Prubangboy

Yeah. We live in Cheapskate paradise. It's like $450 extra month. And like I said, I'm not unhappy having a whole other apartment to relax in. And I'm finally getting laid again (like, every 10 days). She's recuperating from some big health hits and is depressed. I have no resentment.

We had this back in the states. I had an office (no actual work was ever knowingly done in it) and she had a crafts room (a very messy crafts room that I strove never to open the door of). We would never knock before entering each other's spaces, but I can see that as an act of boundary-respecting love. The psychological boost of having lockable doors and separate food has been very uplifting. Not that those doors ever get locked much (and we have keys). And I still eat 80% of my meals at her place. It's a concrete committment to not taking each other for granted, particularly romantically. Introverted people really need a lot solo down time to recharge. I never saw her as particularly introverted, given her job and extreme sociability, but I see now that she's been wanting this her whole life. When I moved out, I left the subpar toaster behind and got a Kitchen Aid one. I saw the old one in the bin and didn't say anything. She's popped over once to toast a bagel in mine that has the proper wide slot. She called first. I told her to buy a proper toaster, but she says she only wants to toast a bagel maybe once a month and she loves having the free'd up counterspace. Same with the blender, which she actually said "good riddance" about. Meanwhile, my bathroom no longer looks like the world's biggest handbag interior due to her many, many skin care and beautification needs -now residing on the other side of our shared wall. I had to move large bluetooth speaker from against said wall, like a good neighbor would.

Some additional thoughts -should you ever find yourself next door-bound: -Like divorce, Living Apart Together is almost always initiated by the woman (often due to exhaustion over unequal home and family labor). 80% of separations end in divorce. -Covid really blew up this trend. A lot of oldie couple stuck together by themeselves for too long hit the wall in record numbers -Introvert-types are 75% more likely to want to a separate space.

He'll also appoint someone to the Fed who he can arm-twist to lower interest rates (whether appropriate or not). And that too will lower the dollar. How much of racist retard do you have to be to just keep on emptying the gun into your own hapless foot just to say 'suck it libtards'?

This proves my point that Straw Dogs is bound for the cultural slag heap. Barbie may have a longer shelf life. The young all still dip into Scarface and Wolf of Wall Street, but alot of what I loved when young has been wholesale forgotten. Tom Robbins had a joke: Time, the ultimate diet pill.

Agreed. He made a handful of thoughtful westerns, just a westerns were fading into oblivion under pressure from the new indie film taste emerging. The Wild Bunch is the last great western. Dances With Wolves was admirable, but a bit of a slog. Until I saw Mean Streets (like pages out of my youthful diary) I rated WB as the best film of all time. Mean Streets remains my #1 film. GoodFella's overtook it for a decade or two, but Mean Streets was looser and more true to life. Nothing is glamorized; everything is ugly. You don't really want to be the De Niro character at all, whereas in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, he was some variety of heroic. Back in the day, great films were usually under 90 minutes -certainly all of the euro art films were. People rating stuff like Barry Lyndon highly have to overlook a lot of bloat. Most Kubrick films would benefit from a half hour trim. Citing Saw and I Spit on Your Grave as proof of an audience hunger for brutality forgets that these are pretty old films. You can not show a woman or a minority being seriously humiliated these days, even if a vengeful, killing rampage eventually settles the score. Even Tarantino has "gone soft". Like I said, I look at this neutrally, as the simple passing of time and taste. I don't have a dog in this fight either way. I def agree with TBL that old films should not be altered to suit the tastes of the moment. In his Playboy interview, Peckinpah took great pains to explain that the rape scene in Straw Dogs was not an anal rape scene. This never occurred to me, even after re-watching it after reading the interview. It shows that it was considered over the top even in those more licentious days. Impossible to shoot a scene like that today.

Must viewing for Gamma (and anyone who loves exploitation trash like he does): Yes, Mandingo. Yes, the story of a man and his dingo. *Astonishing trivia: Soundtrack featuring Blues God, Muddy Waters.

I'm less invested in stuff I liked in the past. You're trying to revisit this lost world of your memory. Good luck. Not much is like James Brown, who I loved 60 years ago and I still spin today. I change, and it's great to see that change reflected in my reaction to stuff. Stuff fades off into the mist. Me too, soon enough.

She looks in here a bit. Bob is def on the B list of wanna meet. As she's said about more than one poster here: "He's no StickyRiceBalls".

If I can barely get in, no one here has a prayer.

This is an important point, but one I view very different from you, my old cineaste friend. Ultimately, the young get to decide what staggers on into history. And it probably won't be Straw Dogs. It would be impossible to film a scene like the rape scene in that film today. The talent wouldn't do it and the wider audience wouldn't sit through it. A lot of stuff from that era just seems cruel for no purpose. The mindless harassment of HotLips Houlihan in MASH is another example. I laughed hard at it back then, now it's def cringeworthy. Changing tastes, changing morals should not be regarded as inferior; they are just a fact of life. Please get out of the way if you can't lend a hand, because The Times, They Are a Changing. The Wild Bunch derives heavily from the work and atmosphere of the great, great adventure writer, B.Traven. Like Cross of Iron (another under-rated book), Peckinpah was generally only as good as his source material. The book that Straw Dogs was based on was very thin, . the film is much better. The drunken, mysogenist genius was trope of our era that is fading fast. See also: Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer. The cultural context moves on, and then soon after, the art born out of that context disappears.

Agreed. But sometimes she needs my assistance and I like being next door. Also, we really, really love our building. We have friends here etc.

Esther Perel wrote a good relationship book called Mating In Captivity, about how over-familiarity kills the erotic spark for long term couples. I agree. I don't communicate with her for 7-9 hours at a time. It's like being in a pre-Iphone relationship. When she "comes over" to my space, it's assumed that some kind of romance-stuff is probably going to be in the mix. It may be heavy, it may just be resting together on the bed. A little distance lets a little demand pent itself up. If she's not feeling it, she might invite me over to her place instead. So far that hasn't happened. We read each other pretty well. She likes that me-invites aren't every day. Dave Chappelle said that if he saw a woman taking a poop, he sort of had to be done with her. I can see his point a bit.

Life is indeed full of surprises, but if she's got to work on it a bit getting to a four, interest-wise, for me, her chances of her looking for a little strange are less likely than her being hit by a comet. The Thai Man -like for most white women, not much interest. The typical expat guy here: She loves to hear their tales, but those tales typically disqualify them from nudity consideration.

She's had some serious medical issues, so the ol' grey mare. she aint what she used to be. But having some space and silence between us has knocked up our (admittedly tepid) hotness factor from a zero to a four. A four with someone who's into you? I say grade that on a steep curve. If I want to get massage parlor handjobs or have a GF that I sponsor or whatever -and it doesn't ever slop over into her life- she'd be fine with that. She really would. Even at 60, she's still very attractive. A former homecoming queen -which in the south, is like being being a former senator or pro ball player.

Me too. The set of The Prisoner was tiny, but properly weird. A lot of stores selling victorian-style dishes in a style that Fornesecca clearly borrowed from. I have English relatives still in Pompton Fryth. And yeah, they're still a bit of outcasts even after half a century there. For me, The Prisoner was the first intellectual English thing that I ever enjoyed (early teens). Without it, I would not have gotten into Harold Pinter or Martin Amis. No one does alienated detachment like the brits. That flavor goes all the way to Oasis for me. Must part company on Straw Dogs. It has not aged well. The Susan George character is a mysogenistic male fantasy: the feral child-woman. Dustin Hoffman goes from nerd to psycho-killer a little too easily to be believed. Actually, no character at all in that film remotely makes sense. Peckinpah was better when his films were male-bonding epic poems like the genius-laden Wild Bunch. Again, only Madonna's and whores need apply for female representation. The Iron Cross was another great one in that vein.

It's the best thing that ever happened to us. We're much more affectionate and into each other with a little distance between us (about 2 meters). I pretty much never initiate seeing her, she texts me if she wants to hang out. Sometimes (seldom) I demur. I'm getting a ton more done for myself, like finally learning Thai (via the ThaiPod website). She's playing the piano again. (she's western, not Thai). I typically pop over for breakfast (which she enjoys making for me) and then don't see her again till about 6 for dinner and a bit of Netflix. I sleep in her bed maybe 3-4 nights a week, her in mine 1-2, and then sometimes it's great for either of us to just take a pass. LIving Apart Together is now a huge trend among older couples. It saves a lot of relationships from divorce. We were just too in each other's faces for too long and became a bit co-dependent. I am reminded of an old country song: How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away? Have You? Would you? Why or why not?

I'm a 20 baht rounder-upper. A cappa with an extra shot is 95 baht, so call that 120. A grab cab to Central Mall is 105, so that's 120 again. Two cold ice tea drinks clocks in at about 130 baht, so 150 it is. Grab delivery is a flat 50 baht. We tend to order from a fair ways away to get something special like a middle eastern mezz appetizer platter or vegan food from Good Souls. We appreciate the person who fights through all that traffic to bring it to us. There's a small handful of restaurants in Nimman where we've been to 12+ times. Call that 100 baht tip per diner. We feel like we know them a bit, and it would feel weird to stiff them. Massage (which I barely ever do) is 25% -or 50% tip if it's a woman over 40. Over 50? Maybe 100%. I have a friend who's obnoxious and demanding of service staff in a restaurant. I'll always leave 200-500 baht to compensate them for his abusive stupidity. He always gives me grief about it, and then more grief when I explain why. I have zero judgement towards people who don't tip, whether it's because they don't come from tipping cultures or just because they simply don't want to. In return, I don't want to hear any lectures if I give the waitress 20 baht every time she brings me a drink.

I got arrested yearly, ages 17-19 for stopping traffic against the war. The first time I got laid was on the floor of a Quaker church, between the pews. She was in for the '71 DC half a million-er and a virgin like myself.

I'll bite. WHY do anti-trumpets have no sense of humor? Does liberalism kill their souls? Or was my joke just not up to snuff? "Orange Man Bad" -over and over again. Where is the pro-Trump humor? Can you cite a single example?

Uh-huh. Tales of HomePro blind-hoping: When I lived in Bible-land, USA, During the tortuous courting of some godly fattie, guys would be expected to do stuff like change the oil in their car, or cut down trees. This, for someone they barely knew. They were trying to show their Christian Leadership bona fides, but I believe the correct description would be: Chump. My wife's ex-husband went over to "help" paint a hottie's den, only to find himself painting alone after she painted about a foot and a half of trim and wandered off to text to her friends. Another friend of mine drove a minor rock singer around town and painted her toe nails. And he wasn't even a fetishist, which I could totally respect. He was just a chump. I recall a Youtube where a cute woman went on Facebook (or whatever it was) and said she needed her car dug out from the snow after a blizzard. She got multiple offers, and one lucky chump showed up and did it for her. Fair play tho, she did provide him with a coffee from the gas station and a donut. When he was done. Hug? No. Meanwhile, plenty of tik toks about women going to a HomePro in search of a REAL man, only to whimsically come up empty. There is this believe that men are just hanging around like noble knights, looking for a M'Lady to serve. I have a female friend who complained that no man was leaping up from his airplane seat to help her put her carry-on in the overhead compartment. What kind of infant can't do this? What was in her carry-on, an anvil? It's completely acceptable to view men as drone-utilities. A lot of blather on Reddit about "high value men". It's not OK to view women as sex-givers. But sometimes, f they didn't have sex to offer, they'd have nothing.

Lynx-drenched; Englishness giveaway or what? It took over the crown from Jovan, Musk for Men. I like that passive aggressive saddo going "Lynch-drenched? Wha? I.....I donnnn' unnnerstan....?" Like he couldn't just get it from the context. Just another leg-humping dimwit dinosaur. My American wife looks in here a bit. She too is a ThaiBeachLover/BritManToo fan. She's met someone from here, and hopes to someday shake the hand of StickyRiceBall, assuming it's not sticky at the time. Mostly, she thinks of it as a Boomer toilet swirl. Testosterone fading into the sunset, is how she put it.

From Trump: "I'm not suddenly lapsing into snoring coma's for me, I'm doing it for you. If they can make me stay marginally awake at my own trial, they can do it to you too -and...and....what about Sleepy Joe?".

"Your honor, the defense requests a recess. Our client needs more Adderall -and a diaper change".

Trump is so anti-woke that he keeps falling asleep at his trial.