I had exactly the same experience.

Understandable. I haven’t made chana masala in a while but you’ve inspired a hankering that I must satisfy soon.

Ah, one of my favorite meals! Good choice. Now for the real question: how spicy?

I also really liked Vermont while I lived there, and everything that you mentioned are great features. That said, the state (and much of New England) is overwhelmingly white. I am white-passing, but my spouse is not, and they felt consistently othered while we lived there. Not in an aggressive or hateful way, but in a “strangers see me as a novelty” way that you tend to get in homogenous communities. Burlington is probably a bit more diverse than the relative middle of nowhere where we lived, so your mileage may vary.

You just unlocked a childhood memory of mine. At maybe 6 or 7 I found it very strange how closely my church’s dogma rhymed with various”pagan” mythologies that I’d read about. I recall asking my mom about it, in some childish way, and being taken aback at how unsatisfying her “paper over the cracks” response was. Later on, I also had a lot of “I’m supposed to feel something but don’t” moments. This was a source of considerable distress until I managed to deprogram myself.

I’m not an ex-Mormon specifically, but this shelf analogy resonates with my experience as someone who was raised in an evangelical Protestant church. Eventually you stack up too many inconsistencies and the cognitive dissonance is too much.

Dragonfruit is delicious, but this depends heavily on where you get it. Most non-tropical markets get imported dragonfruit that was picked too early and shipped/stored over long periods, resulting a relatively bland taste and drier texture. Ripe, fresh dragonfruit is lovely. It’s in my top 5 fruits personally.

Why would you hurt me like this?

This but unironically.

I genuinely can’t tell if this is a rhetorical question or not.

Let’s not fight, y’all.

Partitioning our entire population on the basis of the role its members could potentially play in reproduction makes no sense at all to me, but apparently I’m the strange one for pointing that out?