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Move far away from home with or without a job lined up for you.That's right.Pack up your car with all your essential belongings (probably won't be much).Choose a city thats hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from where you grew up (preferably where a friend might live).Move into a house or perhaps an apartment.Start a life of your own.My life: When I was 23 years old I had graduated college and moved from Chicago to Boston.Prior to that, all I had experienced in life was the "progression of the academic ladder.”I had always known what was going to come next in life:With Kindergarten, I knew that First Grade was next. After that, Second Grade and so on and so forth. You always have a road map of what to expect next in your life.Once I finally graduated college I was to enter the "real world” like many people do.Still young and in my early twenties I knew there was much more to be gleaned from life.I had a friend from High School and University get a job that moved him from Chicago to Boston. He told me that where we was living, a room opened up and he suggested I pack my things, move out there and live in the house.After weeks of deliberation, I took the gambit.I packed up all the necessities I needed in order to start this new and adventurous life. It took about 16 hours over two days and before I knew it, I was pulling up to the small, one-story house I'd be living in the next 18 months.Starting over away from your “nest” can have profound impacts on finding yourself in your twenties.You find who you are when you need to make friends.When we're kids, we pretty much make friends by proximity. We are in the same class as these individuals and we gravitate towards people through similar interests but most of the interaction comes from being held against your will in Mrs. Belford's 2nd Grade reading class (sorry Mrs. Belford).When you move and find yourself in a foreign community, it is up to you and only you to make friends. You can use various networking sites, you can join intramural sports, you can find coworkers and meet their community. You will find out so much about who you are from the actions you need to take in building a community of friends that supports you.You learn extreme responsibility.When I moved from Chicago to Boston, I didn't have a job lined up. I took an extreme risk of failing. I had about $2000 in my checking account saved up. I needed to find a job and I needed to find one fast. I felt as if my back was up against the wall. I knew that no one cared that I moved to this city and I wasn't going to get any hand outs. I networked my ass off. I sent out hundreds of resumes. Every interview I went to, I gave it my all. I knew that as the weeks rolled by, I would have to write another rent check and I couldn't rest on my laurels in Mommy and Daddy's house, rent free. I finally landed a killer job working for a Website Start-up. I grew leaps and bounds professionally from this profession though I was ultimately fired (I'll get to that later).If you want to eat, it's all on you.When I moved away from my hometown I didn't have the ability to text Mom and see what dinner was going to be when I got home. If I wanted to eat I had a couple of options: spend beaucoup on take out/dine in or I could learn to grocery shop, buy in bulk, cook in bulk and learn to live off my own cooking skills. I took the latter approach.You learn a lot about yourself when you learn to cook on your own. You learn what tastes you like. You learn tricks in preparation. You learn tricks in planning out your meals. You learn the failure of cooking which can branch out in other aspects of your life.Extreme Responsibility (Part II).After about two and a half years of working at my first job in Boston, I was cordially called into my boss's office. There, the both of us sat as well as one of the VP's. They laid out a thick packet in front of me. The top lines reading: PERSONAL IMPROVEMENT PLAN. I was being questioned for my lack of production within the company. I was told that I had 30 days to turn my performance around and with that, if I met certain criteria, I would be retained with the company and it would be as if this “conversation never happened.”In that moment, I knew I had done wrong. I was making money both for myself as well as the company, however, I wasn't doing it “their way” with their specific call metrics etc (don't worry, people, no theft or anything like that). I had essentially “checked out” of my role and the company noticed. Again, in this defining moment in my twenties I had two choices: one was to sign on the dotted line that I would conform to their standards, follow their criteria and waste away with a job that I wasn't finding fulfillment. The other, I would turn the packet back over to them, own up to the consequences of my actions and tell them “I'm sorry, I can't sign this because in thirty one days we'll be having the same conversation.” Again, I took the latter. After a few minutes of deliberation between my boss and the VP I was called back in and told I would have two weeks to finish my role with the company. I was fired.This was a crushing blow to who I was as an individual. I never thought in a million years that I was going to be fired from a job (thanks EGO). I learned that we all make choices in life and there can be extreme consequences to such choices. The important thing is to own up to any choice you make. Don't make excuses or blame others. Your life and success is on you.You learn to get by on little to no luxury at all.When I was living in my first house in Boston, I was living in a partially-finished basement and sleeping on a small twin-sized bed. For illustrative purposes, I'm 6'3″ when the barometric pressure is high (meteorological jokes here people!) When I'm on a twin-sized bed, my feet undoubtably fall off the end of the bed. Again, I didn't have enough money to just buy a new bed. To solve this problem, I took a box from a flat screen TV my landlord purchased and wedged it in between the wall and my bed. On top of the box, I placed a pillow. Voila! I had extended my twin-sized bed so I could comfortably and completely fit (of course with this I still had to sleep “Abraham Lincoln Style” by sleeping diagonally). My point is, when I didn't have the luxury of my parent's house or perhaps any other type of aid, I needed to be resourceful in figuring out the solutions to my own problems on the slimmest of budgets.With loneliness, you find who you are.When you move halfway across the country to a foreign city with no friends or family, you will most definitely find yourself lonely (and often). Plenty of the people you try and make friends with will already have a solid foundation of friends they spend time with. You will find yourself going to dinner alone, you will be going to the movies alone, you will spend weekends at the beach alone. Through all of this alone time, you find time to reflect on who you are and what you want in this world. You are still a child. This is such an important time in your life in finding out who you are and what you want to be. Being alone, as hard as it can be, opens up these reflections.Do you want to find yourself in your 20's?Put yourself in a situation where you don't know anything or anyone.Put yourself into situations where your responsibility is magnified and the prosperity of your livelihood depends on it.Put yourself in the mindset of seeing food as fuel and learning new skills in its preparation.Put yourself in situations where your only resource is resourcefulness itself.Put yourself in lonely situations so you can find the strength to find and build who you really are.Your twenties are a pivotable moment in your life. Don't waste the years in comfort. You can't grow in doing so.

As with most Questions beginning “Why do the British…?”, the basic answer is simple: they don't.I think your Question, OP, is based on a complete misunderstanding of one word, “crackers.”You seem to think that the strange British derive their weird Yule-tide enjoyment from dressing up in paper crowns and throwing small explosives around. You must assume we are both primitive and too ignorant to understand the potential for disaster of combining flimsy paper and indoor explosives. I honestly don't know why you even bother to try to communicate with us!From Victorian times onwards, one of the small traditions of Christmas dinner, in many families, has been to have crackers on the table. Christmas crackers are small tubes of brightly coloured, shiny paper, pinched into three sections, and with the central section containing a tiny object (known as a favour) as a prize or gift; a piece of paper with a (very bad) joke, riddle or motto on it; and a tightly folded hat or crown made of thin tissue paper. All three sections are stiffened by a roll of thin card, and a narrow strip of paper is threaded through the entire thing, with a tiny amount of some minutely explosive substance painted onto it in the middle. There will be one such cracker for each person at the table.At a suitable point in the meal, perhaps after the main course plates have been cleared away, or even before the meal starts, someone will decree that it's time for the crackers. Each one is held between two people, and they then pull the two ends apart until there is a sharp “crack!”, bits and pieces fly everywhere, the air is filled with a faint smell of explosive, and everyone rummages on the floor and in the debris on the table to find the paper hats and the favours. The awful jokes will also be found, and will inevitably be read out. People put the hats/crowns on (they are usually much too big) and are expected to keep them on whilst eating the pudding, which has arrived on the table while all this was going on.The quality of the favours (a mediaeval word) will depend very much on the price of the crackers; nothing else will vary much. They can be little more than tiny plastic objects, of no use whatsoever, but can be tiny objects that will amuse a child for a few minutes, or even be of some actual use. Whistles, little tiny fans, rolled up tape measures, tiny packets of some mysterious substance that will turn into crystal “flowers” in water, tiny puzzles, and even (on rare occasions in the past) tiny, safe-to-use-indoors, fireworks, almost anything small enough to fit inside a rolled up cardboard tube a few inches long, might be in there.Most crackers are frankly a complete waste of money, and unless you are sitting down to a meal for the whole family, with everyone from very young children to grandparents and great grandparents there, you probably don't do this sort of thing. But the people who do are probably in the long line of descent from Christmas traditions dating back to the Middle Ages, going right back to the sort of festivities described in poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, back in the late fourteenth century.

It feels like you're invisible.I've debated on whether or not to add my answer to the already many excellent replies listed on this thread, but since this is something I've often thought about, I decided to add my own response.As one of only three Asian American students in my entire elementary school, the difference between me and a sea of white classmates was obvious. My family was also the only Asian family in a completely Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn.It was very difficult not to fit what was the only acceptable beauty standard at the time, a fully Western one. I was constantly reminded of how different I looked from everyone around me. Brooklyn was nothing back then like it is today in terms of acceptance of diversity. I remember wishing desperately I could just look more like everyone else I saw; light brown hair, not black; blue eyes, not brown. I was called "chink" a number of times walking down the street and once even had soy sauce packets thrown at me.However, when you're a little kid, these types of differences don't matter as much. So, though I wished I looked more like my peers and noticed none of the other little boys had "crushes" on me the way they did on my best friend, it's not something I ultimately cared much about.During my early teen years I became quite depressed. I was (and am) petite, small, bony, and the last person you'd notice walking in to a room. This was on top of the usual awkwardness and self-loathing that pretty much every teen on the planet seems to go through, so it was all pretty bad timing. I began dressing every day in a uniform of a really baggy, gray t-shirts and jeans, which didn't exactly do much for me. I was picked on pretty aggressively (by fellow nerds, of all people), which further dented my self-esteem.In high school, making friends was a challenge. More attractive girls who had the confidence to wear flashier, louder clothing were befriended by both girls and guys while I watched on the sidelines.In the early years of college, I did a study abroad program in Paris. While I loved traveling, living in Europe as an Asian woman doesn't generally do much for your self esteem. I was one of the only Asian students in my program in a sea of blondes and generally ignored by everyone, while the other girls in my program were hit on and approached constantly. No one was ever mean, or outright rude. People were always just distant, or didn't notice I was around even when I made an effort to directly engage them in conversation. Dating was a very, very, very remote possibility; men never noticed me.The upside to this is I learned to develop relationships with people based on character, not outward appearance. I learned to work for conversations through shared interests and personality, because "coasting" on looks wasn't an option.It was painful to never be the one noticed in my teens and early twenties, but I am happy to say I tried to let it affect my day-to-day life as little as possible. I'm not a jealous person by nature, and having these experiences did not turn me into one.Things changed for me as I progressed into my twenties and gained confidence. My self esteem to this day still isn't the greatest, but outer beauty, though important, is not everything. I feel confident enough now to wear the things I want, and no longer desperately wish to be the 6 foot tall, Amazonian blonde -- I'm happy being the 5 foot 2, little Korean. I do feel "visible" now, and I feel attractive enough for me, which is ultimately more important.