Pretty Terrible

Spring has finally sprung here and it’s glorious. My pollinator garden and hydrangeas are coming up, the rose bushes have new leaves, and the grass is greening up. I ventured into the spider-infested shed this afternoon to haul out a couple of chairs so I could enjoy some afternoon sunshine and work on an essay. We need to get an umbrella for the table and then it’ll be perfect.

I’ve held off on actually using our patio because of the difficult and fraught relationship we have with our neighbor, and I’ve decided that’s stupid. It’s our yard and we have an absolute right to use it. And someday, we’ll get a fence and never have to watch her mow her lawn twice a week ever again. And Mission: Backyard Lawn Eradication can begin. And Mission: Backyard Hammock.

[Read more…] about “I was your sorry ever after”: Links for 2019-04-05

I deviated from my plan of working on this post bit by bit through the week and that was not a good life decision because I have other things I want to do and it’s been an hour and a half of sifting links and being distracted by the internet and I cannot sleep in tomorrow because I am a genius who has a therapy appointment every Friday at 8:15 am. And boy oh boy, do I need that appointment this week.

I was reading Emilia Clarke’s essay about her brain aneurysms as one does and, well. Well. The first one she had, the subarachnoid hemorrhage? The one that kills 30% of the people who have one? The one which is technically a stroke?

One thing I didn’t mention in my post from last November that I had seizures in the ER. Caused by a subarachnoid hemorrhage. The medication they had me on to prevent any convulsions was the one I was refusing to take because it made the inside of my mouth feel like raw hamburger. I dealt with weeks of guilt-tripping and near-bullying from medical professionals before they prescribed me another anti-convulsant (which I took happily).

At no point was I told how serious a subarachnoid hemorrhage could be. I have no idea what caused it–I did not have an aneurysm (I just read the cerebral angiogram report) and I didn’t have a traumatic head injury and there’s no congenital deformation to the blood vessels in that area. So who knows?

Based on how information was withheld from me during my first hospital stay, I shouldn’t be surprised by this and yet. Here we are. I just found out by reading a celebrity’s essay about her brain and its problems that I had a fucking stroke eight months ago and that I’m lucky to not be dead or brain-damaged.

I really wish I could still drink.

[Read more…] about “They’ll try to tell you what it all means”: Links for 2019-03-22

I’ve been fighting with technology all week at work. We’ve ported some applications into our environment and not only are they are still pretty unstable, they’re also replacing some applications which we’re deprecating in, oh, about six weeks. And I need to writing training documentation and figure out data conversions–without access to learn the tools myself. So that’s been fun.

However, my lunchtime reading is Ann Leckie’s newest novel, The Raven Tower, and boy, is it good. I’m about halfway through and at some point I’m pretty sure I’m going to break and inhale the balance of the book one evening. I’m also working my way through The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. It’s quite a disturbing read and Stout’s matter of fact descriptions of horrible actions doesn’t help. But it’s also interesting and not a particularly long book.

Hugo nominations close tonight and I still haven’t started my ballot. I suppose I’d better get on that, eh?

[Read more…] about “And some days I can’t even trust myself”: Links for 2019-03-15

I feel like an awful lot of us have been struggling with loving art that’s made by people who are terrible human beings. At the very least, I know it’s something that I struggle with.

When I was little–no older than 9 or 10–we’d get the occasional free weekend of HBO and that would always mean there’d be the opportunity to watch Bill Cosby: Himself, which was, for whatever reason, something that I absolutely loved. The idea of watching the show again, now that I know what Cosby was doing to women, makes me sick to my stomach.

And on the other hand, there are three Michael Jackson songs that I listen to on the regular: “Beat It,” “Billie Jean,” and “Thriller” (I’ve been thinking about culling “Billie Jean,” though). And I know what Jackson was doing to young boys and it also makes me sick to my stomach.  There’s clearly part of me that still enjoys fragments of his art–interestingly, the pieces I enjoy the most are the easiest to separate from Jackson as a person, the ones which can be read as fiction. (And would I buy any of his music now? No.)

I don’t know how to reconcile this contradiction within myself; I don’t know if it’s possible. I don’t know if the contradiction has to be reconciled–terrible people can make beautiful art. I’m fully capable of recognizing that both those things can be true at the same time.

People are complicated and we all make the best choices we can.

[Read more…] about “You wear your heart on a ripped unraveled sleeve”: Links for 2019-03-08

I know, I know. It’s been a minute or two since the last one of these.

I’ve been collecting links for several months now and every Thursday I’d think about pulling together a post and…I just wouldn’t. So I did a lot of thinking about why I wasn’t. Initially, it was because I was too tired. This was true through November and December–going back to work was great but exhausting. Then it became clear that my reluctance was about something else. It’s not that I don’t want to share interesting things with people, it’s just that I was putting so much pressure on myself to do it perfectly.

I am a somewhat anxious person and not doing something perfectly is a major trigger on that front; so I sat down and did a lot of thinking. And what I decided is this: instead of spending hours on Thursday pulling it together I would, instead, spread the work out over the course of the week–take a bit of time every day and do a little bit of work.

Let’s see if it works out.

[Read more…] about “Darkness Has a Hunger That’s Insatiable”: Links for 2019-03-01