The great opera singer Enrico Caruso was the 18th of 21 children, only 3 of whom survived infancy.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote an opera about coffee addiction.

The Russian composer Tchaikovsky was afraid his head would come off while conducting, so he would hold his chin with one hand while doing so.

The girlfriend of composer Erik Satie wore a corsage made of carrots, and she was a painter and liked to feed the paintings she made. Satie once threw her out the window but she survived.

I can’t answer as to frequency, but I can say that recently a woman I know slightly cheated on her husband of 20 plus years, and the reason I know this is because he hired a private investigator and put the video of her kissing the other dude on Facebook. Apparently he did not include the video of them having sex but it exists. That seems like a really heinous thing for him to do, but if you know this family they’re actually really well raised good members of the community, and he’s clearly extremely hurt, stating that the depth of her lies to him was unreal. This woman’s mother is a saint walking upon the earth, without a shadow of a doubt, and her daughter was what seemed to be a very ethical well brought up mother herself raised in the Christian faith (not the conservative kind but the really decent person kind), so this was all a big shock. Apparently she was just lying to everyone, including her saint of a mother, all along. Her husband asked her to stop the affair (which was with some guy she had known for years) until they separated houses, but she kept on and kept on lying about it until she was caught on tape.

So until someone’s mask slips, you just really never know what someone will do.

I’m 50. If a terrorist put a gun to my head and ordered me to get on my knees, my head would end up blown off.

Tokkie claims he was sexually and physically abused by them and made into a slave. None of the sources seem very well sourced, it’s just based on a video he made, and they state that he’s an addict and trying to extort them for drug money. Capetown child welfare workers went to their house to see if their daughter Sixteen is ok, and apparently had no problems with them. I take abuse seriously but what he’s saying seems super farfetched and made up. I don’t think they’re great people exactly, but their characters are obviously an act and they’re middle aged parents under it all.

Apparently South Africans are NOT fans of the band despite their success. I think what Tokkie claims about them sounds made up, apparently he’s an addict and trying to extort them is their take on it. It just doesn’t sound truthful at all.

I’m leery of most romantic gestures now because it turns out some of them are just self-serving narcissism so they feel good about themselves for performing them, but honestly trying to cheer someone up with a nice dinner and a peaceful evening is really heartfelt and says, I can’t fix this for you but I can do this much and try to help you have a better day and show you I care about you.

I listen to Die Antwoord still and read the poetry of Anne Sexton. The former is because I think some of the accusations against them are exaggerated, and part of their whole act IS being jerks. The latter is because what she did was clearly in the throes of her severe bipolar disorder which was long before they had any good medications.

That choosing a relationship with someone who is monkeybranching into the relationship with you directly from another relationship is you allowing someone in your life who is fundamentally dishonest and manipulative. It’s one thing to be casually dating in general, and just finding someone you click with and ending it with the people you are casually dating, but entering a relationship with someone who pursues you even though they’re in an ostensibly committed relationship is choosing to accept someone who is really not a good person, because they will just do whatever they want and eventually hurt you without a qualm too. Tolerating any of this means you are tolerating abuse, really.

Unfortunately he didn’t tell me this fact until 18 months into it, but that should have been what made me realize that he wasn’t trustworthy and leave then.

Also committing from the get go and falling in love? That’s just also not valuing yourself. You’re just looking for someone to fit into your life because you don’t love yourself enough to wait and take your time and get to know someone, and you’re afraid to be alone and have nobody to care for you. And I did all of that, because I was immature, completely without any idea of how to make it in life alone or cope alone, and I thought that was all I deserved and was the only way to be safe. And it was all wrong.

Omigod. Do you still talk?

I realized every time my mom worked in the evenings it was always a great day for me.

Also we were brought up Catholic, BUT also to love accept queer and trans people (and I’m 50 so back then trans people weren’t really part of the conversation hardly at all), but also my brother is gay, and when it became clear that was a fact, my mother launched an underground campaign to try and pretend he wasn’t, including inviting a beard date for him to go with on my destination wedding.

Finally realized how absolutely nasty and manipulative she is, and how she just regards me as a reflection of her. I can’t be around her because I feel like she’s constantly scrutinizing every inch of me and criticizing my appearance, because that’s what she values and nothing else, and how she likes to drop bombs into the middle of family gatherings just to get negative attention, like deciding to make fun of my father over a chubby girl he had dated 40 years before, which my spouse honestly came close to clocking her in the teeth for.

Borderlines are nasty the older and more entrenched and untreated they are, they get really malignant behaviour. Just last fall my aunt who she is mostly estranged from had surgery for bowel cancer, which she didn’t share with her since she drinks drama like it’s her poisonous life blood, and yet despite this she got her friend who works in the OR to tell her the date and time, showed up at the last minute while she was waiting on a stretcher to go in for surgery, shoved her face in my aunt’s face and yelled “HI!”, and immediately my aunt was rolled down to the OR, and never visited or did anything else. The whole point was to let my aunt know she KNEW and that my aunt couldn’t keep it from her. She violated her confidentiality and I’m pursuing it through the hospital privacy office…

As an aside I successfully folded a fitted sheet recently, and obviously I’m a wizard now.

Amanda Palmer. I’ve always thought she was a narcissistic asshole who uses people like she’s rearranging furniture. And that has turned out to be extremely true.

I really am kind of messy but it’s because I work so much I don’t have time to do anything properly at all. I always feel frantic.

The human centipede of social media.

I especially hate that Reddit sold out so hard, because it really is the only search result worth anything anymore. I quit Instagram and Twitter as well, can’t quite give up Facebook because of my Livejournal friends. Would give my kidney for Livejournal to make a comeback.

If you think you picked a bad partner because there’s something wrong with you because of how you were parented, actually a bad partner sought you out because they saw those vulnerabilities in you.

I’m Canadian.

Thank you for saying this. I genuinely would never not take someone’s cultural practices and religion seriously. I just really like what it symbolizes to me.

Thank you. I just felt a little silly.

My tattoo is very well designed, but it is a lotus flower with the Om symbol in it because at the time I was practicing a lot of yoga, and I didn’t realize it looks kind of… culturally foolish, shall we say, especially now that I live in a city with a lot of South Asian folks, and some have asked me about it, I am white as the driven snow. I did not intend it in any cultural appropriation way and it isn’t offensive or anything, they all seem to like it, but it was a bit thoughtless ultimately.