Bea's Stuff

PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome) is being renamed PMOS (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome) in order to reduce stigma and dismissal of women with the condition. i feel torn about this

on one hand, anything that will improve women's health is desperately needed because it is VASTLY underfunded and under-treated and not getting much better as time goes on. more women being accurately diagnosed and treated can only be a good thing

however. the fact that we have to rename the condition in order to encourage doctors to diagnose it properly is concerning to me. while the name of the condition was not accurate enough, i feel like the ways it actually affects women's lives have been documented for a long time – weight gain, irregular periods, insulin resistance, signs of high androgen levels, infertility – symptoms that may be caused by other things if you just have one of them, but pretty quickly point to PMOS if you have more than one. i am not a medical professional, so one would think it would be even easier for them to put 2 and 2 together. and yet, the majority of women reporting this pattern of symptoms are dismissed by doctors over and over, often having to try for years before they get accurately diagnosed.

so this name change pisses me off a little bit. why did we have to rename the disorder to make its metabolic nature more obvious (a REAL issue that also affects REAL people, aka men)? why do we have to make it sound less like a "women's health issue" in order to be taken seriously? why are we spending years on semantics about disorders' names instead of tackling the real issue, which is the fact that women are routinely gaslit, dismissed and abused by medical systems in many of the most advanced countries in the world?

idk man. everyone is celebrating this name change like it's going to save the world and end medical misogyny. and while i agree it's a good thing, it sort of also makes me want to fight somebody

i'm having a mandela effect moment with israeli couscous. i know it sounds stupid, and it is, but hear me out anyway:

i love ptitim and have been buying big tubs of it from the brand "rice select" for years. i could swear on my life that the big banner across the front used to say "Israeli Couscous." my husband pointed out yesterday that it now says "pearl couscous." i thought i had been getting a slightly different kind and didn't think much of it, but looking it up, ALL of it says pearl couscous and i could not even find images on google of the old banner that i remember.

now some brands like the one at trader joe's have explicitly changed their couscous to remove the word "israeli" since 2022 – apparently because it's not israeli, which isn't really true and obviously isn't a good excuse considering the timing. but i couldn't find any info about my brand changing their look. this should not really matter but was driving me crazy, because if they did make the same change, i don't want to buy from this brand anymore – i don't vibe with antisemitic branding choices. but despite the fact that i remember choosing this type for the first time BECAUSE it said israeli couscous and i wanted to try it, i literally searched all over google and even with the wayback machine and it does not line up with my memory. i swear i have been transported to an alternate timeline.

i guess i will keep buying this alien pearl couscous. if you are a couscous connoisseur for some reason and have any information about this universe-altering branding, please let me know because it is bugging the hell out of me

i subbed in my favorite 2nd grade class today and witnessed a boy rear back and smack a little girl in the face as hard as humanly possible. she had done absolutely nothing, wasn't even talking to him (not that it would've mattered if she did.) she bawled her eyes out of course, crying for her mom, and had a red mark on her face the rest of the day.

this boy has hit and punched his classmates before, and hurls verbal abuse at them on a daily basis. he was sent home for the remaining 2 hrs of the school day, and will be suspended tomorrow. come monday, he will be back in the same class with the girl he hit and the class he traumatized. until the next time he inevitably hurts someone and gets a slap on the wrist again.

after the boy was sent home and the girl's parents called, i tried my best to stay composed and resume class. when i sent them to gym a little while later i just sat in the classroom and cried angry tears. i get that the district's resources are limited, and i know the violent boy's behavior is probably learned, from witnessing or being the object of violence at home. but where the fuck do we draw the line? at what point do we concede that the safety and success of 20 kids is more important than the possible backlash from giving real consequences to ONE? at what point do we stop bending over backwards for neglectful parents and money-hungry school boards in order to protect our fucking students?

i cannot STAND sitting by and watching while impressionable, innocent children – most often girls – are conditioned to believe that this kind of abuse is normal, and that the response is to just take it. but there's literally nothing i can do except keep placidly showing up, or risk being fired and blacklisted and unable to be a safe adult for them at all

extra trigger warning for this entry

one of the hardest parts of growing older is ending up on diverging paths from the people you used to be closest to. and i don't mean growing apart in general, although that is difficult. but it makes me happy to hear about what my old friends are doing now even though it took us in different directions.

unfortunately though, my closest friendship was more a case of me growing up and her getting stuck in one place. when we were teenagers, we were dramatic little deviants doing drugs together, finding relationships with shallow boys who weren't good to us, and being codependent with our friends. which is all mostly fine when you're 19. but now we're both entering our late 20s, and while my life looks radically different now, hers does not seem to have changed.

she's addicted to those drugs now, relying on abusive men to support her, and just barely scraping by financially, physically and mentally. i can't really put into words how difficult this has been to witness – in part because, at this point, she only reaches out to me when she needs a shoulder to lean on. but mostly because she is a loving and charismatic and talented person who i just KNEW was going to do great things. and now i stay perpetually worried that one of these days, i'm going to get a call from her mom saying she overdosed

i was lucky enough to be able to show several classes of 2nd-5th grade students the videos of the artemis II launch and discuss it with them while the mission was happening. and while most of the kids did show a genuine interest in it all (they were most intrigued by the space toilet), i had at least one kid in every class tell me some version of "well my [dumbass guardian] said this is fake!" naturally, there were also plenty of kids who can't even read raising their hands to tell me about the staged moon landing

now i understand that different people have different opinions on whether the moon to mars missions should be happening. i've heard it discussed that focusing on space is ridiculous when we have so many more pressing environmental issues at home; i've also heard it posited that the world's plans for space are just a glorified pissing contest between corrupt politicians. and while i mostly disagree, regardless of your opinion, you must still hold the basic understanding that we have obviously fucking gone to space. it infuriates me that the kind of people who are having kids most often are the kind raising them to believe that the earth is flat, donald trump cares about poor people, and it's better for a 15yo child to become a single parent than to forsake jesus by having an abortion.

i don't think most people fully realize how backwards & behind some parts of the united states still are. i cannot wait until i'm established enough in my career to bring my resume hundreds of miles away from this shithole.

i was looking through some old documents for journal prompts to use on my wellness page, and found this journal entry thing i wrote a couple years ago. i am proud to say that i have become *slightly* less of a pessimist since this time!

old entry: when i first learned about ACEs, CPTSD, BPD, all the acronyms and all the science and all the sucker-punching facts that turned my perception of my childhood on its head - when i first learned about all that, i thought my parents were monsters. vile, unrelatable lowlifes who were completely devoid of empathy and full, instead, of pure self-interest. that was the only way my brain could make sense of it at the time, as a 20-year-old on her way to working with children. the only way that someone could intentionally hurt a child – a pure, innocent, helpless baby (and one they're supposed to love, at that) – is if they're a monster, right?

unfortunately, i no longer believe that this is the case. it was comforting seeing my parents as monsters. it validated all of the shame and horrible feelings i was stuck with after moving out, and it made me feel like there was no way i would ever let anyone else treat me like that, now that i understood it as abuse. but life is a lot more complicated than that. and the sad, scary truth is that my parents are not monsters. they're not even rare. they're more like piss ants – you might not see them all the time, but there are tons of them everywhere if you know how to look. and just as sad and scary is the fact that there are millions of parents who treat their children worse than i was treated. and those parents aren't rare, vile, unrelatable monsters either – they are also just people, the likes of which can be found in every society, in every class, in every race, no matter how progressive or compassionate or selfless they seem.

i think, at 24, i have officially lost my faith in humanity – and i’m not being dramatic (2026 note: girl yes you are). but the more i learn and experience, the more it seems like the average person is not an intelligent, compassionate one; the average person is just ignorant, self-centered, and at least a little stupid.