Similarly, I find it slightly annoying when you thank a cashier and they respond by saying you’re welcome. This exchange was purely transactional (I paid for my items and you did your job), so please don’t imply that you did me some sort of personal favor. But like you, I won’t say anything about it to the cashier because their job is already hard enough.

I do “international date nights” with my girlfriend, where we pick a country and make some food from it and enjoy a bit of its culture.

Tonight is Bulgaria. We’re making tarator (cold cucumber soup) and shopska salad and drinking a Bulgarian mavrud red wine and snacking on kashkaval sheep’s cheese. I’ve gotta introduce my gf to some chalga music while we make dinner, and we’ll watch the Bulgarian movie “In the Heart of the Machine” while we eat – it’s about a group of prisoner factory workers in communist-era Bulgaria who find a pigeon trapped inside of a machine and they work together to rescue it.

My mom lives in a small town in Norrland that has a single grocery store with only one machine. The machine is almost always broken! I haven’t seen the new machines you’re describing, but I hope her town gets one soon.

I live in the US in a state without a deposit system, so I put all my recyclables into one bag and walk it down the hall to my building’s recycling chute. No need for sorting because it all gets sorted at the recycling facility.

I’m still best friends with an ex from 7 years ago, it’s not awkward at all and us being exes rarely comes up. Her new boyfriend is cool, we enjoy chatting and we text occasionally. My girlfriend and my ex are pretty good friends, they hike and do outdoorsy stuff together without us guys.

$3.50 here too at almost every gas station in my area in the mountain states.

Two weeks ago I filled up for $3.00, and a few months ago it was $1.70 (that only lasted for about a week though).

I was hoping for better answers than the ones you got! Here’s my take as a Swedish/American dual citizen.

Swedes and Norwegians are genetically so similar that genetic tests can’t make any meaningful distinction between them. They’ve interbred for thousands of years, since long before Norway and Sweden emerged as distinct kingdoms. Whether your ancestry is more Swedish or Norwegian doesn’t really matter since the two are very closely related genetically, culturally and even linguistically (Swedish and Norwegian languages are highly mutually intelligible). While there’s no way to know for sure without a well researched family tree, you’re almost certainly a mix of the two.

Unless you’ve researched and know this not to be the case, it’s even possible that your ancestors were from a part of Sweden that was historically Norwegian and that’s why Norwegian culture was passed down to you. For example, Jämtland was ceded to Sweden in 1645 and even today Norwegian culture has a strong presence there.

Lucky for you, there’s WAY more Norwegian culture in the US than there is Swedish culture. Unless you’re prepared to do some serious genealogical research to arrive at a conclusive answer, I’d say don’t worry about whether you’re technically more Norwegian or Swedish – just keep enjoying the Norwegian culture you’ve known your whole life.

I can appreciate beautiful/charming women when I meet them, and sometimes I even get flustered talking to them. But I wouldn’t say I desire them. My girlfriend is peak woman IMO, the perfect partner for me. As long as she’s with me then I don’t need another person in that way.

That said, I’ve absolutely been in relationships in the past where I desired others and wondered what it would be like to be with someone else.