I’m in the US and I learned that blonde and brunette are female, and blond and brunet are male.

There was a privately-owned rescue/zoo that my grandma took me to as a kid (New River Zoo in NC), and a major factor in it closing was a woman who climbed over the fencing and walked up the hillside behind the jaguar exhibit, and sued because the jaguar bit the arm she tried to pet it with. The jaguar had to be…

My first college roommate had such a strong aversion to feet, she couldn’t look at her own between getting out of bed and tying her shoes, or else she’d [allegedly] throw up.

I was in my early teens, and boarding a redeye flight out of Seattle that was taking my family home from visiting relatives, and I had caught the gastroenteritis that had been going around their house on our visit. Made worse by my uncle’s insistence a few days prior that a good 4-mile suburban hike would toughen all…

I read a Not Always Right story (tried to find it again) where a mother freaks out that an employee was dragging her child around by the hand. The child had slipped through the kitchen doors and had been caught reaching for a rack full of knives!

A Wels that large is capable of dragging an adult human into deep water. Honestly more interesting to me than a toy pliosaur glued to a toy boat.

I remember learning about diaphragms in the sex ed book my mother gifted to me when I was 15, but it was all about spermicide allergies and professional fitting and none about the clean-up, as far as I remember. She was asking how you take it out correctly, and your response came across as “you take it OUT, duh!” in…

Sperm can stay motile for up to a week, so “how long do you leave the diaphragm in place?” is a perfectly reasonable question to me. Or are we supposed to intuit that some aspect of the design would squeegee down the vaginal walls on the way out?

Well, when I am not the least turned on, I can poke my cervix with my pinky finger even, and can barely fit my smallest tampon in; I tried Softcups, which are disposable menstrual cups, for a while but in the unsexiness of a dorm bathroom they often wouldn’t go in all the way. (The Caya looks like it would go in a lot…

My dad has told me several times that my mom’s pregnancy with me was the worst year of his life. My mom was on antidepressants, and her doctor told her to just stop taking them if/when she got a positive pregnancy test, instead of a more reasonable weaning off them and then stopping the birth control pills. I was also…

-flexes Deep South accent muscles- “Hey mister, what kinda sports team ya got there? Fur-rawr-ee? Wunna them Yer-a-peen soccer teams?” -innocently batts eyelashes-

When I was a kid, we had a black cat named Pud who would follow my sister and I on our Girl Scout cookie route. Little boys down the block thought we were witches. Pud was also BFFs with our neighbor’s dachsund.

When I started my period, I thought it was diarrhea because my guts felt so bad and the only facilities where I was stuck at were Porta-Potties.

My sister once tried a relative’s soap on a visit (what is it about Florida that brings out the bad decisions?) and her face got all red and bumpy. My grandma took photos of her and posted on Facebook and Flickr complete with tags of everyone grandma knew that my sister knew. Turned one day of hiding in the guest room…

My great uncle lives in Ft. Lauderdale! When some cousins were visiting, one of them picked up a man-o-war by the float and threw it at him. Tentacles wrapped around his arm and it was instantly red and puffy. He makes a point to lecture anyone he takes to the beach beforehand, every time family visits.

So, when I was about 16, we (me, Mom, Mom’s Girlfriend, Little Sister) went to the beach with Mom’s Girlfriend’s Sister and her family (husband, son and daughter a bit older than me). We also brought my sister’s friend, who turned out to have some bad habits that had not previously manifested on sleep-overs.

I try not to say mean things about people but she looks like a withered, faded Lindsey Lohan and it’s freaking me out a little.

You know what’s really gonna paint a target on a young woman? Getting all her hair chopped off. It would not surprise me if all the school bullies went around playing that video at her and generally treating her like shit. 13 is a very vulnerable age, where hormones and neurochemical changes make the smallest little…

I actually read a study about it. Because of how rare they are, it was really hard for biologists to get an intact body or skeleton of one. They have a skull structure very similar to snakes, including venom glands, but there’s a sliding scale between “oral hygiene enzymes” and the different kinds of venom found in…

People give my mother flowers all the time, which can get kind of exasperating because she’s allergic to so many things. Lillies and verbena are the worst, they can’t be allowed inside the house at all.