Do you have a strong stomach?

Personally, I can discuss roadkill over succotash.

I have worked in a hospitalists group for 4 years now. I am learning to develop a strong stomach. Lunch time talk could be about a pus bag that exploded, a swollen scrotom, or blood oozing from a rectum. I long for the days when I was an accountant and lunch time talk was about ledger sheets and bad debts.

I used to work for an ambulance service. Our lunch and dinner discussions were often about the day’s calls. Pizza tastes the same whether you are discussing bodily functions or the merits of home-made marinara.

At one time, none of this bothered me. Now, after being away from it for awhile, I prefer conversations less grotesque, especially while I’m eating. What really bothers me, and always has, is when someone who has never been personally exposed to death, or suffering, mangled bodies, crushed skulls, open bowels or purulent wounds, finds talking about them fascinating or refers to these subjects blithely in conversation. Their main reference is usually something they saw on TV that they think is really cool. Talking like this over a meal is puerile and obnoxious—and noxious at the table. I find it very rude and rudeness pisses me off. I will ask them, in the most abrupt way, to get up and leave—with my assistance, if necessary.

Talking about diarrhea and periods and all that fun stuff doesn’t bother me if I’m eating.

I have a fairly strong stomach over conversations.

I had a weak stomach with respect to smells until I had two children to care for in all their lovely bodily function glory. After dealing with stomach sour dairy products projectile strength emissions from both ends of a toddler, I can smell just about anything.

@zenvelo I remember the days of cleaning up vomit and gagging.

I have a very active imagination and prefer not to get too graphic when talking about bodily functions. Can’t watch movies with graphic violence or torture either.

One thing I can’t talk about is bugs. Only certain bugs. They just gross me out so much.

It depends on your definition.

I can talk about almost anything.

But let me hear one little retching noise, and I start gagging myself.

If I’m eating and things like that come up, I just lose my appetite and quit eating. It doesn’t make me gag, I just lose my appetite. Which just goes to show I get plenty to eat at other times.

I’ve handled my own small intestine; very little bothers me.

I hate this obsession with headshots in movies and TV shows. How many times per Walking Dead episode does the American public need to see a head being blown away by a shotgun round before it is sated? I really think this is a bad sociological symptom of an enormous underlying anger. It goes along with the humiliation humor that monopolizes Comedy Central, most sitcoms and comedy clubs—a type of humor formerly relegated only to the likes of Don Rickles and Japanese TV.

At the same time, we give lip service to bullying. What a bunch of horseshit. You have a government that bullies smaller, weaker countries, a government that bullies it’s own citizens, a bullying bureaucracy, bullying police departments. You have police departments that, when they are criticized for shooting the citizens with impunity—citizens they are supposed to protect—rolls out the Attorney General on CNN. etc., whose reaction is to say that the criticism is unjustifiable and causing cop deaths because they are afraid of being criticized when they gratuitously draw their weapons. Well, fuck you too, pal.

People are being bullied in the workplace by bosses and cohorts like never before, everyone is offended by everything—Jesus, with all the adults acting like this, no wonder individual kids are being mobbed by bully groups resulting in teen and adolescent suicide stats. It’s all related. The society has become extremely more fucked up than it used to be.

Maybe that explains the obsession with headshots as entertainment. It makes you want to go out and blow somebody’s head right off, but that’s not cool, so you do it vicariously multiple times during Walking Dead. Bunch of sick fucks.

My rant for the day, but in there, somewhere, is a solution.

I have no problem, but refrain from such topics as common courtesy. Now if I and a rival cast eyes concurrently on the last slice of cake, I can steer the discussion toward the interiors of slaughterhouses, and lakes of hog farm offal.

Wow @Espiritus_Corvus. I hear you. In our attempt to make the world a “better place,” we’ve actually succeeded in compartmentalizing everyone into billions of little compartments and if you accidentally bump into someone else’s compartment you get sued, or slandered, or bullied, or shamed. “I am offended,”....I am SO SICK of hearing that over the smallest, pettiest shit, especially when they snap that just because they’re in a bad mood and want to take it out on someone.