Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-touch me!

I have psoriasis.
I've had it since I was a small child.
Ever since then, I have had the joy pleasure torture of near-constant itching, pain, and of course, unsightly plaques that resulted in relentless teasing at school and near-epic proportions of body shame... and let's not forget the discomfort of the actual treatments.  Most prescription topical treatments smelled a fright and often did little to nothing to ease my symptoms... especially in the winter when the woes of dry skin would exacerbate into plaques, leaving large swaths of my skin cracked, swollen, and itchy.  Over-the-counter treatments often had additives (like fragrances) that ended up irritating my skin so much that the beneficial ingredients often weren't beneficial enough.  Time after time, my parents and I searched out, then invested in various folk therapies, all to no avail.
Then I had a breakthrough...
It had nothing to do with what anybody else told me to do.
It had nothing to do with seeking out a remedy to my psoriasis.
I was broke and needed to simplify my life to save some dough.
I had conveniently acquired three products because they could be used for several different ends, thus simplifying my needs and making budgeting that much easier:
1. (More) Baking Soda
2. Almond Oil (Cooking, cleaning, AND personal hygiene with a light, pleasant scent, awww hell yeah!)
3. Petroleum Jelly (Not exactly all-natural, but cheap and highly effective)

So, now for my skin polishing/softening/awesomeing regimen that helps sooo much with my skin:
When I'm in the shower, I rub some baking soda on problem areas.  This helps exfoliate excess dead skin, especially on plaques, but without irritating normal, healthy skin like more abrasive exfoliants would.
Once I'm out of the shower, I rub almond oil into my skin.  It's a little greasy at first, but given a little time, it soaks in quite well, leaving my skin feeling soft and not oily at all.  I usually shower at night, so this works out beautifully.  In the morning, before I go conquer the world, I rub petroleum jelly into the plaques to protect them from more irritation.  A lot of times, this will help the plaques heal.
I'm totally not saying this will help anybody else's psoriasis, but it works for me, and it all started with applying several common sense steps that really, really don't cost a lot.... Oh, and did I mention they don't smell bad?  Yay!

Intention

I've been a bad, bad girl.
I'm a serial blog-neglecter.
I have a twitter, a two tumblrs, both a personal facebook and a page devoted to my pet Etsy shop, a pinterest, the aforementioned etsy shop, a linkdin I haven't updated since 2010, and an e-zine devoted to Orlando Bloom that I started in 2002.  I've jumped on damn near every social networking bandwagon since my family got semi-reliable internet in the early 2000s.
This is blog number 4 or 5.
To my friends and family, dear God, I'm sorry.

So, I suppose I should cite my intention for this blog:
I want to follow the same mind-set that some of the Inklings did (for those of you unfamiliar with the term, I'm referring to the social group/literary society that included such authors as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien) and write something I would want to read... So, I'm going to commit a cardinal sin of successful blogging right now and tell you: I don't have one set of neatly-fitting topics that I'll discuss in this blog. I'm not going to maintain several separate blogs.  This may be off-putting for some people.  It may feel disjointed.  Of course, the vast majority of blogs I've visited haven't been blogs I searched for.  I don't read many blogs religiously.  Most of the most useful blog posts I've read have been ones I was linked-to by others, most of them via Pinterest.  Odds are, most of those who read my blog will read one or two posts, use them as jumping-off points for projects or discussions, and then never read another post. For that reason, please consider each post or mini-series of posts a contained unit.  Someone with too much time on their hands, or someone close to me, or some history grad student 200 years from now, may bother to read every single post and draw-out some sort of thesis, but I don't have one for you.  I don't have a catch-phrase.  I don't have a nice, clean narrative planned out for you. Sorry.

So, why the title?
I don't know.  I liked it.  I like the idea of having a blog that expresses a way of looking at the world (albeit, in bits and pieces and blips). Oh, and it's the 21st century of the common era.  That's about it.

I won't tell you why you should read this.  I won't tell you who should read this.  But let me self-identify for a moment.
At present, I consider myself:
A millenial.
An American.
A woman.
A feminist.
An ally.
A Christian.
A humanist (notice the lack of capitalization there before you start kicking and screaming).
A worker.
A universalist (again, seriously, capitalization, people).
A heteroromantic.
A demisexual.
A recovering consumer.
An environmentalist.
A pragmatist.

I hope something I write is useful to someone in some real way.  If it is, great. That's all I want.  If it's "successful" in any traditional way, great... but I have no expectations for that. 

Maybe my kids will read it, and hopefully it will inform them on what I was like before I became the person they know.  I wish my dad had kept a journal or something to that effect so I would have it to read now that he's gone... but he didn't.  So, maybe this blog is derived from not wanting my children to be stuck in the same vacuum I am presently occupying.

All my points: take things at face value, and if you ascribe more than that to it, cool, but that's not my intention.