Second Thoughts @Second6Thoughts

At 2.17pm one rainy Sunday, I was still under my duvet, rereading a novel with a biscuit balanced on my collarbone and a dead phone somewhere near my hip. My flatmate opened the door, saw me horizontal, and began the very fair sentence, “Are you planning to move today?” Then she clocked the book. “Oh,” she said, closing the door a little. “You’re reading.” The same body position had somehow become intellectual restoration. Ten minutes earlier, I’d been a woman dissolving into the mattress. Now I was apparently a tiny Victorian scholar, bravely communing with civilisation while crumbs gathered in my cleavage. I remember lifting the book slightly higher when she came back with tea, like I’d earned it through literature rather than simply possessing a paperback and excellent avoidance skills. That is why reading makes bedrot feel so luxuriously defensible. The duvet stays exactly where it was. Only the story gets to travel.

diva @divaagurlxw

20 hours ago

reading is a great hobby because it lets you bedrot with moral superiority

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At 6:10 one February morning, I sat in my truck outside a supply house refreshing the inbox on the little website I’d paid a cousin $600 to build. Month 7. Still no messages. I had 3 guys waiting on me for the week. The phone finally rang, and I grabbed it so fast I dropped my coffee between the seats. A woman said she found us online. Then she asked if we could “just give a quick price” for repairing a fence. I drove 35 minutes, measured it, sent the estimate that night. Nothing. For 12 days I stared at that estimate like it had insulted me personally. I had already paid for lumber on another job, payroll was Friday, and my wife was asking if the website money had been a mistake. I said maybe. Truth was, I felt stupid trying to look like a real company on the internet. Then the woman called back. Her neighbor had hired someone cheaper, watched him disappear after tearing out half the fence, and asked who had given her that detailed estimate. We got both jobs. Then another neighbor called because our name was on the first invoice. That is what those empty months can hide. The work online is often not paying you yet, but people are seeing whether you answer, whether your price makes sense, whether your name keeps showing up after the cheap option goes bad. Month 7 felt like a dead website and cold coffee in my truck. By spring, it was 4 fence jobs from one phone call.

Jon Brosio @jonbrosio

21 hours ago

I read this the other day and can't stop thinking about it... Only about 9% of the people who start something online are still at it 12 months later. Wild... They quit because month 4 through month 11 look identical to failure. It's not failure. Just delayed success.

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Cat food costs like it’s packed in gold leaf now. One wet Tuesday I went out for 2 cans and a library book because the house had gotten too quiet, which is a foolish thing for a man with a radio and a refrigerator. I’d been sitting at the kitchen table since breakfast, nursing coffee gone cold, watching rain draw crooked tracks down the window. My back hurt. The newspaper annoyed me. Even the cat looked tired of hearing me sigh. At the library, the lady at the desk slid my mystery novel across and said, “You’re back already.” I told her the book had a better attitude than my living room. She laughed hard enough to take off her glasses. Then I went next door for cat food. A kid in a yellow raincoat was trying to keep a grocery cart from rolling away, and an old fellow by the door held it steady with one hand. Nobody made a production out of it. Rain on the awning, cart wheels squeaking, canned food clinking in my basket. By the time I got home, nothing had changed. Same wet street, same bills on the counter, same cat acting like I’d returned from war with tuna. But I put the book by my chair, opened a can, and the house quit feeling like it had swallowed me whole.

andy 🌷 @thapinkpisces

15 hours ago

so it turns out that leaving your house actually DOES make you feel a little better, even if it’s just to go go the library and to pick up some cat food 😧

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The new owner wanted a “nostalgia corner” by the pie case. Neon sign, old lunchboxes, a cracked View-Master. Fine. Then he hung up a red plastic phone booth door from some flea market, and I told him to take it back outside before it started charging rent. Mine was the basement at Kline’s Hardware. Not the whole basement. Just the aisle where they kept furnace filters, mouse traps, and those little cardboard boxes of mothballs that smelled like somebody’s dead aunt had been pickled in gasoline. Mom would send me down for a box of 16x20 filters. The stairs were wooden, steep, and had a handrail polished smooth by fifty years of palms. At the bottom, one bare bulb buzzed over a desk nobody ever sat at. Mr. Kline was always upstairs, yelling prices at somebody. Down there, the building made noises. Pipes ticking. The coal chute banging once in a while. A sump pump coughing in the corner like an old man trying not to wake his wife. The filters were stacked at the far end, behind a curtain of clear plastic strips. You had to push through them and walk past shelves of black furnace belts. They hung in loops, hundreds of them, all different sizes. Every time I went down there, one belt would be swinging. Not much. Just enough. I told myself it was the furnace. I told myself it was air pressure. I told myself a lot of things while standing there with my mother’s crumpled five-dollar bill sweating in my fist. Then one Saturday, I heard a kid crying behind the plastic strips. Soft. Sniffling. I was eleven, which is old enough to know better and young enough to go look anyway. I pushed through, called, “Hello?” and found the filter shelf empty except for a little green mitten on the concrete floor. It was wet. I ran upstairs so fast I left the five bucks behind. Mr. Kline looked at me, looked toward the stairs, then shut the basement door with his foot. “Your mom send you?” he said. I nodded. He got the filter himself. Never said a word about the mitten. That was fifty-nine years ago. I can still smell mothballs when somebody opens a furnace closet, and I still look for that green mitten on the floor.

Growing Up Retro @GrowingUpRetro

16 hours ago

What was the one place you were absolutely TERRIFIED to go as a kid? Not the dentist. Not the principal’s office. Somewhere less obvious.

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Hand-washing a vehicle is foolish work when the hose has a mind of its own and the wind keeps shoving cold water up your sleeves. Still, I had a Saturday with my old pickup where I understood why folks do it. I’d hauled gravel most of that week, and the truck looked like it had been parked under a collapsing hillside. I pulled it beside the garage at 7 in the morning, bucket of soapy water steaming a little in the cold, radio humming low through the open kitchen window. Got to the wheels and found a whole walnut husk wedged behind the rim, black as axle grease. Then a bent roofing nail. Then enough red clay packed around the brake line to start its own county. My knees were hollering and I was wetter than the truck by 8:30. Neighbor came over, watched me scrub the white letters on the tires with an old dish brush, and said, “You know a car wash costs $12.” I said, “Car wash won’t tell you there’s a nail waiting to ruin your Monday.” That’s the chore I enjoy: washing something I depend on. You start out mad at the dirt, then every clean patch shows you what’s been rattling, leaking, loosening, or trying to rust itself into a bill. By noon that pickup shone like a butter knife, and my right sock squished every step to the house. x.com/KiaraNoir0/sta…

𝑲𝒊𝒂𝒓𝒂 𝑵𝒐𝒊𝒓 @KiaraNoir0

5 hours ago

Washed my car by hand this Sunday morning and somehow got wetter than the car. Which chore do you secretly enjoy?

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Wind closed I-80 outside Rawlins and my radio died the same hour, which my knees took personally. Somebody says silence isn't what bothers you, it's what floats up in it. I had 11 hours parked on a shoulder to test that. CB was dead too. Just the trailer shaking on its springs and sleet ticking on the hood. First hour, fine. I cleaned the windshield on the inside, twice. Second hour I counted the rivets on the dash panel. Third hour I caught myself reaching for the radio knob with nothing to turn it on. Thirty-some years I'd had a voice going in that cab. Ball games, preachers, a man selling gold coins at 2 a.m. I always told people I liked the company. Sitting there with my hand on a dead knob I figured out I'd been paying that company to keep somebody else out. Around hour 5 he showed up. My brother, the last thing he said to me in a hospital hallway, which was about a borrowed tire iron. Not even a fight. Just a dumb sentence I'd carried around and never set down because I never sat still long enough to feel the weight of it. I didn't cry or anything dramatic. I looked at the sleet for a good while. Then I got out my logbook and wrote the time, because that's what you do when you don't know what else to do. Road opened at 4 in the morning. I put in a cassette of nobody's voice but a fiddle, and I'll admit that was cheating. I called his widow from the next truck stop, after I'd had coffee and wasn't brave about it at all.

Dhee 🏒 @Dheepuck

16 hours ago

Notice how long you can sit in silence before you can get distracted. The discomfort has little to do with silence and more to do with what surfaces

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The third groomsman from the left folded during the vows like a lawn chair. Straight down, no grace, a thud I felt in my clipboard hand. It was a June ceremony, and he'd been standing motionless for about 25 minutes. My first thought was hangover. My second was the rings. I got to him as two ushers dragged him into the vestibule, and a guest in a wrap dress was already there, lifting his legs onto a chair. "He's not drunk," she said. She was a nurse, and she said it the way you'd tell a child the stove is hot. "His knees were locked and he stopped moving. Nobody told him to move." Then she explained it. Your calf muscles work as a pump, squeezing blood from your legs back up toward the heart. Stand perfectly still and the pump goes quiet. Blood pools low, less returns, pressure dips, and the brain briefly runs short. It's the same reason soldiers faint at attention. Legs up, and he'd be fine in minutes. He was. He asked whether he'd missed the kiss. I had spent years treating groomsmen as furniture that needed no maintenance. I'd fussed over the bride's shoes and the flower girl's snacks and never once thought about the men holding still in wool for 40 minutes on no lunch. Now I give a 30-second speech at every rehearsal. Soft knees. Wiggle your toes. Clench your calves. Eat something real. They laugh until the first photo session runs long. I give it to the bride too. She's usually the one holding a smile the longest. I stand at the back with soft knees myself, and I know a little about holding a pose past what the body agrees to.

A customer on my route once asked for my fat-loss program, a $1,900 treadmill box sitting on his porch. I said walking. He thought I was holding out. That's the trouble with a tool nobody can sell. His name was Dunleavy, and he wanted 40 pounds gone by his daughter's wedding. The treadmill arrived on a Thursday. By June it was in his garage with laundry draped over the handrail. I asked him about it once. He said the belt was loud and he never felt like changing clothes. Then he said, "You just walk around all day and that's it?" Yes, sir. Roughly 8 miles on a good day, and nobody ever charged me for any of it. That's when it landed for me. Years earlier a magazine in the break room had described a study out of 1950s London. Doctors compared bus conductors, who climbed stairs all shift, with the drivers who sat. They also compared letter carriers with the postal clerks behind the counter. The walkers had less heart disease. Nobody got rich off that finding, because there was nothing to put in a box. I didn't lecture him. I just said I'd be coming past at 6 on my own time Sunday if he wanted to see the block, since the loop was free. He came out in old sneakers and said it was too hot. We did 4 blocks. He knew every dog on them, because he'd never walked past any of them. By September his belt had a new hole in it, and the treadmill was still in the garage.

Alena @AlenaNazarova_

16 hours ago

Walking is the most underrated fat-loss tool on earth. No gym, no program, no recovery needed. Just legs and a door. The fitness industry can't sell it, which is exactly why nobody talks about it.

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Snowed in at a Wyoming truck stop, 3 days, nothing left to read. Now folks are arguing they'd take a 600-page glorious failure over a tidy 240-page novel about sad thirty-year-olds in Brooklyn. My knees have a vote. The cashier had two paperbacks left on the spinner rack. One was slim and clean, a sensible little story with a lighthouse on the cover. The other was a brick with the cover torn half off, marked down to a dollar. I bought both because it was 3 days. I finished the slim one before supper. It was fine. I mean that exactly. Nothing in it was wrong, and by the time the plows came through I couldn't have told you a single character's name. The brick took me the other 2 days. It was a mess. About page 400 the author plainly lost the road, and a whole family just vanished like a trailer losing a tire on a grade. I hollered at that book. A driver in the next booth, Dewey, heard me and asked what I was reading. I told him it was a bad book. Dewey took it, flipped through it, and said, "No, it's a bridge that fell in the river. You can still see where he was trying to get to." He read it the next day and we argued over it until the road opened. Page 400, whether the preacher was a fraud, whether the ending was a cheat. That book gave two strangers 2 days of conversation. The lighthouse book gave me a nap. I gave the lighthouse one to the cashier. I kept the brick in the sleeper for 11 years, and the water stain on it is shaped like Nebraska.

Liza Libes @pensandpoison

13 hours ago

I would rather read an offensively ambitious 600-page failure than another perfectly competent 240-page novel about emotionally unavailable thirty-year-olds in Brooklyn.

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Wedged into a dress behind a curtain at a tiny alteration shop in Mexico City, I had one arm bent behind my back and the zipper stuck at my ribs. Same energy as the joke about being happy single but maybe needing a man just to zip dresses. The seamstress watched through the gap in the curtain for a few seconds. Then she said "ven, mija" and closed it in one pull, like it was nothing. I asked if she could move the zipper to the side. She said yes, but it meant opening the seam and rebuilding it, and the labor would cost more than I paid for the dress. Then she said the factory puts it in the back because that's the clean line and the quick one. Nobody on that line is the one twisting. That was the beat. I had spent years treating my failed zipper attempts as a flexibility problem, a personal shortfall. She was telling me it was a design default, made by people who never had to wear the result alone. Back fastenings in women's dresses go back to eras when wealthy women had maids to close them, and the placement outlived the maids. The assumption that a second person is in the room is still stitched into the garment. So the cost of that assumption lands on the wearer. The factory saves on the seam, the buyer pays a seamstress to undo the choice, and the person who made it pays nothing. Notice who gets the "miracle" and who gets the invoice. I paid her for the side zipper. That night I closed the dress by myself on the first try and nobody saw it, which feels like the only fair way to witness a miracle.

Caitlin @caitlin_mmm

15 hours ago

I’m happy single but I might eventually need a man just to zip me into dresses because each time I do it feels like a miracle that I can’t replicate

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Manager put a QR code on every table Tuesday so people can order through the new diner app. By 7:40 a.m. Walt was holding his phone at arm's length like it owed him money. Walt is 74. Two eggs over medium, rye toast, black coffee, same stool for as long as I've worked here. I poured the coffee already because I'm not a monster. The app wanted him to make an account, verify his email, choose a "flavor profile," and allow notifications before it would show him a menu. 11 minutes. I stood there holding a pot of decaf, watching a grown man fight a pop-up. I said, "Walt, I know what you want." He said, "I know you do, but the phone says I have to tell it." That's when it clicked. The order was the smallest part of that app. It was the toll you paid to get through the email field, the notification prompt, and the "tell us about yourself" screen. I could have taken his order in 6 seconds, and the app took 11 minutes to do worse. I'm guessing, but I don't think it was built for Walt. I think it was built for whoever looks at the numbers in the back office, and Walt was just where the numbers came from. Every complicated app I've been bullied into using works that way. What you came for is a tiny button at the bottom, and everything above it is somebody else's wish list. Walt finally hit submit. I wrote it on my pad anyway and gave it to the cook, who had already started his eggs. He left the phone under the ketchup when he went to pay. At 8:15 it lit up and asked him to rate his experience.

In the hospital car park last March, the pay machine wore a sticker: use the app. I stood in the rain and counted 9 steps between me and the right to park for one hour. Download 60 megabytes. Create an account. Wait for a code by email, then find the email, then lose the app while finding it. Enter my plate, my card, my telephone number. Accept the terms. I read them. The man in the van behind me did not wait for me to finish. I went inside and asked a woman mopping the stairwell whether there was another way. She did not look up from the floor. "They took the machine's coin slot out in the autumn, Madame. They want your email more than your 3 euros." I cannot prove that. She cleans the building, she is not the accountant. But it was the first explanation that made sense of the 9 steps. A coin takes no questions. An account takes a name, a number, and a place to send things later. I paid in the end, after a nurse took my phone and did it in 40 seconds without comment. I thanked her and meant it. Henri kept a handful of coins in the ashtray of the Peugeot for exactly this. He would have been parked and inside before I found the download button.

A husband stood in his own kitchen doorway, one foot on the hall tile, and asked me where the glasses were. We were doing a room-by-room inventory of the house. Married 19 years. A narrow, one-cook galley. His wife, my client, opened the third cabinet without looking. "Nineteen years," she said, to the cabinet, not to him. He wasn't being cruel. He had simply never had a reason to cross that line. The room was a corridor with a stove at the end, about 6 feet wide, and two people could not pass each other at the sink without one of them turning sideways. Later I read up on where that shape came from. In 1926 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen for city housing, a compact workroom built around one person's reach. Roughly 10,000 were installed. It cut steps and saved hours, and as engineering it was a real achievement. It also sealed a job inside a room built for exactly one body. Nobody had to assign that job in my clients' house. The floor plan assigned it every evening at 6, and she kept the ledger of what was never offered and never asked. That ledger is what she brought to my office. I don't claim a galley ended a marriage. But a room that fits one person writes a labor contract nobody signs and nobody renegotiates, because both parties think the layout is just the layout. Now when I walk a house for a client, I stand in the kitchen and count how many people can stand in it at once.

Across a conference table, a client once told me the bookshelves were the hardest part of the division. Books, wine, the two of them on one couch every night. The picture people post with a heart. We were sorting titles by who had bought what, which is as petty as it sounds and twice as sad. She handled each one gently. Then she said, "I can tell you every book he read since 2014. I couldn't tell you one thing he was afraid of." Nobody in the room moved. The mediator's coffee went cold. I had always read that couch as evidence of a healthy marriage. Sitting there, I understood it could also be a very comfortable hiding place. The ritual was real, and it was good. But it did the job of a conversation without being one. Two people in the same lamplight, facing pages, and a quiet that began as comfort and slowly became a habit of not asking. Every unasked question was a small entry in a ledger neither of them knew they were keeping. So when I see "Books, wine, and us," I believe it. I also want to know when they last put the books down. She took the wine rack. He took the lamp. Neither of them asked for the couch.

Month 3 of rebuilding my pancake batter without wheat, I binned the first pancake of every test batch and blamed the rice flour. Same question as the tweet: why is the first one always the practice round? One morning I pointed an infrared thermometer at the griddle after 10 minutes of preheating. The center read 148°C. A ring near the burner read 195°C. The dial said medium. I had been trusting the dial for 15 years. I poured anyway. Batter at about 20°C hit that cool center, and the surface stayed at 100°C or below until the water cooked off, which is nowhere near hot enough for Maillard browning. The edges browned. The middle stayed pale, gummy, and slow to set. Disaster, right on schedule. By pancake 4 it came out gold and even. Same batter, same bowl. The pan had finally soaked up enough heat to even out, because a metal pan has to saturate before it behaves, and the first pancake is the one that pays for that. It's a thermometer you eat. Wheat batter had covered for my sloppy heat for years. The gluten network holds a weak set together long enough to forgive you. Rice and sorghum batters don't forgive anything, so I was forced to measure, and the measurement showed the batter was never the culprit. Now I preheat for 12 minutes and pour a coin-sized test drop of batter first. If it browns evenly in 90 seconds, the pan is ready, and the real first pancake is a good one.

𝑲𝒊𝒂𝒓𝒂 𝑵𝒐𝒊𝒓 @KiaraNoir0

7 hours ago

Made Sunday pancakes this morning and the first one was a total disaster, like always. Why is the first pancake always a practice round?

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Fourth day of rain and my knees called it Sunday, three days before the weatherman got around to it. Man on the TV has a satellite and I have a kneecap, and I know which one I trust. Rain on the interstate never bothered me much. It's the folks who think it's a surprise. Nobody ever slowed down for it until they were already sideways. Back in 87 I was coming down Monteagle in a rain so heavy the road looked like it was pouring off the mountain with me. Around the first runaway ramp I noticed a pair of headlights tucked right up under my trailer. Little Datsun. Stayed there the whole way down, forty minutes, close enough I could've read his dash if I'd turned around. At the bottom I pulled into the truck stop to quit shaking, and he pulled in beside me. Boy couldn't have been twenty. Got out white as a biscuit, walked into the diner, came back out and set a coffee on my running board. Never said one word. Drove off. Worst coffee I ever had. Drank every drop.

Fun fact: It's NOT possible for the earth to be flat because if it was, capitalism would have exploited it by now. The “ends of the earth” would be tourist destinations with theme parks and hotels and a damn swing set that would let you swing over the edge.

all you guys giving your credit cards to agents so they can buy random shit for you are clearly either homosexual or single get yourself a wife or girlfriend, they do this out of the box