NASA
Noah Kahan
almost home
Cosimo Galluzzi
titsay
Cosmic Funnies
Andulka
todays bird
Keni
#extradirty
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
official daine visual archive
RMH
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
untitled
Product Placement
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
hello vonnie
Not today Justin
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@blazingsnark
First day back at work and apparently now the lights and thermostat are remotely controlled by corporate. It is currently summer. But the heating system was fully off when I came in and I just know that during the cold months they’re going to turn it off at night and not start warming until the second we get in which is gonna be fun when we need people to take off puffy coats and lay on beds.
I’ve talked about how I had a lot of ear infections as a kid. It didn’t bother me as much as it probably should have, because I usually took an oral medication that I loved. It was horrifically pink and it tasted so good. I forgot my dose one day and my mom had to bring it to school and I lit up like I’d missed Christmas morning which baffled every adult in the office who had expected me to whine about taking medicine.
But that wasn’t the only treatment I would get prescribed. Indeed, the circumstances conspired to deal me a heavy blow when I was dealt an alternate medicine.
My family was on a road trip. We generally went on at least one a year. Often it was a 12 or more hour drive to visit family in California, occasionally it was a family reunion in Montana. I can’t remember where we were going. I was probably around eight at the time. And I had an ear infection.
I had to take medicated ear drops every few hours. This was no delicious pink liquid. I did not light up with joy when it was time for a dose. In fact I sobbed when my mom came near with the dropper because it left the most intense itching I’d ever experienced in its wake. I wanted to claw my own skin off. I wanted to dig a hole through my skull to rip the itchiness out of me. But I couldn’t do anything.
So instead I sat in the backseat rocking back and forth whimpering about how badly it itched. I would have happily endured the pain of the infection because nothing could have been worse than the relentless unstoppable itching. If you’re wondering if my parents were worried that I was having an adverse reaction let’s just say that was the least of the things that went unnoticed in my childhood.
Eventually I rebelled, refusing to let more of the wretched stuff near me and my parents realized that perhaps something was wrong. We still waited until we got home to see a doctor who asked in horror if they’d continued to give me that medication when I was clearly allergic.
That’s how I had the worst roadtrip of my life even worse than the one where my mom bought a palm tree that was infested with ants and I woke up repeatedly covered in bugs, developed a lifelong aversion to being itchy, and found out I was allergic to sulfa.
On average I read a great deal more British literature than the average USian. I’ve picked up a lot of random British sayings and cultural tics. When watching Bake Off with my wife I can explain cultural confusions about 80% of the time.
But my absolute favorite divergence between the US and UK is the use of “sugar”.
The first time I ran across UK usage was while reading Monstrous Regiment. A girl is outed as being female after saying sugar while preparing dinner. This wasn’t quite enough context for me to understand what had happened. Was she out of sugar? Is using sugar girly? I puzzled over it for a while before I moved along in the narrative and shelved my questions for later.
It wasn’t until years later when watching Bake Off that I finally realized it was a swear and I had a glowing Amelie moment of perfect enlightenment as someone’s cake burned.
As has been previously established I am extremely pale. Someone literally told me the hex code for my feet in that video was #FFFFFF.
So I am no stranger to sunburns. Most summers I get lightly toasted at least once. And I’ve had some doozies in terms of severity for worst burn I’ve experienced but the top two occasions are a tie.
The first took place in high school. My best friend at the time was a girl who had skin several shades darker than me. She embarked with me on a family camping trip under the dubious aegis of my nana and my aunt.
My aunt, a horrible woman, cornered me to slyly ask if I were smoking and drinking in secret. Her daughter, my cousin, was and it was totally okay because she was a cool mom. When I told her no with horrified insistence she fully didn’t believe me because in her mind of course I would lie and no teen didn’t smoke and drink, so we can rule her out as a responsible adult.
My nana is not someone who could be relied upon to bring supervision to an event, which is why she didn’t question when my friend offered me what I presumed to be sunscreen. My mother would have been watching like a hawk on a sunny day, but alas. No one noticed that what my friend proffered for a day of sunbathing was not in fact sunscreen.
It was sun tan oil.
We lay out in the full sun for hours. Front and back. We applied fresh coats repeatedly with great relish. I’m not sure what I thought sunbathing would accomplish as all my life experience to that point pretty clearly illustrated the two colors available to me: white and red. Browning of any kind was never an option.
I. Was. Fucked. The next day I was so sunburned I slingshotted straight into illness, complete with fever and stuffy nose. Because I was not being cared for by responsible adults nothing was done about this. I slept in agony in my sleeping bag, the rough polyester tearing at my damaged skin, the hard ground pressing into my burns. My friend was extremely put out that I didn’t want to do anything but convalesce but the worst was yet to come.
The burn I sustained was utterly complete, front to back and top to toe I was scorched. Healing was painful and there was no comfort in any position. But heal I eventually did. Then came the itching. Every skin cell screaming at once that scratching was called for. I remember vividly pacing my nana’s house like a caged animal, desperately resisting the siren call, hunting for aloe vera or any kind of relief. None was forthcoming. Eventually I found what I’ll describe as old lady lotion that I applied in desperation.
The burning was so immediate that I induced my first ever panic attack. I wound up rocking back and forth in a cool shower promising to be good if only the itching and burning would stop.
It took weeks to fully heal and the peeling was the only upside cause I’m a little lizard freak who loves to peel dead skin off. The burns were so comprehensive I could get huge strips peeled at once off arms or legs, and that part satisfied me.
The second worst sunburn of my life happened far into adulthood and under significantly more cautious circumstances. My beloved and I were on vacation in Hawaii. My beloved had taken surfing lessons as a kid and wanted to get on the waves again. I agreed and to that end we slathered on sunscreen. We slathered again before hitting the water. The strongest UV protection that was still reef safe was rubbed stubbornly into my vampiric hide.
But it was all to no avail.
The UV shirt I wore protected my torso. My swim trunks protected my thighs. But my calves were left bare, and after an hour in the ocean the sunscreen gave up.
I emerged from the surfing lesson already crisping, a terrible sign. We sought aloe immediately and with dismay I realized my calves were redder than I’d ever seen. Then came the blisters. It was a second degree burn, on the first day of our trip.
I hobbled along on severely burned legs the rest of the time, trying to enjoy the beautiful island while being terrified of more sun exposure.
When we got home I went back to work and had to wear skirts and dresses that left the burns on my calves open to the air. Everyone who saw them was horrified and asked why I was even at work and I’d just shrug. I applied aloe every break. I got told I should get some burn cream by enough people that I trooped myself dutifully to the walk in clinic after a long shift. I waited.
They asked three times what my allergies were. Each time I repeated, “Sulfa.”
The doctor came in and put a hand too far up my knee. He then tried to scrape the burn cream onto my leg with a wooden stick. I had rubbed rosehip oil on the burns before I left work, so the cream wouldn’t stick. He gave me up as a bad cause and wrote a prescription instead. I limped out to the pharmacy.
I waited over an hour for them and finally the woman called my name. She was already frowning. “Do you have any allergies?”
“Sulfa,” I said woodenly. I was dead inside. I was up to almost two hours after my long shift at work. I just wanted the pain to stop.
“They prescribed you a burn cream whose primary ingredient is sulfa.”
I looked at her with the saddest, wettest eyes. “Is there an alternative?”
She shook her head. “They all have it.”
I nodded and limped away.
I went home after my horribly no good very long day with no cream or hope. Eventually my legs healed but they have never been the same.
I haven’t gone surfing since.
When I worked at the place selling oils and vinegars I’d sometimes get asked about food. I was, and remain, wildly unqualified to ask about food, but thankfully it was pretty rare. Usually our shoppers were fully aware they knew more than me and they were content to ignore me.
One day a woman in her fifties came in. She looked at the pretty amphora displays and the sample cups before she turned to me. “What would go well with steak?”
“Oh, some of the fruit vinegars would be a nice finisher,” I said, talking out my ass. Like, I’d eat that but whether it’s conventionally accepted to douse a steak in mango vinegar is up for debate.
“I’ve been a vegetarian for forty years, but my doctor suggested I might need more red meat. So I thought I’d get a steak tonight and I don’t know much about preparing it.”
I stared at this woman. This fully adult human woman. Who had just spoken to a doctor. And I said, “Do not buy a steak tonight.”
“What? Why?”
“You’ve been a vegetarian for forty years?”
“Yes?”
“Then your body has no idea how to process meat. You will get so sick.” It was pure luck that I knew this. I had a few hardcore vegetarian friends who had been exposed to meat at potluck dishes and told me about the ensuing horrors as their gentle veggie gut biome was overrun with flesh. And how consequently their toilet overfloweth.
“Really?!”
“Yes,” I said, emphatically. “If you want to try to incorporate meat I would start with a tiny portion of fish, and slowly work your way up, but your insides will not know what to do with steak.”
“Wow! I’m so glad I mentioned that to you.”
I was likewise glad, and ended up selling her a light vinegar that would go nicely with fish. I don’t know if she didn’t have any other vegetarian friends or if her doctor hadn’t said anything to prep her for a radical diet change but it still blows my mind that she didn’t know she couldn’t just cook up and enjoy a steak.
Hey it’s my dad’s birthday and his favorite thing is people listening to his weird music.
Go listen to his Saguaro song to make his day, please! (He got hyped that 40 people have listened over a month. If everyone who sees this listens once or shares it with a friend it would make his year)
Here are the links since his post is a mess:
Spotify
Pandora
Apple Music
YouTube
Today we were catching up with my friend Curly. He’s been in a committed relationship with a guy for almost eight years but they spice things up occasionally. He told us about how they hooked up with another couple.
“It was great,” he said, “at one point I had three dicks in my mouth at once.”
We were suitably impressed, nodding in congratulations for his absolutely bountiful harvest of dicks.
“But then the next day I got tonsillitis.”
This was met with a hearty laugh and a quick search on whether having three dicks in your mouth can really give you tonsillitis, the consensus being that, yeah probably if they were really far back there which apparently they were.
conservatives may see empathy as a weakness because they don't understand the purpose it serves beyond some vague moral gesture. it's important to note that empathy is not just born, it is learned.
for example, developing cognitive empathy is incredibly important to you yourself staying out of danger. understanding that not everyone thinks and lives the way you do is necessary to navigating basically every aspect of life. a person who lacks cognitive empathy and engages in a lot of psychological projection is more likely fooled into acting against their own interests
we joke about "dark empaths" but the fact is you can technically be a more strategic and successful villain with empathy. this is why I don't really moralize empathy - it serves a purpose, which can be good or bad depending on the individual's motives
