I'm having a "high anxiety" day, so everything feels like it's threatening me with its capacity to go tits up in seconds and kill us all. My children are both Virgos, so it was a relief to see that they did not die in the early modern period. It's really taken a load off my mind.

I had such a bad clothes moth infestation among my yarn stash that I had to throw it all out. All 4 60-gallon garbage bags worth. I was too sad to cry. I now have about 10 balls of dark blue silk/wool blend in bags in my freezer. The internet told me it only had to stay in for 12 hours, but I haven't had the heart to take it out yet...I think it's been a week. I guess at some point I'll be ready to knit again... To hell with moths!!!

No one has answered your question!? I'm not the author, and I'm not disabled, but my mother has MS, and has recently discovered a lot of the shitty things about being visibly disabled in public that the author has mentioned. With that caveat in place, to make it clear I can't speak from person experience and don't want to speak for anyone as much as offer some insight, one of the things that drives my Mum crazy is when she's for example, using a heavy door to balance herself, and someone behind her who is maybe in a hurry or maybe thinks they're helping pushes it wide open and she has to rebalance herself to avoid falling. She tells me that "the current popular etiquette" about addressing disabled people who might be struggling is to always ask before helping, and not push if the person says they're fine. What jumps out at me about this is that it treats a disabled person in a manner that neither makes the disability invisible (because you observe frankly that they might need help) nor singles them out further (anyone who asks to be left alone should be left alone, so you do).

I feel like I'm not really qualified to address the argument that broke out here. I see your question as coming from a place of respectful curiosity and goodwill, and I answered it because a) I saw no one else had, and b) I gather people who need these types of answers disseminated (like my Mum) are kind of sick of being the only ones to answer. I don't see what's inappropriate about reading about an annoying phenomenon, seeing yourself doing the thing, and then trying to learn how best to avoid doing it in the future. That is the spirit in which I offered my insight. I hope it's useful.
Editing to add, my phone formats replies funny and I now see that several people have said approximations of what I said, but I couldn't tell they were in reply to your original comment. I was thinking of the "emotional labor" of being the disabled person people ask when I jumped in, effectively to say, "this is exactly how far my knowledge stretches but it might be useful." The larger discussion about whether this is an appropriate place to ask the question in the first place is not one I feel I can comment on either way.

My partner once went on one of their classic rants about having to carry so many dates' keyes and wallets, and announced that the only thing that could convince them that there was an overt, deliberate world-wide conspiracy to oppress women was the fact that womens' clothes never had any fvcking pockets! I think there may be something there...

I was drinking a sip of water when I read this comment and almost DROWNED because of it. There is still lemony water burning my sinuses. You win.

So I'm sure it's not the Thing to promote my partner's work, but this article sounds *exactly* like an art project they made and submitted to hackaday a couple years later. Props if you understand the math, I'm embarrassed to admit I don't. I do understand that his program spit out the most objectively True statement I've ever read: http://hackaday.com/2012/07/15/creating-a-decaden...

"Nothing says goodbye like your cardiovascular system." Words to live by indeed.

Putting in for the smell of hay and bunny neck, the smell of water evaporating off the pavement in summer, the smell of hot roof tiles baking in the sun, and the smell of dust getting hot for the first time when the electric baseboard heaters come on in fall, and the smell of wood smoke on the first day of heavy snow. Also the smell of lilacs carried on the spring air at nightfall. Also the stagnant smell of a small wetland.

Although...I love these smells and love reading about other peoples' smells...am I the only one who doesn't like scented candles? Regular candles, yes, especially in winter, but scented ones are too strong and make me think they must be toxic, not to mention the many observations that they are often kind of a disappointment in terms of accuracy...it would still be amazing to capture those smells somehow.

I just read this whole thread because I love the toast and miss going to church and actively practicing my religion and loved to hear others talk about it like it's a normal thing to do (it wasn't where I grew up, though I attended church with my mom as a kid). I fell out of the habit of going to church when my first son was about 9 months old, because I had to go alone with the baby (husband is non-religious) and around then it became an hour's wrestling match with a stroppy, squirmy proto toddler. I had another kid exactly 2 years after the first and the logistics got worse, especially because I don't _expect_ them to be quiet in church, but I _want_ them to be quiet in church, and the noisier they would get, the crankier I would become (which, when you're a 3 year old little boy who feels ignored, is hilarious!).

For lent I have done the usual chocolate, candy in general, soda, and one year all sweets. I always found those to be sort of anti climactic, because I would psych myself up for the week leading up to the fast like, "yeah, I'm having an ice cream now, but _next week_ it'll have to be herbal tea..." and then even if I was consumed by DESIRE for the soda or whatever for the first 10 days or so, eventually I did lose my taste for it, and would sometimes find myself slightly grossed out by my Easter basket and the candy would last for weeks. The memorable year was the year I was feuding with this other girl among my extended friend group, we'd been despising/ignoring each other for like a year, and around that time of year I realized that I was messing myself up over it, so I gave up "hating her" for lent. I mentioned this for some reason in the car with my ex-Catholic dad and he was like, "so, on Easter morning, are you going to cheerfully resume your hatred in a joyous celebration of the resurrection of our Savior?" I was a bit baffled, because I'd never thought about the point of _ending_ the lenten fast, to me the fast was always the end in itself, like a marathon or something, and assumed that watching the spaces between sugar cravings lengthen over time was kind of the point. I don't know where I got this idea, because obviously that's not what it would be like to hang out in the desert with no food. I think somehow I've always linked lent with processing grief for some reason?

On a side note, I read a couple of these comments to my husband while I was reading them and my 5 year old (the same little boy who got me _out_ of the habit of attending church in the first place) overheard and asked us what an atheist was. We told him it was someone who was really very sure there was no god, and left it at that. He thought about that and then announced that he was "One THOUSAND PERCENT sure that there _was_ a God," and I can't describe the relief and pride that flooded me, unexpectedly (he takes after his father a lot, who has always seemed to me to be kind of constitutionally just without any spiritual feeling or need, and who is a really excellent person anyway). I thought that it would be okay with me if my boys took after their unspiritual uncurious non religious Papa, but I guess it matters after all.

We just moved house and are closer to the neighborhood Catholic Church now, and I'd be more excited to check the new church out except for its "I regret my abortion" billboard that, while small, seems to scream at the sidewalk from the church yard. I hope that despite this unpromising bit of landscaping, I will be able to find a few feminist kindred spirits. Fingers crossed or whatever.

I had no idea this was still in print! I may subscribe, if they send it to the US (bet they don't...). I first heard of this magazine on the London Underground during my only trip to that city. The train was delayed, and this slightly older side of middle aged British woman sitting across from me with her husband and she was _staring_ at me. Finally, as the train was just sitting there, she leaned over and said, "excuse me, but I just wanted to tell you I really like your coat." It was January, and I was wearing my Catholic Housewife Grandma's cobalt blue plush church coat with a fuzzy, furry sort of collar, which had become mine when my mom cleaned out her closet of things that Gramma had given her when she moved to Florida in the 70's. I smiled at the woman on the train and said, "thank you, it was my grandmother's." I figured this would be one of those polite answers you make in public and that's that, but to my surprise, the woman took an awed breath and said in huge surprise, "you mean, it's a REAL one?" I had no idea what she meant. Apparently the collar of my coat identified it as a "Persian Lamb coat," and she proceeded to tell me about a family tragedy in which her mother accidentally shut a panel of someone's Persian Lamb in the door of a taxi, tearing it in half, and in order to replace it, placed an ad in "a magazine called THE LADY," which title she said each time she mentioned it with the kind of reverent emphasis you express in all caps or maybe italics. Evidently this story happened during a financial crisis, and the woman's mother ended up with an arm load of Persian Lamb Coats from all over England with sad stories about how their owners could really use the cash just now, and what a wrench it was to part with them. By this point the train had started moving again, and the woman's fidgety husband rolled his eyes and said, "so thenow the had to post new ads in The Lady..." , and she turned to him to sort of shush him or something and I reached my stop. The friend I was with kept rolling her eyes at me all the way up the escalator. I have literally never heard anyone else mention this publication since that day, and was under the impression that it was out of print. But I feel oddly connected to it because of my breath taking (oh come on, I'm sure my coat was a good fake, Grandma put everything but the absolute necessities into her retirement!) Persian Lamb coat. Which sits in my closet now, mostly useless in Seattle, but loved too much to be parted with.

I almost married a guy when I was really young, and really wanted to have a kid with him at the time. Then we broke up by accident, and 4 years later I married his childhood best friend, and we totally had kids. Small towns man!