What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
At 22 years old, after months long assessments, I have been diagnosed with severe ADHD, depression and moderate anxiety. Here is a quick timeline of my experience:
I don't know what more to do. I always knew I was broken and needed help. And for all my life I thought that seeing a psychiatrist is a last resort in case "I can't fix myself" on my own. Now it's been almost a whole year and I am in a critical time period where I need to excel and put in the work but I find myself succumbing to my symptoms while jumping up and down with the doses of some pills that barely seem to have an effect.
I didn't have many people around me from the start, and many of them would not understand my condition at all (nobody from my family does). But now it seems that even the few that were empathetic I have unfortunately tired out. I've heard my fair share of bad remarks that have gradually demoralised me (ADHD is not real. I'm just lazy. I just like to complain. etc) and due to the fact that I also have codependency problems this has greatly hurt me and made me feel like I am completely alone and nobody cares for my troubles or has my wellbeing in their best interest. Right now I just wish I'd know what to do. I wish there was some clear step by step goal oriented way to "happiness" or at least normality. I don't even know what more to tell my psychiatrist other than how I don't feel well, which is what I've been telling him since the start.
If you've been through a similar journey, I'd love to hear your experience and any advice you wish you had received earlier.
What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)
Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.
You can make a chart if you use last.fm:
http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/
Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
Second Martin Scorsese movie is Gangs of New York from 2002.
Besides any thoughts any thoughts on this movie, now that we have done this little comparison between Scorsese and superhero movies, what do you think sets these types of movies apart and are they really as opposites as it is sometimes made out to be?
The schedule for March is:
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
Hey y'all! I'm finishing up a work (academic) project, and, to my delight in the near future I will have time to read for fun again! In talking with a friend, I realized that many people have at least one or two favorite books no one's ever heard of before.
Fiction, nonfiction, weird, old, whatever! What're your favorites?
I'll start: Karl Kerenyi's book on Hermes, and Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman. The Kerenyi text is lovely because he dwells in this between-place of pure academic and personal experience, and it reads almost like a memoir of a man who is still very much in the midst of his love affair with his research. The Fadiman book is a lovely (if tiny!) volume of essays that I've come back to time and time again about what books mean to a reader, and how they have shaped her life.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
Who got the better end of that deal? It was in Google rewards. They were already involved in that transaction. How much is me matching their phone records really worth?
I like that music app algorithms are able to suggest similar songs to add to my playlist, but I wish there were a way to specify bpm for the song suggestions. I get extra motivation from a playlist with a specific and consistent bpm when I'm doing jump rope or using the treadmill.
Is there an easy way to search for songs based on both "vibes" and bpm?
Or alternatively, music playing app that can auto adjust songs in a playlist to all play at the same bpm.
Follow up to this post
I did my first ever platelet donation!
This one was a bit more intimidating than the blood donation. For platelets, the donation takes around two hours not counting the onboarding time. Additionally, during the donation, you can’t move either of your arms, as you have needles in both. The blood draws from one arm, goes into a centrifuge where they separate out the platelets, and then your blood gets returned to you in your other arm.
I was a little worried about how it was going to go leading up to the appointment, but I’m very happy to report that everything went fine! All of the needles went in easily and it was a nearly painless process. After that it was actually kind of boring! They had a screen with Netflix on it, so I watched three episodes of a TV show.
My least favorite part of the whole thing was not being able to scratch an itch when one arose, which is not so much a complaint as it is an endorsement. If the worst I can say is that I couldn’t scratch my nose once or twice during a multi-hour process involving multiple needles and my blood leaving and re-entering my body, then I’d say it went really well!
The staff kept checking in to see if I needed a blanket because most people feel cold when donating platelets, but, weirdly, I actually liked the chilled sensation I got? It wasn’t like a regular “cold” feeling; I found it genuinely pleasant.
Also, the whole experience was an interesting experiment in forced attention. I couldn’t check my phone, so I just watched a show, uninterrupted. I can’t remember the last time I did that? I got home and tried to continue watching it and, sure enough, now that my arms were free I was looking at my email and checking messages and the news instead of paying attention to what I had on. The whole donation session had a genuinely nice, calm, almost meditative quality to it. It was a nice way to start out a Saturday.
You can donate platelets separately from blood, and platelets have a much lower “donation cooldown” (you can donate them every seven days). I don’t think I’ll be keeping to that rapid of a turnaround, but I’m going to start doing it once a month. One thing I learned from this is that, unlike blood which can be stored for up to a year (edit: turns out it’s only 42 days), platelets have to be used within five days, so they’re pretty much constantly in demand because they can’t be stockpiled.
Anyway, I just wanted to share my little mini-milestone with everyone here. The novelty of being able to donate as a gay guy still hasn’t worn off for me. I love the idea of being able to do it regularly and support people over time!