I see what you mean and where you're coming from, and I also realize there are historical reasons for 12 hours, there's a reason it's called "p"m and "a"m and so on. Still, it does not feel intuitive to jump from 11:59 am to 12:00 pm, go on to 12:15 pm, and end up at 1:00 pm again. It feels like an either or thing. Either you go to 12:00 am after 11:59 am, or you go to 0:00 pm. I understand why it is pm and why it is 12, I am just saying, it feels off to me (and, as mentioned above, the whole class of German students). I absolutely understand that it feels much more natural and less counterintuitive if you have grown up with this system.
volvoxvsmarla
joined 2 years ago
I'm not saying it's hard, and we got the explanation too. It's about what feels or seems off. It's technically correct, I know, but the first reaction of the class was confusion and a lack of intuitive understanding. Mostly it is using 12 instead of 0.
Reminds me of the collective confusion in english class when they taught us that 12:15 am is in the night and 12:15 pm is at lunchtime.
I even remember the moment I heard. My husband came to me and our baby, we were playing on the bed, it was a Thursday. He asked if I had heard yet. I asked what, and he told me that Russia attacked Ukraine. It felt so surreal. It felt like being held at gunpoint to r*pe your sibling.
We don't live in Russia or Ukraine, but we have close friends and relatives in both countries. For about a week I couldn't concentrate on our daughter. My head was somewhere else which felt awful, but was also the first time I had allowed myself to think about something else and not give her 100% of my attention. We went to demonstrations (well who cares) and kept doom scrolling, which felt more urgent, more necessary to stay in touch with what is happening. We realized how we didn't see the obvious for years. Which was very painful, since my husband was always interested in politics, also back when he lived in Russia, and got me into being more political myself. We were way too naive about it.
We kept asking our friends and family how they were, what they planned to do. Some fled immediately. Some a bit later. Most stayed. With time, the imminent feeling of threat and impending doom numbs down to low key anxiety. So many years down the drain. So many futures waisted. They stole their futures.
I remember I kept telling my daughter "one day we will tell you about a war between our countries that lasted for 1 day when you were a baby". 2 days. 10 days. 30 days. I stopped counting at 100.
Now I just hope we will have time to go there. Will my grandparents be able to see their great granddaughter? Will she meet her grandpa in Russia? Will she ever be able to play with her cousins in rural Ukraine? I had planned to spend summers there, to get to know this side of my spouse's family, and hoped she would get to learn some snippets of Ukrainian there. That's how he knows the language. And now I just hope that his cousins will not die. The fat one lost about 2/3 of his body weight so far. I'm not surprised being in the military does this to you.
Damn I even remember the pigeons. That stupid pigeons. We had pigeon problems on the balcony and in March 2022 they built a nest and it had eggs in it. But the day prior they bombed an orphanage. Or a children's hospital? Or a maternity ward? God these assholes bomb everything, don't they. And I cried and we couldn't do it, we couldn't bring ourselves to remove the eggs. We had freaking pigeon babies with incredibly proud pigeon parents who were, btw, super progressive, crazy emancipated pigeons, both were looking for the eggs and babies equally. We gave them names when they hatched and watched them grow older. And then fuck nature, about two weeks before they would have left the nest, a fucking crow ate Hittin first, and poor Putler was so, so scared, and we tried to shelter him and even lifted the rule of no feeding no water, but then the next day, he was dead as well. The parents were devastated. We were devastated. We were powerless. We still are. We couldn't protect them. We couldn't make a change even when we tried. We were powerless.
The universe stood still, and then it started going with a different pace and in another direction than before.
Not sure where I am going with this, I think I'm just grateful someone else found this moment... Majorly significant.
Well that's a low bar
Here in Germany, we will have a conservative government at best and a fascist one at worst. AFD is at 20% at national levels, and locally they are winning in the East, which I, naive and wrongly motivated as I was, moved to from merry Bavaria.
I'm pretty sure there is enough research that supports the idea of paternity leave increasing parental involvement and connection with your child and leading to more gender equality/more balanced responsibilities in families.
My husband and I went the very conservative route with him being off for 2 months and me being off for 3 years (German classic). Let me tell you I would have not survived the newborn stage, having no help from outside, without him. At the same time, for him it was so hard - although I am not sure that work was easier, he after all still came home to a little baby. Parental leave doesn't mean you get to chill, it means you have no excuse for not doing half of the night shift, half of everything except breast feeding. When he went back to work, he would do the night shifts on the weekends, and I would do all the night shifts on workdays.
Your co-workers are morons. They miss out on helping their baby mamas, connecting with their kids, and going through a unique experience. Even if your pay was much lower, it's worth it. It's hard and stressful and awful and it is the best thing you'll ever do.
They weren't literally standing in poop. It's just the playground's nickname thanks to all the dogshit.
I'm not so sure what cardboard/paper you mean? If you mean something like the paper cups that coffee comes in, they also contain plastic. Dirty paper/cardboard can also not be recycled, so your pizza carton ends up in a landfill or burned. And what do you mean by foil? Genuinely curious.
In my area a lot of takeout places now offer reusable options for a deposit. Usually it is a cardboard with plastic lining container if it is one way. Except the Asian takeout places, they are all over the place from classic black plastic to aluminum containers to styropor to - circling back - the plastic carton stuff.
I meet mostly moms. So I save them with their name and their kid's name and sometimes the location we've met (usually a playground nickname) on my phone. Sarah Noah Locomotive, Madlene Jacob Crown, Vitali Pasha Poop.
Startup culture is so toxic. I'd rather give Rob Schneider daily foot massages with truffle and lavender oil than ever work for a startup again.
That reminds me how after not sleeping for 3 days (I studied for an exam) I fell asleep randomly on my bed (more like passed out) and woke up to a low sun, the analog clock showing like 7:00, and I could not tell whether the sun was rising or setting.
(As a side note: I didn't have a clue whether my window went out to the west, east, north, etc, and I was way too groggy to even think like that. It was more the color of the light in the room that was ambivalent. Obviously I checked my phone rather quickly and didn't need to figure out the position of the sun to understand whether it was morning or evening)