it's only a little bit more trouble to split the pod with a thumbnail and partially open it. drop one or two in a pot of rice or in hot milk for chai or in soup or... as fnarf advises, eat/drink around them or fish them out.

re: wanting a cure,
i think a person's answer to that question would depend on how much they were suffering and how much "meaning" they ascribed to that suffering. i've suffered a lot, and i know many others who've suffered more. i view the suffering from mental illness as a scourge on the human experience.

my own illnesses are very well treated right now, but if i knew of a procedure that would allow me to live drug-free i would certainly want to give it a closer look.

a doctor prescribed valtrex just in case? which he took for a month just in case? that seems unlikely to me. and if he was taking an anti-viral and didn't have any symptoms of an initial outbreak, how would he know if he had it or not? did he get the blood test (there is one)? how smart is this guy? is it possible he's just really confused?

if you still want to have sex with him, you can send him back to the doctor and get an ongoing Rx for valtrex, to somewhat lessen that he'll pass on any kind of herpes to you. yes also to the latex barriers. tell him it's "just in case".

yes to cranberry and d-mannose! woo!

when my doctor initially prescribed the daily low-dose nitrofurantoin, i asked her about the possibility of developing resistance. she told me that the bacteria that cause UTIs have usually migrated from the anus to the urethra, and that the way nitrofurantoin was processed by the body (almost all of it goes directly from the bloodstream to the kidneys and down the drain) meant that it wouldn't affect any of the normal places where bacteria should be breeding. so theoretically no die-off, no resistance, no yeast overgrowth, etc.

BUT: there's still the inevitability that traces of antibiotics flushed down our toilets will reach rivers, streams, lakes, and oceans, and cause the same imbalances there that they don't cause in our bodies. so there's that.

It's up to your boyfriend to decide how he navigates his relationship with his mentor. In a few years when he graduates, and you grab him by his black robe to breathlessly confess that OMG you flirted online with his mentor YEARS ago... how will you explain to him why you kept it a secret?

"Venue-appropriate volume"... ahhhhh, that's the insider info I needed! Thanks!

Jeez, y'all, I was just trying to be charming. Note to self: take self seriously.

As a diner, I've often wished that the musicians would ease up a bit both on the volume and the razzle-dazzle so I could focus on the conversation I was having with my dinner companions. As a musician, I'd like to try my hand at enhancing the ambiance rather than drawing everyone's attention away from their dinners. I maintain that this is its own art, and there's no shame (or 'tude) in it.

er, thank you, captain obvious!

the stomach is indeed a harsh environment for any living thing, but mouths themselves are not. saliva breaks carbs into sugars, but isn't all that hard on anything else. and it was mouth cuts that i was thinking of, gormster, when i pointed out that mouths are delicate and vascular. maybe i'm unusual in that i almost always have a tiny cut of some kind in my mouth; right now i have one perhaps two millimeters long under my upper lip. tomorrow it'll probably be healed over, but meanwhile it's an open door to ... whatever.

i'm really glad to hear about your 100% success rate with unprotected blow jobs! god willing, your winning streak will continue. meanwhile, please be aware that your sweeping statement about people who have herpes is not even remotely true.

agreed! north dakota is the worst.