The Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ACA or Obamacare, was designed to work in a particular way. It’s no surprise, then, that when Republicans refused to follow directions on it, chaos and suffering ensued.
01. What Is The ACA?
It goes by many names:
- The Affordable Care Act
- The ACA
- Obamacare
- The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (formerly)
It was the attempt made by the Obama administration and the 111th Congress to retool the way healthcare is done in the United States. For folks lucky enough not to know, getting medical care here is a bit of a minefield and has been for a long time.
Prior to ACA’s implementation, however, it was worse. Insurance companies could and would deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions. That was the big one, and the Obama administration did succeed in making that practice illegal. Obama the candidate made the mistake of telling people they could keep their doctor, full-stop, and that turned out to be impossible under the circumstances. The implementation of Healthcare.gov …
I went vegan for the animals before I knew any of this other stuff. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
01. Trying New Things
Whether you’re an adventurous eater or not, it’s not a bad idea to expand your food repertoire to cover a variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, and so on. You won’t love everything you try, but you’ll find cool stuff you never knew existed. And it doesn’t even have to be fancy.
When I was a kid, I never ate oatmeal. We just never had it in the house. But I really do love it, and it’s extremely versatile. Do it up with some peanut butter and strawberry jam on top, and call it PB&J oats. …
Audacity is stored in the testes.
I miss having casual hookups with people from Grindr or FetLife, but I’m not taking any chances right now. Some people will lie about anything to get laid, including COVID-19 and social distancing. The liability factor went through the roof when that happened.
I’ve Had a Vasectomy
According to a well-sourced Healthline article on the subject, only around 1 in 10 men in the United States get vasectomies, despite it being far and away the safest and easiest birth control method. Between 2000 and 2009, men in the military got them at an average rate of 7.1 per 1000, which is less than 1%.
I don’t remember the exact number, but I do know that much more men tried the vasectomy line on me than would be expected, given the known statistics. …
Three main ingredients: patience, lube, and relaxation.
People tend to assume anal has to be painful. It certainly can be, but there are things you can do that could make it enjoyable.
Note my use of the word “could,” in that sentence. Some people simply do not like anal sex, or they may not like sex in general. That’s okay, too.
As for the rest of us, anal can be a lot of fun.
Step 1: Relax
Tension is not your friend here. I find anal is more pleasurable after a glass or three of wine, but you need not drink, if that isn’t something you take pleasure in. …
This #Veganuary, consider adding more plant-based meals to your kitchen repertoire. Here are some tips that will help you avoid going hungry.
Going vegan can seem intimidating. I had the fortune of being a teenager when I made the switch, and while my options were quite limited then, as I came from a rural town in northern Florida, I had one big advantage: I didn’t know I couldn’t go vegan. I mean to say that I didn’t know that the obstacles in my way ought to have prevented me and would have prevented most people from succeeding. Yet, about 15 years later, I’ve never looked back.
Still, there are things I wish I had known when I started out, things that would have made life easier. This article addresses some of the issues I encountered or observed and what I’ve learned along the way in terms of dealing with them. …
A quick-and-dirty guide for the uninitiated.
Plenty of people get bored in their relationships, and plenty of those folks get curious about BDSM. It isn’t for everyone, but there’s no harm in exploring these things.
On the other hand, more and more people go into relationships knowing they want to incorporate a BDSM dynamic and seeking out a person who is compatible based on that from the start. The things I’m discussing in this article will be relevant to both these people and those in relationships who are seeking to try out new things with a partner they’ve had for a while.
Be advised, however, that these topics are those you ought to discuss with a prospective new partner in addition to the other factors affecting compatibility. Whatever things are important to you in a partner, you need to plan on talking about that sometime. I’m someone who prefers to be direct, partially so that no one can say I misled them. But I also appreciate being forward, within reason, from the beginning. …
And I use the word “date,” extremely loosely.
(Content warning: contains sexually explicit language.)
I didn’t start dating or having sex with people until my late 20’s. I’m 31 now, polyamorous, and living with a partner I love very much. Back in 2018, I spent some time exploring dating apps, FetLife, and Craigslist. I ended up getting my V-card punched by way of a Craigslist hookup, in a public men’s room, by a guy whose name escapes me.
Around the same time, I was talking to several people online and hooking up with some of them. A gentleman approached me on FetLife, the social networking site for folks who are into BDSM and other fetishes or non-vanilla sexual practices. I was being approached by several people, but this one stood out mainly because my gut said this person was not going to be someone I wanted to be around. …
No one cared where I got my nutrients when I was eating the Standard American Diet. Then I started eating more plants, and suddenly, everyone was a nutrition expert, and I could do no right.
I realized, fairly early on in my vegan journey, that attacking meat-eating folks wasn’t going to work. Much as I might enjoy hollering at some of them — and I might derive some form of satisfaction in doing so, if I’m honest — it isn’t the way to do things. People have to come to veganism and be ready and receptive; you can’t force it. And so we tend to live by some version of the Serenity Prayer: we must change the things we can, accept the things we can’t, and hope we have the wisdom to know the difference.
Not only that, but we need to acknowledge and appreciate the progress that has been made. I’d love to live in a vegan world, and I don’t love that people eat animals when they have the choice to do otherwise. …
Here’s why I’m doing it as a relatively young person and how to know when you might need to get one done.
First things first: if you have a history of cancer in your family, you can’t be too squeamish to talk about it, no matter what kind it is. I’m not saying you should dwell on it, because you shouldn’t. It shouldn’t dominate your life, this concern that you might have inherited some nonsense DNA. But if you know it’s a possibility, you have to ask yourself whether you’d like to find out for sure or ignore it and roll the dice.
Medical testing isn’t something that scares me. For me, it’s research and data collection. I’ve got plenty of piercings and tattoos, and I give myself weekly injections, so needles don’t bother me either. …
When you vote for someone like Donald J. Trump, you endorse the whole package. Here’s what that means and why it matters.
It’s beginning to look a lot like, “Smell ya later, Donald.”
You might not consider yourself a racist, or a misogynist. It might never remotely occur to you to be buddies with someone like Jeffrey Epstein. You might find it disgusting to consider the idea of siccing riot-gear-wearing military-looking police on peaceful protesters.
But when you throw your support behind someone like Trump, you signal that these things are not deal-breakers for you. And that’s important.
Your non-white friends, your non-Christian friends, your queer friends and your women friends, they see you. And a lot of them don’t know if they can trust you. You’ve never said the N-word or any kind of similar hateful epithet. …
