M o i s t u r i z e m e

…Is your bathroom a swamp?

Isn’t that HAraM

In 2021, I was riding an Amtrak train when it derailed at 80 mph. Several of the cars, including the one I was in, fell onto their sides and slid a significant distance along the ground. Three people were killed.

After spending the night in a hotel, they arranged for me and several other passengers to get on another train to get us home. I didn’t think much of it, I just wanted to get home, but the moment the train got up to speed I realized I had made a mistake. I spent the entire journey in a state of extreme stress, on the verge of crying. This train (the Empire Builder) is timed so that you get to sit in the diner car and eat dinner while passing through the most scenic part of the trip, the Rocky Mountains of western Montana and northern Idaho. But I didn’t enjoy any of it. I remember staring at my dinner, desperately trying to hold myself together, wincing every time there was a bang or jolt (and for those who’ve never been on an Amtrak train - there are a lot of those).

I had never experienced an anxiety attack before, and based on this experience I never want to have one again. The train got to my home station at about six in the morning, and I didn’t sleep at all.

I blame lazy parents. The message is meant to be “You shouldn’t be picky, you should be thankful that you’re fortunate enough to have access to such quality food. There are people in much worse conditions than you, which much worse food security, who would gladly eat this broccoli/peas/whatever.” But most parents just say “there are starving children in Africa” and leave it at that.

holds up spork

Plants don't have the ability to pull out a gun to defend itself

Yet.

Unfortunately, no. From what I gather, any other browser on an iPhone is just Safari with a different skin.

Get off my lawn.

The fax machine, actually

There is, sometimes it’s really well hidden. In this one it’s in the fifth panel, on the plant

I was on this train. Amtrak paid me a settlement not to sue them, but it’s not Amtrak I blame, it’s BNSF, who owns the track. It’s very clear from the camera footage that the track was badly misaligned by the time the train went over it at 80 mph. That line is one of the busiest in the country, and if the freight locomotives (one of which had gone over that section of track barely an hour prior) had some kind of monitoring system, they would have alerted all the other trains to stop or slow down. I used to love riding trains, but our rail infrastructure is much too far behind places like Europe.