as ur friendly Neighborhood Nursing Student™ i feel somewhat compelled to remind everyone with the hot weather:
every liquid except sea water and alcohol hydrates you. It’s not CHUG WATER OR DIE. in fact, gatorade and the like are designed to hydrate you efficiently.
yeah, this includes coffee and tea and soda. the diuretic is not enough to cancel out the liquid. juices and milk have solids in them, sure, but they’re also mostly liquid! it counts.
your body can only absorb so much water at a time, so chugging 64 oz of water at noon and calling it good will do a wonderful job of flushing your kidneys, but not so much of hydrating your tissues. it’s more important that you’re getting consistent fluid throughout the day.
there’s a lot of fancy ways to determine How Much Water (Liquid) I Should Drink but honestly? 8 oz (1 cup) every other hour on cool days and 8 oz every hour on hot days should be fine (assuming you sleep for a normal amount of time per day…. i’m assuming ur awake 16 hours a day.)
figure out how many oz each of ur favorite cups is. it’ll help your guesstimation.
if ur urine is darker than light yellow, you’re dehydrated.
if u pinch the skin on the back of ur hand for a couple seconds and it takes more than a second or two go to back to normal then ur dehydrated.
In regards to #1, don’t take this as an excuse to drink the sugar water that they call sports drinks. They aren’t bad for you per se, but please choose water.
actually this entire post was written in the spirit of ppl using it as an excuse to drink sports drinks and soda etc
ppl have been commenting abt sodium levels in soda and sugar levels in sports drinks and thats all well and good but what i’ve noticed is that people who internalize “well, ONLY WATER hydrates me” but who HATE WATER remain horrifically dehydrated cause they dont drink anything.
so like. if ur a person who haaaaates tap water, this is absolutely me giving you permission to drink whatever fluid you can stomach. please take this as a direct excuse to drink nothing but gatorade if that’s what it takes to get enough fluid into ur body.
it’s not the healthiest for you, sure, but you’re a smart enough person to know that. please drink fluids anyways.
if u like water thats gr8. if you can stomach water that’s gr8. if you can’t, that’s okay too, and you need to stay hydrated just as much as anyone else, so pleasedrink.
I used to hate tap water, and in some places (looking at you, Iowa) it is legit disgusting, but one thing I do which helped a ton and was long term cheaper than buying soda or juice was to get a bottle of Angostura bitters. It’s a cocktail additive with a strong distinctive flavor, so although a tiny bottle is like $6 it will last you for ages. Put a small drop or dash in your glass then fill with water. It has a pleasant sort of herbal metal taste (I understand that those words don’t seem like they should go together but it’s hard to describe) which masks tap water. It also helps me smooth an upset tummy but your mileage may vary. It’s not something that will get you drunk, just a flavoring like vanilla extract.
If that all sounds like too much bother, dropping a lemon wedge into water also helps.
I am learning that lemon wedges are magical in almost everything I like to drink.
here is the magic that made me stop being chronically dehydrated:
because yeah, i can’t STAND plain water – it tastes like the inside of my mouth. it tastes like spit. imagine drinking a glass of ice cold spit. ugh. but add a squirt of this stuff to your glass of tapwater, and now it tastes like apple, cherry, lemonade, whatever.
i also got a bunch of these
and pre-prep them with flavored water, iced tea, iced coffee, whatever (or ask my helper to do it), and then when i’m thirsty but distracted and want to just grab some kind of liquid without thinking about finding a clean glass etc., i can just grab one of these.
because yeah, hating water is a thing, and dehydration SUCKS. so drink SOMETHING, don’t be a water purist. better to chug iced coffee than go without.
mio was a damn genius for comin out with that shit
can I just speak up here as someone who has been a nurse for 17 years? I heartily endorse this post and also give you permission to DRINK WHATEVER THE HELL IT TAKES TO KEEP YOU FROM BEING DEHYDRATED
especially in the summer, you can’t play around with that. drink something. seriously. for the love of kittens. DRINK SOMETHING.
Just in case any of you feel bad about your writing, this is an extract from John Updike’s Witches of Eastwick, one of few authors to win a Pulitzer Prize more than once and be heralded for his literary genius.
That said, trying to get through Barcelona with a combo of rusty rather bad Mexican Spanish and gestures was an experience I would rather avoid repeating. And I was managing better than Mr. C, without even the half-assed Weird Colonial Spanish to work with. (Probably even weirder-sounding by the standards of a traditionally Catalan-speaking area, never mind some of the politics there.)
A couple of people didn’t try to hide their amusement, and I wasn’t sure I could really blame them after dealing with enough British tourists. It still made me kinda want to crawl into a hole, though.
Everyone in Berlin speaks English. I had been told that I’d be able to get by (the only German I know is ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and ‘sorry’) but I did not realize that it would be everybody. I order a sandwich and the guy making my sandwich asks a question and I say ‘sorry, no German”, and he says without missing a beat “do you want guac on that, it’s an extra Euro”. A panhandler asks me for money and I say “sorry, no German”, and he says “can you spare some money for the train”. The man next to me on the train says something vaguely scolding when I put my bag down, I move it and murmur ‘sorry’ with a sufficiently foreign accent that he switches to English to explain that he thinks I should keep my hands on my bag lest someone steal it.
I feel vaguely guilty about visiting Germany and coasting off the extra effort on the part of the locals, although I don’t endorse feeling guilty about this, if people felt more guilty about travelling to places where they don’t speak the local language I can’t imagine that makes anybody better off.
you don’t have to feel guilty about this. in the netherlands its the same, and most people like the chance to show off their english to a native.
I had some similar worries visiting Stockholm, without the spoons to try and brush up much beforehand. Even more uncomfortable in a way, since after living with a native speaker for years I had only picked up maybe a dozen everyday phrases 😐 (He was also already living in the UK when we met.)
In Sweden, it’s a safe bet that anyone between the ages of, say, 15 and 70 is going to have some level of English proficiency. I knew that going in, and still felt awkward–maybe especially given some of the stereotypes specifically around monolingual English speakers who refuse to make any good faith effort to help smooth out communication.
But, as pointed out in another reblog? The main problem there does seem to be the subset who don’t even feel like they need to try. Not coming across as arrogant can make a big difference, and it doesn’t sound like you probably would have. And a lot of people really do seem glad for an opportunity to practice, as maybesimon said.
A combo of social anxiety and scrupulosity really hasn’t done me a lot of favors there, I am very aware. Mostly chiming in because that did sound too familiar. *wry smile*
and this idea that people who worry about people who are surrounded bigotry becoming more entrenched in it are just like…prioritizing evil privileged people over the marginalized people who REALLY deserve their compassion
no, i worry about it because i was a scared queer kid in a conservative cult-church and i was lucky enough to get out because i got to interact with compassionate people who exposed me to new (better) ideas without making me feel like a shitty person.
and i want other scared kids to get out too. i want them to know that there’s a whole world outside their bubble filled with kind and compassionate people. i want them to know that even if their family relationships become strained or break altogether, there is a new family who will love them on the other side.
and i don’t want you scaring them away and making them feel even more trapped, because i know what that’s like too. i don’t want you putting even more locks on their door.
like i’m not even saying you personally have to reach out to them, just allow other people to do so without threatening to take away their Progressive Card.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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