The US is in the middle of a particularly bad flu outbreak and people are dying because they can’t afford medicine, or because they are making horrible choices between like that between medicine and other basic needs.
This breaks my heart literally every day, because I see so many customers have to make this choice. Sometimes they can afford it for the person in the family that is actually sick right now, but can’t buy it for the rest of the family (or at least those most at risk of catching it from their loved one), and then someone else catches it, and it’s just a vicious cycle. Especially since there’s multiple strains going around, so overcoming one bout of flu (or having the flu shot) doesn’t mean 100% immunity to catching another strain of it.
Over here in PA/NJ the generic $106.99 cash, but a lot of people haven’t met their yearly deductibles yet, so the insurance companies
(the absolute filth)
cover NOTHING. NADA. ZIP. Not even a measly 5%.
SO!!! Here’s what to do:
If you are prescribed Tamiflu or it’s generic, Oseltamivir, ask your doctor if they have a coupon for it, or immediately go online/on your phone and look up a coupon on google. Usually GoodRx or scriptsave have decent coupons.
(Between $40-$80 is what I normally see for coupon prices, much better than $100-$250). There’s also familywize, wish foundation, blink (who don’t work with CVS btw), or even your state’s drug discount card.
Make sure it’s for the form and strength of the drug you were prescribed (capsules or liquid, usually. 30/45/60/75mg) and for the pharmacy you’re going to. GoodRX has different prices for CVS vs Walgreens vs Costco, etc. You may need to check with the pharmacy if they have it in stock, because there’s a huge shortage since the manufacturers didn’t anticipate such high demand. Adjust the brand/generic and which chain on the coupon accordingly.
Activate them if they need activating – usually an email or a quick call, sometimes an app download. Read any fine print and check that the coupon is not expired.
Take a screenshot, or print it out. Barring that, write down all the codes exactly as they appear, including how they’re labelled. (Pharmacies always need BINs and IDs, but if there’s PCNs, [rx]Group numbers, Person Codes, etc, they’ll need everything on the card to be able to bill correctly. It’s better to have the actual card/email/screenshot.)
When you get to the pharmacy, check how much your prescription is. If it’s more than the coupon (again, usually $40-80, but sometimes less), ask politely!!!*** for them to rebill the drug with this coupon, and wait patiently as they do so (depending on how busy they are and how busy the servers are for the company they’re submitting the info to, it may take a few minutes.) Understand that whatever amount is billed to the coupon is not being contributed towards paying your deductible, but hopefully you won’t have to worry about that much over the year.
Success. Please feel better soon.
***Please, please, please be polite. Please do not yell or have your parent/spouse/sibling/child/friend/nurse/neighbor/nanny/errand boy yell at the pharmacists/technicians/front store employees/customers in front or behind you/hapless passerby
about the price or availability or how much insurance is a racket. Please understand that the workers have absolutely no control of how much ANY drug costs initially, nor how much your insurance asks for as a copay, nor how helpful the coupons turn out to be in regards to your own financial situation. Even their control over availability is tenuous at best, because of aforementioned manufacturer backlog, high demand, and strict ordering systems. If they need to call around to find it for you, let them call around. If they need a few minutes to get the information processed, give them a few minutes. Please treat your fellow humans with respect, even when you understandably feel like shit and they are limited in what they can do for you.
GoodRX is an absolute saving grace. It brought my ADD meds down from $274 to $125. It helps with almost every med if you pay out of pocket. Sign up, download the app, follow the instructions. Be well, y’all. 💜
As a former pharmacy tech I promise you if you are polite and there isn’t a line 7 people deep a good tech will move heaven and earth to get you what you need and find you a coupon. For a while I had three different discount cards memorized. Sometimes they would only take off $5 sometimes it would make the medicine half price but I was willing to try.
Bisexual girls who used to identify as lesbians are not proof that lesbians are secretly into men.
Lesbians who used to identity as bisexual are not proof that bisexuals will eventually pick a side.
Sexuality is complicated! Discovering more about your orientation is a wonderful thing and no one has any right to tell you that changing your orientation is bad or wrong.
me before seeing The Shape of Water: haha can’t wait to get me some fish dicc ;))))
me after seeing The Shape of Water: how could I have been so blind? We’ve all been blind. Of course love exists! It persists, no matter how dark and cruel the world may become. Love will kindle itself in the strangest of places, steal into our dry and empty hearts and flood them with light and happiness. Elisa and the Asset are a guide for all of us, how our strangeness will fit the strangeness of someone else, someone special. Love is real. My heart is full.
It’s open until 1st March 2018, it’s open to everyone, and last year we got about 10,000 participants – you can see the results here.
After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a blog post summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.
If you think you might have followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, retweet this tweet or boost this Mastodon post. Every share is extremely helpful – it’s what helped us get 10,000 responses last year.
I see a lot of people on this site bending what Asexuality means so that it can benefit their toxic agenda, but I’ve also noticed that people who are sucked into that agenda often have zero clue what Asexuality actually is besides what they see on tumblr. So, mark your calendar folks because this is the day we set it straight. By the new year we will all have our eyes open on the word Asexuality.
I will first get into the history of the term asexuality (in terms of sexuality) and then I’ll get into it’s proper and improper uses/definitions often seen on the internet. I’ve made a post before about AVEN and it’s intense battle for the rights to the word asexual before (in response to another post from a well known aphobe) and I’ll sorta just be restating the same things here.
The 2000’s era was pretty big for asexual people as there were finally communities for them to talk about their experiences and find other people just like them. These communities, The Official Asexual Society and AVEN (Asexual Visibility and Education Network), while both working to bring visibility to asexual people, had some VERY different takes on what it meant to be Asexual. Many people do not know this, but the asexual community has had its own internal turmoil (even now as we speak). The Official Asexual Society argued that to be asexual one had to have an aversion to sex (anti-sexual is the term) and have no libido (nonlibidoist is the term), and thus heavily screened people to grant them membership to the community. AVEN argued that asexuality was simply the lack of sexual attraction and allowed all people of all varying degrees of asexuality within the community. As you can imagine, since they both used the word Asexuality for their conflicting websites, a battle of ‘So what is the truth’ struck up between these two communities. The Official Asexual Society claimed that real asexuals don’t have or want sex, and real asexuals have no urge to have sex (rhetoric that I’m sure many asexual people have seen even now within our own communities). The Official Asexual Society thus became a haven for asexual elitist that refused to acknowledge asexuals who weren’t like them. This drew away a lot of people looking for a place to be comfortable with their sexuality. So they went to AVEN instead. Because AVEN was inclusive to asexual people of all kinds, those deterred by The Official Asexual Society went to AVEN instead, thus building AVEN’s asexual population faster and greater than The Official Asexual Society. And because The Official Asexual Society didn’t get as much outreach as it did before, it gradually crumbled to renaming itself The Official Nonlibidoist Society, to eventually collapsing completely. The people themselves had spoken on what the definition of asexuality was and “The lack of sexual attraction to any gender” won. Source
All that being said, I will take no slander on how because the definition changed, asexuality has no real definition. The definition of the word ‘Democrat’ changed but nobody debates on what a democrat is. The popular definition of the word ‘Pure’ changed but nobody debates on what pure means. Definitions to words fucking change all the time. That’s why linguistics is a thing people study.
Now let’s get into the proper and improper uses/definitions of the word asexuality.
Since asexuality is defined as “The lack of sexual attraction to any gender” Then asexuality can’t be defined as:
uwu No Sex (yes that is shade). Asexual people should be able to state that they are sex repulsed and they don’t have sex without someone suddenly claiming that to be the definition of asexuality. Asexual people can have sex (one reason being to have a child). To say that Asexuality means ‘no sex’ would be ignoring the fact that there are many people who don’t have sex who are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual and etc. Are those people suddenly asexual? The answer is no, they are as they identify themselves to be.
Celibacy. Celibacy is a choice whereas Asexuality is not a choice (I will keep saying that until people listen).
TMI (too much information). I see this argument a lot where people will say ‘Only your partner should know your asexual’. And I have a few problems with this. When dating (you know that thing people do to find a partner) the conversation about sex will come up (unless you are dating within celibate and asexual circles). In those circumstances should we not mention our asexuality? And within a circle of new friends when someone asks ‘Hey, what’s everyone’s sexuality’ should we just not say anything? Stating you are asexual has NOTHING to do with your sexual activities. Read again: NOTHING. You see people who think asexuality is TMI, look at it as a modifier for other sexualities and not a sexuality. But asexuality can not be a modifier, which I’ll get into…
Here. A modifier. Since asexuality is defined as ‘The lack of sexual attraction to any gender’ then it can not function as a modifier for another sexuality that describes sexual attraction to a gender. It is not possible. Asexual people can, however, identify as homoromantic, heteroromantic, biromantic, panromantic, and etc. and thus can call themselves an ace lesbian, or a bi ace, or pan ace or het ace. But not all asexual people use the SAM to identify themselves. So if asexuality is a modifier for other sexualities, what about people who are aroace? What’s it modifying then?
Practically Straight. This one is typically in response to heteroromantic aces, but I’ve seen it in reference to all aces. Let’s make this clear right now, you can not be a straight asexual person. A straight person is a person who is sexually attracted to the opposite binary gender and pursues romantic relationships with people of the opposite binary gender. Because asexuality is defined as (and I repeat) the lack of sexual attraction to any gender, they literally can’t be sexually attracted to the opposite binary gender. Stop trying to redefine the word straight to benefit your aphobe agenda.
Since asexuality is defined as “The lack of sexual attraction to any gender” Then asexuality can be defined as:
The lack of sexual attraction to any gender. That’s literally it. And this definition includes (but is not limited to)
Demisexual people
Grey Aces
Aroaces
Heteroromantic Aces
Homoromantic Aces
Biromantic Aces
Panromantic Aces
Sex Repulsed Aces
Sex Neutral Aces
Sex Positive Aces
Kinky Aces (yes they exist)
Cisgender Aces
Transgender Aces
Intersex Aces
Autistic Aces
Aces with no sex drive
Aces with a normal sex drive
Aces with a high sex drive
Aces who have been through the trauma of sexual assault
White people who are aces
POC who are aces
Ace Women
Ace Men
I hope that someone out there learned something today. And if you didn’t and you are still gonna misuse the word asexuality, I can’t help you at this point. Happy New Years Eve. I hope that everyone has a good 2018. Let’s start off right.
*I went back and edited the bullet point on straightness just a tad
ATTENTION: We are no longer drinking Respect Transgender Juice; we are bathing in it.
this is for Lush America, which is A+.
here in Australia we have the Love Wins soap, https://au.lush.com/products/new-products/love-wins which goes straight to LGBT+ grassroots charities! we haven’t got the bath melts this year yet (they’re seasonal here because they would Die in summer) so it’d be cool to get that here too ❤
Oh man…I’m not the best person to ask, but I guess something you could do is just keep going? I mean if you at least try to put your thoughts down on paper you’re likely to get somewhere right? I think if you figure out what’s really keeping you from writing; fear of your work not being good enough or fear of people not reading your work, know that is completely normal.
I’m actually going through something similar. I’m one of those weird people that has an entire detailed story in my head, but when I go to write it disappears. It’s incredibly frustrating and I can rarely get anything down and out because of it.
Don’t give up anon, we’re all here for you to support you and talk further if you need.
One of my friends @prettysherlocksoldier just go a similar ask and I think her response was great and you can find that here
I’ve definitely been there. Here’s my advice (pick and choose what fits for you):
Keep a notebook with you and jot down ideas as they come to you. I’ve heard of authors that keep “first line” journals, “title” journals, “what if” journals, etc. I have a google doc in which I keep screen caps and notes of prompts and ideas. I may not get to some of them but I like having them all in one place.
Write something else. Write a letter to a friend, capture a dream you had, revisit a favorite childhood memory.
Doodle. Listen to music. Dance. Bake banana bread. Do something, anything creative, to get things flowing again.
Accept that a first draft of anything isn’t going to be a finished piece of work, and it isn’t supposed to be good. It’s supposed to be a start. Writing happens in layers, just like a painting.
Start with an outline or some basic plot points instead of jumping right into the story. Make a timeline, do a character study, imagine the physical setting in which your story takes place. Flush it out bit by bit by bit.
Set a goal to write for a reasonable period of time, and then write without rereading or editing as you go. When you’re done, walk away. Look at it again in a couple of days and you’ll see where you can make improvements.
Be aware of “productive procrastination.” For example, you’re going to sit down and write and then you decide to do the laundry, clean out a closet, and take the dog for a walk. Resist the urge to do those things. If it’s too hard to not get distracted by that stuff, take your laptop to your local library and write there.
Create some writing routines. Maybe you need a cup of tea by your side, or certain lighting, or you write best first thing in the morning or right after lunch. Maybe you like to have some music playing, maybe you need silence. Create your own writing environment.
Write in a coffee shop. Research shows that the level of noise in a coffee shop is just right to foster productivity without being too distracting. Of course, this depends on the coffee shop.
You don’t have to write in chronological order. If you can’t stop thinking about something that happens 2/3 of the way into the story, go ahead and write it. If you’re writing one story and get an idea for a second, go ahead and start the second.
Don’t wait for everything to align. If we wait for motivation we’ll be waiting a long time. Sometimes we have to just go ahead and start.
I get writer’s block badly sometimes. When nothing else works, I write when I am supposed to be doing something else. This is what I mean: when I am really, really having trouble, I sit down for like 5 minutes before I leave the house. because I don’t have long, it turns off the self-critical part of my brain and words just flow. It can be hard to stop when I am supposed to leave, but I find that if I get excited about it, then my brain wants to keep adding pieces and I will think about that story more during the day and when I come home, I can usually add more. I have also had success with writing ANYTHING because even if what you are typing is something like “I am not sure what to write. this is stupid but here are some words on a page,” pretty soon that is boring and my brain longs for more and I will start something. even if it is just basic things like, “I am not sure what John and Sherlock are doing right now but I know they are at a crime scene,” or whoever your characters are. The titles, situations, or inspirations documents can really help. I often have 2 or 3 documents open when I’m between projects and I will add a sentence or two to each until I get inspired and things start flowing on one of them.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 