As a nurse who graduated in the middle of COVID (and was working in hospitals leading up to it), A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher was surprisingly healing read.

“You expect heroes to survive terrible things. If you give them a medal, then you don’t ever have to ask why the terrible thing happened in the first place. Or try to fix it.”

tbh the more I learn and experience that’s most of the human experience. I had a Minister when I was young that said there’s really only two human emotions, fear and love, and that without significant intervention fear pretty much always wins. I’ve been working in psychiatry for almost a decade now and there’s lots of finer points to be made about human psychology but in the end it pretty much all does just boil down to fear and love.

He was an exceptionally good Minister, to the extent that for while I didn’t understand how common it was for people to be deeply betrayed by a church leader. It was not uncommon for people in the community to genuinely compare him to Fred Rogers (who was incidentally also a Presbyterian minister). Very similar background, temperament, points of advocacy, and even appearance and mannerism; if they hadn’t both been alive at the same time it almost might make me believe in reincarnation.

This is a big factor. A lot of people conflate less benefits with higher taxes because fear-brain just knows they both equal increased hardship in the end. They’re technically wrong but their statistically slightly more active amygdalas are responding to a genuine threat, just one that they’ve been very skillfully misdirected into helping worsen.

eh if I took up travel nursing I’d probably still want something similar to a house or apartment to rent for 3-6 months because most hotels aren’t really designed to be lived in that long but I also don’t want to buy a wholeass house then worry about selling it in 6 months. but that’s splitting hairs, at what point do you just call that an extended stay hotel? but also at what point does an extended stay hotel become a rental property?

but every time I hear a “property owner” complain about how hard and expensive it is to own other people’s homes I’m just like my guy no one is making you do that if it’s so damn hard just sell it to the person who lives there except deep down you realize how good of a deal you’re getting you’re just mad everybody isn’t acting like you’re not a prick for it.

boofed it

My experience with the internet suggests that you are all but alone in that assertion. I was going to say I don’t know anything about that personally but Nick Wilde from zootopia did kind of get me (I’ve always had a soft spot for the trickster archetype).

Also, if we suspect you’ve done so (such as a hx of inserting items into orifices or swallowing them for pica or malingering reasons), we would do an XRay or CT first.

Imagine pinhead from hellraisers turned inside out. Also they might heat up and burn too.

You’re my favorite commenter in this thread. Please enjoy this squid as a token of my affection: 🦑

Man this takes me back to highschool

Most girls I see with big curly (or other textured) hair use wraps or bonnets of some kind, usually silk. It does usually have a snug elastic band around the forehead, backs of the ears, and nape of the neck, but the top that holds the actual hair is usually looser and flowy. Another option is to contain the hair in a silk scarf wrapped in some sort of elaborate layered wrap system that you can either look up on YouTube or possibly go learn from a black or other curl / texture specializing hairdresser. If you’re looking for something more masculine, black men usually call it a do-rag, or you could get a bonnet that is in a darker more subdued color and side profile.

In either case you would have to accept that big textured hair does demand somewhat counter-cultural styles just for practical reasons; there’s a lot of stigma around them, at least in the states. I work in an institutional setting in a predominately black area and one of the more twisted bits of US irony is that we institutionalize black and other non-white people more often, then don’t stock the hair products they need, then send them to court looking a fucking mess.

We had a really really beautiful success / recovery story this week after I had an utterly hellish experience with the same patient the previous week and I was reflecting that I really live for those moments because it can be otherwise difficult to justify my role in this system, and I work in the kinder mental health half now, not the completely fucked correctional end. Sorry for the tangent, I’ve had some pretty big emotional highs and lows of late.

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no such thing when you grow up fundie, LOL. So glad I knew what birth control was and a sketchy man looked like on my own from internet research. I went full blown HOE the second I got the chance and that could’ve gone a lot worse if I hadn’t had the knowledge to keep myself safe because my parents sure as hell weren’t gonna teach me.

Awkward by not talking is 100% better, especially from a strategic standpoint. I would be so much farther in life right now if I only knew how to keep my fat fucking mouth shut. There’s a reason the “strong silent type” is a trope. You might be a weird nervous awkward little fuck in there but nobody can prove it.

I’d be interested in knowing what psychosocial developmental stage this person was experiencing during COVID.

Papermate inkjoy. The other nurses keep trying to steal my last one that I stole from my last workplace just before it started going downhill and stopped buying the nice pens. It was about 6-8 months before they swapped all our managers and supervisors with ones that were literally physically violent. Now that I think about it the pens have actually been a pretty good thermometer of all my past workplaces. If you go to a hospital and all the nurses have the same decently nice pens, that means their employer is probably taking decent care of them (at least as far as healthcare execs go) and well kept nurses are better at taking care of patients.

It could barely make calls. It can make calls as a party trick but you can’t really access your contacts book in an easily usable way, you can’t start new text conversations, and you can’t view your full calendar and you definitely can’t add events. I don’t need much for a watch to replace my phone but I do need it to call and text well and I need to be able to access my calendar. It’s very clear that those devices are designed and intended to add more tracking and monitoring and dopamine hooks on top of your phone, not to replace it with a less intrusive alternative. It was actually fairly frustrating.