My sister and I got our first Guardasil rounds together and never went back. I missed most of a week of school because of how sore my arm was; I couldn't carry my books or even reach higher than my shoulder (my sister had less pain, but she's always had a flare for the dramatic, so mom never insisted we go back). I…

North Carolina has two different, very distinct regions: the Appalachians + foothills, and the Sandhills + coastal plain.

I'm suddenly picturing a lot of twenty-something guys, in response to blatant tv propaganda, flipping the bird at the nearest government camera and going back to masturbating.

I learned cursive in 3rd grade, and have never once regretted it. High-speed note-taking in high school and college, classmates asking for copies of my notes if they missed a day because everything is legible, and even just random people praising me on my handwriting.

I clicked just to try and figure out what in the world the headline meant.

Out of the Silent Planet: read it, loved it, wanted more.
Perelandra: green-skinned space babe starts schooling our sunburnt protagonist about Jesus; I put the book down and backed away slowly.
That Hideous Strength: mom told me it wasn't any good and after Perelandra I decided not to.

The tragedy of you really, REALLY not getting the reference.

25% of the homeless in the United States are under the age of 18. Children kicked out for being gay, or who are running away from abuse. Single mothers and their children, who need a home to get a job but need a job to get a home, or who need to keep their heads down or else Daddy will find them. If you rent and…

When Oregon was founded, it was illegal to not be white within the state. Today, it has the lowest minority percentages of all the states and some of the highest anti-vaccine rates. "Most livable city." At least here in the South we aren't delusional about how crap we make life for each other.

At the university I went to, I once saw a guy run across the street just to shove a cheeseburger in the mouth of a passing service dog, and without acknowledging the blind girl who had the dog, he ran back across and just kept walking like nothing had happened.

Just looking at this makes my everything hurt. I might actually throw up. Wow.

Ugh, I had some serious anxiety and depression all through high school, but I came from a fairly stable family compared to this. I can empathize with the daughters.

Anybody else immediately think of Vriska Sekret?

It bears pointing out that the wild mood swings and aggression associated with schizophrenia are mostly side effects of medications, but sometimes the medications' side effects never go away even decades after stopping them. And, culture has a surprisingly strong effect on what hallucinated voices say and sound like:…

Mine was so awful when I started. I'd get really snotty a couple days before, and wake up at 4am with what I began calling "Holy Crap Crime Scene" all over my sheets and a stomach full of mucous demanding to be emptied. Pick which end gets the toilet first.

There was a movie I saw years ago, Epidemic or something like that, which had a scene where a doctor who is centrifuging some samples absentmindedly grabs for one of the (still spinning!) test tubes and ends up punching out half the samples. He got broken glass and super-ebola in his hand and died horribly not long…

I remember a variation of that rhyme that was, for whatever reason, on a big giant poster in my Spanish class. Oh, middle school.

Well, you have to be 18 or older to qualify for a Darwin Award (except for that time a 15-year-old and his parents were all electrocuted trying to erect a radio antenna in their back yard).

Patrick Stewart?!

My friend has been raging against her Wii lately. The flimsy little cord for the motion sensor bar got damaged, and she only uses it for selecting games from the menu. EVERYTHING else can be controlled with a Gamecube controller or the other Wii-mote functions, except selecting things.