o_O

Ohhhhh. That is truly scary. When I was in my teens I was friends with two sisters who had two older brothers. One of the brothers had killed himself, and the family was struggling to deal. The older brother, over the time I knew him, became progressively stranger and had really weird experiences and thoughts that, it…

Aaaand there are the goosebumps.

When I was 2-3 years old, after my brother was born, I went through a serious night terror phase. I slept in the same room as the baby, and I would routinely wake up screaming about the little men that had been coming through the window to take my brother away.

That was the first thing that went through my head, too. I got actual goosebumps. And then I remembered that he a) grows sentimental about everything and hates losing or giving up anything; b) he's very melodramatic in the moment, but minimizes it afterwards and; c) he'll contradict his brother, at all costs.

A little over a year ago we lived in a big house on the edge of a forest, which was part of a provincial park. We had a big back yard, and from the living room where I worked I could see through the yard to the forest behind. I had left my full time job to work part time at home, and was by myself in the house in the…

My uncle died a little over 4 years ago, and about 10 months after he died I was heading back home to visit relatives, including his widow and kids and grandkids. The night before I flew out, I had an incredibly vivid dream in which he and I were sitting on my deck, chatting about the trip. He had lots of questions…

We moved to Lima a year ago, and were temporarily housed in an apartment there. The apartment was on the 6th floor of the building and took up the entire floor - kitchen, dining room, living room, TV room (with a weird little bar/closet off of it), 3 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms. Lima is a foggy, overcast city most of the…

Speaking of seeing ghosts, any news on this year's scary story contest/share-a-thon?

Me toooo! Except that I took forever to click, because I thought "no way did she 'play' an entire symphony with her boobs." I have no idea how to move my pectoral muscles in isolation, so I could never do this. I could, however, do it with my kneecaps.

I'm having enough trouble cajoling halloween costume ideas out of my kids, who want to trick-or-treat. I'm dressing my dog up as a hell hound, which is to say I'm letting her exist on halloween, with all the people and the noises and so on. She's a bristly black mutt, she'll figure the rest out (and she'll be either…

Jane Austen touched repeatedly on the theme of the nouveau riche mistaking being fashionable/having the latest "thing" for being interesting and having good taste - but she was also mocking the old wealthy types who smugly looked down their noses on this kind of thing. Which, as you say, in no way detracts from the…

This article has gotten me the closest I've been to understanding "basic" in the way it's being used here, and it still feels like the conceptual equivalent of oil on Teflon.

I love food in general, and soup in specific - I eat some kind of soup almost every day, and am highly critical of bad soups, although I consider bad to usually be in the execution, not the concept. But quality of product aside, this list is so wrong to me I don't even know where to begin. Ranking…

Not sure if it was roofies, precisely, but I was drugged in a bar. I started feeling off and got my friends to get me into a cab, in which I found myself in and out of consciousness and unable to give him directions to my house. Cabby dropped me on the side of the road, where I passed out for 2 hours on the ground in…

Definitely a thing. A trench, on an angle, with low partitions along it to make something resembling stalls (at least, in my experience). The partitions were low enough to allow other women to peer over them and watch the white girl :/

Good point - there are also those songs that go on FOREVER, and you don't realize it until you're already standing up there.

If you don't like your job, and you can afford to quit ... I recommend quitting. Then again, full disclosure, I've never worked for the same employer for more than a few years. And I left a desk job to move to South America, so I'm likely biased. This was to follow a fancy job opportunity for my husband, and now I…

These Boots Were Made For Walkin' - almost anyone can handle it, even fairly drunk. My go to is Crazy by Patsy Cline.

I think it depends on whether squatting works for your body or not, and part of that might be the environment you grew up in. I, too, have lived in Asia and LOVE squat toilets - even when experiencing digestive woe. I do like them private, though. Not a fan of the communal trough squat toilet, which I experienced in…