It’s cuffing season — that time of year when single people are ready to stop serial swiping and find the one to stick with. Yet finding a new bae can be easier said than done; dating, especially in this uniquely interesting time, can really suck. Of course, people use all kinds of techniques and tactics to find a new boo: apps, going to clubs and bars, matchmakers, asking friends — you name it. Yet there’s another simple but somewhat unorthodox method people use to nab The One: literally thinking them up, or in more formal language, manifesting them.
“Through manifesting and tapping into your own energy, you can find what you want,” says Lisa Stardust, the renowned astrologer who recently released The Love Deck: 70 Cards to Ignite Attraction, Passion, and Romance, a deck of beautifully illustrated cards that guide users through attracting love (and keeping it). “It’s about putting the energy out there.”
The idea of manifesting a partner or romantic relationship merely through the power of one’s own thoughts might sound out there or woo-woo, but manifesting, as a broader concept, is an age-old practice stretching back for generations, if not millennia. It’s the fundamental idea in the best-selling book The Secret, and popular ideas like the “law of attraction” have become so mainstream, they’re understood without much explanation.
Much like shopping for secondhand clothes, buying old books at stoop sales, online, or at used bookstores brings its own brand of excitement. There’s the thrill of happening upon a book that you’ve been wanting to read or letting spontaneity take over, choosing whatever calls to you. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that it saves money and a perfectly readable tome from ending up in a landfill. The one thing you might have to contend with is removing the dust, dirt, and grime that has built up on the covers and between the pages of an old book. Fortunately, learning how to clean old books is often easier than removing the inscriptions left behind by previous readers.
How to clean old books to get rid of dust, dirt, and grime
“To remove dust, dirt, or grime, my best advice is to use a paper towel,” says James Fraser, manager of The Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Boston. Alternatively, you can opt to use a microfiber cloth to dust off books. This method should work when you want to clean old paperback and hardbound books.
1. Wipe down the whole book, cover to cover, being careful when you clean the book’s pages.
2. If there are stubborn smudges and stains on the cover of the book, wet the paper towel or microfiber cloth with a little water and revisit those bits. Bear in the mind that books—particularly old books—can be fragile. “Any attempt to fix past wrongs may end up damaging the book even more,” says Fraser.
Lindsey Konchar has known her best friend, Caroline since Caroline was born. Their mothers have been best friends since the seventh grade, so even though Konchar is two years older than Caroline, and the two attended different schools in their hometown of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, there was no escaping each other. “We were quite literally forced to be friends,” Konchar told me. But even after they moved out of their mothers’ homes, the friendship continued.
Konchar stayed in Minnesota for college, while Caroline attended school in Boston and then moved to New York City, where she started dating someone. (Caroline is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy.) At first, the new relationship seemed marvelous, “all butterflies and roses,” Konchar recalled. But over time, Caroline’s updates on the relationship grew less cheerful and more vague. To Konchar, a social worker, something seemed off, and a visit to NYC only solidified her concerns that Caroline’s partner wasn’t treating her well. “She wasn’t her happy-go-lucky self,” Konchar recalled. On the final day of her visit, Konchar decided to express her concerns about the relationship. She chose her words carefully, making sure to cite specific examples, use “I” statements, and clarify that she was speaking up only because she was worried about her friend’s safety. But Konchar could tell that Caroline wasn’t having it. “Her walls went up,” Konchar told me. “We didn’t talk for a long time.”
The dilemma that Konchar faced—whether to say something or bite her tongue—gets at a long-running debate about what it means to be a good friend. Is it appropriate to tell a friend when you think they’re making a bad decision? Or is a friend’s role to offer steadfast and unconditional support, and leave the unsolicited advice to parents, spouses, or siblings? Those parties may feel more entitled or obligated to speak up because their relationships are better defined and more formalized. But it’s difficult to speak about authority or obligation in friendship, which is to some extent defined by what it’s not: Friends are those who choose to be in one another’s lives although they don’t fulfill a specific role. Even between close friends, it can be tricky to pin down exactly what, if anything, two people owe each other.
The world’s tiniest rabbit is roughly the size of a softball—a very, very soft softball. An adult weighs less than a pound.
These little bunnies abound in the scrublands of the American West, but one population, known as the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, long ago colonized what is now central Washington, happily munching away at a smallish patch of fragrant sagebrush steppe for thousands of years.
Every last inch of a pygmy rabbit is built for sagebrush. The enzymes in its gut evolved to neutralize the plant’s toxins and maximize digestion, and it tunnels elaborately beneath the sagebrush’s roots. It even forfeited its archetypal cotton tail, and thus blends in with the gray-green bushes.
But in the last century or so, about 80 percent of the wild “sagebrush sea” of the Columbia Basin was converted into farms and ranchland. By the early 2000s, the genetically distinct Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit population had dwindled to just a few animals. Scientists crossbred survivors with pygmy rabbits from Idaho; reared in protected paddocks, the offspring retained at least three-quarters of their unique Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit DNA. Today only a few hundred of the rabbits remain, living in semi-captivity and in the wild.
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The Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit relies on sagebrush for food and shelter, but the shrub has nearly disappeared. It’s also slow to regrow: it takes about two decades or ten pygmy rabbit lifetimes. Morgan Heim
When I was younger, I would wander around the pre-teen jewelry store Claire’s imagining myself decked out in its wares. I often came across dual necklaces, each with a broken half of a heart with the inscription “best friends.”
I never bought these necklaces out of fear that whomever I considered my best friend at the time would not reciprocate this label, and just the thought of that rejection crushed me into inaction.
Even in adulthood, I hear stories of uneven friendship “levels” and the negative spiral it induces. If your best friend has ever implied that you’re not theirs, it can indeed be crushing. Why might this be, and what should you do about it? Communication and friend experts tell Mashable that everyone has their own individual measures — and that labels aren’t the most important part of friendship, anyway.
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Realizing your best friend doesn’t think of you the same way can feel like a rejection.Credit: Bob Al-Greene / Mashable
I admit it: Like many liberals, I’m feeling a fair bit of MAGAfreude — taking some pleasure in the self-destruction of the American right.
There has, after all, never been a spectacle like the chaos we’ve seen in the House of Representatives this week. It had been a century since a speaker wasn’t chosen on the first ballot — and the last time that happened, there was an actual substantive dispute: Republican progressives (yes, they existed back then) demanded and eventually received, procedural reforms that they hoped would favor their agenda.
This time, there has been no significant dispute about policy — Kevin McCarthy and his opponents agree on key policy issues like investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and depriving the Internal Revenue Service of the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax cheats. Long after he tried to appease his opponents by surrendering his dignity, the voting went on.
But while the spectacle has been amazing and, yes, entertaining, neither I nor, I believe, many other liberals are experiencing the kind of glee Republicans would be feeling if the parties’ roles were reversed. For one thing, liberals want the U.S. government to function, which among other things means that we need a duly constituted House of Representatives, even if it’s run by people we don’t like. For another, I don’t think there are many on the U.S. left (such as it is) who define themselves the way so many on the right do: by their resentments.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Photo: Stocksy / Lauren Lee
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James' World 2 