Pretty Terrible

Pop Culture Criticism by Natalie Luhrs

Weeknotes 2 – 2019-04-29

We had all the boxwoods and azaleas and random evergreens taken out of our yard this week and the crew also weeded and mulched and everything looks so good. I want to get two more bee balms and something in the yellow-orange family to fill in a hole where the moonbeam coreopsis was (didn’t make it through the winter and I’m not too upset about it as I didn’t care for the foliage). I’m thinking either rudbeckia or a yellow echinacea cultivar, depending on what the garden center has in stock.

I’ve also gone ahead and hired people to mow my lawn this year so I don’t have to expend the emotional labor on fretting over what my awful neighbor will think and on chivvying P. into mowing the lawn (which he hates to do, which I do understand, but it’s gotta get done).

Reading/Watching/Listening

Went to see Avengers: Endgame Friday afternoon–I enjoyed it immensely and while I found the fat jokes troubling and not funny, I didn’t find them as upsetting as I thought I would, based on the social media rhetoric surrounding the issue. I found the film to be a generally satisfying ending to this phase of the MCU and there were a couple of moments that just cracked my heart open, there’s really no other way to describe the feeling.

I also read Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning and liked it an awful lot. It was a super fast read and, in some ways, reminded me of the early Anita Blake books–like the first three or four. But more self-aware, in a lot of ways. I really loved that there wasn’t a Diné to English dictionary at the end and that the meaning of specific words was left as an exercise for the reader to either puzzle out or research. The worldbuilding is fascinating and I’m looking forward to reading more.

Still plugging away at Nevala-Lee’s Astounding and so far my biggest takeaway is that John W. Campbell was an egotistical jerkface. Possibly moreso that L. Ron Hubbard, if such a thing is even possible.

Work

Finished up a few projects this week, made some incremental progress on a few others. Slow and steady.

Medical

The big news of the week is this: my stent is out. I had an endoscopic procedure on Thursday to remove it and it went well. My GI doctor let me bring it home and it’s sitting on my desk next to the keyboard right now.

The other news is that I need another paracentesis (so. much. fluid. y’all) and I’m getting an appointment with a hematology/vascular doctor. I was supposed to have the info I needed for both these things on Friday, but didn’t hear from my GI doctor’s admin, so I have to call tomorrow. I also have to call the pharmacy to find out what the situation is with the delay on filling the Eliquis scrip that was sent over on Thursday; my insurance covers it, so it shouldn’t be a problem. And I need to call my mail order pharmacy about my Creon refill because their website wants me to pay $650 for it and nope, I’ve met my deductible and it should only be $125 for a 3 month supply until I hit my out of pocket maximum (at which point it’ll be “free”).

I felt fine on Friday, but I’ve spent most of Saturday and Sunday in bed feeling miserable and sorry for myself.

I’ve also decided that being sick is basically a full time job and I don’t like it.

Productivity

Fell a bit off the planner wagon this week, but did take the time to re-write my master list. I need to do a better job at breaking things down into smaller steps so I can continue on with the slow and steady.

Weeknotes 1 – 2019-04-22

I’ve been enjoying Sunita’s Weeknotes so much that I’ve decided to copy her. There seem to be a bunch of people doing these, and it seems like a good way for me to get more writing done. I’ll be writing these on Sundays but posting them on Mondays–think of them as a week in review.

Reading/Watching/Listening

I’ve been trying to get some reading done every day. This is, weirdly, harder than you think it might be. When I’m in the office, I shut my door at lunchtime and read while I’m eating. Last week I finally finished N.K. Jemisin’s How Long ’til Black Future Month? and started Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The Jemisin collection was fantastic and I’m not far enough into Astounding to really say one way or another, but the introduction and first few chapters are great. Very glad to see Nevala-Lee acknowledge Asimov’s history as a serial groper right up front, too.

I also reread Lois McMaster Bujold’s Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen and it was as lovely as I remembered it being.

The other book I’m slogging my way through is Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human. The essay I read based on one of the chapterlets in this book (there are 100 of them; I wonder if he has plans to nail a copy to Facebook’s doors and one-up Martin Luther) intrigued me enough to pick up the book and I wish I hadn’t. As the book goes on, he becomes increasingly shrill and doesn’t seem to quite understand how certain communities (ahem, fandom) work online. His perspective as a white man also pervades the book to an uncomfortable degree.

I did my annual rewatch of Jesus Christ Superstar this week and realized that Judas is the Biblical equivalent of that scold on Twitter who is upset that your concerns and worries about the world aren’t congruent with theirs. See all the people who don’t think people should be sad about Notre Dame being on fire.

Work

Work is working along. We’re rapidly approaching the date when we’ll be spun off into an independent company and hooboy, I’m not ready. We still have a ton of work to do in order to get the system we’re shifting some of my work into functional for us to use, but I did get read/write access to one of the databases last week, so that’s a good thing.

I’m having some feelings about the spin, but I think that’s only natural.

In the long run, everything will work out as it needs to and I’m trying to keep that in mind when I run into various brick walls.

Medical

Let’s see… I’m still on tons of medications and I still have a fair number of bad days mixed in with the good. The bad days aren’t as bad as they used to be, so that’s a good thing.

My surgeon thinks it’s still too risky to remove my gallbladder, so I get to live with the creeping fear that it’s going to try to kill me again for the foreseeable future. He wants to have the vascular problem in my abdomen corrected and my stent removed and my nutrition to be stable before doing the surgery. My stent is coming out this week, I had labs done to check my nutrition last week, and I’m hoping to talk to my GI doctor about the vascular problem and get a referral to a specialist so I can start working on that.

I also had to have my left breast reimaged. I had a mammogram a couple of weeks ago and the radiologist noticed a difference between last year’s mammogram and this year’s so they wanted to take another look to be sure. Everything came back normal and the difference was due to the weight loss I had last year (I lost a lot of weight in the hospital, an awful lot of it in my breasts), but they still want me to come back in 6 months for more imaging.

Productivity

I have really been struggling with executive function lately, so I’ve tried to externalize it as much a possible to a planner. I’ve moved from the free form bullet journal style to a Hobonichi Techo because I need the dated pages. So far, it’s working out well. I’m keeping a master list of work tasks and moving them into the Techo when I want to work on them and it’s helping me not feel overwhelmed (see rapidly approaching spin above). I’m also able to keep track of when I have doctor appointments a bit better, since I tend to have one or two a week if you include therapy which I totally do.

I also took care of the overflowing inbox–well over an inch of medical paperwork that needed to be filed. I need to sort through it and figure out what actually needs to be kept as opposed to shredded, but our shredder is broken (a new one is on order). But it’s such a relief to have the empty box there on the shelf next to my desk, not stressing me out.

Okay, time to go put away laundry and sort/fold headscarves. The excitement is overwhelming, I am sure.

“I was your sorry ever after”: Links for 2019-04-05


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

“They’ll try to tell you what it all means”: Links for 2019-03-22

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