#NotEveryoneInTheNFL

OK, Stevens of the world, riddle me this... I worked hard and earned a nursing degree. I worked for about 15 years in a job I loved, and then I was blindsided by mental illness. When I became incapacitated, I was earning somewhere in the neighborhood of $35/hour. At this time, I am still unable to work because my…

haha I also have that delusion. I always get soooo excited before a flight, imagining the handsome British man seated beside me named Tom who has a soft spot for rough-around-the-edges Canadian girls... but it's never Tom. It's always Linda, the overweight middle-aged woman who chats incessantly and loses her mind…

I wear a tuxedo when I fly, but only on flights after 6pm.

Looks that way, unfortunately. I don't want to come off as a paranoid feminist, but part of me wonders if autoimmune disease would be in a brighter spotlight if 78% of its sufferers were male instead of female.

Y'all is an excellent gender-neutral word EVERYONE should use. Keep it!

Glad I'm not the only one crying. Also when the person is not only amazing but in such a position of power. I think there is a change coming, there are days when I doubt it, but this just give me hope. I know now if I were to ever meet him I think I would burst into tears.

Same thing here. I got the lump in my throat after about the second sentence and the tears came right after. Men who "get" it just destroy me. And good-looking men who get it have usually been able to get it, speaking as one who's been gotten.

That's interesting! I have heard a bunch of theories (from overuse of antibiotics in meat, to resistance to the pesticides sprayed on wheat, to endocrine disrupters in hygiene products, to the amount of sugar and alcohol in the modern diet, all of which have to be filtered through the liver, which is also responsible…

You'd actually be surprised by how hard it is (still! with the crazy increases in diagnoses!) to be diagnosed with an autoimmune disease as a woman. According to a bunch of research I've read about my autoimmune disease and the people (mostly women) who have it - the average amount of time it takes for a woman to be…

AND he has limited mobility and lives with a rage-filled abusive drunk that does this kind of shit regularly? I can only shudder to think what his life is like.

I can still recall reading a Miss Manners exchange on this subject at least 20 years ago. Someone wrote in asking about what to do on some insane point of wedding etiquette, trying to excuse the question by confessing that she didn't know much about rules of etiquette.

omg yes. That is what bugged the shit out of me when I first started going on wedding websites because everything everyone ever does is rude, according to these people. And they would spout off even the most ridiculous outdated rules when they were yelling at people. Stuff that doesn't even make sense in this day and…

"Mr and Mrs John Jones cordially invite you to celebrate the permanent legalized union of their daughter Jane's hairy clam purse with Tom Smith's throbbing bone on Saturday, the twenty-fifth of..."

Aww, yours is all huggy! :P

You know what might be my biggest pet peeve about weddings? It's people who have spent their entire lives ignoring all rules of etiquette and generally behaving like entitled assholes suddening turning into some combination of Hitler and Emily Post and acting as if the typeface on their invitation and how things are…

Thank you! It was one of those moments where you think "Did I actually just hear that?" It wasn't offensive enough to make me actually angry, so I just found myself shutting the eff up. For quite a while actually.

Mark, I love that your Jez posts are frequently just a framing device to share ridiculous awesome stories about yourself. Never change!

I've heard that being mentioned a lot and I think that may be true in terms of autism to some degree (it's a big spectrum and there are a lot of high functioning autistic kids who would have never been diagnosed in the past, most likely.) However, with a lot of autoimmune diseases, they aren't new, they're just more…