Turn back time and let me keep my memories and I’m in. If I have to be 18 with no way to prove that I really have finished high school or prove my experience, ugh. It would be like being an undocumented immigrant. How do you even start to put a life together when you can’t prove your past?

If the government would magically accept my IDs but just change my birth date to 2006 I guess I could get my GED, go to community college until I can transfer, and start over in a new career with all my secret knowledge of my old careers?

For me it totally depends on what kind of midwife the mother in law is. If she’s a certified nurse midwife in a state that has those, then your niece is likely getting much better prenatal care than you fear. Many countries with better birth outcomes than the U.S. use certified midwives for standard prenatal care. If she’s an unlicensed provider who just calls herself a midwife then it’s a scarier situation.

Biking, hiking, paddle boarding, urban exploring (fancy name for walking around new neighborhoods), strength training, swimming, and I even have a friend who took a hip hop class this year (we’re all late 40s). A few of my friends do pickle ball of course and CrossFit, but those are very much not my jam. Most of those can be relatively inexpensive, depending on whether you have access to a Buy Nothing group for gear. Pickup basketball, volleyball, or soccer at the park or the Y.

Photography and birding are pretty traditional middle age hobbies that get you outside and moving around a little but less than the ideas above. Plein air art class through the local community center or community college. Musical instrument or a community choir. My in-laws joined a TACO (terrible adult chamber orchestra) in their 60s.

If there’s a university nearby, see whether they have an Extension program and take some classes.

Volunteer in the local schools or at the animal shelter.

For the most part I think I’m becoming more progressive. I’ve always been liberal but there were a lot of things that I just hadn’t thought about and went with what everyone around me said. I live in a much more ethnically and socioeconomically diverse area than where I grew up, and I think that’s made a huge difference. My high school friends who still live near where we grew up, where most of the people are the same ethnicity, income range, religion, and even just a few of the same jobs say things that make it clear they believe the whole world has had their same experience.

He has dementia and never really had a great grasp of what was appropriate to talk about with his daughters even when we were children. It’s been…difficult.

Heh, as a woman and former student at Catholic school k-12, I’m familiar with not being allowed to wear pants. We used to wear shorts, then a pair of pants, then our uniform skirts. The pants had to come off when we got to school and the shorts were protection against the creepy teachers.

Got to admit that as a younger GenXer who had never heard Jefferson Airplane or Jefferson Starship before this song came out, I still love it. I suspect it hits different for people who heard their earlier work first.

Unfortunately you have to do it for every version of the song, but:

Tap the … to the far right of the song in the playlist

Select Hide song

It’ll never play that version again, and Spotify uses your “hide song” requests to update your algorithm. So unless it’s something where there are a million and one different popular renditions, you’ll start to get that song and all its renditions less frequently.

Fair point. My original attempt at this post did specify the U.S. south, but it kept getting rejected because of the character limit. I must have cut those two characters when I tried posting again.

Hm, my dad also grew up on a farm in a rural area, so this sounds like the answer.

I try to stay on the kinder side of the line between only correcting people when it makes a difference in meaning vs becoming a “well ackshually” person. :)

That sounds pretty likely.

You may like to know that gentile means “not Jewish” and genteel means “fancy manners.”

My dad swears that only teens and older were allowed to wear long pants, and a few articles bear out that while this was changing throughout the 40s, it was still a thing in a lot of places: https://www.histclo.com/style/pants/chron/20/pc20d40.html

I think that’s a regional thing. In 80s/90s Chicago most of the jokes about stereotypical dumb people were Polish jokes. Often told by children or grandchildren of Polish immigrants.

I do think we’re in the part of the cycle where it’s the mid 1920’s rise of hyper nationalism again. I don’t think things are uniquely bad now.

I’m sorry not sorry to do this, but I’m going to make it worse for you. Literally every time my elderly father with dementia hears that song he goes on and on about how incredibly sexy the song and Nancy Sinatra are. Now that song gives me the serious icks and I’ve learned so much about Spotify by making sure that song never plays again.

I’m doing everything I can to lower my blood pressure before starting medication. I have zero desire to end up with lifestyle-induced dementia as both my parents had/have.

Hey former neighbor! Edison Park represent!

My most recently arrived ancestors came to the U.S. at a time when assimilation was the name of the game (1890s). They spoke Polish, but they refused to teach their children Polish. So they only spoke in fairly broken English to their children who pretty much learned to talk from neighborhood kids and then school. Wild times.

My grandmother would have been highly offended to hear you say that a hat is just a matter of fashion. To her generation it was a mark of respect.

Because you and I were not raised to believe that a hat is a matter of respect, this former common courtesy seems quaint and outdated to us…just like insisting on using last names seems quaint and outdated to approximately GenX and younger (source: am a younger GenX not in the South who did struggle for a minute with what to ask my kids’ friends to call me, as here most parents want to be called First Name. I settled on telling my kids’ friends to call me First Name and having my children call their friends’ parents Ms or Mr First Name.)

My sister is required to wait for her husband to open the car door because they’re in a Dom/sub relationship.

I never answer the phone with my name because it’s 50/50 whether the person calling me legitimately needs to schedule an appointment for my dad or kid or is a scammer.

But I will die on the hill that if you’re calling someone who doesn’t have your number, then you must say who you are immediately. “Hi, this is Jen from Dr Smith’s office, is this Jane?” I’m so, so sick of “Is this Jane????” And then they get miffed when I don’t answer the question and instead ask (in a polite but not particularly friendly tone) “who is this?”

Eh, what is respectful is not set in stone. When my grandmother was my age she would have been lamenting how disrespectful it was that no one wears hats outside. That sounds silly to most of us, but to people born in the 20s walking outside without a hat was just as disrespectful to the people you encountered as using their first name without permission.