(no subject)

Via petzipillingo - The High Price of Living with Celiac Disease or Gluten Free in NY Times.

The article depicts how in Britian - you get prescription for gluten-free foods and health insurance pays for it and in Italy - the same thing, you get a stipend. In fact, I found out recently from a random shopper at a grocery store, that in Australia and in England, every grocery store product stated whether it was gluten-free or not.

The US? Not so much. It's better than it used to be. But Europe and other countries took celiac disease seriously long before the US did.

I can't get a tax rebate, because to get one - you have to prove you are celiac. I can prove I'm gluten resistent but not celiac. Since my test came back negative for celiac, but positive for gluten resistent. The difference is one just makes you have the runs, feel tired, severe IBS, while the other can kill you.

BTVS S6 Essay - Abdicating Power or Letting Others Define Who We Are (Doublemeat to AYW)

Before I do the meta a couple of caveats:

1. Of all the episodes of Buffy I've rewatched since April 2009, these four episodes were the hardest to rewatch and the least enjoyable. Yes, I enjoyed Ted, Bad Eggs, Amends, and Teacher's Pet more. There's lots of reasons for that, the big one is in some ways these episodes are the most emotionally horrifying. And well, we all have our triggers. Also, sigh, the dialogue really sucks in these episodes. I think Dead Things is the only one that doesn't suffer from bad dialogue - which is a good thing, because it is a pivotal episode and hard to watch for other reasons - if it had bad dialogue...shudder. Example from As You Were (which has possibly the worst dialogue of just about any Buffy episode, with Older and Far Away being a close second) : "Slayer if I knew you were coming? I would have baked you cake." (WTF?? That's Spike's line in AYW. Apparently I was wrong, Angel isn't the only character to get cursed with bad fanfic/pulp romance novel lines. Spike gets a few doozies in S6, although to be fair they are only in these four episodes. Older and Far Away is worse. Oh well, at least Spike doesn't sound like a walking hallmark card commericial. Also, is it just me or does Sam (Riley's wife) resemble a Tony Roberts self-help guru in AYW? Seriously, I think that might be her true calling.)

2. Since I get the triggers, I am putting the bulk of this post behind an lj-cut. If B/S bugged you, you might want to stop here. Although I'm NOT romanticizing them in this post. Far from it. At any rate, if any of this hits your buttons? Avoid. Life is too short to send your blood pressure sky-rocketing over an internet post about a tv show. Trust me, I know.

( Letting Someone Else Define Who You Are or How Other's Control Our Image of Ourselves - Suppression of Power and Sexism in the Buffyverse )