The Frying Pan

They come one or two at a time for years

while I was desperately trying to tell them that I do have a few white hairs, I know it very well, and even if she was mistaken this one time, she should stop insisting that I have no white hairs, because I very well know that I have them.

But they were completely ignoring me and telling me that it's wrong, and I have no white hairs

I was so pissed at them

say, "I have earned every white hair I own"

@Jolenealaska Actually white. They look grey or silver compared to other hairs. If you look at them under a magnifying glass, they're just white...

9:47 AM

I may not like the idea of my hair turning white, even though it's still a long time until it will be obvious

Reminds me of my lovely grandmother.

but the idea of pretending that I have no white hair is much, much worse in my view

@rumtscho :D

I could imagine coloring it, depending on if I think that it fits my look better at some point

@rumtscho Don't...

9:48 AM

but I wouldn't hide the fact that it's colored then.

She died with Alzheimer's at a remarkable age (90+)

Once you go down that road, you have to do that every week/2 weeks and it damages your hair...

Better to have grey hair then no hair...

@Fabby it's a matter of preference. I like my hair long and letting it unbound, but I also don't like the way grey hair looks when it's long and unbound.

The very last time I saw her, she was in a totally different era.

@Fabby oh, it doesn't damage it to the point of having no hair

9:50 AM

She looked at me, (I was 42ish?)

@Jolenealaska oh, that's so sad. Alzheimer is really one of the cruelest things you can get.

She asked me:

I swear...

She asked me if I was a virgin.

A human can get over a lot of stuff happening to him or her. But the illnesses which slowly steal upon you, taking away who you are piece by piece, they are sooo hard to take. (and I count MS among them too :( )

Weird you should bring that up...

@Jolenealaska in my calculations, this happened after you had been married :)

9:52 AM

Or quite a while before....one of those :)

Anyway, MS

@rumtscho Well, I've seen friends of my mum that have very little hair left...

I mean in the physical reality, you must have married before you were 42. Independently of what age your grandma believed you to be.

I have decided that I don't like "suffering from.."

I have known suffering.

This isn't it.

I am not suffering from MS.

The way people talk about illness is still very awkward, even after decades of destigmatizing

Very much so.

Mental illness especially

9:56 AM

"suffering from" is a kind of a convenient set phrase, I guess. It's acceptable to say it when you are too confused to know how to talk about the subject.

Yeah

and it's supposed to be kind

@Jolenealaska ah yes, that's even worse. But non-mental ones are still seen as somehow "shaming" for many people.

@Jolenealaska So what would be the correct phrase then instead of "suffering from"? Just "have"?

And even where there is no expectation of shame, there is too much of "gosh, can I talk about it without making a faux pas"

"Have" is probably best...

Furthermore, I was in a wheelchair for over a year.

9:58 AM

Thanks... Good to know... (me not being a native English speaker)

@Jolenealaska And now?

Some people bent over to be at my level, and dramatically slowed their speech.

as in - no big words

@Jolenealaska in some light, it's kind. When you have a medical condition, it's better when others acknowledge that it exists, and it impacts you in some way, than to pretend that the elephant in the room doesn't exist. But of course, it can be way too generalizing. And in this case, also so cliched as to have lost meaning.

@Jolenealaska ah yes, there is nothing to be done about such people :(

So I guess the best answer is to just honestly ask.

@Jolenealaska It's because most people have no experience with physical disability...

They don't know what to do and how to react.

Tim Minchin has a great line.

10:02 AM

I studied with a blind guy and one rainy day he showed up late in class and said to everyone:

I can't type it right, I have to find it, so I'll show it to you later

"Sorry I'm late, All this f@#$g acid rain in my eyes! I couldn't see s@#t!"

We see them all the time. People who stick the world into neat tiny categories. "Healthy person" vs "Cripple". "Christian" vs "cheater" (see this story, notalwayslearning.com/parents-have-blind-faith/37322). "Food which is safe" vs "Food which will certainly give you food poisoning"

from that day onwards everyone treated him "normally"...

We are all normal in our own way

10:05 AM

I recently had to write a comment on a question of mine at Chemistry, saying

there is a very big difference between somebody who learned something wrong, and somebody who'll defend his ignorance with his last breath

Well, I know I'm not like other people, so for the common definition of "normal", I'm "abnormal"

;-)

@rumtscho :D:D:D

You're a chemist too?

@Fabby not at all, this is one of two questions I have ever asked there

:-) Ah! ;-)

All cooks are chemists!

I've had an education as a chemist, but hardly ever worked as one...

Well, I can say that all chemists I know are cooks! ;-)

10:07 AM

but my point is, there are simply people who hang to such oversimplified stereotypes of the world. You sit in a wheelchair, so you have to conform to their expectation of a generic "cripple", built from furtively gleaned pop culture references and urban myths.

uhoh!

@rumtscho And I thought that was typical of CompSci people...

@Fabby Cool! I must say that I love the chemistry side of cooking, I just have never had any formal education after highschool chemistry, and I've forgotten lots of that too.

Putting people in rows and columns!

@Fabby No, it's quite orthogonal to occupation.

10:09 AM

A former almost-home-town of mine is up in flames tonight,

over-simplification...

black and white thinking

Baltimore.

@Jolenealaska what, there is a fire in that large city which is serious enough to make the news? It must be really a large thing.

Speaking of black and white thinking

riots

lots of riots

Ah. Cultural...

10:10 AM

A black suspect of something died in police custody.

Black & white means something completely different to me...

not race: political affiliation...

it is both here

whichever fits

Oh no. Every time I look around me and think of how nice it's to live in this beautiful future and not sometime in the middle Ages, there comes another event to remind us how barbarian we still are.

@rumtscho exactly

But @Jolenealaska re: the way to treat people with a medical condition or a disability, I must admit that I also feel uncomfortable about it and I'm prone to use the plattitudes myself

10:12 AM

@rumtscho We haven't progressed much compared to Roman times...

A large part of it is that every individual reacts to it so differently

Only antibiotics and the Internet are different...

so what can be perfectly acceptable to one person can trigger a panic or rage reaction in another one, depending on how they feel about themselves and their condition

I only know as well as I do because I have been on the other side. Trust me, I feel no ugliness towards people who don't know how to act.

I have chronic conditions myself, some serious, some not. And I have noticed that others with the same condition can view it in a totally different light, and expect to be treated in a very different way than I do.

There are even the ones who insist that I should feel about it in a certain way, or that I form their expectations so that they are the same as theirs

10:16 AM

When confronted with an unknown, the best you can do is inquire.

and those are the ones who bug me :(

@Jolenealaska It should be. Sadly, I've been conditioned not to, because it triggers the worst reaction in certain people, including my mother.

Mothers...

If I were to ask her a straight question about her condition, or even admit that I have noticed anything wrong, she'd not only feel terrible about it, but in no uncertain terms let me know that I was wrong for making her feel that terrible way and that she blames me for it.

I can only feel great pain for that.

My mom kept it from me too, but we lived apart.

I am treated in public as I would expect a "cripple" to be treated. More often than not, doors are opened for me and seats are relinquished.

Sometimes it bugs me a bit.

I don't see myself as obliviously handicapped.

(usually)

But people don't immediately talk down to me like they did when I was in a wheelchair.

That was singularly the worst part of that time of my life.

@Jolenealaska I can imagine it. It's bad. And really, there are always two sides to it. Hiding your disability is a bad way to go through life, but showing it in a world where you are met with either contempt or pity or disgust because of it is not better.

I don't have any obvious handicap, but sometimes people hold open the door for me, as a gesture

And believe me, I can tell when it is a friendly thing and when it is a macho show-off. It bugs me a lot when it is the second one.

But the problem is that the machos don't even realize that it can be anything else than positive.

10:33 AM

I am pretty happy (most days) by simply denying that I have any particular mental disability, and that I can handle physical disabilities that come along.

Often, I respond to open doors as a flirtatious measure.

After the initial startle, they tend to be fun encounters.

yes, but having to assert it over and over must be tedious.

Yes

but with rewards

this is a great thing. You know, it's quite rare to be able, like you, to simply go with the flow and turn something irritating to a good experience.

I went to the pot club last week, my membership is paid through the month, so why not.

It was deadsville.

I think it was Thursday.

As it turns out, I knew everyone there (including the owner)

So she invited us all to the VIP lounge.

WOW!

This was neat.

@Jolenealaska cool

you know, this reminds me that you wanted to tell me a story about it - sadly we missed each other for a week or so - but that the story is longer.

And I'm past my lunch time.

10:39 AM

So, the very young, very cute waitress (potress?) noticed I was carrying a travel Scrabble game

I think I'll go grab lunch, but in half an hour I'll be hear ready to listen to your story

ping me!~ :)

haha, potress. I shall remember that. Try to use the word in Scrabble next time.

Well, it was so dead that she quit for the night and challenged me to a game of Scrabble.

We actually broke open a virgin, never used board game instead of my clumsy travel game.

It had been forever since I played with actual tiles.

I also got extremely stoned. I did a "dab hit", something I had only just heard of.

I wish such things didn't exist.

I was very careful - I had read about what I was getting into, and it is not my in nature to be naive.

Still, I was on a razor's edge of being "too stoned".

A very cool thing about pot, the way old stoners experience it, is that there is almost no-such-thing as too much.

This kind of thing tips the scales.

Apparently one can use propylene glycol and glycerine to achieve a nearly 90% extraction.

11:02 AM

ok, I'm back

@Jolenealaska oops, this sounds like you're extracting a lot of other things beside the ones you want

Well..

are the waitresses allowed to smoke on the job?

I haven't done any extractions besides cooking 15 years ago. No, waitresses cannot smoke "on the clock"

What is OK now may not be OK 2 years from now.

Very interesting time to watch.

@Jolenealaska what do you mean by that? I must have missed something

OD has always been an almost laughable "can't happen"

making draconian laws just ridiculous

But now we're messing with very, very pure extractions.

11:10 AM

@Jolenealaska the point of the laws is not to prevent OD

and that's a good thing, because you can overdose on table salt too

Of course not

I have ODed (I think) on salt.

Remember Caramelized Salt?

@Jolenealaska I meant it in a completely serious "your heart stops beating" way

but yes, it's possible to eat amounts of salt which cause ugly symptoms without reaching cardiac arrest

@Jolenealaska yes, I remember it. And I remember how much you liked it. I can understand if you ate lots of it.

As of yet, no one has died of a known marijuana overdose. There has been a (single) death attributed to it.

He took a very large hit (dab?) and jumped out a window.

Ouch

Using that as a criteria, I bet you $100,000,000 (as if I had it), that I could claim chocolate as a similar cause of death.

I know..................blame windows.

11:19 AM

yes, it's ridiculous

I really enjoy living here today.

I considered briefly moving back to Iowa.

No way now.

This is too much fun.

Please................Don't ruin it now with the obscenely strong extractions.

what was the story which happened the first day you went there? You wanted to tell it, but it happened to be on the day I was going away for a conference :( and we didn't seem to meet the next days in chat

@Jolenealaska ah well, that's the trouble, isn't it

nobody in the world knows how dangerous pot is or isn't

Hmm...lots of stories...must look...brb

because everybody who has to say something about it either tries to prove that it's 100% evil or that it's 0% evil

Yep :)

11:26 AM

so sure, if there is one mishap, the "against" crowd will howl that this is proof it's 100% evil

but of course, you can't expect every single stoner to act responsibly and not harm himself by pushing borders. You can't expect it of any human being, actually.

Quick look brought me to a probable answer.

MJ treats some MS treatments.

I know this from limited experimentation.

@Jolenealaska yes, I've heard that it's used that way

Flip side is that being stoned is a big negative.

I am going to grow a few different strains.

I like being stoned, but not all the time.

I thought people saw it as a positive :) But I can see what you mean if it only helps your symptoms during the time you feel stoned. There are very few people for whom spending the rest of their life constantly stoned is appealing.

I want to find the happy medium.

11:34 AM

Maybe there are also extraction methods which reduce the stoning compounds.

The punch line of the earlier joke about Scrabble is that I now have a reputation, cool enough.

@Jolenealaska the reputation of somebody who has Scrabble in her blood so she can whump others' asses when she's stoned?

we didn't add it up

totally unnecessary

I may have broken 600

as for the other story, I mean it from this time

Apr 18 at 7:55, by Jolenealaska

a lot to consider...I won't jump into anything. In the meantime I want to write about Luckie(y)shit (I kid you not), Mary and Linda. So, I'll catch you soon.

As always, my sense of time is warped

it is one week older than I thought

OMG!! :)

11:41 AM

I swear, time passes me by and I just can't grasp that it's happening, feeling that distant stuff has happened only yesterday

Holy Crap, I had forgotten all about that.

But I know I promised you to listen to that story, and wanted to make good on that promise. Plus, you made me curious :) Sorry that it's so old now.

That story MUST be told!

No prob...please forgive my very slow typing.

OK, I wandered into this place that smelled strongly of pot.

It wasn't my first time, it was my second.

I was a member now, but still trying to get a feel for things before the big 4/20 celebration.

I wandered (alone) to a table for 4.

Me

Linda - The older sister of the "Fuck it I Quit" google.com/search?q=Fuck+it+I+Quit&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 Lady

An (I swear to all is holy which isn't much) ex-mormon

@Jolenealaska I don't see anything strange in it. It is normal that, the more restricted you've grown up, the more extreme you become once you reject the restrictions (for those who do reject them)

And a movie-star good looking, unbelievably rich, young Indian guy who had been in the country (for the first time) less than 48 hours.

Between the four of us (including the Indian guy who taught me to get stoned), that was one of the best nights ever.

Truly, I can't tell you how enjoyable that was.

11:57 AM

@Jolenealaska sure, new friends feel good, serendipity feels good, celebrating something anticipated feels good, and I can imagine the combination is just awesome

It was...Jupiter aligned with Mars. Great Night

And no one was hurt :)

are you seeing them again, or did they disperse to wherever they came from?

I will certainly see Linda again.]

The others <shrug>

Another thing....

wanna hear it?

Hi

@Jolenealaska sure

hi @Gigili

12:02 PM

There is soon to be a television show.

A reality show, like the Kardashians.

The time is now for me to decide.

I remember someone once introduced a perfect dulce de leche recipe in this room

Could someone help to find the link?

@Jolenealaska I wouldn't go there

I can remain anonymous or make some extra money. I agree

I won't do it. Tempting though :)

reality shows are full of shit. I wouldn't go near one even if it sounds on the surface like it could be a good thing

the whole point of them is to deliver to a spoiled audience the exact kind of conflict they already expect

@Gigili Yes, I can help you there brb

thetoughcookie.com/2014/01/14/…

If you have canned condensed milk, that is all you need to know.

12:10 PM

@Jolenealaska Thank you very much

There is a great picture online of the badness that can happen.

And I'm sorry I interrupted you

Don't let it boil dry.

Yes, I was about to ask, is it something safe to do?

Ah OK.

Not at all :)

Yes, it is safe enough that I do it all the time.

Don't leave home.

12:13 PM

Noted.

Can I use it for cake decorating?

A little fender bender can wreak unimaginable havoc.

I mean, like ganache

Yes, but alone it will spread.

So great if you want to spread crushed nuts.

But it won't hold a star shape.

Got it, thanks

YUM!

I am on it!

Best to use it between layers.

12:17 PM

Yeah, that's a great idea

@Gigili Just for giggles, look here:

messygourmet.com/stains/mysterymess.html

That is why you don't leave home.

12:33 PM

Haha

The map is just perfect

Boiling for 3 hours will do, right?

Yep, 3 or 4, no matter.

4 is a bit thicker, but still won't hold a star.

what about 5? will it burn?

As long as you still have water, no problem.

Maybe thicker? but barely.

I think 4 is about the max for greater returns.

12:49 PM

Yes, thank you. I probably will report the results.

Some recipes are more extreme:

Emeril Lagasse does 3 unopened + 3 pierced:

foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/…

I did that when I was first experimenting, but found it unnecessary.

And quite time-consuming for a simple dulce de leche!

5 Hours?

I will go with 3, can't wait more.

@ElendilTheTall How could you possibly forget me? The very first user of this chat room!

He hasn't forgotten you

sad panda smiley

He is away!

12:53 PM

@Jolenealaska No?

He'll be back

But he didn't mention my name

On vacation

@Gigili the very first user of this chat room? I thought this was the mythical Darin.

And there is no limerick for me

12:54 PM

@Gigili this can certainly be rectified. You'll have to remind him when he's back.

Oh, Elendil. I wish I were there too, lazily wiggling my toes in the hot Andalusian sun.

@rumtscho Don't you remember when you where all alone in this room and I appeared out of the blue and there was a bright smile on your face as you saw me

We are still getting occasional snow.

@Gigili I'm afraid I don't remember it. But it sounds plausible. I guess I've spent too much time in the room to remember every thing which happened to me in it :(

@Jolenealaska ouch, poor you. Good to know that you're all right with cold. I couldn't stand that.

In fact, we are back to below 15 Celsius after ten hot days and I'm already complaining and freezing.

Luckily, I do OK with cold...I haven't told you the best thing!!!

@rumtscho Haha, very well said, Ms.Mythicall.

12:58 PM

CN is moving

Snowy weather is much much better than the sunny one :/

I am taking his (first floor) apartment!!

He broke the news to me two days ago.