When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year, which includes posting regular updates. It’s a new month, so here’s the next report!
So, how did I do…? Continue reading A new month, a new goal kick
Category Archives: life
I would lose my head if it wasn’t attached
There are so many topics I want to write about now, but most of them are so outrageous that trying to figure out how to reasonably discuss them will take too much time from my other writing, so I’m instead going to write about how forgetful I am.
This story requires a little context. I’m not a morning person. At all. I consider myself exceedingly lucky to have worked most of my life in jobs that don’t demand that I be at my desk precisely at 8:00:00 am ready to go. While I have a lot of flexibility in my schedule, though, I still have to get to the office within a certain window each day.
My poor husband is not any more of a morning person than I am, but his work requires him to be there earlier than, frankly, I even want to be awake. And I have such a hard time getting up in the morning, that I have a three-level alarm system to get me moving. My husband is usually leaving for work about 15 minutes before the second alarm in my system goes off, so I’m usually still in bed at least half-asleep when he comes in to kiss me good-bye.
Monday morning I stayed in bed until the third alarm went off, so I had almost no time for anything to go wrong in my getting-ready-for-work routine. After I had eaten, packed my lunch, showered, gotten dressed, packed my backpack, I was getting all of my pocket stuff together: phone off charger and into one pocket, watch off charger and on my wrist, keys in another pocket, and wallet–
My wallet was not where it ought to have been. Now this is no cause for panic on its own, because I am one of the most absent-minded people on the planet, and despite decades of trying to teach myself to always put things in consistent places so I can find them, the reality is that I misplace either my keys, eyeglasses, phone, shoes, hat, et cetera nearly every day. So when my wallet wasn’t where it belonged, all that meant is that I needed to check the five other places where it sometimes gets left around the house. That only took a couple minutes, no big deal, usually.
Usually.
My wallet wasn’t in the usual places. So I started looking underneath things, pulling out drawers and packs, poking into the pockets of coats in the closet, pulling pairs of pants out of the hamper and checking their pockets, and so on, and so on, and so on…
Throughout this process, I am getting increasingly angry and frantic. At first I was just muttering under my breath, “Where did I leave it?” Which soon became “Where the f– did I leave it!?” Soon I was no longer just muttering. How could I do this to my self again?
About forty-five minutes later I had turned over every corner of the house, when it finally occurred to me to check the car. As soon as I think of the car, I know exactly where it is. On Sunday, after we’d finished grocery shopping, we took the car to the automatic car wash. Because we had been planning to do that, as I was getting in the car in the grocery store parking lot, I pulled my wallet out of my pocket and set it on the inner console, because wrestling with my pocket to extract the wallet so I can put cash in the little machine at the car wash after I’m belted in is not fun.
I ran out to the car, my mind boiling over with the recollections of the times our car has been broken into, along with all the recent reports (both in the news and from neighbors) of overnight car prowls in our neighborhood.
I got to the car. Relieved to see no broken windows. There, sitting on the console, is not only my wallet, but a very visible wad of the bills the car wash payment machine had given me as change. I unlocked the car, retrieved the wallet and money, locked the car again, and rushed back inside.
I was running quite late by then. Fortunately, I had no morning meetings on Monday, and no one anxiously waiting for me to handle any emergencies when I got in.
Tuesday morning, I tried to get up and moving sooner. I had one meeting before noon, and I was feeling a little worried about something else going wrong.
My worries were not misplaced. I couldn’t find my keys. I tore the house up, again, checking all the usual places. The wallet has only four or five usually misplaced locations; the keys, unfortunately, have about thirty such places. Once I had checked those locations with no luck, I pulled everything out of my backpack and felt around in the bottom of its compartments before I gave up and called my husband to see if he remembered seeing my keys at an unusual spot. He had not.
We haven’t gotten any extra house keys made since the new doors were put in (I just keep forgetting), so I didn’t have any way to lock the deadbolt behind me. My husband told me to just lock the lower lock and get to work.
I hadn’t spent as much time looking, but I had to catch the next bus if I were going to make my meeting. I didn’t run the almost half-mile to the bus stop, but I walked really fast. Which wasn’t entirely easy, because my hasty re-packing of the backpack had left things cattywumpus in there, and I had an uncomfortable lump in the middle of the pack pressing into my back the whole way.
By the time I got to the bus stop, One Bus Away indicated I had about seven minutes until the bus arrived, so I sat on one of the benches and contemplated the pros and cons of trying to straighten out the contents of the backpack. I felt the lump in the center of the back of the pack… and it felt an awful lot like keys.
This backpack has a weird little elastic pocket on the back panel of the main compartment. It is odd shaped and in a spot that’s difficult to get into, so I never use it. Monday afternoon the weather had been very warm, so before leaving the office I had shoved my jacket and my keys on top of everything else in the main compartment before walking home. When I reached home, my husband was already there (as usual), and the door was unlocked, so I hadn’t needed my keys to get into the house. The keys had apparently worked their way into the pocket, not sliding down all the way into it until after I took the pack off when I got home.
I felt like such an idiot.
Wednesday morning, for whatever reason, I woke up, fully awake and ready to get out of bed, about a half hour before the second alarm went up. So I was puttering around the living room and kitchen when Michael needed to leave.
He came downstairs and asked, “Where are your keys?”
I walked over to the coffee table, pointed to my keys, wallet, and hat. “That’s the wrong question,” I explained. “If my luck keeps running badly, today it will be something else entirely. My glasses, or my phone, or—”
“So, where are they?”
As I was gathering my glasses and phone, he started listing other things. “Where’s your jacket? Your iPad? Your headphones? Lunchbag?”
I asked him why he puts up with me. He just laughed and kissed me good bye.
How I learned to stop being a jerk and love the wish list
Some years ago (on another blog) I said some extremely stupid (and dickish) things about wish lists. One friend brought the dickish aspect to my attention, and I felt like a complete heel. As well I should have. I didn’t say what I said merely because I was a jerk1. I had reasons for feeling the way I did. But like any emotional baggage, we are seldom aware of just how off-kilter our perception is thrown by carrying it… Continue reading How I learned to stop being a jerk and love the wish list
A most excellent man
We’d gathered at a friend’s place for gaming, and we were reminded not to turn on a particular light switch because the fixture needed replacing. My husband, Michael, pointed at it and said something along the lines of, “Is there a hardware store nearby?”
“We were going to get someone to come in and—” the friend began.
Michael had already pulled a multitool from his pocket and was checking the wires. “Naw, this will take me a couple minutes, tops.”
Michael and the friend walked to a nearby store while the rest of us set up food and reviewed what happened the previous gaming session. When they got back, Michael set to work.
One of the other friends there looked at me and said, “You’re married to MacGuyver!”
Before I could answer, another one of the friends there said, “You’re just now figuring that out?”
Fixing some badly mangled wires and installing a new fixture is not a super complicated task, obviously (though the number different kinds of things my husband can repair, refurbish, or build is a quite impressive). No, the extraordinary thing is how blithely and eagerly he jumps into such tasks, and the fact that he’s always got a number of tools, spare parts, et al handy.
Sometimes I think he physically feels pain when he sees a machine not functioning correctly. He certainly empathizes strongly with people who are struggling with a device that isn’t working properly. I’m constantly finding computers, phones, or other gadgets stashed around the house in various states of repair he’s got in process. When I ask, about half the time he says, “so-and-so needs a better computer/phone/iPod so I’m trying to get them something newer and more reliable.”
When he doesn’t have someone specifically in mind for a device, he says, “I figured if I get it fixed, I’ll start checking around to see if someone could benefit from the upgrade.”
And those are just a few of his more obvious sterling character traits. I’ve written a few times before about what an incredibly sweet, kind, smart, talented, knowledgeable, skilled, patient, and funny person my husband is. And I am hardly the only person who thinks he’s awesome.
I hope you have a happy birthday, Michael. You’ve more than earned it!
Why I hate hay fever #5938, plus 4312 & 3786 & 3113 & 2488 & 2149 & 1364, and don’t forget #23
Go back four weeks. Find every day that I didn’t post anything on the blog. Imagine a post that begins with the phrase, “Why I hate hay fever…”
That’s been my life. More than four weeks, now, every day the pollen count is up in the red (nearly, there were two days it barely dipped into the orange, okay? But only barely).
It saps my energy. It makes it hard to even think. It is so difficult to stay in a good mood. Occasionally I get just the right combination of medicine, rest, and fluids to feel almost human for several hours.
My husband was suggesting spending hundreds of dollars on a positive air flow full face-mask filtration respirator. His thinking is that if I wear that for a few hours every night, my sinuses may clear for at least a few hours and my immune system will get a rest for those hours and it will make the rest of the misery more manageable.
“And you can scare the neighbors!”
So I replied, “You want me in a respirator like Darth Vader, where I’ll be tempted to say to random people,” and I lowered my voice, “I find your lack of faith… disturbing!”
He laughed and replied, “Just the facemask and helmet!”
When I summarized this on Twitter, our friend @kehf said that if I get the mask system, the line I should be saying to scare people is, “I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.”
Of course, I know that what I really need to do is clean out the filters on the two air cleaners in the house and otherwise make sure they’re doing their utmost. It’s been a while since they were cleaned. Maybe just getting a few nights in the house with the filters going will have the effect he’s going for with the respirator.
Pronoun trouble
Unlike Bugs Bunny, I have never been terribly good at drag. Part of the problem is simply a lack of practice, to be honest. Contrary to the stereotypes that some people still hold onto, not every gay many wants to be a a woman or do drag. Another part is I’m hairier than a hobbit. The vast majority of my adult life I’ve been bearded, (and I literally don’t have much practice at shaving my own face, either).
When I was a kid people used to talk about men who had five o’clock shadow: their beards were so dense or fast growing that after shaving in the morning before going to work, by late afternoon they had a noticeable “shadow” of stubble on their face. My dad had something like 10:00am shadow, and by the time I was in my early twenties I had it, too.
Despite that, I am no stranger to being mis-gendered. Back in the days when people used phones to (verbally) talk to other people in distant locations (I think it was the early Triassic), I was constantly being addressed as “ma’am” on the phone. Never mind that when I was still regularly singing that I can hit an E-flat below the bass clef and was usually stuck in the bass section (because choruses never have enough basses), I clearly talk in my upper register. It isn’t something I consciously do. In fact, because the “way” I talk was frequently the excuse for a lot of the bullying I experienced in school (and teachers and administrators were always mentioning to my parents that I’d surely get along better in school if I could just stop talking like “that”) I went through quite a long phase of trying to talk in my lower register.
And it was irritating, to say the least, to have customer service people and other strangers on the phone call my “ma’am” or “miss.” So I can barely imagine how infuriating and demeaning it must feel for trans* people when others call them the wrong pronoun.
Especially when it is being done on purpose. It’s rude and disrespectful. And it infuriates me that there are people who claim that they don’t understand why it is rude. The very same people would get upset if someone refused to address them by their preferred name, right? I’ve known many grown men whose legal name is Thomas who absolutely despise being called “Tommy” for instance. So why is it so hard to wrap your head around preferred pronouns?
Of course, just like those people who would call me “ma’am” on the phone weren’t being intentionally rude, sometimes we use the wrong pronoun because we don’t know or we forget. When a person who is trans*, agender, or gender-fluid is a good friend or close colleague or family member, it’s easy to remember their pronouns. But when it’s at best a casual acquaintance or one of a bunch of strangers you’ve just met, it’s a lot harder.
There are also pronouns that are difficult. A trans woman acquaintance who prefers she/her/hers is fairly easy to remember. A genderqueer casual acquaintance who prefers they/them/theirs is a teensy bit more awkward for some of us. And then there’s the one trans* person who preferred to be called it. That word just has so much emotional baggage for me—bigots of many stripes I’ve had to endure loved calling anyone who was gay, lesbian, in any way gender non-conforming, or otherwise not conforming to their ideas of being “it.” I’ve known racists who referred to anyone non-white and with an accent “it.” I’ve known people bigots of other kinds who call atheists “it” for goodness sake! The point is that I carry a lot of emotional baggage with that word, and can’t use it myself without feeling that I’m dehumanizing someone.
Which is not a justification for intentionally using a non-preferred pronoun. When you can’t remember or have some other difficulty with someone’s preferred pronoun, it is perfectly okay to just call them by their name. It isn’t that difficult to phrase things without pronouns. And it’s not a bad habit to get into with everyone you interact with, because the other kind of pronoun problem still occurs with everyone. If you use people’s names, everyone is less likely to be confused, in any case.
If you don’t remember someone’s name, well, there are ways to fix this. “Hi! I know we were introduced earlier, but I’m always getting names mixed up. I’m Gene, nice to meet you!” Admit to being less than perfect, and show that you’re making an effort to get to know them.
It really can be that simple!
The stages of truth
And I’ve been quite fond of the way that blogger Driftglass merged the two and customized it to refer to a particular gay conservative columnist: “First they ignored you. Then they laughed at you. Then they fought you. Then they got gigs in national magazines repeating as breathless epiphany things you had been saying for thirty years.”
Personally, I’ve always felt as if it was more, “They erase you through ridicule, harassment, hate crimes, and criminalizing your nature; then they ridicule and violently oppose you; then they claim you’re hurting them and try passing laws that claim to be about something else but whose effect is to essentially to re-criminalize you; then they pretend that they agreed with you the whole time (while privately still ridiculing you and cheering every time a “lone psycho” commits a hate crime against you).”
Now, you may think I’m talking about gay rights, but it’s a much bigger thing than that. My topic includes:
- GamerGate trying to drive women out of gaming;
- the Sad Puppies trying to “take back” sci fi fandom from women, people of color, and queers;
- the Teabaggers trying to “reclaim our country” from women, people of color, people who aren’t fundamentalist christians, and queers;
- the Reagan revolution trying to bring back “traditional family values”;
All of those things are part of the same reactionary movement trying to shut out the other and keep the old guard in power. And while I like the beautiful simplicity of Schopenhauer’s origin, “ridicule, violently oppose, accept,” I can’t quite embrace it as the truth. Violent opposition is evident in every stage. The only thing that is different in each stage is how the violence is talked about in polite society.
The truth is that humans are a diverse bunch. But that isn’t the entire truth. We’re weird, and we disagree, and we don’t all like the same things, and we don’t all thrive in the same way, and we have different skill sets (and strengths and weaknesses), and we are hardwired to be social animals. We can’t survive without communities. Whether we call those communities families, churches, social circles, or like-minded people, we need them to survive. But we also need the bigger communities, because surviving the thriving in this world requires sharing the world.
And it’s the sharing part that irks the people fighting us even more than the fact that we’re different.
Why I hate hay fever reason #5912
Because of all the corporate mergers, selloffs, partial acquisitions, and so forth, you can’t go to a drugstore or pharmacy section of the grocery store and quickly find a familiar medication. For instance, when you’re suffering a particular set of allergy symptoms that you know used to respond best to Comtrex. You may find boxes labeled Comtrex on the shelf, but now instead of having he ingredients that used to be found in Comtrex, they contain exactly the same ingredients that used to be found in Tylenol Cold.
Similarly, in the old days, I could buy Tylenol Cold & Allergy, and be certain that is contained an analgesic for the headache, a decongestant for the sinus congestion, and an antihistamine for the hay fever. It doesn’t, any more. Now it contains analgesic, decongestant, and an expectorant (to help you get mucous out of your lungs). Lung congestion is not typically an allergy symptom, it’s a flu symptom. They should have the expectorant in the Tylenol Cold & Flu… but they don’t. What they have in Tylenol Cold & Flu is a cough suppressant, which might also be useful with the flu, but what would be better is the expectorant which is over in the allergy-labeled brand for absolutely no good reason.
And don’t get me started on why you can’t buy a cold or allergy medication containing actual pseudo-ephedrine any longer thanks to misguided anti-methamphetamine regulations that did absolutely nothing to slow down the cheap manufacture of meth. Now we get “Sudafed” (the brand name belonging to the company that first patented pseudo-ephedrine and named by phonetically spelling the name of the active ingredient) that contains no “sudafed” at all, but rather phenylephrine, which clinical trials have shown is not an effective substitute for the vast majority of people.
On really bad hay fever days, as I’ve been having for about a week, what I need is a medication that contains acetaminophen, pseudo-ephedrine, and diphenhydramine or chlorpheniramine (analgesic, decongestant, antihistamine), in a tablet that is a nice, safe dose. And I do mean the safe dose. Back when I could find that combination, the recommended does of 2 tablets every 4 to 6 hours was seldom what I needed to take to get relief. One tablet every four hours was usually perfect.
The closest I found on the day last week I was shopping, was Nyquil-branded “Night Time Cold Caps” which contain phenylephrine instead of the pseudo-ephedrine. It’s close, but much more expensive that any generics.
I can buy plain acetaminophen, plain pseudo-ephedrine, and plain chlorpheniramine. To get the pseudo-ephedrine you have to wait in line at the pharmacy counter, tell them what you want, then wait for them to dig the giant notebook out of the secure location. They will then scrutinize your photo ID, fill out a form, make you read a statement and sign the form before selling you this drug which was FDA certified for over-the-counter sales decades ago (and is still perfectly safe if all you are going to do is swallow a pill every 6 hours as recommended). But here’s the thing: box of 24 generic cold tablets with two of the ingredients I want and one I don’t costs just a little bit less than the stand-alone pseudo-ephedrine. Likewise, the stand-alone chlorpheniramine, and the stand-alone acetaminophen.
In other words, to put together my manual version of the generic tablet that has the right ingredients costs a bit more the three times as much as buying any of the already packaged tablets with nearly the right ingredients. And I have three times as many pills to keep track of, and the real kicker? They often recommend different times between doses. So I’m trying to keep track of one pill that I’m only supposed to take every six hours along with some that I’m supposed to take every four…
The answer is, obviously, to buy the Nyquil branded stuff, which has most of what I want, is more expensive than generic but less expensive than the collection of stand-alones. Which I did. It annoys me that the box is covered with all these dire warnings about taking them at night because they might cause drowsiness. And they there are sold in enormous gel caps, which seem to degrade more than the regular tablets. At least I don’t have trouble swallowing the giant capsules. Unlike my poor husband, who gags on the big gel caps.
Not that the meds are helping as much as I’d like.
Goal check-in for April
I set goals for the year and promised to update monthly. More or less. I’m doing Camp NaNoWriMo right now, so every minute I’m updating this blog, I’m not moving toward my goals with revising my novels, so I’m going to do a truncated check in:
My specific tasks for March were:
- Finish the re-plotting of what was formerly book two into book two and three. Done.
- Keep plugging away on the edits for book one. Almost no progress.
- Write the fight scene I keep procrastinating on. Started it twice. Ended up writing a fight scene for book five instead of book four…
- Write at least four blog posts about things I like instead of rants or critiques. Only managed two! But I also posted a little less often than usual.
- Draw something. Failed miserably.
My bigger goals for the year are:
- Write more, rant less. I mostly did well on this, though the craziness in Indiana and Arkansas (and other places) near the end of the month pushed me more into ranty than I’d like.
- Take care of myself. Did mostly well on this one.
- Enjoy time with friends. I did enjoy the time we spent, but didn’t make much effort to do more than the usual sorts of get-togethers.
- Paint, draw, and make music. The closest I came was making a few new playlists.
My specific goals for April are:
- Complete Camp NaNoWriMo: specifically, write 25,000 words worth of scenes to make 2 and 3 work as separate books, finish re-arranging the subplots for subsequent books in the series.
- Finish draft two of the Cthulhu Ponies map.
- Run episode three of the Cthulhu Ponies game.
- Complete layout and upload that book to the on-demand publisher.
- Write at least two blog posts about things I like, rather than ranting about things that outrage me.
Irish fairy
I realized Monday night that none of the shirts I currently own that are appropriate for the office are green. And I when I tried to dig out the good jewelry box where my sterling silver shamrock earrings are, things kept falling down. We really need to go through things in that hutch and toss out stuff we never use.
I did find some nice, dark green rhinestones. But I forgot that the last time we cleaned out that section of the bedroom that I threw out a lot of the cheap earrings.
Still, it’s St. Patrick’s day, so when I found the silly plastic leprechaun earring, I figured that would have to do.
My recent ancestors on one side of the family were descended from Irish catholics who came to America after the potato famine. Some of my ancestors on the other side were protestants who came to America from Ireland, though they were descended from folks who came to Ireland from England along with King Henry’s army in the 15th century. (It’s not all Irish and English, there’s also some German, a lot of French, at least a bit of Norse, and supposedly some Native American, though statistically that’s more likely an old family myth than a genetic reality.)
Anyway, there are some who wonder why I, a gay taoist, makes at least a bit of a deal out of St. Patrick’s Day (since Patrick is a saint in the Catholic church which is far from gay-friendly, et cetera).
Well, looking back up two paragraphs, there are two ways to look at my heritage. One is to say I’m an Irish-Anglo-Franco-German-Norwegian-Native American, and the other is to just say I’m an American, a mutt, a mish mash, the genetic version of a ceasar salad—heck, a whole potluck!
Back in Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day is still mostly celebrated as a religious holiday. It’s not a day of drinking—no green beer or discount Irish whiskey shots at the local pubs there. Parades have been a very recent development, and at least according to one report I heard, mostly because American tourists kept asking for them.
But here, in America, it is a party day. We do the tacky green beer and wear the “Kiss me I’m Irish” shirts or “Everyone’s Irish on St. Paddy’s Day” shirts. Since it is only a few days before the Spring Equinox, it’s practically one of the spring mysteries. It’s a Bacchanal!
For me, it’s a day to put on at least one silly earring, to remember my Great-grandpa’s stories about his great-grandpa, to remember my Great-uncle Lyle’s story about my great-great-grandparents.
It’s a day to let out my inner leprechaun. I’m a fairy with at least some Irish ancestry, so that works, right? I may sing a silly song. I may dance a jig at the bus stop. I may cast a wily leprechaun spell that encourages people to give in to the silliness, at least a little. Because life is too short to be borrowing trouble. It’s too short not to have fun.
Font Folly 