It’s not cultural appropriation if it’s from your own culture. Even if your culture has many similarities with other, less advantaged cultures.
Ask the Archbishop of Canterbury if he’s more or less Catholic.
I am sick to death of No True Scotsman. Your religion is responsible for a whole lot of shit in the world. You can deal with a little rudeness on the internet (and for “rudeness,” read “lack of deference”).
In the past year and a half, I have had to cancel/postpone/reschedule three trips that were purely for pleasure:
1. I was scheduled to go to Barcelona in March 2010, but my uncle passed away;
2. I was scheduled to go to Amsterdam in May 2010, but the volcano happened; and
3. I was scheduled to be in New York right now, but my body betrayed me.
Work, family and jobhunting-related trips? I can take those, fine. It’s the pleasure trips that elude me.
More on the body betrayal: I didn’t actually bork my liver by getting dehydrated. Instead, it turns out I have a stone lodged in my common bile duct, and the dehydration pushed it from being happily asymptomatic to being symptomatic. And once these things become symptomatic, they can back everything up and you’re looking at jaundice, liver shutdown, and life-threatening infections. Fortunately, my doctor caught me before I left, or I might have been at the ER in Bellevue.
I’m scheduled for a procedure to have the thing removed on Monday. It’s a pretty non-invasive procedure, in which a scope is inserted via a tube down your throat to peek up your bile duct where it empties into the esophagus. If they can grab it there, they will; or they’ll cut a small hole in your small intestine and let it drop out there. There’s a small chance it won’t work and they’ll have to open me up, but chances are good it won’t be an issue. The biggest complication is pancreatitis, which is extremely painful and sucks very much. In fact, that’s what Sugarplum had when she stopped eating and her liver went toxic.
I’ve already had my gallbladder out, 24 years ago, due to stones (I got to keep them after the surgery; they were HUGE). I’m one of the lucky 10% whose bodies just love making stones even after removal of the gallbladder, and when there’s nowhere like the gallbladder for them to collect, they hang around in the bile duct once they get too big to pass through. So I’ll have to be careful of this in the future (though maybe it’ll be another 24 years before I have to worry about it again, and by then I’ll (hopefully, if it’s still around) be on Medicare).
In the meantime, I’m waiting for my procedure and watching for signs of becoming bright yellow and having shaking chills. Woohoo!
And once again, I’m very glad that this is all coming to a head when I actually have health insurance. I don’t know what I would have done had I still been uninsured; probably take antacids and hope for the best. Then turn yellow and die, probably.
See this look? This is a look that says, “Keep that fucking Cone of Shame away from me.”
Junebug’s knee surgery (and teeth cleaning!) went very well and came in a couple of hundred bucks below estimate. She’s also surprisingly mobile; I would have thought she’d be limping around for weeks, but she’s managed to get herself on and off the couch and bed, and motors along quite well when I take her out. She’s also got the three-legged pee squat down cold; not for nothing does she have such muscular thighs.
So, the dehydration? Has fucked up my liver.
I was doing okay until Thursday, when I woke up at 4 am in agony. I felt nauseous and was doubled over in pain; though I got to the brink of vomiting, nothing came out. I had to take Junebug to the vet that morning, and had several meetings lined up, so I had to go into work. But I felt completely poleaxed. It wasn’t just that I was in pain and nauseous; I wasn’t really functioning mentally. But I got through the morning by clutching a bottle of sports drink (fortunately, I’d just bought some hydration/electrolyte tablets at the running store, and they helped immensely) and left early to go to my doctor.
Which I have, now. A doctor. Because I have insurance.
Anyway, my doctor was actually on vacation, so I got his cranky partner, who seemed skeptical that I had identified my internal organs correctly (he asked me to show him where my kidneys were when I said my kidneys hurt, and didn’t seem to take my self-diagnosis of liver pain seriously until he palpated me and discovered that one edge of my liver was unusually firm. He sent me off to the lab to get some blood drawn and advised me to keep hydrating and make sure I ate. The next day, he called me with the results: my kidneys, urine, salts and potassium were all fine, but my liver enzymes were elevated. I should come in to the lab again for a liver panel, and the ultrasound people would be calling me for an appointment, after which I should go see my doctor again.
My brother, who’s a fire-rescue EMT, sees a lot of dehydration on his crews, especially during wildfire season. He tells me this is pretty typical, given the beating my system just took with the dehydration, and will pass. I just need to rest, keep taking in fluids, and eat whether I want to or not.
And in the meantime, I can’t exercise. Which means no half-marathon next Saturday. I’m still picking up my t-shirt.
I had my last long training run before the half marathon, 11 miles, on Saturday. It went really well, though my mouth was terribly dry the whole time (probably due to taking a Claritin) and my legs started cramping at the end.
On Sunday, I woke up feeling fine. I had some yogurt and raspberries with coffee for breakfast. About an hour later, I started feeling crampy. I thought maybe the yogurt had gone off, or I was cramping because my period was coming. I went to bed, but things only got worse. My kidneys started feeling sore.
Protip: if your kidneys start hurting, DRINK SOME DAMN WATER. I didn’t, for quite some time, because unlike on Saturday, my mouth wasn’t dry. I even thought it was appendicitis.
I got to the point where I thought it would be a good idea to get some medical attention, so I called my insurance company to see where I could go. They gave me two urgent care centers, both of which were closed. An ER visit would run me $100 for a copay and probably take all damn day.
I finally got some water, and that helped the cramping, so I drank more. And I went out and got some Pedialyte.
So I guess I’d gotten way more dehydrated yesterday than I’d realized; I’d consumed two 20-oz. bottles of water and a 20-oz. Gatorade during the 2 hours and 23 minutes I ran, so I thought I was adequately hydrated. I probably didn’t realize how much water I was losing because in this climate, I don’t really sweat (or more likely, I still sweat buckets, but it just evaporates instead of hanging around soaking my clothes and running in my eyes). Also, this hadn’t happened on any of my other runs.
I’m now mainlining water and Pedialyte, and I’m peeing again, so that’s good. I will pay much closer attention to my hydration on race day AND the day after race day. That was hellish.
I got an eviction notice yesterday. I’m not entirely sure why, since my landlord hasn’t called me back. But I suspect it’s because the neighbors complain every time Junebug farts. And every time that the dog next door barks, which is somehow my fault.
I spent the month of January and part of February leaving a voice-activated digital recorder running in the apartment when I was gone. With only one or two exceptions, the length of the recordings were between 8 and 16 minutes. Over the course of 9-12 hours. Which also included me and my dogwalker announcing the time, traffic noise, leaf blowers and lawn mowers, and the cat meowing.
The property managers met with me, met with my neighbors, reviewed the materials I gave them (a month’s worth of recordings plus a huge memo) and told me everything was fine. That was the last I’d heard from them until now.
It’s now official: I hate this place. I can’t leave for at least another year, but I hate this place.
UPDATE: I just got off the phone with the property manager, who of course won’t tell me much because they want me to come in. But I highly suspect that he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. Why? Because he denied that he served me with an eviction notice, then when I said it damn well was an eviction notice BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT IT SAYS RIGHT ON THE DOCUMENT, THAT YOU’RE TERMINATING MY LEASE IN 60 DAYS, he sort of cavalierly dismissed it as “just procedure” and “I don’t know why it was done.” This is of course after an entire fucking day in which he didn’t bother returning any of my increasingly frantic phone calls asking why I was being evicted.
As I suspected, it’s about the dog. Why he has to send me an eviction notice to get my attention instead of, oh, PICKING UP THE PHONE AND CALLING ME I’m not quite sure.
But I’ve decided I’m going to take them at their word. They want to send me a termination notice? Fine. My lease will terminate within 60 days and I will be moving out by the end of June. They can pay for the movers.
And I still hate this place.
You know, not everything is “triggering.” If you’re so sensitive that you find disagreement triggering, you should probably stay off the fucking internet. Because while it behooves us to avoid some of the major triggers, like violent language, rape imagery, abuse, etc., if your triggers are idiosyncratic and esoteric, you should maybe take it upon yourself to avoid putting yourself in situations where they might be tripped.
Also? I hate to say it, but maybe Kos had a point about the “sanctimonious women’s studies set.” It appears that the strawfeminist may be real.
Junebug needs surgery. Her ACL analogue is ruptured, and she needs it fixed. Of course this has to happen just before I go on vacation (to New York - YAY!).
Have I mentioned that I live on the second floor, and she will need to be carried up and down the stairs for several weeks? I’m thrilled that she’s only 25 pounds, but I do worry about dropping her. Or throwing my back out.
Not “if he’s the one,” but how do you know when you’ve given a place enough of a chance and you still don’t want to live there?
I’ll put it out there: I’m homesick for New York. Really, really homesick. I miss the noise, and the energy, and the subway, and the LIFE. I miss having stuff to do within easy reach at all hours. I miss culture. I miss neighbors who can live with a certain amount of noise without running to the landlord to complain; if they did have a problem, they let you know directly. I miss not feeling like I’m missing out because I don’t own a car. I miss not having tweakers on every other corner. I miss having a peer group of single people in their 40s without kids. I miss not feeling overdressed when I wear a dress and tights to work. I miss seeing people out on the streets. I miss restaurants that stay open past 9 pm. I miss accessible movie theaters. I miss wearing red.
I’m having a hard time adjusting to my new city, if that’s not obvious. I’m struggling with building any kind of a social life. I don’t have friends or family here (the closest relative is more than 2 hours away), I’m single, no kids, and I don’t have any sort of obvious community, like my boss (who’s gay) did when he came here. There are colleges here, but it’s not a college town that has late-night cafes and bookstores and events. Even in the happening part of town, shops and gyms close at 7, restaurants at 9. Bars stay open later, but I don’t drink anymore, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be hanging out by myself at a bar. The buses aren’t that frequent, are expensive (no free transfers) and stop at 9 as well. I do yoga, but while I’ve gotten friendly with several people there, I haven’t yet made friends. I had to stop wearing red because I apparently work in Crips territory.
And while my job is going great, it’s been very difficult to build any kind of social life there. The library is full of cliques, and to the extent I’ve managed to connect with people, it’s been limited because either they have families and kids or — as in the case of my boss and the writing faculty, of which I am at least nominally a part — I’ve been discounted as a social person because I don’t drink. So nobody even thinks to ask me to things that have anything to do with alcohol. And you can’t exactly invite yourself along to things if no one tells you about them in the first place.
I’ve tried to get people to go to lunch with me, but they’re always too busy, or they say they will and then they just forget to put it on their calendars. But they’ll go with each other, all the time, and they socialize after work. It’s probably time to stop trying.
I’m beginning to feel like Col. Brandon from Sense & Sensibility: the kind of person that everyone thinks well of, but no one remembers to talk to.
Seriously, it’s spring here already. Daffodils and everything, and it’s not even Valentine’s Day yet.
I am all discombobulated.
My training is going well (it certainly doesn’t hurt that I can run outside), though I have a small ache in my left foot near the base of the big toe. I’m hoping it’s not the beginnings of a stress fracture. Frankly, though, I can easily give up running if there are going to be stress fractures from doing it. I can lift instead, since my shoulder is well-healed by now and I’ve got a gym available at work.
And! I have health insurance, so I don’t have to just guess whether it’s a fracture, I can actually find out and get treatment. What a radical departure from the last 10 years.
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