Four years ago, I had an affair with my cousin’s husband. The fallout was exactly what you’d imagine: godawful. I felt terrible about it at the time and apologized immediately. My cousin severed ties with me and most of my immediate family. Recently our grandmother died from COVID, and we were all together for the funeral. My cousin was perfectly polite, and I was reminded of my immense guilt that I hurt her and broke up her marriage. I would like to send a note apologizing for my part in the dissolution of her marriage but am not sure it’s a good idea. I also realize sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie and don’t want to bring up a painful memory for her unnecessarily. I would ask my parents, but I don’t want to open an old can of worms with them. We’ve moved on, but I know they feel pain at losing their niece at my hands. Any advice you can give would be appreciated.

—Family Fallout

When I moved to New York at 22, it became clear that an honest man would have a hard time getting a job. The nicer interviewers would get concerned and offer sincere advice, telling me that when asked about my biggest flaw, I wasn’t supposed to actually list my flaws. When I told them I hoped some employers would appreciate my honesty, most laughed. In some cases, I ended interviews early on the grounds that the interviewer and I clearly weren’t compatible. But I got lucky and was hired by an eccentric who was charmed by my earnestness. After two months as his assistant, he brought up areas where I needed to improve, and I candidly told him that I didn’t think I could do better, that I wasn’t the best person he could get for this job. I pretty much persuaded him to fire me.

After years of feeling torn between my old ways and my new ones, I got over my discomfort at participating in the dishonest world and started to see why people spared one another the truth. As I experimented with small talk, I noticed how others used honesty to establish intimacy. I’d always seen “hiding feelings” as cowardly, but for other people, the selectiveness of their honesty was what gave it meaning. They’d choose who was special enough to hear their secrets. My indiscriminate, automatic honesty had meant that I’d tell a personal story the same way to a stranger as I would to my closest friend; that cheapened anything I shared. Anyone who loved me wanted to see a side that I didn’t show others, but I hadn’t saved one for them. Immediate honesty was impatient; if I wanted people to be honest with me, I had to earn it.

Dear Prudence,

To celebrate a milestone, my girlfriend dressed up as a 100-year-old lady; apparently this is fairly common. However, she didn’t stop there. She has now created an elderly alter-ego and expects to be treated as a grandmother while in this mode. She said it’s like crossdressing and even suggested that I dress up so that I can be her “granddaughter.” She has previously made me up, but it was only a costume; I never felt like a different person. She said that it would be fun to go out as grandmother and granddaughter, with me holding her arm or pushing her in a wheelchair. I feel like that might be disrespectful to actual old or disabled people. But I always want to make my girlfriend happy. Should I participate in this?

—Ancient Alter-Ego

A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University got more than 500 people to complete a behavioural survey on their sexual activities over several years. About a third of participants had been diagnosed with HPV; about two thirds hadn’t. Main points of interest included an individual’s age, their total number of sexual partners, the age of their “sexual initiation”, and the number of people they performed oral sex on within a short time period.

The findings, published in the American Cancer Society’s peer-reviewed journal CANCER, indicate that having 10 prior oral sex partners is linked to a 4.3-times greater likelihood of contracting HPV-related cancer of the mouth and throat, and that having oral sex at a younger age and more partners in a shorter time period are both associated with higher risk.

Participants who had older sexual partners when they were young and those with partners who engaged in extramarital sex were also more likely to have contracted the cancers, while those who had never engaged in oral sex were less likely.

The parents of an 8-year-old student who killed himself after being persistently bullied can move forward with a lawsuit against the Cincinnati school district that alleges wrongful death and other charges, a federal appeals panel ruled Tuesday.

The lawsuit's allegations also charge school officials with intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress and failure to report child abuse. The lawsuit says Taye was bullied at his elementary school starting in first grade, with the bullying escalating in his third grade year.

Other students punched and kicked him in assaults and on Jan. 24, 2017, knocked him unconscious by throwing him against a bathroom wall, the parents say in the lawsuit.

He stayed home sick the next day, returned to school Jan. 26 and was bullied again in the bathroom by students who took his water bottle and tried to flush it down the toilet, his parents say. He killed himself that evening in his bedroom.

Q. WFH boundaries: My husband and I are both working from home due to COVID. Things have been rocky at best. My husband works in a room that is his dedicated office. We don’t have the space for a dedicated office for me as well, so I usually work throughout the house and oftentimes in our bedroom. My husband just does not seem to understand that I am working during the day and will often walk into a room and start asking me questions or make small talk. He also will open the door if I have it closed, without knocking or announcing himself. I have tried talking to him about this many times and I have asked him repeatedly that if he needs something or if he wants to take a break to talk, to send me a text message before just barging in. He feels that it is insulting that I don’t want to talk to him and that he “has to ask permission” to talk to me.

Am I being unreasonable? Is it too much to ask that I have space to work without being interrupted? I understand that working from home means many people have fewer social interactions outside of the household, but I can’t just be available to my husband at all times during the work day. If I am not being completely crazy in asking for this, how can I get my husband to actually respect my boundaries? Please help!

Dear Prudence,

My wife is beautiful, smart, fun, and we complement each other in a lot of ways. But we cannot for the life of us figure out how to stick to a compromise. When we disagree, we’ll talk about it and come to an agreement, then a few days later, she’ll bring it up again, saying I “need to work with [her] and move to the middle.” For example, when her family would want to visit in pre-COVID days, we’d always have to discuss how long they’d stay in advance, otherwise they’d show up with no departure date in mind. She’d want them to stay for two weeks. I’d want a few days. We’d agree on a week, and then she’d get on the phone with them and say, “OK, you can stay for 12 days.” When I protest, she says I need to be more flexible.

This kind of moving-the-goal-post thing happens constantly, with things both big and small, and I’m not sure how to handle it, especially with the big stuff. I’ve half-jokingly told her I’m going to have her sign contracts when we agree on something and put in the fridge so she doesn’t forget. Short of drafting fake legal documents, what can we do?

—Where’s the Middle?

The support for nurses demonstrating outside South Coast Global Medical Center is clear. It was one of four protests at Orange County hospitals.
Nurses say that their safety and patient lives are at risk after the state allowed their hospital, part of KPC Health, to increase the patient to nurse ratio in the middle of a pandemic.

"So instead of giving us more nurses we got more work. Patients are going to die, nurses are gonna break, nurses are exhausted," says Karen Rodriguez, a registered nurse.

Nurses say that they are overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, shifts go as long as 16 hours, four to five days a week, code after code, leaving them exhausted, waking up anxious in the middle of the night.

"It might be surge after surge and who knows, and they're not preparing for the worst," says Irene Brown, South Coast Global Medical Center ICU nurse

"I don't have any more to give when I get home, and that's really unfair to my family and myself because I just want to rest," says Vanessa Aguilar

She says it's also unfair to patients. Aguilar had this heartbreaking admission: Some may have made it if we had more resources.

In October, as the pandemic’s winter surge was beginning to take shape across the U.S., California’s public-health researchers and officials expressed measured optimism that the nation’s most populous state could avoid a disastrous rise in cases. During a press conference on October 19, Governor Gavin Newsom pointed to declining hospitalization rates as a sign of the state’s success, but also warned that the decline was slowing. “We’re beginning to flatten out, plateau, as relates to hospitalizations,” he said.

For a moment, such a plateau seemed like the most likely outcome. A week after Newsom’s press conference, the state had 2,991 people hospitalized with COVID-19, its lowest number since April 10. But the trend quickly reversed, and by November 23, the state’s hospitalizations had doubled to more than 6,000.

What’s happened since is a worst-case scenario. While California’s per capita hospitalization rate is nowhere near New York at its worst—with 39.5 million people, the Golden State is about twice as populous as New York—the sheer number of patients in the hospital is still a sign of how badly California is doing right now.

Worse yet is how quickly the state reached nearly 18,000 hospitalizations during its current surge. When New York reached its record, it represented a 12 percent increase over the week prior. In California, by contrast, hospitalizations are up 27 percent over last week. With cases in California continuing to rise, more hospitalizations will follow.

Things are much worse in some parts of the state than others. Southern and central California are driving the current surge: 34 percent of the state’s hospitalized patients are in Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous by far. Yesterday, 620 people per million were hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 there, the fifth-highest rate among California counties.

Q. I accidentally made everyone hate me: I’m a first-year teacher at an urban Title I middle school. As is common for many teachers in my position, I’m using my personal paycheck to cover the gaps that classroom funding doesn’t. After I realized at the beginning of the year that many of my students were having trouble concentrating, I started keeping a stash of healthy snacks near my desk. The students know they can come take a snack when they need one. The costs add up quickly, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make if it helps my kids focus.

Not long after I started keeping the food in my room, I began noticing it disappearing dramatically between the time I left each afternoon and the time I clocked in the next morning. The only staff who have a key to my room are the custodians and the administrators—both of whom are fed a meal by the cafeteria if they work nights. Because I rarely stay late enough to see the night staff in person, I started leaving notes on the snacks, stating that they were for students. When that didn’t work, I eventually hid them in my desk or closet (neither of which lock). They were still being taken. I weighed my options and realized I was either going to have to stop buying food for the kids or tell someone, so I mentioned what was happening to our head of facilities. Unbeknownst to me, our head of security hid a camera in the classroom, caught the custodian who was stealing, and promptly fired him.

My students’ food is no longer disappearing, but now I have another problem: All my co-workers hate me! The administrative assistant told anyone who would listen what happened, and now everyone is angry that I caused someone to lose his job. Some of the other teachers had also grumbled in the teachers’ lounge about food going missing from their rooms, so I know I’m not the only one who was upset, but apparently I broke some unspoken rule about tolerating food theft. Was I wrong to report it? I’m seriously considering quitting because so many people are suddenly being hostile and treating me like an entitled Karen.

Tyson Foods has fired seven plant management employees after an independent investigation into claims that leaders at the company bet on how many workers would become infected with COVID-19, the company announced Wednesday. The allegations against managers at the Waterloo, Iowa, plant were part of a lawsuit filed by the son of an employee who died of the coronavirus in April.

"We value our people and expect everyone on the team, especially our leaders, to operate with integrity and care in everything we do," Tyson Foods President and CEO Dean Banks said in a statement. "The behaviors exhibited by these individuals do not represent the Tyson core values, which is why we took immediate and appropriate action to get to the truth. Now that the investigation has concluded, we are taking action based on the findings."

The lawsuit, filed in early November, alleges that the plant manager of the Waterloo facility "organized a cash buy-in, winner-take-all betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many employees would test positive for COVID-19."

In a viral post on the popular sub-Reddit forum "Am I The A**hole," one mom shared that she made rainbow blanket for her baby, but it stirred up a bit of controversy with her friend. The mom was confused by the whole encounter, as was pretty much everyone else who commented on the post.

According to the mom, one of her friends was interested in purchasing one of her blankets, but when the pregnant mom sent a photo of the blanket she was creating for her own baby, the friend took offense. Why? Because she hadn't had a miscarriage, apparently. "I told her it was for my baby and she asked whether I’d had a secret miscarriage before this baby. When I told her no, she went off on me saying it was very disrespectful to make myself a rainbow blanket when I hadn’t suffered a miscarriage and therefore I wasn’t having a rainbow baby," the mom shared on Reddit.

My husband and I are in our early 50s and married for nine years. I hate to say this, but the way he dresses embarrasses me to tears, and it’s hurting our relationship.

Is it acceptable for a man to wear tights and nothing else? I’m not talking yoga pants; I mean ballerina dancer sheer tights that leave NOTHING to the imagination. He mainly wears them in our garage (where people who drive by can see), but lately I’ve caught him standing talking to neighbors like that. Am I overreacting by telling him he can’t wear things like that outside the house? If it isn’t the tights, it’s skin-tight biker-type shorts or shorts made from a mesh material that shows it ALL if there’s a light source behind him.

We have gone rounds over this almost daily. He promises he will stop, but it’s only a matter of hours before he’s back in costume. Is it OK to wear things like that now? I don’t see women wearing tights that show off as much as his do. I’m at the point I want to gather up all offending clothing and head to the dumpster. If you say let him wear what he wants, I will, and I will keep my eyes and mouth shut. -- MORTIFIED IN CALIFORNIA

Southern California and San Joaquin Valley residents will be under a stay-at-home order after the intensive care unit capacity in the two regions fell below 15%, triggering a mandate issued by the governor earlier this week that aims to bring down the soaring number of Covid-19 hospitalizations.

The order goes into effect Sunday at 11:59 p.m. PT for the some 27 million people in the regions, which includes Los Angeles and San Diego.

That follows a proactive order issued by six San Francisco Bay Area jurisdictions on Friday for its almost 6 million residents. It also goes into effect Sunday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday announced that any region that fell below the 15% ICU capacity threshold would be placed under stay-at-home orders.

You probably already know the ins-and-outs of how to protect yourself from COVID-19 when it comes to dealing with other human beings. If you do have to be around people, don’t get too close, wear a mask, and try to stay outside. But, having a friendly dog can make those interactions tricker. After all, many dog owners have been dragged across the street to meet a new fuzzy friend and their owner, whether they like it or not.

One study recently published in Environmental Research found that pet owners who take their dogs on walks have a 78 percent higher chance of catching COVID-19 compared to pup-less peers in a survey of over 2000 people. That’s higher than even that of people still going onsite to work.