Sunstream

I really should feel sorrier than I do for laughing out loud at this

Always a relevant Simpsons quote

Kid: What if people say you’re not good enough to be in the Constitution?

Amendment: Then I’ll crush all opposition to me, And I’ll make Ted Kennedy pay. If he fights back, I’ll say that he’s gaaaay

Parasitophobia and dermatophobia (fear of parasites and skin disease, respectively). This bleeds into a fear of fungal infection and worms in general. I guess my kryptonite would be a parasitic skin infection 🙃

I don’t know what it is about them that repulses me/freaks me out over anything else- I quite like spiders, snakes, heights, the dark, etc- it’s just instant nausea when anyone starts talking about them. If there’s a hint I’m in danger of encountering either irl, I’m out.

Worst fear is having something crawl into my ear (I guess I can thank Animorphs for introducing yerks to me as a kid). I’ve seen some videos of that sort of thing happening to people, and I can’t even fathom how calm people seem to be in comparison to how I would be if it were me. I’d have to have to put on a watch so I didn’t start ripping into my head in animal panic.

I also have a particular dislike for really large fish and really large lizards. Anything larger than a foot and a half begins to make me uncomfortable. Dinosaurs are right out.

As my sister would say (who has a fear of lizards, herself) “If I were trapped in a room with a komodo dragon and a gun with two bullets in it, I would shoot myself twice.”

So you would think, but although South Korea (for example) has a similar low birth rate, their baby boxes gets plenty of traffic, unfortunately.

People who have the largest barriers to contraception, abortion care, sexual health care and education are the the ones most likely to have their children end up in baby boxes.

There’s a doco on youtube called Babybox : S. Korea’s Paradox of Low Birth Rate that’s well worth the watch (though brace yourself if you’re a crier, it’s rough).

I learned in a video that cats can read our facial expressions just fine, we’re just crap at reading theirs because their facial muscles don’t allow for the same movement as humans (and dogs to some extent). They’ll become more anxious if we show a fear expression around them in a new environment, or become more relaxed and cuddly if we smile at them in a new place. They look to us for reassurance as much as dogs do.

Once I learned that they do a lot of their communicating with their tail, I started paying attention to my two cat’s tail movements and now I can’t unsee it. It’s as obvious as a waving hand, and they’ll talk to one another this way as well as with us.

For example, they lift their tail as a greeting. If I say their name as they enter a room, I might think they’d completely blanked me if I didn’t see their tail lift ‘hello’ every single time. Once my older cat, Bartine, didn’t bother to tail lift, and I said “Oi! Barty! Rude?!”. She then gave me a quick, half-hearted lift, like she couldn’t be bothered with more than half wave, lol

Their tails quiver with excitement if there’s a very interesting treat up for grabs, or my favourite is a coquettish swirl which is 100% “I love you” because it’s always followed up with an approach to snuggle or headbutt. They also understand me when I say I love you, but particularly now because I see the swirl tail and say “I love you, too!” followed by indulgent pets.

Eh, the tardigrades will probably survive. That’d be enough for me.

'Tis a silly one, but it’s hilarious when it stumps people. Best used verbally:

There are thirty cows in a field, and twenty-eight chickens. How many didn’t?

Oof, that must have been infuriating. I know there wasn’t much choice involved, but good on you for going back each time. I know a few people whose pride would have financially crippled them in that moment. Patience and persistence paid off, in the end. Congratulations on graduating :)

You gotta think diabolically.

My psychiatrist here in Australia cautioned me when doing online research into different ADHD medications to check the country of origin and avoid American sources where possible, as there is a huge anti-drug bias in US public and medical literature, and to stick to European/Australasian/other resources for more accurate information on mechanism of action and potential side-effects.

Boy, he was not wrong. If you go on many American websites that talk about the pros and cons of one stimulant or another, it’ll overemphasise its propensity towards abuse and extensively list the side effects without bothering to explain how the drug actually works in the body.

You’ll think it’s an unbiased source, at first, because the website itself only seem to contain basic drug information (at a cursory glance) only to scroll to the bottom and find that the website is owned/sponsored by a rehab facility, of all places.

It’d seem like there’s money to be made off of dx and prescribing ADHD meds, but we all know how fucking hard it is to dx’d in the first place, let alone prescribed something that works. It’s not wildly profitable to prescribe drugs with heavy federal restrictions on it.

What is profitable, however, is to give someone 6 other psychiatric medications to treat ongoing mental health issues from undiagnosed ADHD, and the half dozen other co-morbid issues like substance abuse disorders, PTSD, anxiety/depression, bipolar disorders, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and so on- none of which you’ll get much traction in treating without also addressing ADHD, and some of which may be misdiagnosed or more effectively treated when identifying the core disorder.

Why treat 1 condition when you can treat 7 ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Better yet, you can do that in an inpatient facility that their insurance can pay for, where you can convince them that their substance abuse issues are due to moral failing rather than an attempt at self-medicating a (widely speaking) treatable disorder, yet hypocritically prescribe them a cocktail of other psychiatric medications for their “moral failing”.

That being said, I’m not saying all rehab facilities are bad or operate in this manner, but it is just one of many ways that the medical and pharmaceutical industry inadvertently or directly discourages appropriate ADHD treatment, additionally fuelled by the government’s bigotry-fuelled war on drugs.

Yeah I’m 30, now. I presume they’re just chilling, lol. Has anyone’s come down after that point, do you think?

It can depend on how complicated your impaction is. Sometimes they look at you and go, “Yeah I can work that out no issues,” other times they’ll be like, “Nah fuck that, this is going to be a major surgery.” The last thing you want is for them to realise it’s the latter and not the former when they’re halfway through the procedure 😅

I’ve heard of that happening, actually; the dentist ended up driving the patient around themselves trying to find an available surgeon to finish the job, and eventually gave up and just dropped them off at the emergency department.

Usually it’s not that wild, but I feel safe in assuming that many dentists choose to book a general out of an abundance of caution, 'cause I’m sure that scenario features in their nightmares as much as it does the patient’s.

It probably has something to do with licensing and costs for anaesthetists, too, come to think. Most dentists are qualified to give locals but not generals; verrryyy different ballgame, you can imagine.

Oh yeah, and finally, people’s jaws are getting smaller. Seriously, though. The smaller the jaws, the more complicated dental surgeries are becoming, so there you go.

There is no difference between saying Princess Monoke is one of the finest movies ever made and saying that animation peaked in the 2000s.

They are both examples of hyperbolic statements we all use to illustrate how passionately we hold our opinions.

The only difference between them is that you agreed with one and not the other, so it’s a bit intellectually dishonest to go into an emotional argument challenging exaggerated opinions as though they were true statements, particularly when you pick and choose which ones you decide to take literally.

If I’m wrong and you really did see the latter as a statement, it’s not a statement proveable by any metric which immediately makes you the easy victor and makes the other person look foolish.

At best it’s a cheap win but at worst, frankly, it’s unkind. It’s okay to just disagree; it holds no bearing on the validity of your own opinions.

I’m kind of sad that I never got to experience that, to be honest. I only had two wisdom teeth- 1 on the top left and 1 on the bottom right. The right was set to be impacted, but apparently it hadn’t grown any roots, yet (I was 17 or 18) so they decided it just get it out with a local. It was… unpleasant. The top left one has never come through, either, so I may well not have bothered 😓

It gives me the shudders to think of waking up on the table, but I suppose it beats the years prior to that, again, where it was “Jeremy, get the 40 proof… You, bite down on this and don’t scream too loud, you’ll pop a vessel.”

I’ll give you a piece of advice that’s been very valuable to me, especially in the case of getting injections, which is always difficult for me. In the lead up to a local anaesthetic, and during, take a short-to-normal inhale through your nose (depending on your lung tolerance) and do a loooong, extended exhale, as long as you can extend it without needing to take too big a gulp afterwards. When you exhale, this pushes your diaphragm up into your heart, slowing your heart rate down and significantly decreasing the physical effects of anxiety.

It works very, very quickly, and if you do it for up to 5 minutes, the heartrate lowering effect can last several hours. Doing it regularly (5-10 minutes a day) has long term positive effects for your overall cardiovascular health, too.

I’ve never been one for meditation, but practices like that have probably been helpful to so many people because it naturally takes advantage of the relationship between breathing patterns and heart rate variability.

There are even more ‘tricks’ like this, such as the double inhale. Taking two very quick breaths in succession before that long exhale is even better at reducing your heart rate and generally calming you down. You’ve even done it before, but you wouldn’t know it.

Children in particular will do this, and it can happen naturally when you’re sobbing. Sometimes you’ll take two short inhales like “huh, huh!” before going in for another cry rather than one big gasp- and this is why!

I hope this really helps you out, because it’s very quick and straightforward, but boy does it work fast. Sometimes I’ve only remembered to-do it halfway through an unpleasant experience and it still banishes burgeoning pre-syncope and nausea. Good luck!

Idk about where the original poster is, but here in Australia, yeah there are different energy providers. They all take advantage of the same infrastructure (which is run by a singular company, by and large- Energex), but different companies will offer different rates or deals for your energy needs and your service area. It’s supposed to provide some competition for the consumers, although I don’t know how that works out on the vendors side of things.

Additional unfun fact, in case the implication goes by anyone; some few folks have discovered exactly how much it sucks when your immune system discovers your eyes and have, indeed, gone blind because of it :(

It sure is; here’s a video demonstrating the effectiveness. Shutting your door can mean the difference between life and death. I encourage anyone to watch or re-watch this, just to hammer it home.

Unfortunately, my cats can’t deal with shut doors, so if there’s ever a fire in my apartment, at least we’ll all go together 🙃