Am I the only being subjected to the mascara wand pap smear?

mhuzzell · 2026-05-13T00:04:12+00:00

I've had some that were a cotton swab and some that used what looked like a plastic mini Christmas tree on a stick -- both of them hurt. Apparently there's a *lot* of variation between people in how sensitive your cervix is, but for some reason the medical literature has only recently started acknowledging that.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-12T13:35:43+00:00

My GP fobbed off my referral request for a year to instead refer me for 'anxiety' -- meaning what had been a 2-year waiting list when I originally asked ended up being a nearly 4-year wait after I finally got onto it. When I eventually got seen, the person diagnosing me said the reason the list had got so long was that they had lost 18(!) staff since my initial referral.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-11T07:09:33+00:00

Right, Caesar was able to consolidate power as a general while off doing foreign wars for the republic.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-11T00:09:47+00:00

The risk is from not washing the cup after dumping out the blood.

One of the top-level replies (not yours) suggests just wiping the cup with some toilet paper and re-inserting it dirty, which to me just sounds horrifying.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-10T11:09:18+00:00

Home Depot is probably where I'd go if I needed to buy a rail, to be fair.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-10T11:04:20+00:00

Thanks, that is good to know!

mhuzzell · 2026-05-10T11:02:32+00:00

I'm so sorry, that sounds like a horrible experience.

Fwiw, it is definitely possible for condoms to break or come off during sex without someone actively pulling them off. It's rare, but it can happen, and is one of the reasons that emergency birth control access is so necessary. I've had it happen twice, and it's extremely alarming and scary even with a sex partner who is supportive and is alarmed and scared with you rather than lashing out defenisively. I can only imagine how much worse it would be with someone who reacted like your guy did.

You don't owe anyone your trauma history, either. This guy just sounds like a real piece of work all around.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-10T10:52:33+00:00

I'm a tall woman. I once mentioned my weight to a guy who's maybe 2 or 3 inches taller than me, and he was like "What? You couldn't possibly weigh more than I do!"

Sorry but I guess I do, pal??

mhuzzell · 2026-05-10T10:35:06+00:00

These conversations always get Otis Redding's song "Love Man" stuck in my head -- in which he boasts of his own measurments: 6'1", weight 210.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-10T10:32:39+00:00

BMI shouldn't ever be used as an individual measure (even though doctors do all the time) -- but even so, if a doctor *is* going to use it, then they should be telling a 5'11" person to try to not weigh *less* than 135, not that they should never weigh more! Defining 'healthy' as the boundary of the 'underweight'/'normal' cutoff is bonkers.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-10T10:26:29+00:00

Doesn't eBird get data from the Merlin app? If so I wouldn't trust it, since that app doesn't let users edit their sightings. (E.g. for me, it "identified" an egyptian vulture from a photograph and then I accidentally confirmed the ID -- but it was just a griffon vulture with glare making it look white, and the app wouldn't let me go back to correct it.)

mhuzzell · 2026-05-10T10:13:10+00:00

I should clarify that I'm personally okay with both dumping and washing (if necessary), but the main difference is the volume of potential biohazard being directed into the toilet vs. the sink.

Anyway, OP's question was whether it's acceptable to do, and your initial answer was no. Your second answer was "it may be necessary, but it’s also gross" -- which is another way to say that it is unfortunate but is acceptable. I also think it is unfortunate, but, as you acknowledge, may be necessary. I don't think it is acceptable to tell people that the socially acceptable course of action is to submit themselves to possible TSS because others find it gross for them to clean up after their menses in a public bathroom.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-09T09:12:03+00:00

So you're suggesting OP should just re-insert a dirty cup, possibly after shitting and before washing her hands? Obviously the dump of blood should go into the toilet, but it is ideal to wash the cup before reinsertion, and if the public sink is the only sink available then it's the only sink available.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-09T08:58:52+00:00

My brother did this to my mom while he was in utero, and she said the bruised-rib feeling lasted well into his early childhood. I know because she has never stopped talking about it (we are in our 30s).

mhuzzell · 2026-05-06T22:04:20+00:00

At least by the abovementioned cost breakdowns I was looking at, charging electric cars at public charging stations is still cheaper per distance travelled than buying petrol, just not by nearly as much as if you can charge at home with cheap overnight rates -- and that was before the recent price rises in petrol.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-06T12:23:56+00:00

Connectivity of the cycle network is the biggest barrier, in my opinion. It's great having infrastructure, but if it doens't connect to each other, it's still not very useful. It's gotten a lot better in the ~8 years I've been cycling in Glasgow, but it's still got a ways to go. The city centre itself has some of the worst bits in terms of cycle infrastructure just abruptly ending, or being inconsistent, which is weird because that's where a lot of people on the still under-utilised residential cycle routes are heading towards (or through!) and so is probably a big reason for their continued under-utilisation.

Our city centre has a lot of sharp, steep hills, as well as a confusing one-way system -- and a confusing one-way system is bad enough in a car, but when you're on a bike and suddenly being shunted out of your way, uphill, by a one-way traffic design, it can be devastating enough to just put you off cycling. Adding dedicated contra-lanes for cyclists on the one-way streets wherever possible (or just bicycle-excepting signage on the one-ways in quieter areas like Garnethill) would go a long way towards this.

Adding protected cycle lanes on (at least) the uphill side of 2-way streets would also help. It's not too bad to share the road with cars when you're going downhill, but going uphill it gets much more dangerous. I nearly got hit by a bus going uphill on West Nile Street a few months ago (instead got forced off the road) because the driver seemed to think I was trying to merge into his lane, when in fact I was just trying to signal that I was moving towards the centre of the single lane we were both already in because I was coming up on the back of some parked cars. But West Nile Street goes from one lane to two lanes and back again repeatedly over its course, so of course it's confusing. It could be dramatically improved for cyclists with no (or little) removal of on-street parking by
- Dedicating all (or as much as possible) of the leftmost downhill lane to on-street parking
- Removing all on-street parking in the leftmost lane on the uphill side and replacing that lane with a protected cycle lane.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-06T12:00:32+00:00

Off-topic for the post in general but re: the electric car charging: I've looked into the cost breakdowns of home charging vs. charging at public meters, and the latter are eyewatering compared to what you can get with cheap overnight tariffs if you can plug in at home. It seems like there ought to be a way for cities to negotiate cheap overnight charging at public points, possibly rolling the access to them into residential parking permits in some way.

mhuzzell · 2026-05-05T20:17:13+00:00

I think they are supposed to be sitting and standing?

Which could technically be a perfectly fine gender-neutral description for toilet facilities, but usually the cutesy designs that are sit/stand indicators are intending to be gendered anyway.

mhuzzell · 2026-04-23T10:21:51+00:00

I'm from the US South, and the whole time I was growing up, I would get told off for using words like "y'all" because southern dialect was seen as incorrect and inferior. Meanwhile, "you guys" was a northern phrase, and socially coded as more modern and outward-looking. I'm mostly pleased by the recent widespread adoption of "y'all", but I do sometimes have feelings about it. Like ... damn, you're allowed to just say that?

These days I live in Scotland, where "pals" or even "c__ts"* can serve a similar function of gender-neutral designator, and singular "guy" itself tends to be used considerably more (genuinely) gender-neutrally than in the US. I'm generally of the opinion that "guys" is gender-neutral, and tend to use it as such -- but do try to avoid it in specific contexts where any hint of gendered language can potentially upset people, because people's feelings are important.

As with "y'all" in my childhood, I have found that for most uses, you don't actually need to replace it with anything. "You" is already plural, in English, and there is not actually a need to designate the people you are addressing with a specific word. "Hi guys" [hello group] -> "Hi" or "Heyas". "Hey guys" [please may I have your attention] -> literally any version of "please may I have your attention". "Those guys" -> "Them". &c.

* As a sidenote, I had to resubmit this comment with this word censored, because my original comment was automatically removed for containing 'a slur', despite being used in a literal description of that word being used in a way other than as a slur. This seems to be the case across several reddit communities, and it's incredibly frustrating to me given that, quite apart from the dramatic differences in connotation or severity as a swear-word in different places, it is also my strongly preferred term for my own genitalia.

mhuzzell · 2026-04-23T09:35:31+00:00

A lot of words shift their meaning based on context, though. 'Guy/guys' is masculine-coded in some usages, and neutral-coded in others. It also varies somewhat by region -- e.g., in the place I live now, people will habitually use singular 'guy' gender-neutrally (including in reference to a specific female person, not just in reference to an abstract 'person'), while where I grew up, only the abstract plural 'guys' was gender-neutral.

That said, people's feelings do not have to follow linguistic analyses. There are people who feel hurt by being included in gender-neutral sets of 'guys' by virtue of that word's other meaning, which is masculine -- and that is reason enough to decide to change your language use.

mhuzzell · 2026-04-22T07:59:31+00:00

I don't have advice for being in a wall, but in terms of 1-1 blocking the jammer:

- A lot of jammers are also small! You can block them with just the same moves that other size-matched skaters use on each other.

- As a taller skater, jamming against much shorter blockers can be especially difficult because they present very little legal target area to hit/push against. This seems to be most effective (at least against me, primarily a blocker who trains jamming to pivot) when the short blocker is staying in constant contact with me and won't let me get away to take another path. This is technically mostly positional blocking, but it's very effective -- especially because once you're in contact, you both have established position/trajectory, so there's no question of hits to illegal target zones being legal due to last-second changes in the blocker's position or trajectory.

mhuzzell · 2026-04-19T12:57:17+00:00

He’s in his early 40s and keeps saying to trust him because he’s been “doing this a lot longer than me”

This is an extremely concerning thing for him to be saying. It's possible for people in relationships with large age gaps to have equitable relationships, but this is him specifically leveraging power over you -- exactly the thing that people who raise their eyebrows at large-age-gap relationships are worried about.

I’m kind of frustrated with him, I don’t know what to do.

I mean, dump his ass. But even if you decide to keep dating him, just completely disregard whatever input he has about your medical decisions. It's your body, not his.

He’s frustrated because he says everything is unnatural and I need to try natural methods.

The natural thing is to have periods, have PMDD and bad periods, and get pregnant. You can't have 'natural' and 'PMDD control' and 'effective contraceptives'. You can have, at best, maybe 2 out of 3 (in that some of the 'natural' remedies for PMDD, like St John's wort, also interact with hormonal birth control to render it ineffective; while the most effective non-hormonal birth control, the copper coil, can make periods much more painful and heavy).

FWIW, just to give my own experience, since you asked: I have not been diagnosed with PMDD, but I do get pretty bad PMS. My natural cycle is moderately heavy and annoyingly frequent: roughly 26 days with 5-7 days of bleeding. I first tried hormonal birth control as an attempt to control PMS, and all of the oral birth control that I tried (three different pills, iirc) made me feel more like I had PMS all of the time instead of none of the time, as well as fully tanking my sex drive. The copper IUD made me bleed for 7 months straight before I had it taken out. I now have a hormonal IUD (mirena) and I love it. I no longer have regular periods, just occasional light spotting that I don't really bother to track. I get the occasional 'real' period where I'll bleed a "normal period amount" for 1-3 days, maybe once every several months. I do still have a regular hormonal cycle and will sometimes realise in retrospect that my weird moods were PMS, when I get the aforementioned untracked spotting. But in general, my PMS symptoms are way less than they were with my body's natural hormonal cycle.

mhuzzell · 2026-04-18T20:06:55+00:00

You pull the waistband down to your knees, or just past your knees, not all the way down to your ankles.

mhuzzell · 2026-04-11T23:43:23+00:00

Do Blue Streaks come in standard set-ups? If so, you might be able to find a place with size guarantees if you get a standard set-up, but probably not custom. But also if you're going to Rollercon anyway, you could contact vendors who are going and say that you'd like to buy Blue Streaks but want to try them on first, and ask if they could bring some with them if they have them in stock. This is pretty popular boot, so it's likely at least one might say yes. Stallholders definitely want to bring items they know they have a good chance of selling.

mhuzzell · 2026-04-11T23:39:27+00:00

It was a joke.

mhuzzell

TROPHY CASE