Did I just employ the "Treat Them Like You are A Kindergarten Teacher Again" method with my insurance company today? I surely did. Did it work? Probably better than intended because I made an actual doctor feel contrite.
So, my insurance has been trying to not cover my SNRI because it is new on the market and no generic available yet, so pricey.
I apply for a refill and the request gets locked for review. Again. For the 3rd time.
This time I call and immediately ask to speak to the actual doctor making these clinical decisions. Very politely. Must be a slow day because they allow it.
ME: [Teacher voice] I'm calling in regards to the SNRI you have placed a lock on. Why was this decision made?
DOC: Well, there are dozens of other medications on the market in that tier, and far cheaper for you and [insurer]. We have sent a request to your doctor to consider alternatives.
ME: I am aware of that. So, can you do me a HUGE favor and look up my prescription history really quickly and tell me how many SSRIs and SNRIs were only filled once in 2022 for me, showing they were poorly tolerated?
DOC: It looks like eight.
ME: Great job! Now, can you please look at my genetic test for psychiatric drug tolerance and tell me how many medications are listed in the safe category?
DOC: Two.
ME: Awesome! Now, can you tell me what type that other drug is that I'm not taking?
DOC: Yeah, totally, it's an MAOI.
ME: That's correct, you're really knowledgeable! Should I be taking something as dangerous as an MAOI with my other medications, or even just in general?
DOC: It's contraindicated for sure.
ME: It is! So true! So, last question since you've been incredibly smart and helpful. Is it less expensive for [insurer] to pay out for the medication knowing they already get a huge manufacturer discount anyway, or is it more expensive for them to pay for me to need potentially long-term inpatient psychiatric care?
DOC: I'll clear the code, ma'am and flag it as medically necessary. I'm sorry about this.
ME: I appreciate you SO MUCH. You have a great day now.
WALGREENS PHARMACY TECH WITH 5 NOSE RINGS AND PURPLE HAIR STARING AT ME: ........... OKAY! It'll be ready in five minutes. You wanna come work here?
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
The excerpt paragraph made me look up and stare at my wife for three solid minutes waiting for them to return to the couch. I couldn’t move on with my life. I had to read it aloud to them to their audible disgust and then they read all the comments with unbridled delight.
It wrinkles my brain that Jupiter’s moon Europa has oceans that are sixty miles deep, while Earth’s oceans only reach seven miles deep at most. I’m willing to bet good money that there’s life in Europa’s oceans. Like five bucks. You hear me, NASA? I bet you five bucks that there’s life on Europa… Now that there’s money and reputation on the line, I bet they send a mission there real quick.
I have no idea when this was originally posted, but NASA is working on their Europa mission RIGHT NOW to look for alien life! But get this, they theorize that because of the depth, gravity, and composition of the oceans, any organisms that lived there would be waaay bigger than aquatic life on Earth. So far everything’s going well with regards to their Europa mission so they should have a spacecraft on its way to look for giant sea monsters in space in only a few years. (The planned date is in the early 2020s.)
Please let there be sea monsters in space Please let there be sea monsters in space Please let there be sea monsters in space Please let there be sea monsters in space Please let there be sea monsters in space Please let there be sea monsters in space
when i was a teenager it felt very revolutionary to be cruel to myself. like some kind of slow passive protest against how much everything hurt. i starved myself of sleep and food and tenderness because it felt right. it felt sharp and angry and radical and i wanted to be those things. adulthood is the realisation that the world is already working to cut into you well before you learn how to do it yourself. caring for yourself and others is the real protest
If you had limitless money, what would you do with yr life?
Limitless?
Become Bruce Wayne.
Not batman. I haven't got the abs or aggression for Batman. But I'd kick ass as Benevolent Billionaire Brucie Wayne. Every library in the country is now fully funded forever. Also everything on GoFundMe. I'm dragging the country by the nuts into fully renewable energy. Hello first nations people, what would be the most helpful thing I can do for you? Also I started a bank and non-predatory credit card company that doesn't have fundie Christian "morals" so that every queer owned shop can do business, or every poor person can bank and build credit without worrying.
I'm not even doing this just as a moral thing, I LOVE being able to handle stuff for other people. It's better to be rich and anonymous than rich and famous but if fame is coming anyway, it's best to be known as "that guy who ended homelessness and took whales off the endangered species list", while I spend most of my time just hanging out with phenomenally cool people and generally fucking around.
Give me a cause and I'll fucking make it happen. I'm an infintillionaire and the world's future is my Sugar Baby.
One of my perennial probably-never-gonna-do-it ideas for a tabletop RPG is... well, okay, have you ever heard of Chronica Feudalis? It's a tabletop RPG set in 12th Century England, except its central conceit is that it's actually from 12th Century England, in an alternative history in which tabletop roleplaying games were invented during the 12th Century rather than the 20th. The text is written entirely in character as a medieval English monk, with commentary by the contemporary editor who ostensibly translated it from the original Middle English.
Anyway, if I ever find the time to perform the historical research to properly do it justice, some day I want to write a Prohibition era hidden-world science fiction game (i.e., a superficially realistic setting with the science-fictional elements forming a "secret world" within the ostensibly mundane milieu), presented as a game written during the actual 1920s in an alternative history in which tabletop roleplaying games were invented and popularised by H G Wells.
I dreamed that I made the banana bread like normal. But then!
Then I thinned some peanut butter with milk (????) and melted some chocolate and thinned that with milk, too, and then put them into separate baggies, and put those baggies into a third baggie so their corners were all aligned. I cut the overlapping corner to make a squeezy bag like for frosting where they would both come out together but not mixed, and then I dipped the tip of it into the banana bread batter and swirled peanut butter and chocolate into it.
THEN I baked it.
I explained my dream to my neighbor and she gave me bananas and told me to make my dreams come true. So. I'm gonna try it tomorrow.
Okay, well. I mixed the dough a LITTLE dryer than normal, to make up for the milk, and I didn't have the wheat germ I normally put in for flavor, but that's a non-essential.
The peanut butter looks exactly like it did in my dream, same consistency as well, so that's. Something.
The chocolate was a little trickier. I would have preferred to thin it with something else, like butter or oil, or even cream, but in the dream it was milk so that is what I used. Instead of adding milk to the chocolate, I heated some milk on a double boiler bowl on low heat and added chocolate slowly. It worked fine. It's not "melted chocolate" consistency, it was more like a ganache, which I suppose it is, technically. It will be extremely interesting to find out what consistency that bakes to in banana bread.
My attempt at making the double-bagged frosting bag went. poorly.
But I suspect if I were going to do it again I would put them in together rather than trying to do one then the other and I would not cut the sides. Or maybe do them one at a time into the bread, more likely. It did NOT go as smoothly as in my dream, I think I would need a metal tip with like... a straw at the end, very thin point at least, to swirl like I did in my dream. Not unachievable in terms of result but not a particularly good method, dream me.
I did put it back in for another 10 minutes on top of the hour it would normally go, and it's cooling now. I will report back once it's sliced open with how it looks inside and if it's actually good.
So, it held together fine, which I was worried about. The peanut butter lines were, I think, too thick, same with some of the chocolate. It wasn't goopy or anything, but it was overwhelming. Using a thinner tip to apply either or both would definitely help.
I had worried I burned the chocolate a little because I left the burner when I went to answer the door and got caught up for a couple minutes trying to politely get some Jehovah's witnesses to leave so my chocolate didn't burn. I don't have a great sense of smell, so I couldn't tell when I got back if it burned, but tasting it after, it definitely did. Unfortunate.
The peanut butter was also weird. Not bad, but I'm definitely not used to it being in my banana bread. The area where the strip was thinner were delicious though, so I think if you could just control the amount better it would work out. OR maybe as a drizzle on top, or a topping on a slice of normal bread.
I think next time, I would thin the (dark) chocolate with butter, apply both chocolate and peanut butter with a thinner tip, and include the wheat germ. I missed it.
But overall, thank you dream me! Delicious treat, 7/10 I will experiment with it again in the future. Please do something more interesting than baking next time, I can do that in real life.
#op please drop the recipe this sounds so good (via @sillypeachduck)
It is, I think, a fairly standard banana bread recipe to start with, my mom's recipe @mamaspark
Non-stick cooking spray
Standard loaf pan (8.5x4.5")
Turbinado sugar crystals (NOT in the recipe above, it's her secret)
DRY INGREDIENTS
1.5c All-purpose flour (180g)
1.5t Baking powder
1/4t Baking soda
1/8t Salt
-WET INGREDIENTS
2 Slightly beaten egg whites
3T Wheat germ
1t Cinnamon
1/2t Ground ginger
Dash nutmeg
1c Mashed ripe banana (2-3 medium, more or less to taste)
3/4c Sugar (150g)
1T Cooking oil
--OTHER
1c Chocolate chips (optional)
Instructions:
Spray pan and set aside (I don't bother, I just spray before I pour batter in).
Mix dry ingredients together in large bowl. Mix wet ingredients together in medium bowl. Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and mix until barely mixed (no dry powder but not blended smooth).
Add chocolate chips if you want and mix gently in. *someone in the notes also suggested using 2 older bananas like usual, and 1 less ripe banana, and adding the minimally mashed less-ripe one at this point, to leave banana chunks for dream!banana bread, and that sounds delicious actually.
Pour batter into sprayed loaf pan.
IF you desire to make Dream!Banana Bread, melt some butter in a double boiler (bowl on top of a pot, so it's not directly touching the heat source) on low heat, and slowly mix in some dark chocolate, completely mix together. Thin peanut butter by warming it in the microwave, you can thin with milk if you want but you don't actually need to. Load these into some form of pastry piping bag (plastic baggie with TINY hole in corner works fine, or get fancy and use a #230 piping tip) and swirl some into the bread. The amounts don't really matter, since you aren't using all of what you mix, just whatever you feel like. I would try a tablespoon of butter and 1/2c of dark chocolate nibs/chunks/chips, and 1/2c of peanut butter to start, and adjust to taste next time. *someone in the notes suggested thinning the chocolate/peanut butter with batter instead of milk, and you can, but it won't make as clean of a ribbon I think. It might work better for the PB than the chocolate. **I used smooth PB, but I think you could use a chunky PB and it would be fine.
Sprinkle turbinado sugar crystals over the top. Bake at 350F for 50-60 minutes depending on your oven for normal bread, definitely 60+ minutes for Dream Bread, until a dry wooden toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.
Let cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes, then turn out onto a cooling wire and let cool at least most of the way. There is little else in the world better than a warm, fresh banana bread slice with a bit of nearly-melted butter on top, where the bread isn't quite warm enough to melt the butter too fast.
As my mom notes, this makes 1 loaf and unless you're the only person eating it, you will probably want to make 2 loaves. Because it's fucking delicious.
Please write whatever deranged, unhinged, dark, fluffy, obsessive, adorable, never before seen take on a classic, 100 word drabble or a 200k masterpiece you want. Write kink, write coffee shop, write dark stuff, write pure floofy fluff. Monsterfucking, Movie AUs, murder mystery, sex pollen, first time, fuck or die, roommates, mafia boss, breakups, harsh times, there was only one bed, bad relationships, imperfect queer rep, heartwarming found family, bad romance, dead dove cowboys on a ranch, non-con, soul bond, weddings and werewolves ANYTHING!
Write ANYTHING YOU WANT. Please.
Don't ever let people tell you otherwise. This is YOUR space too. Contrast is important. Fandom is a tapestry that should NOT only be made up of one uniform colour. It's supposed to be messy.
Please write whatever you have inside you. This is your sign.
💜💜💜
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