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How Fireworks Can Harm Veterans With PTSDYou might love to honor the Americans who died serving in the armed forces with fireworks. But nearby military veterans might not be as thrilled about fireworks when coping with their PTSD symptoms getting triggered. Fireworks can be a severe trigger for those who suffer from Combat-Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Combat PTSD. If you truly want to help and understand veterans who live with PTSD, you’ll take time to consider why fireworks are painful trigger for so many veterans with PTSD. You'll also understand why triggers are serious business and not just excuses for us PTSD sufferers to whine.
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Advice on Icky ToiletsDear Margot,
Is it possible to get pregnant from a toilet seat? -Public Restrooms Scare Me The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
How I Ended a Toxic RelationshipIt is estimated that we interact with 80,000 people in a lifetime. Of those 80,000 people we interact with, one may seem like they are the one. The one you will spend the rest of your life with, the one who is your soul mate and your perfect match. But what happens when that one person turns into someone completely different than you thought and you are stuck in a dysfunctional sick relationship? Some couples stay together and despite failure keep trying and some break ties completely. However, when it is very toxic and ones life is in jeopardy how do you do something about it?
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A Review of Ceremony's "Violence, Violence"
I saw Ceremony live in Richmond, VA back in 2006. It was one of the most heartfelt punk shows that I have ever experienced. The minute they got on stage, the crowd went wild. Raw, Angry, Aggressive dancing lit up the room and if you didn’t want to get punched in the face, well, you probably should have just left and went down the street to a bakery to eat a cupcake, alone without any of your violent friends.
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An Ode to Suffering and the Human Experience Suffering is a shared burden throughout the world, but it’s a rarity when a poet can capture every angle of persevering through everyday tortures. Jen Karetnick’s American Sentencing is a riveting and “intense examination of the physical body and the various indignities and ailments from which [the body] can suffer.”
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Night Light
By Kristin Wagner
QuailBellMagazine.com
Darkness, the way night makes the edges of things indistinct and brownish-grey, is something I experience most often within the walls of my own home. Children who need to go to sleep by 8:30 and a husband who travels nearly every week means that night is something that descends gently outside our windows. It does not fall on us while we are sitting on a terrace, enjoying the end of a restaurant meal. It does not surround us as we walk down city streets, or hike through woods. Even in the winter, when the sun dips below the hedge-line of our backyard before dinner, cold keeps us in and cozy. Night does not often fall on us somewhere other than our house.
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Various Black Dogs: On "Blessings"CS died today. He was distracted and skidded off a road. Last time we talked I could tell he wasn’t doing well. I wonder how much was left for him. He was always open and frank about how he suffered with depression, anxiety, and PTSD. After a point you have to wonder how much a person could take. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Summer Reading List That Saved My Life
By Rosie Campos
QuailBellMagazine.com
Beads of sweat collected on my forehead as my slippery, chubby fingers flipped through the pages. A picture caught my eye, and I stopped to rub my fingers across it, as if, at the age of eleven, I had somehow obtained the power to transport myself simply by touching an image. A cross-section of a stream, the mouth of a volcano, a desolate tundra. I was there.
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Streetcars, Once Nearly Extinct, Are Enjoying a Comeback
WASHINGTON -- With the February opening of streetcar service along the 2.4-mile H Street-Benning Road corridor, Washington joined a national trend of major cities rebooting what was once considered an antiquated mode of urban transportation.
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For Something of Summer
By Samantha Shanley
QuailBellMagazine.com
As we did once each summer, my sister and I ventured out from our beloved island retreat on Lake Winnipesaukee to visit the Fisken house on the mainland, where as children, we had often spent afternoons visiting. The house was old and treasured enough to have been given a proper name—Fairhaven. It wasn’t mine, but I had adored that lovely waterside cottage since I was a girl.
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An Open Letter to An Obviously Compassionate Human Being
Dear Amanda Lauren,
I figured I’d start this piece this way, as so many other ones have, as a letter addressing a grievance, a missive explaining a wrong. I thought about those heartfelt thinkpieces, people baring their souls and scars to you, pleading for you to understand that despite their illness, all those trips to the hospital, all those suicide attempts, all those pills swallowed, that they deserve to live. I think about these people who you have hurt, who you equated to lost causes even as they struggle to get on their feet, writing to you to please consider what you’re saying—the stain of stigma that you are perpetuating—the shame of illness that you’re ignoring. I think about all those people, with open wounds and battle scars, and I end up with little to say other than: Fuck. You. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
10 Ways to Have a Spiritual Summer
By Mel Bikowski
QuailBellMagazine.com
1. Unplug the TV. TV is great for those that need to be entertained or to live vicariously through the characters of your favorite show, but it’s that time of year when the sun is out longer and the bees are buzzing happily around flowers. You should take the time to find out what you like to buzz around. Take the time to be outside or understand that feature of your best friend that you love so much. Collect seashells by the sea shore or go crystal hunting in the mountains. Embrace the love of summer and remember, you definitely cannot do it from the couch.
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Why I'm Glad I Showered With My Parents as a Child
I understand why the Internet broke when Heather Whitten posted a picture of her husband holding her sick son in the shower. But I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the fact that a father is holding his son while naked in the shower. I would know—I used to shower naked with my parents when I was a toddler. My father is not a creep, so he didn’t see anything sexual about sharing a shower with his daughter. I was raised to see nudity as natural, normal, and appropriate within certain contexts and boundaries.
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Parties Weren't Meant to Last
By Ashlie Kauffman
QuailBellMagazine.com No one explained to me why my brother was living with us that summer, when he slept on the couch in my mother's and my apartment. For some reason he wasn't living with my father. He was in college, at Towson State, which was only a ten or so minute drive from us, but as far as I remember, he hadn't had an apartment on campus yet, and had still lived with my father up until that summer. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Ghost Hunting in Richmond, Virginia
Interested in the supernatural poltergeists who haunt history? As one of the oldest cities in America, Richmond has plenty of specters drifting through its cobblestoned streets from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and beyond. Former slave markets, Confederate hospitals, and collapsed tunnels help make Richmond one of the most haunted cities in the South--and an inspiration for the work of Edgar Allen Poe, whose creepy tales draw from Richmond's macabre history.
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Once the Capital of Boring Food, Washington Evolves to Culinary Cutting Edge
WASHINGTON -- New York has cheesecake, Philadelphia has cheesesteak and Chicago is known for deep dish pizzas. California won the lottery with sushi, and Massachusetts still makes a mean clam chowder. Even Alaska’s got king crabs.
But the District of Columbia? I couldn’t think of the District’s culinary claim to fame. Neither could my friends and my classmates, nor The Washington Post and its readers, not even the chefs of Washington. True, the half-smoke is the District’s invention, but an iconic food on a national landscape? Definitely not. So what makes Washington such an anomaly in national food culture? In truth, it has one, reflected for decades in basic fare. But it is evolving into an eclectic mix of regional and international dishes that is transforming the area into a food capital. To understand how the District finally got on the map, some historical perspective is essential. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Presidential Election was Never Rigged, We Just Thought It WasAs crazy as this election has been, there is nothing crazier, or rather I should say, lazier, than when someone says that this election is rigged. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
How Did I End Up This Way?
I was sick all the time, I had no friends left, my family no longer spoke to me, and all I wanted to do was get high. I didn’t care that I was damaging my brain and my body, I was 30 pounds underweight, and hadn’t slept in days. Right around that time the hallucinations start to come on. I had a handful of pills left and my only hope was that they would take the pain away. Of course they wouldn’t, but it was my final option. I crushed them up and consumed them.
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What People Don't Get About Relationship Anarchists
I was a relationship anarchist before I knew what the word “relationship anarchy” meant. Relationship anarchy is more than an intellectual pursuit. It’s about living, learning, and loving to our fullest capacity.
When I describe relationship anarchy to people, they think it’s about conforming my relationships to a set of standards. What they don’t understand is that my heart has been affirming relationship anarchy as my personal truth for most of my life. Sure, relationship anarchy is about loving beyond the oppressive restrictions imposed upon my relationships by large-scale sociological influences. Relationship anarchy is also the best term to describe how my feelings function. After all, polyamorous relationships aren't necessarily free from mononormativity. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
A Shameful Chapter in Virginia History: LynchingsRaymond Bird, a black man accused of having sex with a white woman, was reportedly asleep in jail in the western Virginia town of Wytheville when the mob arrived. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Spirit of St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur
Last month, there was "sad news in the spirits world" when it was reported by Eater.com and countless other food and beverage blogs that Robert Cooper, the founder of the wildly popular St-Germain elderflower liqueur, died suddenly at the age of 39.
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Beyonce's Marriage is Not the Lemon
By Melanie Bikowski
QuailBellMagazine.com
We live in a generation of times where pop music doesn’t say too much. So it comes to no surprise that when Beyonce’s sixth album Lemonade was released onto HBO, the media and fans shrink the think piece into an alleged confession piece about the infidelity of Jay-Z. Only focused on certain lines like “Are you cheating on me?” and “He better call Becky with the Good Hair,” the media instigated the fans to blow up Instagrams of Rachel Roy and even Rachael Ray!
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Those Kinds of Cars Don't Pass You Everyday
1.
My mom saw Prince, in Knoxville. She still remembers the chaps; at least I thinks she does. My stepmother had the Purple Rain poster Prince up on her walls. When I stayed in her place in Tazewell it’s plain as day to me that it was there, even if it had been removed. Something happened one day and I came home to one of the homes and they were both yelling at each other on the phone. My stepmother called my mom crazy, my mom called my stepmother crazy. One was from Arizona, multiply addicted, didn’t get out of bed and didn’t work, smoked and cussed. One grew up in Southwest Virginia, didn’t drink, worked as a respiratory therapist, and never cussed. They hated each other. They both liked Prince. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
3 Ways My Mom Helped Me Date Like a Feminist
In honor of Mother's Day, I would like to thank my mom for many, many things. Thanks, Mom, for teaching me how to drop the real F-bomb: feminism. My mom might be the reason why I do a lot of things, but she's also the reason why I don't do a lot of things.
In other words, my mother taught me how to never take anyone else’s crap for the sake of love. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Punk's Not Just a Fashion Statement
Reducing punk culture to a fashion statement is not only ignorant, but demeaning. Most of us never grew out of punk rock. We grew into punk rock. The older I get, the more I identify with punk rock and the culture surrounding it.
If punk rock is a phase, then most of my life has been punk phase that has no end in sight. Although my appearance might reflect my punk passion, it is not the sum of the punk rock experience like so many people make it out to be. |
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