badgerbag

I'm enjoying small things like a shower with the chair in there (much safer feeling) and lying in bed now feeling scrubbed and letting my feet be sock and moon-boot free while the Voltaren gel dries. My feet are in the down comforter feeling very strange!

Lunch was pad see-ew and curried fish and was very good.

I read Caddy's World (or was that yesterday?), and The Eventer's Trilogy (which was fantastic, and made me think of Marion Chesney but modern and with horses) then tried to read The Quantum Thief and just found it annoying.

Then I read Hilary McKay's Wishing For Tomorrow and, y'all, it was the best book ever. It fixed almost all the things. It fixed or sort of healed up things I didn't know were even problems. I cried for Lavinia. I cried for Miss Minchin. I was so happy for the real happy ending ! The only thing was I would have liked more of a glimpse of (and resolution for) Ram Dass. Oh, my god, though, this book is a joy for anyone who has read A Little Princess far too often or too deeply. It was a masterful and complicated feat of engagement. There was nothing facile about it. It effectively rewrite a million other girls' books while it was at it. Hilary McKay is The Magic!!!

Ideally Bare Numeric Impression giZmo - and a place you can try out different mathematical formulas for generating sounds.

I used to spend hours messing with my commodore 64 doing different waveforms .... a million years ago! this is so amazingly cool!

More stuff on it is here and there is an even better code generator and visualizer somewhere else but I can't find the URL.... will stick it here when zond7 wakes up.

ETA: Here is the even better link to a slightly more beautiful equation twiddler/visualizer.

I read Solar Storms by Linda Hogan and it was extremely good! Intense, sad, amazing, and then increasingly complicated and political.

Then read Caddy's World, and wished I had all that series here to read over again! They're at Rook's house. But I just realized (from the ads at the back of the Kindle edition) that McKay wrote a sequel to A Little Princess. That can't possibly fail to be good!!!!

Yesterday A. was out of school for the lunar new year, having had some sort of chinese dragon parade at school the week before and obviously, lessons about it. I woke up to find her in the middle of dragon puppet things and masks. She was planning to bang on pots and pans to scare bad spirits away from the house.

Over the course of the day this evolved into how we were going to have a party and a parade -- since yatima was going to come over (with kids) and also, her other dad was going to come pick her up for the week. She cleaned up her bit of the house, and made her bed, and cleaned off the kitchen table. She got money from us and went to the corner store "for that kind of stuff that you have at parties that is nuts, and fruit, and things all mixed together". She made a decorative placemat and set out bowls of food (the trail mix, and pretzels, blueberries, chocolate). Then drew a map on her whiteboard, of the house and yard, with the parade route marked. She cut out masks for J. and C. to color. She was weirdly angelic like this all day long, planning her party.

Then she made them color the masks and they all marched around screaming through the room, the kitchen, the back where the trash bins are, and around the corner back to the front door. Cutest thing ever!

Yatima brought me three horse books: Horse Heaven which I predict I won't be able to bear; Horse of Air by Lucy Rees; and a trilogy by Caroline Akrill. While I did own about 50 breyer models and went to a run down "ranch" in 6th grade for lessons which were mostly brushing very nasty horses (my face streaming with snot and sweat), and doing pelvic thrusts with a leathery old diesel dyke actually named Dale Evans in her air conditioned "office" shack covered in pencil sketches of horse heads done by generations of adoring pre-teens, I did not actually have Horse Fever. I do think fondly of Dale sometimes as I do physical therapy exercises and keep my tailbone tucked. The models were pretty though. I had one that was the Queen -- a big white one that was my mother's (with broken feet from my having slept with her as a toddler), a matching smaller white one that was the princess and a little boring but sweet. The others were Thunder, Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, Nestor, Nereus, Sebastian, Viola, and the Palomino who was very stuck up because she had a gold chain and a fancy saddle attached to her, prissily raising a curving forefoot. Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, Sebastian, and Viola used to have a lot of good adventures around the house and yard while the older horses stayed back at the Horse Village being old and wise.

Anyway, I'll try valiantly to read all these Pony Craze books for yatima's sake but I have absolutely no desire to ride around on a giant smelly beast that I'm allergic to unless that giant beast is a) the fastest powerchair in the West b) a darling cute little Vespa with crutch holders attached, which loves only me.

Everybody, thank you for the book recs! It was very moving for me (a bit unexpectedly) to ask and get so many beautiful recommendations. My main coping strategy the last few weeks has been to read constantly and check out of reality. It's incredibly helpful to have a new list of books to look forward to!

I have two walking boots now and they are helpful. Total immobility does make my ankles hurt less. But it is also really hard to keep them on all the time. And I'm not sure that's the right thing to do.

I am considering schemes of obtaining a free powerchair and maybe asking zond7's neighbors if we could store it in their garage. There isn't anywhere else to put it. There's a back walkway but it would block it too much for the people who live back there. If I paved a bit of the front garden with bricks and locked it with ulocks or something.... but someone would steal it, I think.

I am readjusting a lot of my expectations internally and trying to imagine the short term, medium term, and long term future in various ways depending on how much this improves or doesn't.

Right now I just wish I had better pain drugs and a toilet easier to get up from. I could use a high seat and a handrail really bad .

Both kids are here, it is crowded (one room...) but we are doing okay. we had a great time watching Star Wars Uncut (http://www.starwarsuncut.com/) which is the BEST THING EVER.

Today the ankles are not as bad. Yesterday I was crying by this time and, ugh, well, it was bad all day and much of the night. I think I got out of bed somethingn like 6 times total. I think the Special Cookie Dough and the decent sleep helped, as did the ankle boot staying on all night. I am going to try harder to nap, today. I read a bit more about achilles tendon problems. Apparently it is now called tendonopathy as it is not actually inflammation and it is extremely unclear what, if anything, actually helps it. I am disheartened by this and feel that this time, I may actually be totally screwed. But I'm trying not to freak out about that, stay calm, keep ankles still. Ortho clinic is next thursday. Rheum. clinic is next Friday.

I read Daniel Abraham's The Dragon's Path yesterday because it was included as a free book along with Leviathan's Wake. It turned out to be pretty great! It was very readable and the gender stuff didn't piss me off. There's an orphan girl who turns out to be a BANKING SUPERGENIUS. Yes... a fantasy novel in which the heroic action is all around financial investment strategies! It was wildly compelling and yet deeply suspicious. Meanwhile there was a guy who in many fantasy novels would be the hero -- a scroll-loving history nerd and translator who gets bullied by all the other noble dudes in the army. I think the arc there would usually be that he is accidentally catapulted into rule and magically is very competent at it and is a fabulous philosopher king! Here.... well, fuck, not so much. Socially inept nerds do not rule Abraham's fantasy worlds...

The best bit was that there was practically a whole chapter where two middle aged guys discuss the teenage orphan girl. They don't discuss her sexuality or her looks, either. They talk about how to best support her fabulous genius! One of them carefully leads the other to realize his impulses to chivalrously rescue her are all about his own Issues and are just silly and wrong and counterproductive. They then refer to this conversation as a touchstone later in the book and continue evolving in their Ways To Support the Financial Genius. We may need a name for this. It's rare to have two women characters who talk to each other about something that is not a man, but it maybe even more rare to have two male characters who talk to each other about a woman's work without denying her agency.

I bought Abraham's first book, A Shadow in Summer, and it's interesting and has some great female characters (including a totally kickass and important 58 year old heroic accountant woman who has a painful hip and walks with a cane) but it's rubbing me the wrong way because the root of the story is around what a horrible crime a non consensual abortion is, abortion being recognized as sad if you're not a whore, but certainly legal, but somehow an unimaginably worse and more scandalous and painful crime than, say, widespread poverty, slavery, whores being beaten up and killed, or a giant world war. One of the main dudes has a painful past which resulted in all the subsequent painful drama of his life and that painful past is... dun dun duuuuun... that his first girlfriend had an abortion and he didn't want her to and it proved somehow that she didn't really love him. So while I like the book and the characters, I don't like that the entire book is feeling like it has a rather nasty anti-abortion message.

This paper, Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal(link to a pdf) is about conversational analysis and patterns of refusal, explaining how people commonly understand the many ways to say "no", brilliantly applied to anti-rape education. It's worth reading this entire paper and thinking about the politics of the advice we give (and maybe follow.) I am still a fan of practicing the direct "no", yet this makes so much sense! There have got to be some studies of whether the direct "no" is used more by people with higher amounts of privilege (which I think is the case.) Who is comfortable saying "no" to whom, more directly, more often, without palliatives or explanation? that's the only bit left out of this paper and I bet there have been plenty of studies about that very thing. There are also clearly lots of cultural differences in how people are supposed to ask or implicitly ask.... or avoid asking questions directly that might make the other person have to directly refuse. Food for thought.

Here is a quote from a bit near the end, where they have the heart of the article.

In the present study, CA has made clear that there are normatively understood ways of doing refusals which are generally understood to be refusals, and consequently we believe that there is no reason why feminists concerned about sexual coercion should respond to men’s allegations of their ‘ambiguity’ by taking upon ourselves the task of inventing new ways of doing refusals. As feminists, we have allowed men (disingenuously claiming not to understand normative conversational conventions) to set the agenda, such that we have accepted the need to educate women to produce refusals which men cannot claim to have ‘misunderstood’. This, in turn, has led only to an escalation of men’s claims to have ‘misunderstood’, to be ‘misunderstood’, and, in general, to be ‘ignorant’ about women’s (allegedly different and special) ways of communicating. Men’s self-interested capacity for ‘misunderstanding’ will always outstrip women’s earnest attempts to clarify and explain.

So now the doctor who just for handiness' sake let us call Dr. Homeopathy, just sent me the referral, which, great. But it's to the wrong clinic - one I've never heard of instead of the one I've been to before (UCSF) and liked and specifically asked for and to which she said "Okay" and which is like "world class ankle rehab clinic".... So I emailed back politely and asked for her to please switch it to the clinic I've been to before.

Amazing.... I am also just making an appointment now for early next week with a new doctor in the same group of practices (since they now have a bunch of my records and it is convenient.) Unlike Dr. Homeopathy, he has a lot of enthusiastic Yelp reviews which may not mean anything but seems a good sign; he doesn't mention Integrative Holistic Nutrition or Subtle Flowers or the like. I don't like to go to male doctors, dentists, or therapists, for obvious reasons, but his reviews are good.

So I went back to the doctor today (at her suggestion!) A bit worried because in her email she said "you shouldn't be in so much pain" which in my experience people usually mean as "I don't believe that you ARE in pain." But, whatever, I went figuring I would be a lot more calm than last week and could explain why I want a referral to the orthopedic clinic.

She greeted me by saying kind of sharply, "Why are you here? And what do you want me to do for you? "

Not a good opening...

I said that I am still in pain, having trouble walking and functioning, and am still thinking that some sort of physical therapy or referral to the orthopedic clinic might be helpful. I am hoping she can be my primary care doctor and coordinate things so that if one specialist isn't helping there is some other avenue, and I needed somewhere central to send my medical records. When I emailed her last week and monday it was because I was a bit panicked that the rheumatology clinic wasn't going to make me an appointment until I had had specific tests and I wanted to get things into place.

"Well I just don't understand why you're here adn what you think I can do."

I said that what I got from our first appointment was that she was focusing on my medical history in general and she thinks that there is some rheumatological problem, but my immediate situation, from my perspective, is that I have a history of some back and knee problems, that were getting quite a lot better and that I was managing well, that were under control, and I was walking really well and then I overdid the walking too quickly and damaged my ankles, probably my ankle tendons.

"Well why would an ORTHOPEDIST be helpful"

"Because I have this immediate mobility problem... in my ankles... and last year I had an ankle problem, they xrayed it to check it, gave me a boot for it, gave me advice about PT to do for it, and it got better..."

So she referred me back to that clinic at UCSF.

Then I asked her to sign my medical leave forms and she said she could not do it then, she had to have a separate appointment or do it next week or something and I said fine. Then she said it would be pointless to do it because she had no diagnosis and could write nothing but "ankle pain" on it and it would be denied because disability forms were really complicated and difficult and unlikely to go through. I said this is state short term medical leave and not complicated... not like the federal one ... and she was just openly hostile at this point. I can't understand it. I stayed really calm though.

I said I thought I had tendonitis and that three weeks ago I was walking really well and now I can't, I'm not super experienced dealing with my ankles not working, it is usually my knees and back, I could use help, and that's about it.

She then told me (again, really meanly) "well, you're just going to get bilateral tendonitis over and over, because you're not looking at the underlying cause."

Okay then... so, she thinks I do have tendinitis, but she can't write it on the form?

And she thinks it's appropriate to tell me I'm going to get it "over and over"?

I don't understand why she would be so hostile to the idea of physical therapy, and to me personally. It was truly awful. I'm angry. The whole thing was much like how I was used to being treated when I was 22, uninsured, and going to the ER at the county hospital, which is to say, like a pain-med-seeking crack whore. I don't think that crack whores in pain should be treated like that either. I'm just saying.

She is so fired.

She didn't mention the vitamin d deficiency (which she in email said she thought might be part of my problem) She finally did look at my ankles near the end of our "conversation". I explained that they are painful when I flex my foot up, but sideways motion also hurts. It is just much worse with flexing up, with nasty pain in the back of my ankle and low in the calf, which is why I htink I have tendinitis probably in that achilles tendon.

At some point also near the end of this, I simply said, "This feels really different to me, how you'r talking to me feels really different to me than how we talked last week when I first saw you. What's different? Did something that I did make some difference? Was it that I emailed you wrongly in some way? Or in my lab results or records?" She didn't answer that but went on some more about "What I wanted from her". I'm glad I asked that question clearly and calmly, anyway.

I am going to look at the other clinics in the same network and pick a less "naturopath" type of doctor. I wonder if I alienated her by in the first appointment saying I was not interested in homeopathy? She was otherwise totally rational in that appointment and I liked her. She was nice, and she did a fairly rational thing in ordering blood tests and sending me to a specialist. I don't understand what changed.

I figure I will now just go to the orthopedist and rheumatologist simultaneously, and maybe will make another (pointless...) appointment to trya nd find a primary care physician but I will treat that as more of an interview that I'm paying $30 for to find out if we can work together.

I am a nice, and rational, and polite person, and I try very hard to be healthy and it is NOT MY FAULT.

I belatedly started reading (and reading in the wake of) rachelmanija's Read-a-Thon. Her book reviews are always super helpful and interesting and I have gotten many great book recs from her journal over the years so am happy to support her read-a-thon! I encourage you to support it too!

Extra bonus..

a) I have some Amazon credit burning a hole in my pocket right now.
b) I am bored, restless, and stuck in bed.

So that means I can read along with her -- at least partially...

So far I have read Le Guin's Voices and then its sequel, Powers. (I read Gifts, the first book, a while ago.) I love this series and will recommend it to lots of people. We definitely need more books about adventuring revolutionary poet-librarian-magicians!

I also read Rosemary Sutcliff's Frontier Wolf which didn't please me as well. I have never been able to roll with Sutcliff. I get what she is doing but still find something deadly boring and annoying about her books, which are so clearly meant to be inspiring and awesome and which have lots of preciously beautiful description scenes. Every few years I try one again thinking that I might have missed something or might change my mind.

Frontier Wolf did it again. I could not like it! Angsty young Roman screws up, is sent to the border to lead a fort. By any rights I should automatically like this! Then lots of jolly bonding and proving himself to the rough semi barbarian border guards of the fort, and with the local Celtic tribes complete with slashy wrestling and wolf-killing and competing with the young new chieftain of the tribe. Why don't I like it?! I can't pin it down but it has something to do with a sort of flat sameness of tone, and the way it is supposed to be eliding or cleverly implying but which make me wince.

I also just don't CARE about this angsty dude and don't like the setup that one's coming of age happens by being upper class and successfully bossing some lower class people and also fighting and killing one's dear friends because of, omg duty. It feels like such a moldering trope to cultivate young people for the trenches, which Sutcliff fetishizes like crazy. (This from me, who can shed a tear even while reading sentimenally warmongering nationalistic tripe like "The Lost Prince"...)

But I know tons of people I respect people love these books, so go figure.

I kept thinking of Keladry at the border fort in Protector of the Small and how much better that series is!

Onward, to The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, which I've heard of for a long time but have never read!