22. Skin Tone Deaf

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Language and racial terms vary across the globe, making a complex matter even more complex. I love it though, the world would be boring otherwise.

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176. Bubble Trouble.

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Well, by now most of you know the drill. Information has changed and we are all a bit screwed because of it. Our choices change our news in ways that have never happened before. The news are bottled up and served as a product to people. You are drinking Coke and your neighbor is drinking Mr. Pibb; a bizarre, dubious and objectively wrong choice. I know I can't claim to be right, I mostly jest. I am extremely biased when it comes to immigration, women's choice and LGBQT rights. I will favor those over stock market increases and regulation reductions, even though I am an avid stock market investor. I click on articles that show how immigrants are less prone to commit crimes, while my neighbor may click on articles talking about the hive of scum and villainy that files up to ask for asylum. Just like rashes, the amount of biased news you get grows the more you pick them.If you still are not clear how this works, there's an accessible documentary on Netflix: The Social Dilemma.…
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115. Murder, She Heard

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My wife took me to a live recording of  “My Favorite Murder” in Houston this year. It was a great show, but it was also very eye-opening. First of all, the crowd was 90% female. The hosts, too, are female and hilarious about this dreary subject. Not until recently had I noticed the connection between these kinds of shows and gender.

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92. Never Google Your Doppleganger

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In my lifetime I have been told that I look exactly like some people that I would consider to be not perfect replicas of me. Maybe I have a better self esteem than I project, but I feel like I don’t look like “The Critic”; as was earnestly expressed by a girl on a (first and only) date.

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175. A Little Perspective

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132. Warning: Adult Situations

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Anxiety comes at me in waves. Sometimes I am perfectly satisfied with this hard wrought life I’ve made for myself, complete with a wife, home and community. The next second I am obsessing about having to meet people and how am I going to find and wear the proper pants for said meeting (and I only have like two pairs of pants). 

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173. Empathy

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Empathy towards strangers is learnable. So why are some of us so uneducated?  I'm not always empathetic towards strangers. During the Paris terrorist attack I wondered why Muslims weren’t decrying this heinous attack. Spoiler alert: They WERE decrying it (I was just too angry to see it) and they didn’t have to. You don’t expect Christians to apologize for every insane Christian. They'd spend every Sunday apologizing half the time. My mind changed after a single act: meeting Muslim people. We helped a family from Syria as they were welcomed in our community. The “them” became “us.” Their amazing cooking skills and easy laughter will always stay with me.How do we get this to happen to people? There's value in learning that we are all extremely similar. We all worry about COVID, we all want to protect our own, we all occasionally leave skid marks in our underwear and never really talk about it.I’m the most introverted person I know, and I still have been able to meet Jewish p…
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