Nancy Pelosi. after an interminable delay, has finally announced the start of a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump’s egregious conduct. We still don’t know what exactly this will mean, but things are definitely starting to heat up for Trump.
Discuss. No trolls.
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@Catalpa, Surplus to requirements:
My Canadian debit card actually has a Visa logo on it along with the Interac, Plus System, and Interlink logos. (Granted, both Plus and Interlink are owned by Visa now, so that’s not surprising.) I have in fact used that debit card in lieu of a credit card for online ordering during a time when my main credit card was temporarily suspended.
@Shadowplay
Oh, no we haven’t talked about doing that but I suppose that we could. we aren’t exactly champagne type of people. The only drink I really like that is bubbly is coke.
Shorter Surplus: I have X problem, please help me.
*help is given*
Surplus: NO THAT COSTS MONEY! Why can’t you all give me the perfect type of help that will solve all my problems for freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?
Dear Surplus: You will sometimes need to make choices to spend money on things to improve your situation. Sorry, it sucks when your choices are ‘save up money for months to fix something, spend money now and have less for food, or do without’, but Welcome To Late Stage Capitalism. It sucks, we all hate it.
Moving on.
Once you have found yourself an air purifier –
I also have a VISA symbol on my Canadian interac card. If you don’t know how to use it online (I also do not, lol), you could ask at the bank. Or call the bank, if there is no branch near you. I KNOW BANK TELEPHONE LINES SUCK. Deal with it.
OR
You said you could get to wal-mart. Buy yourself a pre-loaded 25$ visa card. You’ll pay a little more, as there is a fee associated with it, but there. Now your problem is solved, you have a card to use online.
You could also try kijiji or craigslist, they would take cash. I think you can set up alerts for when X is posted in Y area?
Though usually they are pickup only, so you would need to get there. I KNOW THAT IS HARD FOR YOU. Figure out a way.
You could also go to wal-mart, make sure that you could return an air purifier, and then buy it + use it for the amount of time you can before you need to return it. Then you could try it out, to see if it helps, before spending any money on it.
Re- allergies – I take a 24 hour pill, and have for years. I need it all the time, as my allergy isn’t seasonal or to anything I can actually avoid. It’s one of the Yes This Is Real and Yes It Was Diagnosed By A Real Doctor With An MD After Their Name types.
Fun~
I’ve also found that different allergy medications hit me differently so Z (of Z&T) might find that Allegra hits them really hard, but for me it could be fine.
I have taken Loratadine (claratin) and am currently on Cetirizine (Zyrtek, I think?) and they basically make my life liveable. I have tried others that were WAY too strong, or had very undesirable side effects. It’s trial and error, unfortunately.
@various:
Debit-as-credit-card: I’ve been told that’s an exceptionally bad idea, because one leak, hack, or unscrupulous merchant can result in emptying your bank account, and if that happens to me, I’m dead — probably literally. (October + no way to pay rent would be a very bad combination here.)
I actually asked the bank one time if there was any way I could specify a limit on credit purchases with it, and they said no.
Prepaid card: I’ve heard mixed information about how useful these are online. Such as that merchants can tell from aspects of the card number that it’s one of those, and some might reject them (likely because they’d like to get you on some sort of opt-out recurring charge). To me that means “it might work or it might not, and if it doesn’t I’m out however much the card cost at the store”. Which sounds an awful lot like gambling to me, and gambling while not rich seems like it would be a poor decision.
Kijiji et al: That sounds more viable, but … how big and heavy are these things? Because it will need to fit in a backpack and not exceed around forty pounds if I’m to haul it any significant distance on foot.
And … is it freestanding? Some gadget that can be put in some corner somewhere, plugged into a standard wall socket, and then ignored? Because anything that requires fancier installation is right out. It would probably need tools I don’t have and the landlord would probably have not-nice things to say about it too. The worst it could get would be like a window-mounted A/C, but anything window-mounted won’t be usable in winter here in all likelihood.
Sorry I seem to just reject everything that people suggest … but I am so limited in what I can do it just seems to foreclose on most of the things people think of. And turns the rest into either some kind of dangerous gamble (where if something goes wrong, I’m out enough money to be a significant problem, or worse) or an amount of work that is ludicrous (e.g., check every store in town = for most people, $5 of gas money and 20 minutes driving around to various places; for me, a week of full-time hard manual labor, or else north of $200 in taxi fares).
I keep hoping there’s something I didn’t know about that would cut the Gordian knot — goodness knows there’s probably lots of things “everyone knows” that I don’t because of my abnormal childhood and schooling experience — but there keeps being nothing. The world just doesn’t seem to have been designed with people like me in mind. 🙁
Backing Rhuu up, I have also found that antihistamines can affect different people in very different ways. For example, my brother, who has had very bad seasonal allergies his whole life, has only ever been able to tolerate Reactine to deal with them. I have had a whole riot of negative side-effects from Reactine, including visual hallucinations. Bodies, right? They are weird.
My apologies for my long delay in responding; real life ate my time for a while. :/
@Big Titty Demon,
I haven’t seen that boom yet. I’ll have to get it and toss it into the pile of books I need to get around to reading one of these days. (Said pile is now about past Alpha Centuri by now, I think. >.< )
Interesting thing I stumbled across a few days ago: toy manufacturer Mattel is testing out a line of gender-neutral dolls.
https://time.com/5684822/mattel-gender-neutral-doll/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Target audience seems to like them so far.
Tiny personal vent, since this thread is still active: a couple of days ago I found out that my older sisters had been talking, and came to the conclusion that I seem to be an undiagnosed mildly autistic person. They are now trying to see if it’s possible for me to get Disability and thus get some more assistance for living on.
I’m not quite sure what I feel about some of this. On the one hand it’d be nice to have an official confirmation of something I’ve long wondered about myself, instead of thinking I might be doing melodramatic (for lack of a better term) thinking about myself and my life situation. (Like, am I autistic, or suffering from Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, or…? Stuff like that.)
On the other hand, I have no idea what Disability entails financially, like if there’s any strict earning limits I must stay under (like there is for Unemployment and Social Security) that if I go over them, I have to pay back to the government. I barely qualify for Section 8 Housing most years, and I don’t make enough to get off that program safely. I just make too much to qualify for things like EBT (food stamps) and one of the government insurance programs (the one for poor non-senior citizens). Will Disability make things worse for me somehow?
I tried to look into whether I had autism once ~10 years ago, but the doctor I saw for the initial conversation/evaluation said I wasn’t. Because (according to her) one of the major ‘tells’ of someone being autistic is a delay in learning to speak, and that is something that no-one’s ever said I did as a baby. So what I am, I still don’t know. Don’t exactly have tons of money lying around to eliminate possibles.
@Redsilkphoenix
As a person on the spectrum, I’ve never been on Disability (I’m not sure if I’m eligible and I’ve never tried to apply) so I can’t speak as to that, but regarding autism in general: there is no one “tell” that all people on the spectrum have. Delayed talking is common, but it’s not a symptom I had. I started speaking at 10 months (rather early) and yet was still diagnosed at age 4. Autism is a spectrum so there is huge variation among symptoms people experience. If your doctor was able to say you don’t have it after checking only one symptom, you should probably see a doctor who looks for more possible symptoms.
I’m not saying you are or aren’t autistic, as I’m not good at trying to diagnose people, but I am saying that you could be. If you have the resources to do further inquiry, it might be worthwhile to put you mind at rest. I was diagnosed as a child, so I’m not sure how one gets a diagnosis as an adult, but I believe there are other commenters here who were diagnosed as adults.
Yeah, I got the “you can’t be on the spectrum because you talk” bit from a psychiatrist twenty years ago, though at this point it’s almost a trope in the stories of women whose AS went undiagnosed until their forties. I still don’t know whether I’d be diagnosed if I asked about it today.
@Lainy
It’s a fun bit of showing off, but it takes a LOT of practice. I’ve seen a fair few failures over the years. Those can be quite spectacular and lead to even more spectacular rows, so don’t be doing it unless you have someone who knows what they’re doing!
@Surplus
Air purifiers? Most are about 30 cm tall, 10 cm wide and weigh about a kilo. Power use is usually around 1 to 3 watts, and they don’t require installation – just put them down where you want, plug them in, and ignore them. They’re totally silent.
I get one cold a year – it comes on in September/October and buggers off again sometime around May. The purifier helps somewhat.
Walmart Canada sells them for about $35, as of today’s offers on the website.
On the topic of late in life diagnoses, has anyone heard of delayed sleep phase syndrome? I’d never heard of it, but ran across it on my Twitter feed and looked into and absolutely everything rang too. I always wondered if I had mild insomnia, but that never seemed right. Reading about DSPS was such a revelation.
It basically means your circadian rhythms are off and your body doesn’t recognize that it’s night at the appropriate time. I almost never fall asleep before midnight no matter how tired I am, but I can sleep in the morning. Plus I have lots of vivid dreams, which is apparently due to excess melatonin production. It all tracks and explains a lot. I don’t think I’ll bother seeking an official diagnosis because there’s nothing a doctor can really do, but it’s nice to know it’s a thing with a name and I’m not just a shithead who’s too undisciplined to figure out how to go to bed at a reasonable hour.
Depends on the type. I have a Honeywell HEPA filter and it’s a little noisy. But it makes a good white noise machine for me, so I don’t mind.
I found out today that my supervisor who I’ve always gotten along with well and who has really been very mentory to me is a Trumper. I’m so disappointed about it. She has never mentioned politics to me, but my coworker overheard her saying anti immigrant and transphobic things.
Fuck.
I’m pissed. I feel bad for my coworker having to hear that too because she’s Latina.
Regarding disability in the US, there are rules as to how much you can make, the more you earn the lower your disability benefits are. You have to be careful in reporting your earnings on time, if they overpay you they don’t take money back right away but they lower future payments to get the money back, which can cause a real headache.
@Shadowplay: Excellent news. The size, weight, and price tag all sound manageable, so I’ll look into them the next time I’m in the Wal-Mart or out that way.
Thank you.
@Naglfar,
I don’t have the resources, but my older sisters do. They’re the ones offering to help me on this, so I may as well get the current tests done and see if the problem is autism or a long-term affect from a childhood head injury from over 40 years ago. Then I can decided where to go from there.
Thanks.
Is anyone still reading here? I’ve got stuff on my mind.
@Stacey
What’s up?
(You don’t need to find an open thread, btw, just use your best judgement. For example, maybe don’t wander too far off topic in a thread about a tragedy, but some MRA bullshit thread is usually fine to post in).
Hi Kupo you are so nice. And intelligent. I like your posts.
Maybe I should say this stuff here though because it’s kind of sensitive maybe? But people here seem ok with that sometimes.
I’ve been working on stuff to help develop my understanding of my own power. I’ve been going to the events of a social group that deals with power exchange. It’s one of the first times I’ve felt welcome to be who I am as an artist. It was scary at first but they made me feel safe and welcome.
@Stacey
I’m not sure what a power exchange is, but I’m happy for you that you felt safe and welcome!
It’s a BDSM group. I thought it would all be creepy and gross but the people were really nice. They made me feel really welcome and safe. It’s like the total opposite of the regular world where outside of my awesome job I get slut-shamed and harrassed by creeps because of how I dress, which I see as art but some guys see as meaning I am supposed to do whatever they want because *they* think it’s sexy regardless of my desires.
And I really like it that it’s the total opposite of so much else I have to deal with.
Sorry, I’m rambling again. 🙂
@Stacey
Oh, that’s cool. That’s basically what I’ve heard about the community, generally speaking. I’m glad you had a good time!
@kupo
Thank you! Yes, it is really cool! At first I would just go and try to be helpful, like help them set up and make sure everyone felt welcome. It’s the natural hostess in me I guess. Mostly I would talk to the women. There were no guys there I was attracted to anyway. I have been going a while. I get all kinds of compliments on my outfits and I love looking my best for them. But the last two weeks two of the women there were with these two guys who were a only a few years older than me and who are SO handsome. I mean the kind I like, really tall and chiseled. They said they appreciated my involvement and asked whether I might think about taking a leadership role in the group. The guys were just quiet like they were really being respectful. So I was nervous at first but thought about. The whole thing was new but secretly it seemed exciting and the two women are so nice. One is a friend of my boss so I trust her. And I couldn’t stop thinking about guys that handsome being so quiet and letting women just kind of have their say. This group usually doesn’t have guys like that and doesn’t let guys in anyway unless they are with a woman.
@ stacey
I’m no expert on this, but I used to be a member of something called Torture Garden. That was ostensibly a BDSM group; although it was more about the artistic and cultural aspects rather than the the sexual side. But there would be regular events and my friends commented as you do.
They liked putting together outfits (you’d probably have enjoyed it) and they said that was nice they could parade around in them without being hit on; which would not have been the case in a ‘regular’ club. People just admired and complemented the creativity.
My favourite outfit there though was a Japanese guy who wore just a strategically placed Nikon camera case; that was such a great joke/commentary on a particular stereotype.
(Personally I mainly went for the music and the lectures; which I appreciate is like saying you read Playboy for the articles; but its true!.)
@Alan Robertshaw
Alan, that sounds so cool. You seem to really get it. Thank you for being that way.
I love the kind of creativity you are talking about. I think people should kind of celebrate creativity itself.
My group has a kind of performance art thing to it. From stuff I’ve seen online and heard I know some people would call it roleplaying but always before when guys would use that particular word it always seemed to be as an excuse for something gross. That’s the opposite of my group and it’s more like a combination of performance art and ritual. It made me want to read the stuff I read in college in anthropology about ritual and in women’s studies about contemporary goddess worship.
I really like it that there’s a place where, just for a little while, my wearing an outfit that I made up and like anyway is more than just me liking it but it’s like a rule for a group that I have to wear it and a rule that they have to relate to me in a certain way when I am. And they were so nice and made sure gently that I was ok with it all first. Some of the stuff that we are doing in our group I am really starting to like a lot. It’s stuff I never thought about or thought I’d like but now I think I really really do. Like the ritual and protocol of it all. I really really like that a lot even though I might not have even known that was in me before. I guess that’s why I wanted to express it.
Thank you guys for being so nice and listening.