snippy

The gracious kalmn gave me the age of 40 to tell stories about myself.

I lived in:
A 1909 bungalow with 3 bedrooms, one bath, a basement, a large yard, and a semi-attached garage, in a former trolley suburb that had been absorbed and urbanized by the bigger city. The house had been badly (very badly) remodeled a few times and was apparently a rental for 30 or more years before I bought it when I was 29. So at that point I'd lived there 11 years, with both my children--although also at that point I'd divorced my first husband (with whom I bought the house), spent a few years dating madly, and married my second husband.

I drove:
I can't remember whether I'd had my 3rd car (a 1998 Ford Taurus) totaled out from under me at that point so I was either driving that or the 1989(?) Ford Festiva that belonged to my (second) husband.

I was in a relationship with:
My dear sinanju, who is still my primary and husband. We'd been married for three years and had worked out some big issues; I think we were doing pretty well that year.

I feared:
My children moving away from me to live with their dad-and sure enough, each of them did so for high school.

I worked at:
The same place I work now, as a legal secretary. In November of this year I will have worked here for 25 years.

I wanted to be:
Happy, creative, more social, and less afraid. I turned 40 just under 2 months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and I was very afraid that the US was about to start a war like World War II. I have mostly achieved those goals, but it didn't happen as quickly as I wanted.

Apparently being in recovery from surgery does not give you magic immunity to the chest cold that has been going around, because I have a sore throat and have been coughing up stuff like mad. DRAT. At least the vicodin I take for the ear surgery pain helps minimize the coughing, too.

The surgery recovery is going well. I can chew, a little (nothing like steak or raw vegetables!), and I've been walking around the apartment a lot. Maybe tomorrow I'll get dressed and try going outside for a walk. The wound is starting to scab and heal, sometimes it even itches (no, I don't scratch it). I do tire very easily, just as the surgeon warned.

I don't like how my head looks. The hair is not exactly shaved over the wound but it's cut very short, and my face and head are still a little swollen. I've been looking around online for how to tie "modest" scarves, mostly at Muslim and Christian sites and some chemo sites, and I think when I have enoug energy to shop I will look for some scarves at the stores that match my work clothing.

Slept well last night. Surgeon removed bandage this morning. I walked-with a walker-and ate jello and ice cream.

Last weekend I had a really good visit with my LDR. The weather in the Bay Area was beautiful; we spent part of one day at Filoli, and that was a particularly good day in that I had a lot of energy and managed to walk around to all the parts I wanted to see.

I'm at one week till surgery, so today was blood draw day and also allergy shots day, 3 punctures total. The blood draw is necessary because I didn't pass my pre-op physical: on the blood panel, my potassium was too low. I've been taking extra potassium for a week so probably will pass this time. Everything else checked out just fine, and this morning at the allergy shot clinic I did terrific on lung volume, my highest ever.

Before the surgery I still have a pre-op appointment with the surgeon and a pre-op phone call from the hospital to get through; I have a list of questions for each. I also have a form to finish and submit for short-term disability through my union. The disability pay is bupkes but importantly it will preserve my health insurance, which otherwise requires at least 80 paid hours per calendar month for eligibility.

I still have moments of general anxiety (that is, I'm not worried about a specific thing, I'm just afraid of the surgery), usually when I'm tired.

I've got things set up at work for a temp, and asked a co-worker to water my 15 plants.

Can you suggest anything else that might make my recovery easier?

I watch the tv series Elementary, in which Sherlock Holmes is a recovering addict in New York City and Joan Watson (played by Lucy Liu) is a former doctor who was hired to be his "sober companion," that is, the person who helps him keep off drugs by being with him almost all the time and demanding random drug tests and supporting non-addict behaviors. And so I am promoting this entry right here, which is an excellent discussion of Joan Watson as a character, and especially when you read the comments, which point out how great she is as a portrayal of an Asian American woman without stereotypical problematic behaviors.

Go forth and read!

Great article by Spencer Kornhaber at The Atlantic about Seth McFarlane's performance as host of the 2013 Oscar Awards broadcast.

The fight over what's OK and what's not OK in comedy is deeply worn out, but it's a fight MacFarlane asked us again to have—almost explicitly, with that Captain Kirk shtick serving as a trolling prebuttal to the tsk-tsking media—on one of pop-culture's biggest nights.

It shouldn't be hard to come up with a sensible position on this. Everything, including punchlines about the Jews cutting non-Jews out of Hollywood, snickers about women faking the flu to lose weight, and cracks that there's no need to try to understand what Salma Hayek's saying because she's so hot, is "OK." It's a free country, etc. But that doesn't mean those jokes aren't hurtful, obvious, or dumb. It doesn't mean they don't make the world a worse place. Humor, after all, can be an incredible weapon for social progress, but it can also be regressive: The more we pass off old stereotypes, rooted in hate, as normal—as MacFarlane did again and again last night—the longer those stereotypes, and their ability to harm people, will be in place.

I found Mr. McFarlane offensive but more importantly boring. I don't remember laughing at any of his bits, and he didn't even do a good job of introducing the presenters--and those are the two main jobs of the Oscars host, comedy and introductions. I turned off the broadcast about 90 minutes in; I can always find out who won and what the best parts were by reading social media the next day.

Note to self: don't challenge other people's identity. Remember other people's identity may be tied up in subjects you enjoy analyzing. Many people do not enjoy picking apart their identity and analyzing it, even though you do.

I haven't been posting much about myself because for a few months I was on hold, doing only basic maintenance, while waiting to see an ENT who specializes in vestibular disorders including vertigo. I finally saw him the second week in January.

He was great. Calm, spent the first 15 or 20 minutes asking open-ended questions and letting me say anything I needed about how I've been feeling, then did a basic exam and started talking. I must admit I zoned a bit at the three multi-syllabic Latin terms for the possible diagnoses, and although he offered to write them out I turned him down. He ordered a bunch more tests, including a hearing exam, a CAT scan of my head, and some other visual and auditory tests. He also suggested I get out of the glasses I was wearing--more specifically, the progressive lenses I use to correct my nearsighted and astygmatic vision while also giving me correction at computer work distance and reading/handwork distance. He suggested single vision glasses (one for distance, one or more for close work) or maybe contacts plus drug-store quality reading glasses.

I was able to do one round of testing immediately after seeing the doctor because another patient had canceled. That afternoon I scheduled an eye exam and went on to get a pair of distance vision glasses made, and also got contacts plus reading glasses. The contacts are working out well, although switching everything around is not yet routine.

After a couple of weeks, but before I finished the schedule of tests, I got a call from his office to start physical therapy. I started PT two weeks ago. You might be asking yourself what does PT have to do with vertigo?

Part of vertigo is balance problems, and at the first PT appointment, I worked on walking differently so I was less likely to fall. It also turns out that improving circulation in the head, neck, and shoulders can affect the inner ear. I've been doing gentle stretches of some muscles, and isometric exercises to strengthen other muscles, and I am actually experiencing brief moments with no vertigo, as well as a general (if minor) reduction in overall vertigo during the day. It's still episodic: I still have really bad vertigo sometimes, but it doesn't usually last more than an hour or two and then I go back to only having mild to moderate symptoms (with the drugs). I'm still taking meclizine three times a day to minimize nausea and dizziness, and when it wears off I definitely have more vertigo.

I'm also having less brain fog, and less of that nonspecific "feeling of impending doom" (both of which the ENT confirmed were normal symptoms of whatever I have). Even so, about once a week I have a really bad couple of hours where I just want to curl up and die, give up on even trying to get better, because I'm so tired and overwhelmed with all the changes. New glasses, contacts, going to PT twice a week, all the appointments for the tests and the eye exam, plus work and home. I'm still mostly unable to read or knit or do any other kind of creative or pleasure pastimes other than (1) listening to books on my iPod and (2) watching TV.

I have to keep reminding myself that the ENT also said he expects me to make a full recovery. He didn't say how long it would take, or what (other than the PT I'm already doing) the treatment would entail. I see him again in a few weeks and will ask those questions.

In the meantime I could really use some kind words and some encouragement.

I am participating in the 2013 Month of Letters, which begins today. Please let me know if you want a letter, and if you don't want to put your mailing address in a comment, you can email it to my Month of Letters address, lettermo2013@yahoo.com.

I've been slowly moving away from use of Livejournal over the last few years. First it was changes to the service that I didn't like. Then there were a couple of outages that lasted more than a few minutes--some lasted days. Other people stopped posting (don't know whether they moved to other platforms or just stopped). Some of my reading list died, and I grieved them. I tried other services. Some of them went away (deadjournal) and some were very different from LJ but I found I liked them (twitter, tumblr). And this one, Dreamwidth, became not just a replacement for LJ but an expansion of it, a service that values user experience and continues to improve my experience of using it.

Livejournal has been bouncing up and down again a lot over the last few weeks. In its defense some will claim it's not LJ's fault, there must be a denial of service attack or other outside interference. But LJ is a commercial business now, and has been for a very long time--I don't feel any personal loyalty or obligation to grant it slack. The fact that it has become unusable so much of the time means it's a source of frustration instead of pleasure in my life. And so I'm moving further away.

Some people only blog on LJ and I will continue to try to read them on a regular basis there. Some people have a much more active following on LJ and therefore comment discussions on their LJ version are more interesting, and I'll watch for that. But I'm paring down my LJ reading list to only people I can't find anywhere else, so that when I do look at LJ, if it's even available each time, I'll have a shorter list to look through and might manage it before another service outage.

I'll be taking journals off my reading/sharing list ("friends list" as LJ calls it) over the next few weeks. Old journals that haven't posted in a while, people I can find on another service, and RSS feeds I can read by going directly to the site instead (my bookmarks list will grow) will be trimmed.

Be sure to comment if you have a low-activity journal but want to stay connected on LJ. Otherwise find me at one or more of the following places I drop my thoughts:

snippy.dreamwidth.org (personal essays)

gelasticjew.blogspot.com (politics, philosophy, random links I found interesting)

gelasticjew on twitter.com (observations on my daily commute, plus re-tweets of people I want to think about)

gelasticjew on tumblr.com (some feminism, some fandom stuff about popular culture)

Hope to see you around the 'nets.