As requested, an open thread. I’ll try to get these up more often in the future. This one will be overseen by Morrissey with a cat on his head.
No trolls, no arguments.
Categories
Open Thread for Personal Stuff: January 2014 Pretty Cats Make Hats Edition
It’s terrible, the disrespect the Furrinati have to put up with.
I should have had a kitty version of that linen in the days when Katie slept in the bed. I had to ban her eventually because waking up with Cat Back was no fun at all.
PS forgot to say, yay for great holiday! 🙂
(TW for eating disorder, depression/self-harm, not happy things in general.) every glob of yogurt feels like they’re forcing me to swallow glue, and I know I sound like a little kid for wanting this but I wish my mother at least was watching. it’s so much more humiliating when the nurse is there watching me eat everything.
I don’t want the rest of my family here, glad lunar new year’s is arriving so they can go get drunk and leave me alone. they keep complaining that I’m not making the right amount of progress yet but whn there are genuinely days when I feel a little better they shoot me down, telling me that I’m a horrible liar and they’ll keep me here as long as they feel like it. I hate it.all
this is not the appropriate thing to put here but people will not respect that I have a diary. I’m just here to vent.
So sorry that you’re going through this, Hannasoumaki.
Hannasoumaki — I’m sorry, and it sounds like your family is being the opposite of helpful, which also sucks. As for venting here…*points to thread title* “open thread” — vent away!
Thank you and I hope everyone here is okay too. It feels weird to talk about it here but yes, it feels like they are doing this to toy with me. They’ll probably complain about this too the next day, since I need my internet time supervised.
That sounds absolutely awful Hanna 🙁
auggziliary: I have depression coupled with anxiety that is sometimes debilitating, sometimes not. (I’m a performing musician and have no trouble doing that IN FRONT OF PEOPLE, but sometimes have trouble taking my dog for a walk in my neighborhood)
But nothing like you. Maybe your experience is more common than people being followed by purple chickens.
I just had to share this photo my mum took of my bird yesterday. Partly to show off my lovely parakeet, Flash, and partly to show off my mum’s skills.
Pretty birdy here
And in a strange coincidence, my nickname for my purple parrot is chicken.
Apologies for the triple post but someone just linked this on facebook, and I think it’s pretty awesome.
http://www.graciehagen.com/lllusions-of-the-body/
“This series was made to tackle the supposed norms of what we think our bodies are supposed to look like. Most of us realize that the media displays only the prettiest photos of people, yet we compare ourselves to those images. We never get to see those photos juxtaposed against a picture of that same person looking unflattering. That contrast would help a lot of body image issues we as a culture have.”
Such a beeeeautiful bird, is Flash!
That Illusions project is COOL.
Auggz, I’m self-diagnosed with depression and social anxiety. When I stopped eating wheat about a year ago, and my general rage, depression, anxiety, and panic attacks dried up, I was left with a kind of calm apathy, with bouts of “leave me the fuck alone”. I’m not in a tizzy so much anymore, but I don’t leave my house once I’m home from work unless I’m forced to, and I get so anxious then that I get nauseated — and this is for things I actually enjoy doing. I don’t *think* I get hallucinations, but I very often check to see if other people are perceiving what I’m perceiving, and they often aren’t.
One day, I may look into addressing my issues, but so far, I’m functioning fairly well, and now that I’m off wheat, I’m even fairly contented. (Although it fucks my brain to know how thoroughly wheat was fucking my brain.) I know from past experience that I don’t cooperate with therapy — even if I want to “get better”, I’m not willing to do the work involved.
I spent a couple of decades in new-agey self-help activities, trying to find my bliss, and from my observations, I think you’re probably more normal than you think you are. Or maybe I think more people are non-normal than we assume? Anyway, if your emotions and hallucinations start interfering with your quality of life, seek help. Otherwise, explore various coping strategies and see which ones help you live a meaningful-to-you life.
auggz, my problems are very, very mild: stress and anxiety, low level generally (I’ve had one panic attack and hope that’s it). I went to a psychologist for nearly a year – he was just the opposite of Argenti’s psych from hell – and am on low-dose antidepressants.
Your seeing patterns in things sounds like the usual way of humans seeing patterns – literally and metaphorically – ramped up high, because of the significance it assumes. It sounds like the Mary-in-toast stories, without the religious component. I have seen pictures in random patterns or shapes forever, too: a knot in wood that looked like a horse’s forehead and eyes, a grouping of black dots on blue vinyl (the walls of the dunny … lots of time to find pictures, hem hem) that looked like the cutest little cartoon puppy in a beret … all sorts of things.
Speaking of hallucinations of the purple chicken variety, the players at the Australian Open were getting really sick because of heat stress over the last week, and one player said he knew he had to stop when he started hallucinating Snoopy.
Kim, Flash is lovely, when did you get zir?
I love that Illusions of the Body project! Not just for how eye-opening it is but for the dorky expressions the models use. I’m guessing they had a hoot doing it.
I need a name for a fictional Russian town. I have no idea how to make up passable place names for other countries.
katz:
One thing you could do is grab a name out of the list on Wikipedia. Another thing I’ve found is that there’s a tendency to use -sk at the end, which I think is a posessive marker. There’s also -grad, which is either hail, or short for -gorod, city. I think I know a couple folks who speak Russian, or have friends of Russian speaking friends. I can try to ask around. Hope that helps!
Wish I could use a real city name but I’ve gone and made up a quite specific town and now I’m rather shackled to coming up with an original name for it :/ Three weeks ago I was all going “Should I find a real city? Nah, it’ll be easier just to make one up” and now I’m regretting it.
Is it possible to find names of towns that no longer exist? Deserted villages or the like? I’ve no idea if such info is available for Russia the way it is for England, f’rinst.
What about an old Baedeker? This one’s 1914, Russia.
https://archive.org/details/russiawithtehera00karl
I realize Peking is actually from a dialect of Chinese, but knowing that the vast majority of their country actually refers to it as Beijing… gah.
Instead of getting myself into a language tizzy, I’ll just post this picture on funnyjunk of Chairman Meow . The funny thing about this, the name for their honorable chairman was a homonym for their word for cat.
So I just learned that cannabis is a natural androgen blocker. Coolest news I’ve heard all week. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that getting high all the time to help feminize my body is a terrible idea (unless I have edibles only or something, but even then it’s inadvisable probably). Oh well.
@ Ally
Soy has phytoestrogens, so I dunno. Maybe make happy brownies with soy… butter? Can you put tofu in brownies? Meh. I’m fairly sure it would take absurd amounts of foods to have any effect.
I made up “Bosnograd” several years ago, and never used it. You’re welcome to it…
Katz — you have pecunium’s email? He speaks Russian, fluently I think.
Auggz — is it psych Dx list time? PTSD, bipolar, generalized anxiety disorder, uh, I think there’s another one that I didn’t get pissed about and borderline personality disorder (which is bullshit and pecunium is right, it’s because I don’t fit meds psych from hell’s little boxes of how people are supposed to be, like, poly must equal risky sex and my refusal to pick a binary gender means unstable self image and shit like that, there’s just no way she managed to twist the criteria without doing shit like that…and being stereotyped makes me cranky)
Anyways, only things I see that aren’t there, when not on acid or such, are my usual synesthesia stuff and thank you flashbacks, I want my acid flashbacks already! (Damnit, I was promised acid flashbacks!) Other than that I do the finding patterns in everything thing big time when hypomanic, but usually only once my brain is stuck on a problem or, like kitteh, staring at the bathroom floor or whatever.
I should note though that pretty much anything sound related could be mistaken for the usual synesthesia I guess (on that note, pecunium’s fire alarm is That Tone, the one that looks like icicles are trying to imbed themselves in my eyes. I’d much prefer Alice in Wonderland Syndrome [the official term for you/things seeming too big/small…done it on acid, and yeah, it’s fucking weird])
As for the squiggles thing, that one took me forever to sort, and a trip to the floor while cooking (I hit the off switch first) — apparently temperature change makes me fainty, or straight up faint in the kitchen floor covered in easy mac, fun day that was. Figuring out that the world going all wtf am I seeing means SIT THE FUCK DOWN was very useful. I do not take temperature change well. But that’s straight up physical, so idk if it’s relevant to you.
Auggz:
Reading your thing about seeing things 30x bigger or smaller actually reminds me of experiencing the same thing when I was a lot younger. I’ve never been officially diagnosed with anything, but I definitely had times where proportions of things went all different directions in my head. I dismissed them as just imagination or something, mostly because I had a fear of being labeled depressed or otherwise mentally unstable. I know now I have some issues, but I have them as under control as I can. Military chaplains can be wonderful people, even to the nonreligious.