Rudynate

It depends where you are too. Handholding in the middle of an urban gayborhood and handholding in rural Mississippi are two different things.

Guilty. Love em-looking at em, stroking them, sniffing them, licking them. One of my favorite parts of an encounter with a sweaty guy is smelling like him for the rest of the day.

In grade school.

I made a marjolaine once. Toasted hazelnut meringue layers, whipped cream between the layers and chocolate ganache frosting. Best thing I ever ate. It was so much work, I never made it again.

There isn't much not to like in European men.

Right. Europeans and Americans really dressed differently back then. In the late 60s, we hosted an exchange student from Sweden. When he first got here, I was sitting in his room chatting with him as he was unpacking and I thought, "Wow, what weird clothes he has." Even more recently, in the mid-90s, I worked at a global company with headquarters in Silicon Valley. Quite a few of the engineers and executives were European, and I noticed that they often wore color combinations that you would never see on an American. It would be nice to report that they were interesting and unexpected, but mostly, they just looked weird. Even now, you see haircuts on Europeans that you wouldn't see on Americans.

Another difference was build. It has all changed now, everybody looks the same. But back then, European men tended to be more slender than Americans and they often didn't have broad shoulders and v-shaped torsos. We used to say that a man had a "European body." This was so even if a guy was athletic and in good shape.

I spent three years in Europe in the 70s in the military. You could spot an American a half-block away just from the way he walked.

I use simple algebra all the time. I took calculus in college but I don't remember much about it.

It used to be easy to distinguish Americans from Europeans at a glance. Movement, mannerisms, dress were all distinctive. Not so much anymore.

It's become commonplace for women to nurse in public. It's true that I would rather not see it, but thats easily solved by not gawking at nursing moms. Anything that eases the burdens of motherhood is a good thing.

There's nothing wrong with subscribing to canned meaning.

And the combination of variables didn't lead inevitably to the evolution of life, it favored it. Which means that the same combination of variables could occur on some distant planet in some distant galaxy and it might not lead to the evolution of life. The universe is so immense that it is likely that life has evolved elsewhere in the universe.

Agree completely, but that combination of variables itself was probabalistic.

Natural selection is a random process. It doesn't have a direction or goal. That's a problem with the way evolution is talked about when it's being taught in schools. Evolution/natural selection is not going in a particular direction. We can only see the direction ex post facto its going by looking how it got us to where we are now. We have no idea where it will take us from here. And because evolution is a mindless statistical process, evolution also has no idea where it is taking us.

Humans seem to be wired to need meaning. The fact that we need to impose order on the universe doesn't mean that there is an inherent order to the universe. The Existentialists hold that the universe is random and meaningless. Any meaning is something that we made up. I can live with that - that there is no supplied meaning to life and that it's my job to find my own meaning in life. There are all kinds of groups and organizations that are willing to supply the lazy with canned meaning. There are those who are fine with providing their own meaning.

Years ago, the food in hospital cafeterias was outstanding and absurdly cheap, I suppose because they were subsidized. In my first job ever, I was an orderly at a VA Hospital. The food in the canteen at the VA was crappy, but across the street, there was a Jewish hospital that had a superb cafeteria. We used to sneak over there for lunch and pretend we worked there to get the employee price. My mother was hospitalized at Emory University Hospital a few years ago, and the cafeteria reminded me of the hospital cafeterias of years gone by.

Easily a full day's calories at a single meal.

My office is in my home, so I rarely eat lunch out. Lunch at home probably costs a couple bucks. I fix a turkey or tuna sandwich on a nice sandwich roll- french or ciabatta- some nuts and some berries. When the cleaning lady comes, I go to the gym and eat lunch out. A sandwich is typically about 12 bucks.

And I would also say that an ignorance of pop culture is a poor indicator of general ignorance. There are plenty of educated cultivated people who find pop culture repellant.

In what context do these conversations occur that a third person's comments about a companion's looks embarrass you? I'm trying to imagine having lunch with two other people where one can't stop commenting on the others looks. Of course, maybe I run with the wrong crowd, I'm not sure I know any MGLs.

He's contrasting himself with the hoardes of insincere fawning goldseekers wealthy men must have to wade through. He's positioning himself as that breath of fresh air, who's not interested in them for their money.

Best not to make assumptions about how they live. Warren Buffet is reputed to live a decidedly middle-class lifestyle. Donald Trump, with considerably less wealth than Buffet, when he's not busy wrecking the country, lives in a cheesy penthouse on Fifth Avenue in NYC.

So you don't click with unusually nice looking men. You think it's because they are deficient in some way?

I may have changed my mind about close fitting clothes. I like 90s style loose fitting jeans. And I've always had the opinion that older men look a little silly in up to the minute fashion. But a while ago, I got a made-to-measure suit from Indochino and I love it. The jacket has natural shoulders and sort of hugs my torso. The trousers are tailored to fit close in the butt and thighs. Fits me like a glove. The fabric is a nice soft merino wool. I love the way I feel in it.