The saying "If everyone's crazy it means you're the crazy" must have come from someone who never lived in Rio de Janeiro

Do you remember Talkie Toaster from an early episode of Red Dwarf?

A home appliance with artificial intelligence that has a brutally single-minded focus on trying to grab the attention of anyone nearby - in any way, at any time - to offer toast.

When the person rejects the offer, Talkie Toaster offers a different kind of toasted pastry. If the person refuses all toasted bread, Talkie Toaster offers a pancake, and so on until the latest response gives leeway to ask for a toast again because it was not explicitly rejected that one last time.

Someone on Quora asked for advice about co-parenting with a woman who has borderline personality disorder of the mildly psychotic flair.

Someone responded, there is no co-parenting with these people. There is parallel parenting, at best. Avoid contact. When unavoidable, make it short and keep shifting the frame. When she speaks about the garden, shift frame to nature in general. When she speaks about the house, shift frame to the neighborhood. Never stay within the topic she proposes, always stay in control of the frame. Always speak in soft sugary tone. Use a lot of diminutives. Use baby talk. Smile nicely.

This is what it's like to deal with people from Rio de Janeiro.

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To the love of your life, when you meet her

I don't speak to my family except for legal matters or when someone dies. It's been like this for some fifteen years now, which is about the half of my life. My uncle died, as it turns out. Hadn't thought of him for years. Suddenly I was faced with the gaping difference of my opinion of him as a child versus now, judging from the same facts. Yes! He's dead and I'm going to speak bad about him. Shocking, I know. Earlier this year I met a woman who reminded me of my cousin. I never meet women who remind me of her! A butch but soft-hearted lesbian with a buzz cut. When we were kids everyone thought she was a boy. This woman was just like that, even the stories she shared about her family were quite familiar. It's been years since my cousin got her heart broken. The love of her life, possibly. They were so good together, I enjoyed hanging out with them together more than with each separately. The girlfriend broke off the engagement because my cousin's family...

and another one goes

Volition

I wanted to say something like, I have yet to find a problem that wouldn't be solved with money. But that's not the entire truth. Money works even on heartbreak. You take up a new venture, or invest in something. Suddenly you have to learn a lot of new things, in a few months' time your life becomes unrecognizable from what it looked like when you loved that person. You will find you still have some love for them but you no longer want to act on it. You outgrew that. That's roughly the wheels on which my life runs. I am relatively happy because I live a life in which I am not a stranger, it is something my heart is in - even if it was also in other things that I would have much preferred. But had I never had to do all this, I would have been relatively happy as well - because if an affair broke my heart, it means my heart must have had been it it, which is the base for happiness. Kundera I think wrote somewhere that comparing diverging life paths like this never ...

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