inihibit

I'm not blogging too much these days. First it was from lack of time. Now that I've finally slipped into a groove with work, it's pain. My hands and forearms are SO damned sore. Did I do something to make this happen? This is the first thing I wonder and it's actually more about self empowerment than not in that if I did it, I can undo it. At least this is how my not very explicit reasoning goes with things like this.

"Things like this" is the uneloquent term for a lengthening list of physical ailments. To say that it brings me down to add a new sometimes disabling habit of my body to the list of sometimes (or always) disabling habits of my body is the understatement of all understatements. Here's the latest impact. While this pain was at its peaks (there were several), I could not hold a book to read let alone type or push a pen to express myself in writing. I have been literate and writing for so long that this feels like taking away my air.

Ah crap. As with so many other difficult things in my life, I find anger is safer. Yeah, how's that? When you can't fall apart, anger is safer than desolation because anger can impel you to action where as the more sorrowful feelings don't (usually). So who am I pissed off at? I'm going to go with the insurance company for canceling my refill of pain medication in the middle of the very badly needed refill this weekend. I berated the pharmacy staff into giving me three free pills (see, anger is useful) but now I have to call my GYN doctor to have him do the authorization and he's going to be like "?" because who the hell is he to comment on the GI stuff that makes this particular pain med necessary? In my idealistic view of things, he could and therefore SHOULD be able to comment on it what with him being a fucking MD and all, but I know better than to expect this. The division of labor in the practice of medicine has the effect of treating the patient as if s/he were a set of disembodied parts, thus my gynecologist won't comment on the need for me to take a selective COX2 inhibitor rather than the old school NSAIDs because there's nothing about my lady junk that makes this necessary.

Ok, so I can add pissed off at my doctors to the list of how I'm going to deal with these feelings. But that was a freebie. I'm pissed off at my doctors any time I have to stop and think for more than three minutes about them or certain intersections of my health and my support.

Shit, time to go to work.

Yay politics!

One of my local papers just ran a story about a couple of folks here in CT who decided not to wait for national democratic party censure of Senator "Traitor Joe" Lieberman.

Back when Lieberman lost the state democratic primary in his last run for US Senate, he refused to give up on his senate seat even though he had clearly given up on the people who had previously elected him. "Traitor Joe" made his own party so he could get a line on the ballot that November. The party was called the "Connecticut for Lieberman" party (or CFL). Lieberman, as stated in the Hartford Courant article, "...abandoned the name and the embryonic party as soon as he won".

Since then, John Mertens, a Trinity College engineering professor and John Orman, a Fairfield University political science professor have put the abandoned party to use. Here's a statement of the revived CFL party's new purpose from their website:

The Connecticut for Lieberman Party (CFL) rejects the fraud perpetrated on the members of this party and the citizens of Connecticut by Joe Lieberman when he used the creation of this party to get on the general election ballot in 2006. The CFL is an independent, anti-war, anti-corruption, pro-fiscal responsibility, pro-democracy party, that stands for individual liberties and real problem-solving in government. The CFL wants everyone to know that in the United States of America, voters are free to join any party they wish, and participate in the democratic process according to the laws of Connecticut and the United States.

I have one word to describe this move and that is BRILLIANT!

"followers"?

Lordy that sounds like a cult or something. Well Blogger has a new widget, it's called "followers" so that you can display the people who read your blog. This is all well and good for the people whose blogs sport intentional hits rather than the folks coaxed here by google searches for heat miser costumes and the lyrics to the I am a pizza song.

But since the mistress of Bubble was nice enough to add herself as a follower for my blog, I've added the feature. See, it's up there under my profile link on the right side of the screen.

Personal truths

Again, stealing from Bubblewench (whose blog has made me smile on more than one gloomy day). Here are some personal truths that make me smile and get me through my day.
- I have had an abundance of love in my life.
- Migraines suck, but if you can manage to rise to the occasion, migraine sex is amazing.
- Having all this time off (i.e. unemployed) means extra time with my fella and my kitty.
- We have three pounds of coffee in our fridge (sale!) and as my fella says, if you have three pounds of coffee on hand, things have gotta be at least moderately ok.
- I have a clean credit history.
- It is extremely easy to make me laugh.
- I'm pretty good at making other people laugh.
- My siblings are funny, smart, strong, and loyal.
- I know that I have made at least some aspects of a few people's lives easier or better.
- On any given day, someone somewhere is probably having the best day of their life.

Personal lies

Bubblewench has asked "What are your personal lies?" That is, lies you tell yourself to get you through your day. Here are some of mine.
- People find me more charming than abrasive.
- My cat is going to live forever.
- Someday when I live near real doctors at real hospitals and I once again have good health insurance, I will be given a diagnosis of something which explains all my daily physical ailments, is readily treatable by eating something q.i.d. that tastes remarkably like candy, which has a 100% cure rate, and which has any or all of the following side effects: boundless energy, an unshakable sense of happiness and belonging, increased intellectual efficiency, and multiple orgasms.
- I do not have an autoimmune disease.
- The real reason I haven't found a job yet is that all of these jobs I've applied for are crap. The excellent, just right job for me is still out there waiting and will make itself known ANY DAY NOW, but certainly before I run out of health insurance and money.
- My fella is not getting fed up with my seemingly endless stream of illnesses.
- My family are not getting fed up with my seemingly endless stream illnesses.
- I'll feel better tomorrow.

Best hit yet

I was checking my site meter today and saw that someone happened upon my blog through a google search for tour de france shitting pants, which apparently yields this post as the top result. I'm so proud...

Lacking

I was looking over my site meter this morning and seeing that a rather large number of people end up here by typing funny shit into a google image search. Up until now, it took them to a post about Archie McPhee and christmas shopping in 2005. Other than cjblue commenting that she almost bought me some of the very items I had been admiring at Archie McPhee's, there wasn't much remarkable about this post. Oh how disappointed these people must be. I'd like to know what the logic is that governs this selection of search terms.

Last night one of my neighbors kept propping open the outside door. This meant the heat was on full blast, roasting at least A____, me, and two of our other neighbors I ran into while I was closing the door a second time. It did occur to me that they could have been lying, but there are good, non-altruism assuming reasons for that being very unlikely. So some dipshit is propping the door. So what? Aside from being worried that our landlord will raise the rent (an issue for me and A____ who are no longer on a year lease), it means we will run out of oil faster. We've run out between 11 PM and about 1 or 2 AM the last few times. This is no fun because it means (a) NO ONE gets heat. If these idiots think their underheated apartment is cold now, imagine how much colder it will be when the whole building is freezing. (b) the oil line to the furnace will clog because it sucks up sediment from the low end of the oil tank. This happened the last time and the filter had been changed within the past year. Clogged means it won't run or won't run well.

I had occasion to wonder what kind of reasoning leads to the behavior of my neighbor last night. I decided that more than being purely self interested, it is childish. That is, self interest would say "I'm cold and I want to be warmer. I don't care if making myself warmer make others uncomfortable. My warmth is the most important thing." So then this person being warm should be a governing principle in the decision of how to act. While propping the door open on a cold night so the cold night air floods the hallway where the thermostat is will make the furnace run hard and might warm the colder apartments, it will also increase the chances of us running out of oil. No oil means NO heat, not simply insufficient heat. And that outcome would seem to be directly in opposition to the governing principle of maintaining warmth.

Ok so this is not supposed to be like some fucking greek philosopher style argument. My point is just that if you're trying to keep warm, wouldn't you think that you'd avoid doing thing which might make you warmer in the short run or for a limited set of times but which has the risk at ANY point of making you much, much colder?

That's the childish part. I don't mean childish like petulant, I mean childish like someone who hasn't mastered object permanence.

All of this is just a long way of me wondering What the Hell is Wrong with People?

More grading...

Not exactly "grading" in that I'm not assigning grades at the moment. I'm "reviewing", where my linguistic training and the knowledge endowment from English teacher parents makes it impossible for me to leave a dangling participle...well, dangling.

Hence, more toys. These allow me to stay at the computer and not get sucked into something truly rewarding while providing enough distraction to keep what's left of my sanity somewhat intact.
(this applet is so cool it's now permanently on the footer of the blog)














Created by Anu Garg.

I feel like I should dedicate this post to my sister, for whom spirograph was a beautiful childhood obsession.

PFG needs (2)

My god some of these are frighteningly accurate...

PFG needs a generic re-post action
(ok not that one)

PFG needs a girlfriend
(not my thing, strictly speaking, but in a more general sense, couldn't we all use more love and understanding?)

PFG needs the volume throughput to maintain the economies of scale
(yeah)

PFG needs some psychological help
(yeah)

PFG needs to change her name
(Petite Flower Goddess Who Is Kind and Sweet and Fair but Who Does Have a Somewhat Short Temper?)

PFG needs another expensive pleco
(Er...)

PFG needs broadband
(No, I need broaderband)

PFG needs a good shot in the arm
PFG needs to constantly adapt in order to stay ahead
(so true)

Perfect

Found this over at Cranky Prof's Cranky Epistles. I edited down the text size because really, who needs 130% font size anyhow?

You're The Sound and the Fury!

by William Faulkner

Strong-willed but deeply confused, you are trying to come to grips with a major crisis in your life. You can see many different perspectives on the issue, but you're mostly overwhelmed with despair at what you've lost. People often have a hard time understanding you, but they have some vague sense that you must be brilliant anyway. Ultimately, you signify nothing.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

most referred

Up until recently, the highest search based hits on this blog came from the following two types of searches.
1. "hippie", "import store", "hippie room", etc. as a result of posts like this one
2. "shaved gynecologist", "shaving and gynecologist", etc. as a result of this post

Since Senator Craig's recently publicized bathroom follies though, the number of hits from searches on the topic of tearoom trade is definitely picking up.

This amuses me.

best hit

"why is my father a douchebag?"
I take some pride in the knowledge that typing this question into google brings someone to my blog.

Movies I'll love?

I put a rss feed up for the recommendations Netflix has for me. I do so with a caveat for those who have not experienced the flawed logic which drives the Netflix recommendations algorithm. Here's a relevant article on the Netflix recommendations, their usefulness, and (readily apparent) limitations.

I've got to agree with most of the assessment in that article. I've generally found their recommendations not terribly useful. When the recommendation isn't just 100% wrong (because I like some old Hitchcock, I'll apparently love anything staring John Wayne), it's more often than not something I've already seen (or own, or have seen enough times that I should own it).

what's this coffee spoon stuff?

I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease in 2002. Since then, I've not felt well. I was unfortunate enough to have some other medical problems prior to that but mostly they were episodic. Since 2002, there hasn't been a single day when I have felt well. Always there's some level of the "post lyme" which could be chronic lyme or could be an autoimmune disease. Sometimes on top of that are the migraines, or the endo, or the intestinal problems, or the out of the blue shit like my hip going out. Sometimes it's everything at once.

I do write about these things here, but I don't write about them as often as I feel them. It seems overwhelming, not simply to me - I mean I will live with that regardless of what other choices I make. What I find mostly overwhelming is other people's responses. I sometimes write about those responses and how they affect me here too, but again, not as often as I encounter them.

There's a social proscription against too much complaining, and complaining of a certain type is especially proscribed. My god, I'm an abuse survivor, an incest survivor, a feminist, and what is most quickly summed up as a liberal. I've got way too much complaining to do already without adding in the sickness stuff.

So lately, I've been posting the medical stuff more on a blog I devoted entirely to medical stuff. I figured that blog's title, description, and content would help self select for readers who are less likely to have that automatic reaction healthy people have. Oh yes, they do tend to have it. And I deal with it enough in my outside life. I dealt with it once here and I didn't like it one bit. The Tea Room blog has a lot of other stuff on it and most of my hits are from people looking for that more general stuff. I find that some days I just don't want to deal with the ignorance which is likely to come from someone who would see the illness stuff as the final bit of evidence that I am inherently weak, not here at least.

What makes me mention all this now is - well there are a couple of reasons. One is that I feel like shit today, felt like shit since Wednesday of last week in fact. Not the cramps and endo whatnot, just shitty. For the first time since getting Lyme, I almost had to call someone to come rescue me because I felt so unwell I was worried about driving. Who needs the details? Me and my doctor I suppose, no need to list them all here. For here, it's enough to say I feel like shit. So it's on my mind.

Another reason is that I have been recently struggling with my faculty about what having a chronically ill grad student means. Does it mean I get the same standards for evaluating progress as my mostly healthy peers? Does my having three times as many publications as my peers prior to getting sick count for anything or will faculty continue to look only at my current rate of progress now that I have so little reliable stamina? Does being so sick mean I get allowances or accommodations only if I ask specifically for each of them in turn, in advance, and of any and all faculty and staff who might be involved in the relevant decisions? Are there limits on what accommodations I can have? Do I need to show documentation? All of those are good questions, and none of them are ones I've been able to ask because the people I need to ask them of have been dodging me since the end of the semester. Possibly it means what my advisor said to me when we were having one of what I now realize were casual discussions about it. That I'm not just not healthy enough to work at a research university. I might not be healthy enough to work. Her casual assessment of my employability was such a gem that this topic also has been on my mind since she said it.

The last reason I bring this up now is that I just found this truly excellent essay about living with illness and disability. It's called "The Spoon Theory". I posted about it on the blog I started for my health related stuff, and I decided to link my post about it here because the essay title and topic ties back in with why and how I chose my blog url for Do Not Enter The Tea Room. The "and coffee spoons" address for this blog is an indirect reference to the notion of being someone who has "measured out my life with coffee spoons", c.f. T.S. Eliot and Crash Test Dummies. The author of the essay does not reference the quote of measuring life in coffee spoons, however her Spoon Theory is exactly right, and it happens to tie together both of my blog-worlds.

tag'd

I've been tagged, by D at Lingo Franko. Problem is, I don't know 8 bloggers (well enough) to send this to. I'm planning to compromise.

Tag Rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.


(my) Eight

1. I floss.

2. A non-intimate who casually touches the top of my head (or reaches as if to touch) is at significant risk of sustaining personal injury.

3. There are two stories about how I got my first name.

4. One is that my parents named me after a woman who was the focus of a certain long dead Italian poet.

5. The other is that my first name is the feminine of my father’s first name. Had I been born a male, my parents told me, my name would have been the masculine of my mother's. Thus, by just one bit of chromosomey goodness, I narrowly escaped being "Charlie".

6. I have been to Graceland.

7. I draw during academic talks. “Talks” include colloquia, tenure talks, so called ‘workshops’ (just another name for a lecture), job talks, conference talks, and sometimes even classes. It helps keep me awake if the speaker is a droner or otherwise unskilled orator, and oh so very many of them are. Sometimes I write notes in the form of speech bubbles in my drawings. More often, I draw concepts I’ve found interesting or amusing for one reason or another or I draw pictures of people who are annoying me. This habit has the undesirable effect of sometimes sending me into a snorting, choking fit of suppressed laughter.

8. I avoid direct sunlight.

I'm tagging...
cjblue
J
Triticum Turgidum
Reverse paranoia
A_____

And now I’m stretching…
Rosie (this one’s cheating somewhat but what the hell)
My sister (who will have to respond via comment)

appearances

I was recently told that my blog color scheme is a brain burning combo.

I've been considering changing the drapes here. The black sometimes seems overwhelming. But I sort of like the dark, and no I'm not saying that in some kind of goth/emo "my soul weeps black inky tears" way.

Really, it's not that.

When I wrote my qualifying exams, about halfway through I changed the document background to something approaching charcoal. The black font on white screen was making me want to pull my eyes out of my head. I had an eye exam around that time and I happened to mention to the opthamologist "you know how sometimes your eyes hurt so much it's almost like you want to take them out and massage them?" (She looked alarmed for a moment then said "Err, no.")

I am at some point planning on changing the format here in no small part because I sometimes think the black all over does give the impression of black inky tears and whatnot. But that's for later. Right now I finally have DATA to analyze. Which means waveforms and spectrograms are what I'm searing into my brain for at least the next week or so.

June 29, 2007
Update: As you can see, I've changed the color scheme. Also I switched to a new template. Most of my content didn't transport automatically so I had to put it in manually, but overall the transformation wasn't as much trouble as I thought it would be.

template

Yes, I'm messing with the template. This may be ill-advised since I recently had screen resolution issues and, as my display is a little odd at the moment, god only knows what the blog looks like on someone else's (not fucked up) screen. Regarding the resolution settings...I'd like to say this is the last time I connect my laptop to someone else's screwy screen (screwy because, among other things, it's all out of focus - why? because it's professor fluffy's and professor fluffy's shit is all fucked up). Unfortunately, it is not the last time since I need to use that set up for data collection. As for the template, yes, do tell me if there are problems in what you're seeing - specifically the alignment of the post content relative to the side bar since that's what I was messing with tonight. Please be kind. I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to this stuff and am learning by trial and error.

Couldn't have said it better myself

Cat Lady at Reverse Paranoia has an excellent post about the Duke lacrosse rape case. In another post, I see a use of the word "asshattery", which alone would have warranted a link but her summary of the media reaction to the Duke case is seriously excellent.

Here be treasure!

Oh look what I just found via Kate's comment. It's something new to make me laugh.
I'm potent, Now

Their mission statement reads: Objectifying human beings is wrong. But anthropomorphizing objects is just dandy.

I think today and tomorrow, and possibly Friday, need to be about laughing.

What I'm reading

My little brother sent me a link yesterday (it was part of the Coulter buzz). It's a blog called Joe.My.God.

Liking it so far....