I Love Nakamura Kenji And Shinji Kido

Now the thing with that radioactive salt is that it wasn’t just radioactive, it had radium in it, which is extra kinds of radioactively nasty. When it’s ingested it actually ends up getting sucked into your bones because your body will stick it wherever it’s actually supposed to be using calcium, so not only are your bones suddenly weaker because they’re made of stuff that doesn’t belong there, that stuff is also constantly dosing radiation directly into your organs, even after you stop ingesting more of it.

Anyway Byers died about a year and a half after he stopped drinking the stuff and the reason they don’t know exactly how much he drank is because when scientists exhumed his body I think in the 1960s he was *exactly as radioactive* as they would have expected him to be on the day that he died, so the suspicion is that he may have consumed more than was originally reported. He’s buried in a lead-lined casket because his body is going to be radioactive for something like the next several thousand years or so.

The precursor to the FDA (I believe it was the FTC at the time) did technically exist before the 1920s, but it was very limited in what it could actually do in terms of food and drug regulation. Byers’ death ended up being one of the big driving factors in strengthening what the FDA was able to regulate and was one of two big events that led to the end of the ‘radium fad.’

He asked: "Oh, was she the only son or something before *waves hand*?" and I was like, warily, no she has two brothers. And he responded with a great deal of confusion: "Then what's their problem?!?!"

When he found and married my mom, he was nearly 45 and they had so much trouble conceiving that he went to a Guanyin temple supposedly "magical" for praying for children. When I was born (not a son, also an only child until now), my mom said, "when you prayed at the temple did you ask for a son?" He said, "Aiya, everyone is asking for sons, so I said any gender is okay. If I asked for a son, maybe we wouldn't have gotten a child because Guanyin's son quota is already used up. Do you want that to happen?" My mom laughed for days about "son quota" and continues to tell people about it today, but her honest answer was: "Any child is okay."

Jokes on them. They didn't specify a gender, so Guanyin Ma gave them a non-binary child!

More seriously: my dad doesn't care about sons. When I told my parents that I wouldn't marry or have children, I thought he might be disappointed, but he wasn't. Then again, maybe I should have expected that, given he tried to become a monk at 18 🤪 I think he said the thing about sons to poke fun at people who care too much about sons because he frankly thinks it's all a bit ridiculous. In his eyes, a child is a child, so what's the point in caring about gender? If the child "changes" gender, does it make a difference?

Go and exercise. Get all of that energy out and away from the people you love.

Get a hang of when you're winding up to a rage and learn to tell people that you need to step away. I will warn you that the first time that someone refuses to let you go once you learn this skill will spook the hell out of you if you don't have a backup skill, so figure out ahead of time what you're gonna do if they won't let you leave.

Learn to set boundaries. One of the best things I ever did for my anger issues was tell people that I can't deal with people stealing food off my plate. Second best was when I'm mad, telling people not to touch me. I spook easily when I'm already angry.

Get a pack of pencils and if nothing is working, break one. Sometimes you really do need to break something in order to feel better, and pencils are cheap.

Don't cook with a knife when you're mad. If you get too much adrenaline, the knife can slip and hurt you.

If you have anger issues that pop up without any seeming reason and frighten you, I would strongly recommend going over the situation and over your mental health. If there's anything consistent with a mental health condition or with something particular happening to trigger it, seek to eliminate the trigger or treat the issue. Depression, anxiety, trauma, you name it, it can probably present as anger issues under the right circumstances.

Some quick notes for people without anger issues that want to help someone who has anger issues:

Fear transmutes into anger really, really well if someone's fear response is "fight". One of my guesses for why so many men have anger issues is that we're told we're not men if we have any other response to fear. However, this issue is far from exclusive to men.

Don't box people in when you're arguing with them or soothing them. If someone is backed up against a wall and upset, then getting closer to them without permission is a bad call for your safety and for their soothing, because that removes the ability to get away from you. Ask before getting close. This goes double if someone is injured or otherwise vulnerable.

Teaching angry people that are distressed about being angry the pencil trick on the spot is really easy and works more often than you can think.

Respect people's requests and boundaries. A lot of people think that some of the boundaries I set up are silly or that once we're pals, they can ignore them. No, because a lot of my boundaries are related to trauma, and crossing them will trigger me and bring up my anger.

All of this goes for children with anger issues as well. I was a child with anger issues, and a lot of disrespect for my boundaries and needs was because my anger was dismissed because I was a child. Respect children's anger.

Walking on eggshells is not and will never be a good way to treat anger issues. Recognizing that people with anger issues deserve to have their boundaries respected and to be treated like human beings is.

An end note: Anger issues are not the same thing as being abusive, because emotions are not abusive. Someone with anger issues can become abusive if they take them out on people, but so can someone with suicidal thoughts who takes them out on people. The issue is targeting another person in order to feel better, not having a mental health issue.