I recently finished reading The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan. It’s from 2019 and so depressing with how much has happened since then that’s not accounted for, but it was interesting insight into how people like that can accumulate a following. It might help answer your question.

My partner and I have discussed our wildly different willingness to try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world plenty of times over the years. He would work to survive and would probably thrive more than the average survivor. Me? I’ve always said I’ll likely head to the cough syrup section of the pharmacy.

This conversation came up earlier today, in fact. Well, I was recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I’m still sorting out the right medication to get it under control and am dealing with a lot of pain, but way less than before starting treatment. I told him with this diagnosis, if society ever collapses in a way that causes me to be unable to get my medication? I’m out.

Thanks for links. As someone recently diagnosed with RA, I’m still trying to absorb as much information on it as possible.

What’s interesting about the study is it focused on RA patients without positive rheumatoid factor (RF) blood work. Now, in my skimming I didn’t see it mention anti-CCP, which is the more definitive test for RA. Despite the name, positive RF alone could be any number of things that aren’t RA. They didn’t mention if they were totally seronegative, though.

I have an unsubstantiated theory that seronegative and seropositive RA may be distinct diseases, but we don’t know enough yet and we treat them the same, so they get the same name. If the pts in this study were totally seronegative, that could correlate to my theory where maybe “seronegative RA” is actually more of a long-term infection triggered by measles. But these are just idle musings.

As a side note, the name rheumatoid arthritis is pretty silly from an etymological standpoint. The words basically break down as:

• rheumatism means inflammation
• -oid means like a thing
• arth- comes from joints
• -itis means inflammation

So put together, it’s “inflammatory-like joint inflammation.”

Right?! I thought about mentioning the bright lighting and glass walls that make all the products visible. Or the window clings advertising ear piercings.

Anyway, thanks for validating my thoughts… I was very confused by the person I responded to and thought maybe the gender divide was greater than I thought, lol.

Good for you! When I got a second piercing I knew better and went somewhere they used a hollow needle instead of a gun.

A mall in my state has TWO Claire’s in it. It is one of the most bizarre traits of the mall, second only to the fact that to get to half of the mall you have to walk through a JC Penney.

This is so bizarrely different from my experience. I would bet 90% of women in my generation (millennial) who ever spent time in a mall think of Claire’s as the default place to get your ears pierced. And naturally then, to get new earrings or other jewelry.

As a teen, it was a default stop on the mall circuit every weekend; it’s where my sister and I both got our ears pierced when we turned 13, and where I got jewelry for prom and BFF keychains with friends before going off to college. I was far from popular; I was the nerd who sat at the front of the bus and read a book to avoid my bullies, etc. I only even had friends to go to the mall with as a teen because I went to a college preparatory high school where almost everyone else was a nerd, too. But despite my lowly status on the social totem pole, Claire’s was a staple.

I use alt+0151 for em dashes and alt+0150 for en dashes, or if I’m in Word or Outlook I use its autocorrect to trigger them (“word - word ” turns into an en dash while “word--word “ turns into an em dash).

But now I’m starting to avoid them. I’m just glad AI hasn’t ruined semicolons yet (especially since I’m using them sometimes to replace em dashes).