Reading through your post and the others, I think this guy Tommy is going to be okay. Smart people with hearts like his usually land on their feet running. Maybe he’ll pull some of you guys over eventually and you can all chill together again.

Yeah, making fun of the rape afterwards and playing the audio of Jackie's nervous breakdown before each show and chanting a line from it as a slogan is just asshole levels of awful. A teenager or not, Joan has lost some of her shine from this.

This is why my blood pressure sky rockets when I go to the doctor (white coat syndrome). He/she is trying to find something wrong (i.e. kill me) and also take all my money (bill me).

There is a fairly cheap titer test thingee you can have done to measure the chicken pox/shingles virus in your body and determine if you should get the shingles vaccination. It will tell you one way or the other and with your fun chicken pox history, your doc might be able to sneak it in under insurance.

I am in the middle of reading The Wilderness of Ruin about this pint sized psychopath. His father was a drunk, according to the author, a drunk who viciously beat his young son. That could twist anyone up.

I have a boyfriend you can have for free.

Between 2012-2014, I worked in a call center for a company that does third party quality inspections at auto manufacturers and suppliers. What would happen is a supplier/manufacturer would call in a “case” when there was a problem with the part, a problem usually discovered by the manufacturer. It could be bad…

My dad died after decades of illness. Decades of illness that he worked through to provide for his kids and wife. He was a good guy and my mom took care of him, managed all his medical issues (appointments, billing, medicines etc.) They had a good marriage despite this giant burden on both of them. Looking back, they…

We actually won the city championship that year as a ragtag group of five. It wasn't hugely competitive but there were several other teams and four out of five girls on our team had never run over a mile, let alone the CC distance, until we formed the team. I have a little medal somewhere.

Yikes. I hope she ordered some Monistat. That list screams yeast infection.

I love those words with the s in the middle. Runners-up is also a good one.

No worries. I had twelve years of guilt-injecting Catholic school so I am always paranoid about sounding like a braggart. They brain you with that sort of stuff so I carry with me the fear of being full of myself.

I am not sure if you're being snarky. I am going to tell you that I am not awesome, I am a regular person, slightly dorky to this day. I did find my CC uniform with the "Dr. Bones" on the back in my mom's basement (where I don't live) a couple years ago, that was awesome.

Yeah, we had sooooo much fun. There was little oversight by the school and I remember the senior boys would have to drive us to meets because we had no school provided transportation. Parents were way less helicoptery back then. There were no shenanigans, just kids stuffed in an old 60s-70s hooptie car with the music…

It's all fun and games until someone takes a bullet kick to the face.

I was on my high school's first girls' cross country team in 1981. The couple of us interested had to stand in the halls and beg passersby, asking if they would like to be on the team. All we needed were five girls and we got exactly five girls. The school didn't provide our uniforms, we had to buy shirts from the…

I think it eliminated the sense of itch. It was bizarre, during the itch/scratch cycle if I focused I wouldn't scratch (even though the itch was unbearable) but then subsequently would catch myself scratching when I wasn't aware or in my sleep. It was very stressful and I felt like a loser. I spray the crap out of…

I got a whopping case of poison ivy last summer. Get this, I put my hair into a pony tail with gardening gloves on, gardening gloves with poison ivy on them. The rash was all over the back of my head and it went away after a few weeks. Even after it disappeared, I would wake up in the middle of the night scratching my…

Sorry, I did not intend offense. I was making the comparison that the tone of the phone calls from people with those conditions (Morgellon's and Post-Lyme) were similarly desperate. I do not have the knowledge or training to make any judgments, I just all these people find relief at some point.

Great post. I used to answer phones in a doctors' office that received (mostly self) referrals for Morgellon's. They were the saddest calls, the people went on and on about their search for a cure and all the "dumb doctors" who wouldn't believe them and referred them to psych. They often carried with them tiny boxes…