I need to be Claritin clear!

I have seasonal allergies. Every spring and fall since infancy, I have announced to whoever was nearby that I am, in fact, dying. I get the itchy watery eyes, the runny and stuffed up nose, the sore throat from post-nasal drip, and exhaustion made worse by Benadryl and Sudafed. But one thing that really makes the hay fever worse, is when people tell me it's not that bad.

"Oh you're not sick; it's just allergies."
I don't care if it's pollen or a virus, my body is waging the same war and it's wearing me out. Aside from the fact that allergic reactions can be fatal, proving that allergies in general do have the potential to do some real damage, that dismissive attitude is rude and inaccurate. I AM sick, and to say that it's "just" allergies so it doesn't count is like saying "Oh you're not really worn out from that 10 mile ride. It's just a stationary bike." You can get worn out on a "fake" bike and I can get truly sick from a "fake" threat to my immune system.

I think I'm going to go to the doctor about this for the first time ever. Even the innerwebs say allergies are worse this year and I think I need something more effective and less drowsy than Benadryl. I'm going to ask for Claritin. I just can't keep up with Tommy as it is now. I'm so exhausted that for dinner tonight he got one jar of beef and half a pudding cup. That's not a good dinner.

Freecycle

Freecycle sounds so good when you first hear about it. Instead of just throwing stuff away or going through the hassle of a yard sale just for a few dollars, you give it away. People give and take and it's all very hippy commune like. But in reality it seem to be a bunch of illiterate mooches begging for stuff. I've always heard that beggars can't be choosers, but apparently on freecycle they can. So now, here are some of my favorite gems culled from my local freecycle. Enjoy.

1. Looking for tan colored bricks chip are ok as long as they are in tacked can pick up. (I added the emphasis)
2. rail road tiles for drive only need 4 tired of people drivin thur yard thanks in advance my son can pick up just e-mail me (Tiles? How about rail road ties instead?)
3. Need a good working frost free refigerator asap. I live on fixes fixed income and cannot afford to buy one. Must be in good working order and not all marked up. Thank you in advance. (The important thing is that it not be marked up. People on fixed incomes who beg for free refrigerators from strangers on the internet need to have nice things.)
4. my sister is looking for a 4-5 month old husky/shepard mix puppy there is a kennel that goes with it just email me if you are interested in it. (What the hell does this even mean? They're asking for a puppy or offering a kennel, but I can't tell which.)
5. 
   if you get that info can you pass it along to us as well? we have a john deere gator, that the bat cost a small fortune. (I thought un reguards was funny. I can only translate it to me not guarding again. And what bat cost a small fortune, baseball or flying mammal?)
   
6. Still wanting an ALL WHITE MALE KITTEN, PREFER SHORT-HAIRED. (If you need something that apecific, you're going to have to pay for it. Free kittnes are a take what you get kind of deal. And this woman's been posting this same request for over a month now.)
7. I am taking up a collection for my residance well there not mine but they are were i work lol (I don't know what he just said but he seems to think it was funny.)
8. I AM LOOKING FOR A FREEZER, HAVE YET TO LEARN HOW TO SHELF STORE HAMBURGER MEAT. (Sarcasm doesn't help your case, lady.)
9. i know this is a long shot but my hard drive broke on my lab top and i need a new hard drive for a tobash i know i speeled that wrong or iam looking for a old labtop that has wifi so i cant get online and do research things (Do you mean a Toshiba? And I think they're called laptops, since they sit on your lap and not on your lab. And if it helps, you can not get online just fine without the wifi.)

More to come, I'm sure

on Octomom

Yes she's a plastic surgery nightmare. Yes she has some mental health issues which require her to be the center of attention and to create her own audience. Yes she is on welfare; like it or not food stamps are welfare, even if disability payments are up for interpretation. Yes she needs help, with the babies and the underlying need for them which will have God-knows-what effect on her now that there are no more embryoes and no more babies to be bad. But I really wish all the zero population growth people would just shut up. People have more than one or two babies all the time and I'm sorry if I don't believe that the future of the planet really depends on the uterus of one psycho in California. Plus, how do you determine zero population growth anyway?

Tom had twins when I met him, and I had one child. Does mine replace the father or me? And let's just pretend Tom's twins were just one kid, does that kid replace him or the mother? The mother has 7 other kids so who do they replace? If Ryan replaced her father, who had another child already when she was born, then Tommy replaces either me or Tom. But my ex's ex has another kid now too, so that kid replaces either his mother is the first one is my ex's, or his father if the first is the mother's. And still there's an abbey of monks somewhere being replaced by the children of Tom's litter0bearing (yeah, I said it) ex.

See? The "two kids, one for you and one for your husband/wife" theory is gone in today's world of step-siblings and half-siblings and unknown by-blows. So the people who blame Nadya Suleman for a population bloom can stfu. Should she have had all those kids? Probably not. But should you have had your kids, or me mine, or Tom's ex whose birthday is the reason millions of people get drunk on Cinco de Mayo have birthed her own soccer team? Like with marriage equality 9see, I didn't say gay marriage), the form your family takes should be no one else's business.

that said, I worry about these kids of Octomom's. Not only are there so many she'll be legally required to live in a house the shape of a shoe, but she's proven herself in numerous interviews to be completely batshit insane. I can't wait for the TLC series, or at least the one hour specials. "Completely crazy, the Octomom story"

Ooh, sounds like a Lifetime movie.

Jim Carrey's not a doctor! Or a parent!

I've been reading a lot lately about the vaccination debate, and I have some pretty strong opinions (shocking!) on the subject. If refusing to vaccinate your child only affected your child, I wouldn't care who did or didn't get any shots at all. But not all vaccines take, and by refusing to vaccinate your kids at all, you put others who were vaccinated at risk too.

Say you have an elementary school with 1000 kids, and 70 of them aren't immune to measles because their vaccines didn't work. If a fifth grader gets measles from a vacation to someplace with an epidemic, there's a chance that it won't spread far - the odds are that that one child won't come into contact with all 69 other vulnerable kids. But if there are 200 other kids who weren't immunized in the first place, the odds go up that all 70 kids will get measles, plus any babies they might come into contact with too young to have gotten their shots yet. It's called herd immunity. Smallpox was wiped out because of vaccines. Polio is on its way too. But if I were to ever lose a child to these or any other vaccine-available diseases just because some idiot chose to get their medical information from Ace Ventura and a Playboy model, I'd be arrested for murder 1.

If you don't want to immunize your kids, then fine. But they shouldn't be allowed in public schools. It's your parental privilege to make that choice, but for the common good that choice should have consequences.

For another thing, I wonder about all this autism in the first place. "Autism rates are skyrocketing!" Are we sure abotu that? Or is it just as likely (or more) that autism diagnoses are skyrocketing. It's a lot like the SIDS rate, but in reverse.* Jenny MCarthy's son (from what I understand from reading articles she herself has written) was diagnosed with autism because he flapped his arms when agitages and refused to make eye contact. He is now considered to be high functioning because he can speak, listen, and follow directions. Twenty years ago this would have been a kid with eccentricities and a nervous habit, but now he's autistic. My daughter was almost diagnosed with Asperger's once because she is painfully shy and over-sensitive to criticism. If you even raised your voice to her she would cringe. Now that she's getting a little of that adolescent attitude she's less likely to cringe than to roll her eyes though, so I guess estrogen is the new cure for Asperger's, huh. Asperger's had, until recently, very strict diagnostic criteria. A patient had to present a certain number of symptoms in order to be considered a candidate for an Asperger's diagnosis, just like any other illness or syndrome. But now it's just tossed around like ADHD was five or ten years ago. Brown is the new black.

I feel for the parent who takes their normal, smiling, talking child to the doctor for shots one day and wakes up the next with an unresponsive stranger who would rather rock in a corner than look at them and who doesn't talk or hug them anymore. But it's coincidental. Autism presents very suddenly around the first birthday, which is also one of the times kids get shots. To link the two is no more factual than to say that birthday cake causes autism. I'm sorry, but it's not.



*SIDS rates are falling, but suffocation rates are rising. The "Back To Sleep" campaign lowered SIDS rates by 40%, but only because now every baby who dies in the crib while on his belly gets an automatic suffocation diagnosis, same with co-sleeping. Infant mortality remains the same while "SIDS" kills less kids every year.

innerwebz hates me

Google results for "I love Tom": about 158,000

Google results for "I love Charlie": about 43,800

More people on the internet love my husband than me.

Post-Columbine

Well, another Columbine anniversary has come and gone. It's been a decade now since 2 bullied and disenfranchised teens were pushed too far and changed everything. Not that they were justified- nothing justifies violence and the randomness of it went beyond mere revenge - but a lot of bullied and formerly bullied people understood that day. I am so glad I went to school before Columbine, back when you could be quiet and wear all black and glare at jocks without people thinking you were about to blow up the cafeteria. Now all it takes to get a school closed down for an hour is a threatening note dropped in the bathroom. Kids who write violent stories (didn't we all have that notebook and hate the cheerleaders?) are arrested or expelled or both. At first I thought the post-Columbine world would be one which valued conformity a little less, one in which bullies got called out for their actions. But that was all talk and so, ten years later, the high school experience is (from what I've heard) basically the same.

Ugh! Neighbors.

I have 2 loud neighbors across the street. One has a drag racing car and he revs it for about 2 hours every Friday. I don't live next to a drag strip so I occasionally forget about the noise and open the windows on nice Fridays. This guy repays my stupidity by occasionally forgetting which day is Friday and revving the jet engine car on other surprise days. The other guy likes to hangout in his garage and play music. Loud music. Louder than the grandstand I live behind ever has. I should go ask him to turn it down but I fear confrontation and it seems to me that playing ten year old country songs on a PA system in your garage is confrontational in and of itself. I can't believe that he thinks the rest of the neighborhood appreciates this, or even that we don't mind. So I'm pretty sure that if I were to walk over there, bowed down into the wind from his speakers, that he'd have an attitude about it. And in my experience, people who sit in their garages drinking beer and being loud and playing ten year old country songs on Sunday afternoons are just begging for fights.

If I ever move, it will be to the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees, with no neighbors to speak of. Ahhh, what a nice dream.

RIP Lawrence Kutner, etc.

I watched this week's episode of House and it was bad. Kutner killed himself and no one knew why. The guy who played Kutner got a job in the Obama administration so that's all good, but irrelevant to the show.

There's a thinly veiled parallel to reality here. When Kutner was found, everyone was shocked. No one had seen it coming, no one had known to try to help. He hadn't reached out to anyone. But what if he had? What if he'd called everyone he knew over and over threatening to kill himself, for years? What if he had been so filled with self-pity that nothing had helped? What if he had alienated everyone with his abject refusal to do anything more than drink, call people, and cry out, "Why me?" to anyone within ear shot, about common problems he had brought on himself? Kutner had no romantic interest written into the show. What if he'd driven away every romantic interest he'd had until no one would have him? What if everyone he'd known had, for their own sanity, been forced to let him go long before he killed himself? What if instead of, "We didn't know, we never saw it coming, he never told us," it had been that everyone saw it coming, everyone knew, and he told everyone, but nothing had changed? What if every person in Kutner's life had tried to help, had listened and given advice until they had no more to give? How would the writers invent a tomorrow for people who had just had to let him go?

Play nice without God

Invisible friend, invisible man in the sky, fairy tale book, fairy godmother in the sky. In the past few weeks I have noticed a disturbing online trend. Atheists, those folks who choose not to believe in any gods or supernatural powers like fate or whatnot, have become supremely condescending. I get that the whole point is to let logic and science run the show. That you are an intellectual and don't believe in anything that can't be proven. I understand that and I respect it. But can you not at least let the rest of the population believe what they want to believe without harassing and insulting them? Even if you are right and they are all weak-willed sheep who can't think for themselves, as long as they're not hurting anyone leave them be.
I also understand that a lot of people seem to think that religion is hurting people, but I disagree. Religion is a crutch. Even if your one particular belief system is true, it's still a crutch. Religion helps people who can't conceive of their own mortality, who need to believe that they and the people they care about will live on after death. It also helps in uncertain times to feel less alone in the universe if you believe there is some force out there looking out for you. I can't say that there is or isn't, but the belief in it seems to make millions of people feel better. The problem only comes in when a person's belief system tries to claim king of the hill status. No harm comes from "I believe in God," but rather in "My belief is right and yours is wrong and it's my job to set you straight."
Calling religious people weak and mocking their religious beliefs doesn't help anyone./ It's merely the flip side to the same coin they've been using for years. It's bullying, plain and simple. It's saying that what you believe is right and what they believe is wrong and that they need to be set straight. Whether it's Christians saying it to Jews, Catholics to Protestants, or atheists to everyone else, it's still bullying and it's bullshit.
So cut it out, whatever side of the fence you may be on. Let people pray when they want to and keep your prayers to yourself. Believe in whatever god you like but don't tell me mine is any worse than yours or even that I need one. And if you don't believe in one at all, please stop mocking the ones that do believe. Sometimes people who use crutches actually need them.