Have A Good Old Moan....

Well, this is truly a roller coaster of medical diagnosis. We're back to cancer, just not a blood type cancer. Luckily a cancer with a very high survival rate (especially in someone so young). Still not certain yet as again there's some complications And confusion with various symptoms etc but should be ok with some horrible treatment. Fingers crossed again. I, and my brother still don't hold this confusion again the docs, there really is some weird stuff to get around in his case. When you think about the huge amount of different things that can be wrong with a person, it's a wonder that they ever get the diagnosis right 🙂

Sorry about your shoulders glitter 🙁 I helped they feel better soon x

Oh no. That really is a roller coaster 🙁 I hope your brother gets better soon xx

And thank you, I'm hoping some heat on the joints will ease it a bit

Aw no Janine, sending you and your brother positive thoughts and hope he gets through it all ok. Like you say it is miraculous when you think about what a complicated machine a human body is, incredible that they can not only pinpoint the causes of an illness but treat most things these days too.

Glitterpix you have my every sympathy, that sounds horrible!

Absolutely, it's quite amazing how well GP's actually do most of the time. Of course, it's useful when people specialise, but taking into account how many different kinds of cancer there are alone, it's quite amazing.

On a really light note, seeing as the mundane can annoy me more than anything...

I have this bit of hair that falls over my left ear that feels really thin! It's like not a bold patch or anything, it just feels thin. It's difficult to tell sometimes with curly hair what is wrong because you don't want to comb it through because FRIZZ! lol Well, I finally  realised that there's a patch where it's got a chunk out of it. It's about 2 inches long and the rest it's mixed in with is about 5 inches long. I don't know if it's breakage or some really bad thinning! Seems too short to have been thinning, but it doesn't feel damaged enough to be breakage. Doesn't really look like it either. So I kind of suspect one of the hairdressers I went to a while ago accidentally cut a chunk of hair and hid it from me! I first felt this thinness after I went to the hairdresser time before last and she did do some pretty appalling thinning (which wasn't necessary when you consider how much breakage I actually had). So I suspect her. Grr.

It's taking me so long to grow out my hair. I don't hate the process as much as others, but due to my mistakes and some terrible hairdressers it's taken a year and a half to gain a couple of inches. I thought I had a hairstyle I could just let grow for a few months, but the longer it gets, the more obvious the blooming thinner side is looking as it's supposed to be the thicker side! I'm just going to have to grin and bear it and then just get several inches cut off again!

Ah well. It could always be worse. 🙂

Yeah I have a couple of friends who are GPs and I admire them so much, not only for the sheer amount of knowledge they have to retain but for their bravery in voluntarily going through the most awful times of a person's life with them, sometimes having to give terrible news and provide care for people they've known for a long time. Incredible people.

Yes time to go back to the small irritations in life I think! I defo feel your pain with the bad thinning, that's what prompted me to grow my hair long and start cutting it myself, I asked for a bob with broken up ends and got a cheekbone length bowl cut with several chin length stringy strands! Hopefully you can find a way to disguise it while it fills out a bit?

My minor irritation moan is that I got really shouted at by a bus driver yesterday for something very minor! I just don't think it's cool for a grown man to be super aggressive to a woman travelling on her own, there are ways of expressing annoyance that don't leave someone shaking the whole journey!

I can't sleep and I'm just so so tired!

Also yesterday I witnessed 2 men having a fight when I was on the way to pick my kids up from school. Wasn't very nice! The police turned up really fast and dealt with it. Because it was school run time there were about 20 odd witnesses so I'm sure it'll all get sorted. No idea what was going on.

I'm in the process of buying a house and while my realtor is awesome and has done everything I ask, the mortgage company sucks! We are trying to get our application ready and now every time they call me its for another piece of information. It makes me want to scream, just tell me everything you need in the beginning and we wouldn't still be waiting for our approval! Buying a house is too stressful!

When you watch youtube channels on stuff you do know about (for me hair, sewing, knitting etc) and see how badly people do things you realise that the ones you know nothing about are probably just as wrong. Don't trust anything you see on youtube!

(Just watched a youtube video where someone makes a dress that would have been lovely, but she gets a few simple things really wrong and it means the dress looks sloppy to me. I'm surprised when others don't notice it)

That's the curse of knowing too much Janine! My brother finds it really difficult to enjoy almost any pop music these days because he can play a lot of instruments and knows about music production and stuff and it's just taken away the magic for him because he can hear the mechanics behind it all!

My worst thing like that (and I know I irritate people with it ) is watching films and saying "It didn't happen like that in the book" or worse still "it didn't happen like that in real life!"

Lol yeah, I'm like that with films about most British royalty from the Plantagenets to the Edwardian era!

Hahah, I did it with Crimson Peak the other day, it's all brilliantly early 1900's until Mia Wasikovska's character wears a gown with spaghetti straps that was definitely closer to the 1930's and it took me right out of it! To be fair though it was a relief from all the pouffe sleeves in it!

Yes! I watched that a few weeks ago and had the same reaction. I think we talked before Reign about that. I can sort of take ridiculous changes to history to make the story "better", but I find watching things with very poor mashing of period and modern costume painful. 

Edited to add. I love being called a sexist and quoted as saying "all men sexist" when what I actually say is men AND women judge women more harshly. Sigh.

Edited to add again, this was the article that someone was commenting on

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-womack/stop-pretending-you-dont-_b_12191766.html?

He managed to miss EVERYTHING the article was talking about (probably because he didn't read it) and went on to say he just doesn't trust Clinton. I said he should probably examine why he feels like this as a FEELING that someone isn't trustworthy (even though she's been shown to be the most trustworthy out of all the candidates I believe) isn't enough. He said she's aloof and smug and part of the establishment. I'll give him the latter, but it doesn't inherently mean she's bad, but I know there's a lot of bad feeling for that at the moment, so ok. It went on a bit longer and eventually I mentioned that he might or might not judge her as harshly if he were a man. He said he would judge her the same and I said there's no way of knowing, adding that men AND women are guilty of harsh judgement of women and a mild sexism we can't see. That's when I was told I'm sexist because I called "all men sexist".

Can you tell it's bugging me? lol

I'm glad you felt the same about those spaghetti straps in Crimson Peak Janine, for some reason they really bothered me! Absolutely loved Jess Chastain's dresses in it though, lush! And yes, I think we have discussed this before with reference to Reign ha!

Hmmm, I think that should bug you, that's pretty awful! I'm encountering a lot of anti-feminist and generally anti-female comments online just lately and it's pretty worrying stuff. Just the other day I posted a jokey Instagram about fixing something in the house (joking that the man of the house was out, but it was ok coz girls can fix things too or whatever) and some guy commented 'feminism is cancer'!! But we can't say anything or we're playing the woman card (phrase of the moment it seems!)

Yeah, it seems to be a backlash recently. I'm not a full on feminist, but it is something I feel strongly about. I've been coming across some really nasty stuff on youtube recently and it's also on reddit. Mind you, there's been backlashes against feminism since women started asserting themselves, but this is definitely a major upswing.

What makes me even more sad is I sit on the fringes of the skeptical community (I like learning about how to think critically more than anything) and read a couple of skeptical forums. They're supposed to be rational etc. Whenever race or seixism comes up it's just horrendous. It's mostly a white boys club and they can't understand why there aren't more women, people of colour and LGBT people involved. This is partly why. Half of them seem to be entrenched in the MRA scene. Because of the kinds of subjects they discuss, there's always arguments, but these always seem to be worst. And, the few women they do have around find themselves not being able to take part because "woman card" or they just get so angry.

The scariest ones to me are the young girls doing those "I don't need feminism because..." posts, I feel like they are proof that people are starting to view feminists as the man-hating, transphobic horrors who are a disgrace to the cause and give it a bad name! I have always considered myself to be a feminist but I don't see myself as better than a man, or want any advantage over men, I just want to reduce barriers that I might meet in life that are unique to my gender!

I think there's been a terrifying rise in men using sexually violent threats against women online too, which sadly seems to often have links to the MRA scene as far as I have seen. I can't help but feel like a lot of the people fighting for Men's Rights are the same people who ask when White History Month is! (although I can see the point of a few of their issues, such as child custody arguments).