Chatterday! Open Thread.

This is our weekly Chatterday! open thread. Use this open thread to talk amongst yourselves: feel free to share a link, have a vent, or spread some joy.

What have you been reading or watching lately (remembering spoiler warnings)? What are you proud of this week? What’s made your teeth itch? What’s going on in your part of the world? Got any questions for your fellow FWD commenters?

A note to commenters: Please, as with other threads, keep the length of your comments down. A usual guideline, in the absence of extenuating circumstances, is to stick to around three pithy paragraphs or so, and to avoid making back-to-back comments.

Today’s chatterday backcloth, a baby pangolin, comes via The Daily Squee.

Long Distance Noms: A baby pangolin extends a very long pink tongue

11 thoughts on “Chatterday! Open Thread.

  1. Found a dentist I could get to in a timely fashion. Yay! Sadly, it’s been a while since I’ve been to a dentist so I need a lot of work. Well, hopefully, this place doesn’t randomly stop taking my insurance like the last dentist I went to did.

  2. I had my first exam with accessible arrangements yesterday. I’m not sure it went well, but I’m not lying down with my hands wrapped in a towel to try and stop them hurting, so that’s a victory on one count at least.

    I’ve been doing precious little else – watching excessive quantities of Big Love and knitting has pretty much been the story of my evenings. Am so looking forward to not working weekends again.

  3. I had a great time with my LDR boyfriend for about a week. Everything was perfect or almost perfect.

    Went out to eat a lot, watched some movies, looked at houses together. All that good stuff.

    Then I came home and started to catch up with my RSS feeder and saw a bunch of filbanserin-related posts and now I want to go back on vacation. Because there is no medical justification to use pills with funny-sounding names if you have sex problems or something like that. And the lack of women with the problem that such a drug might treat.

    Well at least I was stress free for a week…

  4. I had a good week – I finally sent off the movie I rented for my sister (she couldn’t figure out how to put it in the envelope and seal it… but she can drive) from Netflix, so I’m back in my Netflix summer groove – I have one at home, one on the way there, and one on the way to me.

    Netflix Instant… oh how would I have gotten introduced to Dexter without it? And they’ve got plenty of Bollywood, and not just new ones.

    In big big big news, I’m going to see Raavan on Tuesday with my dad. I haven’t talked to my dad in a long long long long time. I don’t remember when I did. A few weeks ago, my mom and I were talking about how my sister hangs out with Dad and how I don’t want any money from him so why both – hey I like Bollywood, he could take me to the theater!

    He’s excited, because I called him. And he liked the youtube clip I posted on his FB wall. (I unblocked him and friended him.) I’m not looking at him as a dad, as the bad father he was, I’m looking at him as somebody to watch Bollywood with.

    This is a big step for me.

  5. Just got back from a reconnaissance trip to Seattle, where I am moving to this fall. I’m still pretty anxious about the move, but at least I have a better feel for the area now. I love the city- it has a relaxed vibe and is very outdoorsy.

    I also got my grades from this last semester. All A’s, I am very proud of myself. That means my final GPA is a 3.9. For someone who grew up going to the so–called ‘stupid school’ (other kids can be so very cruel), it is huge deal to feel smart and get the affirmed by others.

    This week I have to get more boxes packed. So far I’m not doing very well at the packing deal, but I need to hunker down and just do it. And my house has an ant problem, so I’m trying to deal with that.

  6. It’s been a mixed week for me – negative, I went through a lot of stress trying to sort out my flight to a conference in August (bureaucracy I really hate you) and my Internet. The flight is now sorted I HOPE but the internet isn’t and I’m going to have to go into town to stare at them and ask WTF is going on yet again and argh. I hate having no home Internet… I end up surfing on my iPhone but that’s pretty unpleasant and also all the tricks I have in order to get off the computer don’t work so I end up less functional on the whole. It’s immensely frustrating and I should have had Internet by now if there weren’t complications and if the people doing it weren’t so bloody incompetent.

    Plus! I presented a proof to my supervisor on Wednesday, it took about two hours and at the end he said he was impressed by what I’d done. This made me :DDDD because I have been so worried I haven’t been working enough. Also, I got stuck several times and we tried to figure out what was going on and it was almost always me that figured out what to do next… which made sense because stuck or nonstuck I’d been wrestling with the material for weeks and he hadn’t but it helps my impostor syndrome-y feelings when I figure things out before my respected leader in his field professor supervisor.

    @K: I sympathise. 🙁 I’ve seen a bunch of posts about that around and many of the ones on the mainstream sites seem to be acting like it’s some kind of joke and if not that it’s all the patriarchy telling women their sexuality isn’t okay… and asexual people going the latter route as well. And a related similar post about HSDD. And I mean on the one hand I DO worry about asexuality being medicalised and asexual women being indoctrinated into feeling distress – this is my main worry about HSDD – but on the other hand there is absolutely no call to go making the women who are in genuine distress and who would be helped by this sort of medication invisible or painting them as helplessly brainwashed by the patriarchy, you know? People do that to us sometimes and although I’m glad that certain mainstream feminist sites are (currently) not doing that it does not make me happy to see them turning it around and doing it to someone else. Acceptance of asexuality and acceptance of FSD does not have to be an either/or proposition!

  7. I have a Netflix moment, too. We just got it after canceling TV because it’s too expensive. I’m loving watching TV series on my computer (in bed, because I haven’t been able to watch TV really for three years because being in the living room is too painful).

    We just watched the third season of Mad Men — love, love, love it. I love how they don’t pretty anything up. They show all the bigotry and oppression (sexism, racism, anti-Semitism) in the background without “Hollywoodizing” it. ANd now they have finally dealt with disability a tiny bit!

    I don’t want to spoil for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but there are three episodes with some plot stuff relating to disability, and it was completely believable to me. My favorite was when a character with epilepsy says, “The problem is other people. And they’re everywhere.”

  8. @Kaz: thanks for saying what you did about FSM vs asexuality. I’ve really been in a bind because my drive has disappeared, I want it back, but I’m not sure where to go to get feminist advice because all the feminist advice I’ve seen have only said “your drive is fine whatever level it’s at, patriarchy is the real problem!” which excludes me because I WANT to have sex but I CAN’T because I have NO drive at the moment. Which leaves me to tell my partner to start buying random pills from the various online stores that ship to my country so that I can just try them out at random to figure out what works. And I’m not comfortable discussing it with my doctor except as a last resort.

  9. I’m very happy because I’ve finally managed to get a phone with speech software on. I’ve not been able to get it before because it was expensive to buy but then I discovered that Vodafone offer it free with a contract (they were the only company I contacted that did) and the monthly contract fee is considerably cheaper than my previous one so it’s an all round win! The software is very easy to use and it’s so nice to be able to text and use my phone properly at last! I know it’s only a small thing but it does make things much easier on a day to day basis as I don’t have to ask others to read text messages to me!

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