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"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."

"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"

"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"

"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."

"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."

I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"

Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.

There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.

It's far less common for two thirty-year-olds to be so different in so many ways that one thirty-year-old can't just sort things out for themselves and move.

A situation in which a twenty-year-old has independent income and their own place is very rare.

What you're criticizing isn't really that "age gaps aren't a problem," you're criticizing that some people view age gaps as a problem all the time.

You will not be able to get society to judge each age-gap relationship on an individual basis.

Society identifies problems and then groups them together for simplicity across a broad spectrum of functions.

This does, I agree, create a fundamentally awful society.

But all we can do is make up our minds that sometimes, something widely viewed as problematic is okay due to variables outside the usual situation.

And then save our time, energy and breath, honestly, because society isn't going to change.

I was absolutely trying to instigate a great upheaval of social norms via text post on my porn blog and have now learned that this goal is in fact unrealistic.

Oompa Loompa doompity do

"Hey, Gen Z, we're gonna relabel vacations into something else now and tell you how you really should be wary of taking vacation because it might impact your financial future."

See, my point of view is that if we keep trying to separate out the "legitimately need to lie in bed," from the, "lying in bed because they're lazy," our first instinct is to work very hard to hone our ability to evaluate people. To get the right forms, get the right diagnoses. And that's a thing that doctors' offices should do, yes. (Lying in bed can get sooooo boring. It is hard for me to imagine doing it without a reason. Just saying.) But when it comes to spending money or appointment time or whatever on getting a roof over people's heads, is that really where we want to spend our resources?