Stuff of interest

"Actually women should be putting the seat back up when they're done peeing as a courtesy so that I don't have to touch it and put the seat up before I pee"

but you deserve to give informed consent to that process.

the lies around pregnancy - that it's inherently safe, that it doesn't do you permanent damage, that it's only extremely rare for people to die of pregnancy complications, etc like

all of these are lies constructed so that more people will get pregnant w/o knowing all that

there needs to be more talk about the impact of miscarriages and how common they are, how different abortion processes are and how accessible they are

but also like. talking about how pregnancy fucks your body up should not be taboo

this is a process that permanently changes most people's bodies, and that's even if the pregnancy doesn't do them like. severe illness or injury

and i just think everybody should have a right to KNOW that

When I was pregnant I was in a million forums for pregnant people because (cough adhd hyperfixation) and I had something called SPD (Symphysis pubis dysfunction) (not Sensory Processing Disorder though I also have that) which is where your pubic bones separate early (more or less) because they get all loosey goosey as your body gets ready to crank that baby out.

Except my pubic bone got confused and got misaligned at like 3 months pregnant. I could barely walk. I couldn't roll over in bed. Doing something that required me to shift my weight from one foot to another like opening a door knob was like an excruciatingly painful knife being stabbed into my pubic bone, I can't express how intense and blinding it was.

So I am in one million baby forums like "am I dying what is happening why is there a knife in my pubic bone" and all these people are like "I have that too! my doctor says it's normal and not to worry because it doesn't hurt the baby. I just deal with it by laying in bed for months in excruciating pain and think about how lucky I am to be having a little miracle growing in my body."

So lol nope. I went to my midwife and they are like, "Oh squeeze a can between your knees look up a physical therapy youtube on SPD" and I did that can-squeeze thing and it CURED THE PROBLEM in ONE DAY. I had been SUFFERING, y'all, it felt miraculous.

And I was so full of rage (flames, flames on the side of my face) that people are being told "Oh, it's NORMAL just deal with it" "It doesn't hurt the baby." Like, look, yes it's NORMAL but it's 100% treatable!!! SPD (again, not Sensory processing disorder) affects 1 in 5 pregnant people.

I was lucky to have amazing midwives (need a gender neutral term for that profession, but they see pregnant men and women)(side note highly recommend midwives if you are gender nonconfirming/a man/etc) and I have DOZENS of examples of shit like this.

Some people in moderate car crashes are very lucky, and walk away with zero injury. Some are very unlucky, and die. But most people fall into the third category, where they'll be injured at the time, then heal, and then for the rest of their life they have some minor and liveable complication from the injury. Like a knee that lets you know when the rain is coming, or a back that doesn't like seats without lumbar support, or a shoulder that never quite gets its full range of motion back.

she's been suffering with this since she gave birth to me. I'm 38 years old. she had that surgery last week.

Granted, it still needs to be updated because not just women give birth.

Here is an etymologically equivalent but gender neutral term I just made:

"Is this yours?" he asked. "May I borrow it?"

"You want to be a seal?"

"No, but when I take it off, I'll be a woman, right?"

all the replies: you're a fucking idiot

*after act 2*

The realization that the effects of exercise might be delayed prompted me to ask whether this was true of activity in general. After some record keeping, I concluded that it was and, more disturbingly, that I could not trust the signals sent from my body. As a healthy person, I had used fatigue and other clues from my body as a way to tell me to slow down or take a rest. But with CFS, the signal was delayed, sometimes by hours or even days. So I was faced with the question: how can I control my symptoms if I can’t trust my body to warn me when I am overdoing?

My solution was to keep records of my activities and symptoms, correlating activity level with subsequent increases or decreases in symptoms. Over time, I discovered my safe activity level, enabling me to control my symptoms by staying within the limits my logging showed were safe.

All Activity Is Exercise

On some days, I felt quite tired even when I walked my usual amount. I wondered whether it might be due to poor sleep the night before or because of stress. While those factors explained some periods of heightened fatigue, I decided that a more frequent explanation was that my total activity level on some days was higher than on other days.

If this is true, and I’m not convinced it is, it’s probably the worst decision Putin could make.

Russia is in absolutely no position to open up any additional fronts even with military support from Belarus (Lukashenko’s leadership is wobbly at best, and putting Belarusian troops at risk would end him)

Block the Suwalki Gap (the small land border between Poland and Lithuania, situated between Kaliningrad and Belarus), jam up in the Baltic Sea with mines, and try and take over the three nations before a response can be formed.

From there, portray it as a fait accompli: we've already won, are you really going to throw French/German/etc lives away for an already defeated Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania?

(That plan assumes that the Russians could beat the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians at all, which is quite honestly doubtful.)

But Poland?

Poland would fuck 'em up.

There's no geographic advantage, it's a much larger country with large, technologically advanced military that has been painstakingly observing Russia strategy in Ukraine. There's no way Poland could be taken faster that NATO could respond, and that is the only sane strategy Moscow would even be considering.

And that's assuming Poland couldn't just solo any Russian attack. The joke I've seen is that if Russia attacked Poland, Poland would be in Moscow by the end of the week.