Asklemmy

Having kids. I love my kids, but if I could go back and not have them I absolutely would. Never have kids until you're financially comfortable. Fuck, the struggle is fucking real.

That time I came inside her while drunk. 19 years later, I don't regret the daughter I have, but the child support payments haven't exactly been easy...

A lot of these are kinda on the negative side (no judgement!), so I'll add a positive one. I met this girl, we started dating and we had been in that weird phase where like it wasn't exclusive but it felt like it was but it wasn't explicitly said you know? Anyways, I had these plans to go on a trip with a couple friends and some friends of friends and that same week me and the girl talked and decided it was official, nobody is dating anyone else, we're together/a thing/official.

Fast forward to that trip, and I meet this girl, I know nothing about her but she's cute and she's into me. We all get drunk around a camp fire, me and this girl go for a walk, and it's about as obvious as it's ever going to be this girl wants to hook up and I have the green light and I'm about to go for it. So I'm about to and then I remember...I shouldn't. I'm not single anymore. It doesn't matter if it's new it matters to me, I really like the girl I'm dating, we have a good thing going and it's dumb to risk fucking that up for some girl I just met. So I don't. I say I'm sorry I'm drunk and should go to bed and that's the end of that. We were cordial the rest of the weekend and I've never talked to or seen her again.

It's eight years later and that girl i liked is my wife of close to four years and we're just hanging out being boring together and I've never been happier.

We were driving my friends hoopty Saturn back from Vegas to LA on hwy 15, we had just turned 21, and a flash flood was tearing through the desert. I've been in hurricanes and tornadoes but I've never seen rain this heavy to this day. So when the brake lights in front of us reached from the top to the bottom of the windshield after a semi truck poured a waterfall onto us I suggested we pull over.

Once we reached the side of the road we stay and waited a bit, talked to our friends in the other car over the walkie talkies and they pulled over with us when they caught up. When suddenly it hit me, I've been in hot ass desert for a week now, I would love to soak up some rain!

So I tell my buddy I'm going to "Experience the storm" and step out of the car and raise my hands up Shawshank style. And feel all the hair on my body stand up.

Since my earliest childhood I remember a photo of my parents on our living room wall, standing on either side of their beat up Toyota hands raised in a jumping jack pose. And I also remember my father's retelling of the taking, in which they all dove into the car because their hair began to stand on end.

So I dove back into the open door and heard a thundercrack.

I turned down a full ride scholarship plus living stipend at one of my state's top-rated universities because my mentally abusive high school girlfriend didn't want me to move that far away from her, who had only applied for the local community college. The whole time, I knew that i was making a mistake that I'd regret forever but didn't have the courage to stand up for myself. We ended up breaking up before I even graduated, but I had already turned down the offer by that point. I ended up going to the same community college as her. Ironically, she ended up dropping out of that college because she saw me on campus every day.

I have nothing but respect for community colleges and I genuinely believe they can provide a better education than conventional universities, but I know that my life would've went differently if I had taken that offer.

The time I dated a coworker. Things didn't work out which made things very very awkward.

Where I live, back when I got my driver's license, there was always a several months long queue to take the driving test. When my turn came, there was a terrible blizzard. I knew I should just cancel it and wait several more months, but I didn't do that. It ended in several injuries and a totalled car.

I raised my right hand and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

That wasn't my best decision ever, and I kinda knew it while I was doing it.

I once hiked Longs Peak in Colorado. It's an intense hike and has had a lot of people die on it over the years (quick search comes up with ~70 people). It took me and my friends about 12 hours to get up and back down.

Anyway, I was younger and dumber and wore my normal street shoes, which happened to have almost no grip left on them. I vividly remember a portion of the hike near the end where you came up to a ledge (overlooking vast nothingness), you turned to your left and climbed up a 45 degree rock slope. If I had lost my grip on that ledge, I would've tumbled down and out into space. I had lost my grip with my shoes multiple times that day before that last section.

I obviously didn't slip or otherwise die that day, but I think about it pretty often. In a multiverse scenario, I figure quite a few of my parallel selves were lost that day haha

I wanted to buy a sailboat in Arizona, but it was too heavy for my existing vehicle. Boat transport services are really expensive, so I bought a rusty, 16-year-old van. Literally the third time I drove it (1. Get it home, 2. Register it), I hit the road across the continent.

Now, this would be a really good story if that decision had gone horribly wrong, but I'm on that boat in Wisconsin right now. The van made it. I did discover that it had no spare tire when the exhaust pipe broke on the Kansas Turnpike, and I looked underneath for the first time. It was a loud journey through Iowa that day, but I had earplugs.

Once, I was pouring a can of petrol (gas, if you’re American) onto a fire, which spread up the stream of petrol into the petrol tank. I panicked, and my genius solution of how to extinguish it was to shake it around, kinda like how you might do to put out a match.

I poured burning petrol all over the ground and on my clothes, there was fire everywhere all around me. Luckily I was right next to the hosepipe, which I quickly turned on and doused everything in water before it got too out of hand.

Everything was fine, but it could have been a lot worse.

Edit: Don’t play with petrol/gasoline. Fire spreads through it way faster than you could ever imagine, it’s not like in the movies where it moves slow enough that you can stop it, it’s pretty much instant!

I was hiking and drinking with my friends. It was a hot day and I was drunk and dehydrated and we decided to climb down this large cliff that had waves at the bottom. If we fell it would have been death 100%. I remember holding onto this little plant thinking haha if this comes out I'm dead.

On the sixth level of a scaffold next to a staircase in the shell state, which was still completely open (from above I could look down to the floor a few stories below and possibly also fall), I was supposed to glue polyurethane strips and a sealing sheet to the roof slab. However, the scaffolding had already been partially dismantled, which meant I was hanging on the scaffolding with one arm and bridged the distance of over a meter with my body and outstretched arm to do my work. No safety, I could have become goo very quickly... stupid sense of duty and disregard for all the rules. I knew full well I shouldn't be doing this right now, but let myself get pressured. But in the end it was a valuable lesson in self-esteem and fuck your boss's deadlines.

I've never made a mistake in the last ten years, and this is the biggest mistake because I've learned nothing from life.

Was fidgeting around with a lighter when I thought I could get the flame bigger with more pressure. So I thought it might be a good idea to use the refill bottle for that. While preparing it I thought, if that explodes I might burn the house down and maybe lose a hand.

For some reason my curiosity got the better of me and I went ahead. Of course it went wrong, luckily only the lighter exploded and all the gas in the air around it, I remember it as a bright flash of heat accompanied by a bang. I thought, I must be disfigured now but luckily only the hair on my arm was burned off and my eyelashes a bit singed.

So that’s probably one of the dumbest dangerous things I did. Was a teenager at the time though.

Started smoking cigarettes.

Tell us your definitive "I really should not do this" moment.

Standing on the JP's doorstep about to get married. I though "this is a terrible mistake" and did it anyhow.

Moved to socal during COVID thinking, "no one would move during a pandemic, so property values will be great".. cries in current property values

When I was a child, my dad told me "Dont put anything metallic into that electric socket!".

So I took a screwdriver and put it in. Luckily my dad is pretty cautious and the fuse tipped, had no light thats it. Hell, I could have died.

Did some other things, climbed at the side of a big bridge and flexed by only needing one hand to hold myself.

Mine's quite tame, reading some of these, but I remember once using a stick blender to make soup, and I saw a bit of food stuck in the blade, and the thumb hovering over the go button twitched slightly, and even though I was alone I pulled a face as if to someone watching, because I knew I was millimetres from losing a finger. Now if I ever want to touch the blade, I unplug the thing first.

Funny you should ask...

I was in college and needed to attend an important virtual meeting about choosing my major. They provided a Zoom link, but when I clicked it, it didn't put me in a meeting, it said this is unavailable with your free tier. So, knowing this is a stupid idea, I begrudgingly paid this evil company $17 for a month of pro.

And guess what? It still didn't work. Apparently I needed to sign in with only my school account for it to work. Never utilized the month of pro either. But at the moment, it felt like a gun was being held to my head to pay Zoom $17.

I hate tech sometimes, and despite being a young person I prefer things in person rather than always online at the mercy of these companies.