Erin Wert

I’m hipster famous. You probably haven’t heard of me.

@Delafina777 This is so relatable. So often my brain is like “if you make over 6 figures it should be easy to own a home so what’s wrong with you” and then I have to remind myself that my rent is still nearly half my paycheck. 2nd income just means we finally have a 3 month emergency savings

@alyssaleann My friend had a bump wedge pillow she really liked in her last trimester. Idk how much it was but that’s a thought

What’s a good small gift (<$50) for a fairly close friend who is in the early stages of pregnancy? Something that is nice + congratulatory but not necessarily baby gear?

@HollyStallcup This feels like a problem I could probably solve but also one that I may need to ponder for a little bit. I have some potential ideas forming………

Looking for ideas for a disease that could be diagnosed in the mid-twenties to mid-thirties that would be fatal within a handful of years but could be hidden from most people for the first several years of the diagnosis. Trying to avoid a cancer storyline if at all possible.

@adhdlibrary She’s a woman who is successful without (and often despite of) any man. That’s really all they need.

Or it could be very cheap. The choice is yours! (My parents have a house rule where they have special prizes for whoever brought the best gift of the night and whoever went home with the worst gift, which is a way to encourage some thoughtfulness and make up for truly awful ones

I tend to flag items as potential white elephant items all the time. I now explain white elephant rules as “buy nothing, but a gift exchange stealing game” because essentially it’s most fun when you’re trading things someone else might want or need. It could be very expensive!

Once I recall someone brought a ton of mulch and someone else was very excited indeed to steal the mulch because they in fact needed a bunch of mulch!

For instance, at my parents annual white elephant parties, we have had framed Star Wars art or posters or something that someone was getting rid of, but also there’s a pair of granny panties that show up routinely, and other return gifts that circle.

White elephant has a lot of house rules but my house rule has always been you’re not allowed to buy the thing you are giving but must already have it. It doesn’t have to be terrible, though it could be.

Some Money Talk... Because of how the P4A works, we raise money all throughout the year now, but don't send it out until after the livestream. That means that we can have as much as a million dollars in the bank for over six months. So we put that money in a CD so that it can generate a little extra income. It's 5% for six months so a meaningful amount...maybe $25,000. The thing is, you can look at that and say, "Oh, why not just do that? Why not take all of the money the P4A has ever raised and, instead of donating it, you could earn 5% on it and then donate the 5% forever?" This is what endowments are and that's how they work. If we did this (WHICH WE WOULD NOT (which i'll get into)) then there would be like $15M in that account and we'd be donating $750,000 per year...theoretically forever. That sounds amazing! There are a lot of people who are very compelled by endowments like this, because the main nugget of money never goes away and is always throwing off more good into the world. This misses something very important. It imagines that donations are one-time goods while capital throwing off money in an endowment is a forever good. But that's not the reality. The reality is, when you donate money, the good that money does does not vanish the moment the money is spent, it continues to do good forever, you just can't see it anymore. If you help a mother not die in childbirth, then that doesn't just do good that one time, it does good for her and her community and her children for the rest of her life...longer than the rest of her life! Her children will have the support of that person who otherwise would have died. They will continue to live healthier and better lives because they did not lose their mother as children. They will be better prepared to serve their own community and their own children. Those returns continue /forever/. There is economic return on donations, they are just returns that you can't see as a number in your bank account. And those returns are MUCH BIGGER than 5% per year. If you are a person with money and you have a charitable giving account and you can see that there is currently more money in that account than you have ever donated...I'm sorry but you are doing it wrong. The money needs to get out and do good now. There isn't some future time when it will be more capable of doing more good because it has grown. It needs to get into the world. It can be doing so much good. And if you don't know what to do with it, just send us an email at hankandjohn@gmail.com. We've got you.

People responding to Drew Barrymore making the right decision with “she didn’t do it until she got blowback” are what’s wrong with our country. You make a wrong call, you listen and you correct. That’s not the thing to punish.

@emilykmay This is why religious trauma is so different and has to be addressed and healed differently. Because the rupture in families is not straight forward, and the love you still received wasn’t secretly manipulative abuse the whole time. Everyone is being hurt.

🧵 What people don’t understand is that the Duggar parents are not monsters. They are people who became harnessed by an ideology that was predicated on fear and control. Do not get me wrong- they have behaved monstrously. And Josh, specifically, is a monster. /1

@MomRobe Honestly, starting a chat with all the different teams is one of my power moves. “Hey y’all, saw X today. Want to make sure we’re all on the same page…”

This is not a Duggar apologist thread. This is about the fact that fundamentalism lies to you and tells you that what you are doing is good, loving, right, and holy. It’s insidious-ness is covered with niceties and grains of truth, but the eventual fruit is rotten. /9

But normal people can be changed by dangerous ideologies. And they aren’t all just sociopaths. Shiny, Happy People said it: “Gothard turned every father into a cult leader and every family into an island.” /8

We tend to look at people in cults and say, “we would never.” We want to “other” them. We want to act like they are simply sociopaths, like the Turpin parents. /7

But fundamentalism does what it promises- it fundamentally alters people and tells them to go against their instincts of what is right. IMHO, Jim Bob and Michelle love their children. And this is *not* excusing their behavior, or dismissing it with “all parents screw up”- /2