You really should buy a bedbug proof mattress cover and interceptors for the legs of your bed and furniture. Trust me when I say that an ounce of prevention will save you a lot of trouble, cost, and emotional trauma. Even if it costs more, buy then anyway.

Cool, how do I disable this shit feature?

Television set.

I hate giving up my seat on the bus. So I will pretend not to notice someone standing there until I absolutely have to, and then feign ignorance. Fuck off, I wanna sit down.

Because of Nick Cave.

Even Satie. Who collected umbrellas.

The great opera singer Enrico Caruso was the 18th of 21 children, only 3 of whom survived infancy.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote an opera about coffee addiction.

The Russian composer Tchaikovsky was afraid his head would come off while conducting, so he would hold his chin with one hand while doing so.

The girlfriend of composer Erik Satie wore a corsage made of carrots, and she was a painter and liked to feed the paintings she made. Satie once threw her out the window but she survived.

I can’t answer as to frequency, but I can say that recently a woman I know slightly cheated on her husband of 20 plus years, and the reason I know this is because he hired a private investigator and put the video of her kissing the other dude on Facebook. Apparently he did not include the video of them having sex but it exists. That seems like a really heinous thing for him to do, but if you know this family they’re actually really well raised good members of the community, and he’s clearly extremely hurt, stating that the depth of her lies to him was unreal. This woman’s mother is a saint walking upon the earth, without a shadow of a doubt, and her daughter was what seemed to be a very ethical well brought up mother herself raised in the Christian faith (not the conservative kind but the really decent person kind), so this was all a big shock. Apparently she was just lying to everyone, including her saint of a mother, all along. Her husband asked her to stop the affair (which was with some guy she had known for years) until they separated houses, but she kept on and kept on lying about it until she was caught on tape.

So until someone’s mask slips, you just really never know what someone will do.

Tokkie claims he was sexually and physically abused by them and made into a slave. None of the sources seem very well sourced, it’s just based on a video he made, and they state that he’s an addict and trying to extort them for drug money. Capetown child welfare workers went to their house to see if their daughter Sixteen is ok, and apparently had no problems with them. I take abuse seriously but what he’s saying seems super farfetched and made up. I don’t think they’re great people exactly, but their characters are obviously an act and they’re middle aged parents under it all.

Apparently South Africans are NOT fans of the band despite their success. I think what Tokkie claims about them sounds made up, apparently he’s an addict and trying to extort them is their take on it. It just doesn’t sound truthful at all.

I’m leery of most romantic gestures now because it turns out some of them are just self-serving narcissism so they feel good about themselves for performing them, but honestly trying to cheer someone up with a nice dinner and a peaceful evening is really heartfelt and says, I can’t fix this for you but I can do this much and try to help you have a better day and show you I care about you.

I listen to Die Antwoord still and read the poetry of Anne Sexton. The former is because I think some of the accusations against them are exaggerated, and part of their whole act IS being jerks. The latter is because what she did was clearly in the throes of her severe bipolar disorder which was long before they had any good medications.

That choosing a relationship with someone who is monkeybranching into the relationship with you directly from another relationship is you allowing someone in your life who is fundamentally dishonest and manipulative. It’s one thing to be casually dating in general, and just finding someone you click with and ending it with the people you are casually dating, but entering a relationship with someone who pursues you even though they’re in an ostensibly committed relationship is choosing to accept someone who is really not a good person, because they will just do whatever they want and eventually hurt you without a qualm too. Tolerating any of this means you are tolerating abuse, really.

Unfortunately he didn’t tell me this fact until 18 months into it, but that should have been what made me realize that he wasn’t trustworthy and leave then.

Also committing from the get go and falling in love? That’s just also not valuing yourself. You’re just looking for someone to fit into your life because you don’t love yourself enough to wait and take your time and get to know someone, and you’re afraid to be alone and have nobody to care for you. And I did all of that, because I was immature, completely without any idea of how to make it in life alone or cope alone, and I thought that was all I deserved and was the only way to be safe. And it was all wrong.

Amanda Palmer. I’ve always thought she was a narcissistic asshole who uses people like she’s rearranging furniture. And that has turned out to be extremely true.

I really am kind of messy but it’s because I work so much I don’t have time to do anything properly at all. I always feel frantic.

The human centipede of social media.

I especially hate that Reddit sold out so hard, because it really is the only search result worth anything anymore. I quit Instagram and Twitter as well, can’t quite give up Facebook because of my Livejournal friends. Would give my kidney for Livejournal to make a comeback.

Neko Case!

There was this mommy blogger in the early aughts who decided to have an “unassisted birth”, which is a thing where you just don’t have any medical care at all. She pontificated often about Big Obstetrics and how they always pushed you for C section because they got paid more, she called midwives “medwives”, and all sorts of other crunchy shit like that. She clearly was not terribly confident but was terribly obnoxious and holier than thou. Fine. I think she had NPD or BPD because of her behaviour personally. Just the nastiest person. She did all her own pregnancy care, which apparently was just writing weight down and taking vitamins and that’s about it.

Well at 33 weeks she went ripping into early labour, phoned her old midwife and while telling her quite rudely that she wanted an unassisted birth also asked her what to do. The midwife told her to go to ER and that she couldn’t help her because it was out of her scope. So she went screaming to ER, could feel baby sitting right at the perineum. The OB takes a look and tells her they have to do a section because baby is breech and obstructed. She began screeching at him that she only wanted to have a vaginal birth and told him he was “birth raping” her, and acted like a hysterical hyena. He managed to convince her how bad things were and that she needed to be delivered RIGHT NOW, and she finally consented and they took her up, and put her under general anesthesia.

She later wrote this vague blog birth story, baby had died because of congenital defects before she woke up, and she wrote a very long set of blog posts about All The Ways The Hospital Was Wrong without really going into why her baby died, and everyone fell all over themselves pitying her and telling her that she was so right about everything. She blogged about how the nurses were so terrible for trying to connect her with social work or grief groups, and when they offered her medication to dry up her breast milk she screeched that they were not supportive of her breastfeeding her 3 year old.

But later on the story came out that baby had a rare condition called sirenomelia, or mermaid syndrome it’s sometimes called. It’s a birth defect where the legs are fused together into the appearance of a mermaid tail. They have a lot of other defects, including no kidneys, no genitals, heart defects, etc. Sirenomelia is caused by untreated gestational diabetes. So not having prenatal care probably killed her child. That was damn deceptive, making everyone pity her when it was just her own obnoxious ignorance.

I go to church now for the last few years so I’ve retrained my choice of words to a degree so not to offend, but I still curse loudly.