You may choose one weirdly specific and mildly useful superpower
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#time to create an elaborate system of coded messages out of catchy pop songs #me‚ choking to death and telepathically screaming for help: S-O-S‚ please‚ someone help me [bass line from ”Tainted Love” plays] #surveys #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #death mention
You guys want to play a game? REBLOG and put in the tags why you follow this person
Tags:
#her mental structure is deeply weird and it’s great #I’m glad she exists‚ and I’m glad I get to be friends with her #memes #the wondrous variety of sapient life #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Ok, so that poll about sleeping with the door closed because of The Killer had one obvious flaw. So, I present an alternate poll:
Do you sleep with your bedroom door….
Tags:
#airflow #my bedroom is small enough that there might actually be a significant amount of carbon-dioxide buildup otherwise #(nothing *obvious* happens when I leave the door closed overnight‚ but I’d rather not risk it) #surveys #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
guy with telepathy but he can’t use it because every time he tunes into someone else’s mind their unique perception of all of reality is so fundamentally different than his own and so incomprehensible that he just immediately passes out like a lovecraftian horror protagonist
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#relatable #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
One absolutely hilarious part of human existence is the repeated incidents of spicy bananas. People who have lived their entire lives up to this point just assuming that a specific fruit or vegetable is supposed to taste bitter, tangy, or spicy, having no fucking idea that all this time, they’ve been allergic to this plant. Because how would they have known? You learn what things taste like by tasting them, nobody’s going to tell you that bananas are supposed to be one of the mildest flavours out there. And people already eat so many things that taste hot, bitter, tangy and tart! Because they like how that kind of thing tastes like!
You can just happily much on a plant, thinking “ah, this angry plant tastes sharp because it hates me. Much like all the other sharp angry plants that people eat because they like the sharp”, and it wouldn’t cross their mind to think that the plant just hates you, specifically.
My best friend’s husband didn’t realize he was colorblind until after they were married in their mid-twenties and she watched him run a stop sign that was in front of a big bush. He’d lived his entire life not knowing. So when they did some tests and realized “hey, you’re super colorblind,” he got to thinking, it’s X-linked, right? Which means it had to have come from Mom’s side of the family, so he started digging and asked his mom’s dad, and Grampa was like “Well that would explain a lot, I suppose. I kind of thought your grandma was just pulling my leg about the tomatoes.”
Because Grandma had apparently banned him early on from picking the tomatoes in the garden because he was constantly coming in with unripe ones, and he thought she was just being super nitpicky about it. This was a lifelong family joke, that Grandpa couldn’t tell a ripe tomato to save his life, and nobody ever stopped to wonder if maybe he and the grandson who routinely colored the grass red on his drawings might have something going on with their ability to see red and green as distinct colors.
i thought aloe vera gel was SUPPOSED TO burn your skin. like how rubbing alcohol burns when applied to a cut. figured that everyone else was just better at gritting their teeth and bearing the full body aloe sting than i was. i just didn’t feel like the stinging was worth the mild healing properties aloe had.
yeah… turns out it’s NOT supposed to burn and i was just allergic to aloe
My husband comes from a “weird” family. Like, the whole county knows. “He’s a total weirdo. AAAH THAT’S HIS LAST NAME THAT EXPLAINS IT OKAY NO PROBLEM GO FLY FREE DUDE WE LOVE YOU!!” The family’s just a bunch of freaks, like the Addams Family meets the Beverly Hillbillies. I ADORE them.
It was celebrated because they’re so valuable to the local community. This one sells meticulously grown veggies at the farmer’s market, then hisses at you for suggesting they wear soemthing that isn’t tie-dyed. That kid was in kindergarten before she said her first word, and that’s cool because her older sister translated for her NO THANK YOU TEACHER WE DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR THAT IS NORMAL FOR THIS FAMILY GO AWAY. She’s got two quiet kids of her own now and WE STILL DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR GO AWAY. That uncle knows everything there is to know about every car engine ever, and he never wears shoes with laces because he literally never worked out how to tie them (He’s 60). He’s also the top mechanic in his town and makes serious dough that put his super-smart daughter through college, and now she’s an ace veterinarian who pterodactyl screams at acrylic sweaters and keeps everyone’s pets alive. I shit you not, the family matriarch gets excited for tax season every year and begs everyone to bring her their taxes so she can MATH at them. It’s her freaking hobby.
Whatever. They’re in OUR family. It’s totally normal for us. The family’s just full of freaks, that’s all. We encourage our people to go with their strengths and use their skills to make our little corner of the world a nicer place to live in, then teach them how to manage the difficult parts of the world because we all had to learn to do it ourselves. “Because this family’s full of people just as freaky as you. You’re one of us.”
No, most of them don’t go to college. It’s rural Illinois, of course they don’t. Lots of them end up in specialized trades, like electricians or farmers, and they always kick ass at it. They tend towards jobs that require a lot of focus, and attention to detal, and very specific, in-depth knowledge that is almost useless outside of whatever field they’re in. We’re mostly spread between two or three small towns in Illinois, and I do not think these three towns would function without my husband’s family fixing and growing everything they do.
One of our cousins’ kids got diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder a few years ago. His now-ex-wife insisted that something was wrong and that our cousin was a jerk for not caring enough to notice. The family reacted with “He’s fine, it’s normal, we all did that when we were his age… wait… shit… what do you mean it’s genetic?”
It turns out that like 70% of my husband’s side of the family is autistic as fuck. We’re talking about grandmothers. Uncles. Cousins. People are in their 70s just now figuring out why they are how they are.
They’re just so famously weird in our community that they attract the other weird people as partners, and then they have weird little kids, and no one really looks twice. A bunch of the people (including me) who married in were informally adopted first. “Oh, your parents punished you for this behavior? We all do that here. Come to the barbecue!” Two years later, I had their last name and was helping watch their adorable little handflappy babies.
We’ve got an entire gene pool over here of autistic people thriving so well that no one noticed we were all autistic.
Also, that cousin got RID of his wife when she started talking about how “tragic” their son’s autism is. Their son is a perfectly normal child in our family and will be raised as such. We joke now that when something needs fixed, “Oh, just call Uncle So-and-So, he’ll autism at it.”’
Beautiful, wonderful story, no notes (except maybe asking if there’s room for one more at the dinner table).
Anyway, back to the original post, I am in deep gratitude for it, because it’s the only reason I thought to wonder if chickpeas are supposed to be spicy.
(Hint: Apparently they’re not. The genetic lottery locked the good tasting falafel and hummas behind an allergy wall.)
#that one post with the thing #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #food #allergies #autism #PSA #embarrassment squick #poison cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
the other day a doctor told me that “the best way to make [something i should do but never want to do] routine is to put it on your calendar!” and i found myself completely buh– hhuh?-– about how to respond. i was stupefied by the gulf between our worlds. i looked into her kind eyes and i thought “put it on my what?” shoot it into space? i did not know how to explain to this extremely functional woman that an obligation to myself, with no stronger enforcer than my own words on a calendar, is to me a tattered codex from a lost religion. like this text is maybe historically interesting but not useful as a structure around which to build a life. what am i now going to write that will (or indeed should!) have any authority over me later? WALK? i don’t know her life! and in what world would i respect directives left to me by a complete stranger(me from two days ago) whomst i have every reason to distrust (ate all the entemann’s and put our keys in the laundry)? put it on my calendar. ok, dr goodbrain. but in the moment i nodded like a grinning toy monkey and dutifully thumbed WALK! into my phone at 4 p.m. Repeat: Every Day like that would have any effect on my actual behavior. sometimes it takes an enormous amount of optimism to be a person and frankly i admire us all for trying to do it
I tried to do this once but I was stoned and put it on my band calendar instead of my personal one so for several months every tuesday my bandmate would, without any context, get a calendar notification that just said “RUN”
thank you
Tags:
#this is not something that I experience #but accordionsrule’s anecdote there is a hell of a thing #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #embarrassment squick #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #adorable #Christmas #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #food #illness mention #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
a few years back zinc acetate lozenges were doing the rounds and I love a good superstition so I went ahead and incorporated that into my belief system. been a while so I thought I’d check to see if the state of the science on the subject had shifted since then
afaict there hasn’t been much work on the subject in the intervening time, and nothing much to change your mind one way or the other. good work everyone, you may return to your superstition behavior.
some details:
one study¹ recently reported a null result, but based on the going theory for zinc lozenges that’s what you would expect (zinc acetate was administered by capsules). also the study was lacking in other ways.
another² has a good looking graph and is maybe positive for the concept. haven’t read the fully study yet
that’s maybe about it? my method for researching this research was to search pubmed for “(zinc) AND ((acetate) OR (gluconate)) lozenge” plus some other words instead of lozenge, as there were too many results without an additional keyword for filtering. I am sure there are other places results are published besides pubmed. feel free to catapult relevant studies into my inbox
yeah that sounds fucked up! had no idea that was the case for some people, I always thought of a cold as a 1-3 day kind of thing. but presumably if someone gets 20 day colds they’re probably very glad to cut a week off that
The third week of a cold sucks a lot less than the first week so, like, maybe only as much as a normal person’s cold, but yeah if there’s a pill for cutting that third week off, I’m interested regardless of whether it helps with the main brunt of the cold. Gonna have to look into this.
you want zinc acetate, or if that’s not available, zinc gluconate. it has to be a lozenge or otherwise dissolve in your mouth, since the theoretical method of action is coating some tissue or receptor or something with ionic zinc. preferably with as few additives as possible. if it doesn’t taste bad and feel astringent, it’s not working. in the US everyone buys the life extension ones. idk about elsewhere
it is ideal to start as soon as possible. preferably in the not-sure-if-im-actually-sick-yet phase. starting once the infection is well developed seems to be much less effective
tbh I will actually take one prophylactically if I feel like I was in a high exposure environment. this is a not the protocol the research was done on but it seems reasonable and as long I don’t do this every day it is at worst a bad tasting zinc supplement
iirc the studies mostly had a protocol along the lines of one lozenge (of varying size and type?) every 1.5-2 hours while awake until symptoms subside. that’s a lot. it seems to produce some effect in the studies. I do not know that anyone has done any real study on taking more or less to compare, so it’s unclear what the optimal amount is, or how long it is worthwhile to persist in taking them
…well, I tried a Life Extension zinc-acetate lozenge (not to be confused with a Life Extension zinc-oxide/gluconate + citric acid lozenge, which I previously got by accident and which are much wimpier), and, uh, that was kind of scary.
I *didn’t even get a full dose*! I ended up running out of time before bed and having to spit two-thirds of it out! And it *still* took about *17 hours* for my sense of taste to stop being blunted!
(my sense of smell still worked, FTR, so I’m *probably* not just leaving a proverbial bad Yankee Candle review)
…I’ll *consider* giving it one more try the next time I’m *confident* I’m sick, but I cannot do this at-first-sign-of-illness when my first-sign-of-illness has a 99%+ false-positive rate.
yeah that sounds like a bad reaction, don’t think I’d bother with that either
from a single lozenge I do notice astringency but the effects on taste are minor. I hardly notice them, I don’t mind them much when I do, and they last at most a few hours if that
For me, TheraZinc lozenges pretty consistently stop colds if I start using them as soon as I notice a sore throat (haven’t tried Life Extension, have tried Cold-Eeze and they were bullshit.) they do indeed fuck up my sense of taste for days, and that’s a decent tradeoff for me because my colds have a tendency to turn into bronchitis. but it’s hard for me to voluntarily inflict that much unpleasantness on myself >_< so sometimes I don’t.
Yeah, the “as soon as I notice a sore throat” aspect is probably the main hurdle here. This could maybe have been a very valuable antidepressant for, like, 2015!me, but these days…well, these were some of my tags on that recent reblog:
(the current ratio is *mostly* because I have other forms of throat irritation way more often now, but partly because I have fewer colds thanks to more other layers in my security I’m literally writing this while wearing a P100 because my sick housemate was recently puttering about in our kitchen completely bare-faced like an asshole)
I have a really hard time doing QALY analyses on myself because my brain’s response to being queried on how much lifespan it would give up in exchange for not experiencing X suffering is “we do not negotiate with terrorists”, but ‘hypogeusia is more than 1% as bad as severe depression’ seems like a very plausible statement to me.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #the power of science #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #illness tw #death tw? #venting cw? #he *has* at least been refraining from hanging out in the living room or in our parents’ room #and *sometimes* he wears a KF94 (unsealed‚ but he might not *know* how to seal a mask around facial hair) when he’s fetching food/water #I don’t know why he’s landed on ”sometimes” and I don’t dare ask
a few years back zinc acetate lozenges were doing the rounds and I love a good superstition so I went ahead and incorporated that into my belief system. been a while so I thought I’d check to see if the state of the science on the subject had shifted since then
afaict there hasn’t been much work on the subject in the intervening time, and nothing much to change your mind one way or the other. good work everyone, you may return to your superstition behavior.
some details:
one study¹ recently reported a null result, but based on the going theory for zinc lozenges that’s what you would expect (zinc acetate was administered by capsules). also the study was lacking in other ways.
another² has a good looking graph and is maybe positive for the concept. haven’t read the fully study yet
that’s maybe about it? my method for researching this research was to search pubmed for “(zinc) AND ((acetate) OR (gluconate)) lozenge” plus some other words instead of lozenge, as there were too many results without an additional keyword for filtering. I am sure there are other places results are published besides pubmed. feel free to catapult relevant studies into my inbox
yeah that sounds fucked up! had no idea that was the case for some people, I always thought of a cold as a 1-3 day kind of thing. but presumably if someone gets 20 day colds they’re probably very glad to cut a week off that
The third week of a cold sucks a lot less than the first week so, like, maybe only as much as a normal person’s cold, but yeah if there’s a pill for cutting that third week off, I’m interested regardless of whether it helps with the main brunt of the cold. Gonna have to look into this.
you want zinc acetate, or if that’s not available, zinc gluconate. it has to be a lozenge or otherwise dissolve in your mouth, since the theoretical method of action is coating some tissue or receptor or something with ionic zinc. preferably with as few additives as possible. if it doesn’t taste bad and feel astringent, it’s not working. in the US everyone buys the life extension ones. idk about elsewhere
it is ideal to start as soon as possible. preferably in the not-sure-if-im-actually-sick-yet phase. starting once the infection is well developed seems to be much less effective
tbh I will actually take one prophylactically if I feel like I was in a high exposure environment. this is a not the protocol the research was done on but it seems reasonable and as long I don’t do this every day it is at worst a bad tasting zinc supplement
iirc the studies mostly had a protocol along the lines of one lozenge (of varying size and type?) every 1.5-2 hours while awake until symptoms subside. that’s a lot. it seems to produce some effect in the studies. I do not know that anyone has done any real study on taking more or less to compare, so it’s unclear what the optimal amount is, or how long it is worthwhile to persist in taking them
…well, I tried a Life Extension zinc-acetate lozenge (not to be confused with a Life Extension zinc-oxide/gluconate + citric acid lozenge, which I previously got by accident and which are much wimpier), and, uh, that was kind of scary.
I *didn’t even get a full dose*! I ended up running out of time before bed and having to spit two-thirds of it out! And it *still* took about *17 hours* for my sense of taste to stop being blunted!
(my sense of smell still worked, FTR, so I’m *probably* not just leaving a proverbial bad Yankee Candle review)
…I’ll *consider* giving it one more try the next time I’m *confident* I’m sick, but I cannot do this at-first-sign-of-illness when my first-sign-of-illness has a 99%+ false-positive rate.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #oh look an update #illness tw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I cannot find the post but I saw someone recently saying that the Yankee Candle Index looks bad again for this winter #(that is to say‚ Yankee Candle is experiencing another flood of negative reviews from #people who actually have sudden-onset anosmia but are blaming the lack of scent on poor candle quality) #P.S. I started wondering whether my health-log data supported my 99%+ estimate #so I did some ctrl-F and wow‚ I have non-contagious sore throats *even more* often than I thought #I had a noticeable amount of non-contagious throat soreness on *86 days* out of 2023-so-far #plus one contagious sore throat spanning two days‚ slightly under 24 hours total (before moving on to different cold symptoms) #but bear in mind that in the period 2020 – 2022 inclusive‚ *every* sore throat was non-contagious #so yeah‚ lately I *have* had >100 sore throats that don’t lead anywhere for each one that develops into a cold
Not to sound like a 90s shallow prep, but how you dress can affect your self esteem, and putting energy into wearing things you actively like and projecting an ideal of yourself through fashion instead of seeing clothes as things you have to put on out of obligation helps.
It also can give you a sense of control over your appearance that you otherwise wouldn’t have lmao
this post is written in a humorous tone but this is the realest shit.
two years ago i wore baggy sweatpants and flip flops every day because i was depressed but then decided eh to hell with it and bought some black edgy emo clothes bc thats how i always wanted to dress but never got a chance to and it was only then that i realized that the sweatpants flip flops look was just keeping me in my depression funk. i didnt like the way i looked and i didnt identify with the clothes i was wearing and it only made me feel worse.
i then went through my entire wardrobe and got rid of everything that made me feel that way.
now i have multiple outfit possibilities requiring different levels of effort but on days where putting on clothes just seems like a project i just have to put on black jeans and a band t-shirt and i can still feel good about the way i look which is a really good way to start off my day.
i can not recommend this approach to clothing enough.
WFH for 3 years got me stuck in the same sweatpants flip-flop depression funk until the zooms stopped and I realized that no one can see me so I can wear whatever I want and even tho I still wear a lot of lounge wear (because fibro) and sandals (because florida) I now have CUTE comfy stuff I really love that matches and it really does make such a big difference to my mood and has also dropped a few barriers to leaving the house and while it hasn’t fixed my mental illness and I might never win a fashion award I really REALLY feel so much better about my appearance which helps
In jr high I tried so hard to be “normal” and “cool” but the harder I tried the more apparent it became that it wouldn’t work. I could do all the trendy clothes/makeup/hair I wanted, I wouldn’t ever be seen as “normal” (largely due to undiagnosed ADHD). One day I said to myself “If they’re going to treat me like a freak, I’ll show them a fucking freak” and just started doing whatever I wanted. I painted flowers on my face and dressed like a hippie, had a pair of jeans that were basically a belt and shreds, dyed my hair, got piercings, and started having a LOT of fun. I finally made friends. I found my people because I stopped trying to be someone I wasn’t. I’ve never gone back.
Now that I have a chronic illness, the way I dress and look is one of the very, very few things about my body I have control over and it’s very important to my health. It doesn’t matter if how you dress is trendy or not, it matters that it suitsyou personally.
Tags:
#that one post with the thing #I don’t tend to *think* of myself as having strong opinions about clothes because I’m not big on *beauty* or *decoration* #but actually I *am* very picky about clothes #last time I tried to thrift clothing #after combing through *so* much stuff #I managed to find…one job-interview dress and one pair of good sweatpants #(I don’t understand the whole sweatpants-as-lazy thing) #(sweatpants are just cold-weather clothing) #(how do the sweatpants-as-lazy people not overheat wearing sweatpants in the summer and freeze wearing not-sweatpants in the winter) #((…it may be relevant here that I can’t stand jeans)) #(anyway) #I gave up and went back to shopping at Lands’ End #(at least thrift stores are good for shoes) #(people try out hiking‚ buy gear for it‚ decide they don’t like hiking‚ and dump the boots) #(then I buy a $150 pair of boots for $35 and wear it around town for many years) #I do keep largely-separate house clothes and out clothes though #yeah‚ it’s a barrier to leaving the house‚ but I need a sanctuary #a place where things are (ideally) clean or (at minimum) sanitary #I don’t want to come home and sit on my couch with #the same pants I was wearing when I sat on a bus seat next to four sniffling people‚ you know? #and it lets me get more life out of clothes that are just a *little* too ragged to wear outside #I make no attempt to make my repairs pretty #tag rambles #clothing #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
Brinens and Things 