Some Things I'm Learning About My Sugar

1) It really is better if I get up between 5-7am instead of 10-11 am. My numbers just look better when I get an early jump start on the day. I'll test around 90-100 between 5-7, but by 10-11, my sugar's already risen cause of the whole dawn phenomenon, and I'll come out at 130-160(!).

2) Jelly beans and graham crackers really are some of the best foods for 50s and 60s low sugar episodes. There's little to no fiber and fat to slow down sugar absorption, so you're not getting initial upswing followed by a delayed upswing that you have to correct later.

3) Cooking up my old Alaska staple of meat, carrots, peas, garlic, onion, tomatoes, parmesan cheese, and rice *without* the rice is actually just as good, and I can save half a unit of dinner insulin.

Impending Feministacon

"The program schedule for WisCon 31 will go live on April 30, 2007."

So, um, where is it?

WTF?

Who comes up with this stuff??

"Everything Will Be All Right"

I just received a check in the mail for $502 from my old employer. Apparently, they've just now gotten around to re-purchasing the company stock that I had with them.

Damn, I get by by the skin of my teeth...

OK, technically I owe $110 of this to my endocrinologist back in Chicago and $200 to the podiatrist, but I can afford my minimum credit card payments for May now and MAYBE EVEN JUNE!

Fucking miracle.

The only thing that pisses me off is the huge surprise at just how much money I actually had stuffed away for old age. I've gotten three checks and close to 5K, and that's *after* taxes. All gone now.

So it goes.

Coming Out

"Transgender Canadians are coming out at younger ages than ever before. Support groups for transgender teens report growing memberships, and are sprouting up beyond the major cities in areas such as Kitchener, Ont., and the Niagara region. One by one, school boards are amending their human rights policies to include gender identity...

In recent years, the success of the gay-rights movement has helped to pave the way for transgender rights, some say. For teenagers, the increasing presence of transsexual role models in the mainstream media has helped make it easier to come out at a younger age."

I think you see a lot of this "coming out at an earlier age" thing among gay, lesbian, and bisexual teens as well, mainly because we do now have so many people who publicly identify themselves as being GLBT.

What I like about that idea is that you're no longer neccessarily struggling in the dark for so long to try and figure out what the hell it is you're feeling and what it means and who that makes you.

The downside is that by giving everything a label and a name, I fear that GBLT identities could become just as fixed as het male/female identities (which are changing, but a lot of people still grow up with fairytale templates).

One more reason to knock them all apart.

The Hidden Costs of of Living in a Hypermasculine Culture

"The trouble with manhood, American-style, is that it is maintained at the expense of every man's feminine side -- the frantically repressed Inner Wussy -- and the demonization of the feminine and the gay wherever we see them."

I do love that even in an article about how we demonize the feminine, the feminine is still described as the "Inner Wussy."

And Miles To Go

Temp work until 12:30 today, followed by one interview at same place I'd been temping that's looking for somebody to assist one of the investment brokers. Bike ride home, lunch, bus ride downtown for second interview for a receptionist/project assistant position that's got a commute out to fucking Springboro and a 7:30 am start time.

Collapsing now.

I have a follow-up second interview with investment firm tomorrow at 9am (they had others to see this afternoon). Both positions are open because they've had temps either burst into tears and quit or just not show up. Repeatedly.

I always end up getting called in for jobs that no one else will do. Ha ha.

There are two big problems with my resume. The first being that I've only stayed at one job longer than a year, and the second... my Master's Degree.

Everybody expects that I'll ask for 60K. And yeah, it would make sense that I'd want 60K... (which I do!) until you look at aforementioned job history where I've never been anywhere more than 3 years. You need to work up to that salary. And work somewhere where you can do that. I just never cared about my jobs all that much. I'll put in my 8-5 and work my butt off when I'm there, but when I'm done for the day, I'm done. I don't bring work home.

I'd rather be writing.

Both promising interviews, but only one that I want. C'mon investment firm with the 3-mile bikeride commute!

At this point, of course, beggars can't be choosers, but I wouldn't mind a little frosting with my toast.

How Did I Get On This List?

"Occupation" is turning out to be one of those stories that, like "Genderbending," I didn't realize anybody actually liked, read, or cared about until a year after it was published.

Now Occupation's on a "notable stories of 2006" list and reprinted in a Year's Best SF.

And, to be honest, of the three stories I wrote at about the same time that covered similiar themes, this was actually the one I felt had the least chance at getting published and getting any attention.

Goes to show how much writers know...

I'm starting to get that's just how it goes. Once something's out there, it really does sink or swim on its own. It sort of stops being yours.

Special Women's Issue!

The Onion's Special Women's Issue.

Yeah, I Need to Get Back to Watching Fights...

I didn't see the fight, but knowing the result sure makes me miss watching `em. I was surprised at the result, actually, even having seen De La Hoya when he was seriously out of fighting shape.

Fucking Plot

Fucking plot.

OK, But Only if I'm Played By Christian Bale

You Are Batman

Billionaire playboy by day. Saving the world by night. And you're not even a true superhero. Just someone with a lot of expensive toys!

What Superhero Are You?

One For the Road

Conversations With My Roommate(s)

Ian and I went out on a beer and pie run tonight. On the way back, I mentioned I'd sent out some query letters today.

"Wow," Ian said, "if you got a big fat check for that book, you might almost be cool again."

State of the Union

Had to turn down interviews for a couple of short-term temp assignments because... well, after I was told I wasn't going to be interviewed for one of them, I went ahead and booked Wiscon for some extra days, and now I'm committed to doing that instead of a possible 2-week assignment for 20 an hour.

Dammit fucking hell.

But people are calling me now, and that's a huge improvement over the last few weeks. I'll take what I can get.

I've sent out some preliminary query letters for GW, and I'll be sending some more soon. The line edits are pretty much done, I'm just re-reading the last 80 pages or so and making sure my chapters are still sequential after some of the cutting I did.

Stephanie works at a hospital, so she asked around for some endocrinologist recommendations, and I have a name and number for a new one.

I'm interested in starting work on some new writing projects, but GW fine-tuning and marketing has been taking up a lot of energy. After this weekend, I should be able to finally start working on some original material again. It occurred to me the other day that I've been working on this book since 2003.

Spent the morning deferring my student loans and trying to find hardship applications for my credit cards, without much luck. Not sure what I'll do with those.

I wish I was doing a lot more - going to school, boxing classes - but I'd settle for being able to pay my bills.

I'm telling you: the whole starving artist thing is seriously overrated.

Gender Testing of Female Atheletes

Are you a boy or a girl? Flash presentation.

You know, I always wondered, do/did they ever test people competing as *male* atheletes to make sure they're *really* men, or has this always been some kind of wacked-out, let's make sure the girls are protected macho thing?

One For the Road

Black Desert: Excerpt

The train dropped Nyx off at a refueling station within view of Mushira where the local farmers collected fuel for their farming equipment and personal vehicles.

Nyx alighted and pulled up the hood of her burnous. She started to put on her goggles and then looked out over Mushira and stopped. She wouldn’t need those here. After the rolling desolation of the dunes and the flat white sea of the desert, the green terraced hills around Mushira were a jarring change of scenery.

She waited around at the train station until the hottest part of the day had passed, then began the long walk down to the river.

Mushira was full of fat, soft, happy people. These were the hills of her childhood, the terraced green and amber fields that she had run into the desert to forget. Mushira was an isolated oasis; they used up all of the local water for farming, so nobody came in to ship it out. Though there were some people who came into town to do business, Mushirans didn’t make a habit of traveling. Nyx had known Mushira was an anomaly even while she was growing up there, because the sand was never more than a few hours walk from her mother’s farm, and the trains and bakkies that ferried goods in and out of Mushira were operated by hard-bitten, skinny desert people who knew how to use a knife for something other than carving up synthetic fuel bricks.

Nyx remembered spending many evenings standing out at the edge of the fields and watching the sand blow over the dunes beyond the line of low scrub and fat bulb trees that held back the desert. Some nights she believed the encroachment of the sand was inevitable, and she welcomed it. Other nights she feared the desert would devour her, and she convinced her little brother Ghazi to go out with her and walk the tree barrier after dark, to scare away the sand. He had been afraid of sand cats, so they brought machetes with them - poor protection against the far more likely but less tangible threats of the desert at night: flesh beetles and airborne bursts, rogue magicians and wild shape shifters. But at the time, Nyx had promised Ghazi that she was the most dangerous thing in the desert.

It was the thirty-first, so Nyx had the afternoon to find herself a place and get cleaned up before the morning meeting at the mosque. The mosque was a domed structure at the center of the city, on the eastern bank of the river. Six spiraling minarets ringed the mosque, and during the call to prayer, all six were staffed with muezzins. Mushirians didn't miss a prayer.

Nyx hadn’t been to Mushira since she had returned from the front at nineteen and found nothing waiting for her but a bit of charred, plowed-over land that no longer belonged to her mother. Her mother’s farm had been burned out by Chenjan terrorists as part of a wider raid on Mushira when Nyx was at the front, and by the time she was reconstituted the neighbors had bought the farm and her mother had died at the coast due to complications during her second pregnancy. Nyx hadn’t had any reason to come back.

Nyx walked down into the main square at the entrance to the grounds of the mosque and looked around for a couple of public hotels. There was a convention complex just south of the mosque that should do fine.

The people on the street gave her looks ranging from surreptitious glances to outright stares. Long lines of children followed after their mothers carrying baskets of starches and giant ladybird cages. Nyx kept tugging at her burnous in an attempt to hide her sun sore face. Most desert traders didn’t come down to the square during the off-season, and bel dames and bounty hunters generally stayed out of rural areas - Nyx hadn’t seen her first bel dame until she was sixteen. If Nyx didn’t want to be noticed at the mosque she’d need to buy some new clothes and swap out her sandals for work boots. She probably shouldn’t be going around armed in Mushirah, either. Not visibly, anyway.

She scouted out a hotel and walked over to the marketplace on the other side of the river and bought some new clothes that she couldn’t afford. She found a public bathhouse and changed, then unbuckled her blade and her pistols and stored them in her shopping bag. For a handful of change she got herself a bath and had a girl re-braid her hair in a style more suitable to Mushirian farm matrons. Her mother had worn her hair that way.

When she walked back onto the street she got fewer looks, but the boots hurt and she felt half naked with her sword in a bag instead of on her back. The hotel clerk gave her an odd look when she walked in, but the notes she handed the clerk were mostly clean and certainly valid, and after that she got no trouble.

Nyx spent an uneasy night staring out at the square from the filtered window of her little room. There was a balcony, and after it got dark she moved out there and leaned over the railing. She was tired, and hungry, and ordered up enough food to feed a couple of people, ate it all, and fell into a deep sleep that felt like water after a day in the desert. Her dreams were cloying things; dark and tangled, full of old blood and regret.

The call to prayer woke her at midnight, and after that she couldn’t get back to sleep. She went to the privy down the hall and vomited everything she’d eaten. After, she stayed curled around the hard stone basin with her cheek pressed against the rim while the roaches inside the bowl greedily devoured her offal.

Nasheen was being slowly eaten from the inside, and when somebody had cancer, it had to be cut out. Nyx hadn’t had a steady hand in a long time.

I can’t fuck this up, she thought, and she tried to hold that thought in her fist like a tangible thing, like a stone. But her resolve slipped away, trickled through her fingers like sand.

She couldn't hold back the desert anymore.

Marriage, a History

One of the strongest arguments for continuing to teach history is the incredible sense of freedom it gives an individual who's grown up thinking that the cultural norms, the "reality" that they've grown up in is just "the way things are" or "the way things have always been." Spent some time studying history, and every single one of your assumptions about the way people are, the way the world has to be, will change.

One of the big arguments you get from conservatives about the current US regulations regarding marriage is that marriage has, from time immemorable, been between ONE man and ONE woman. Even somebody who's only ever read the Bible can tell you that that's, well, not true. But it sure *sounds* really good. The kicker is that the sort of male breadwinner marriage "ideal" of ONE man and ONE woman, the nuclear family ideal, is actually only about 50 or 60 years old (and those narrow, aberrant expectations are, even now, changing).

In Marriage, a History, Stephanie Coontz tracks the history of Western conceptions of marriage from early hunter-gatherer societies to the present day, exploring not only the number and kinds of acceptable partners that made up marriages, but what "marriage" meant in a cultural and economic sense during different periods.

Her interest primarily centers on when and how marriage went from being a largely economic enterprise to one based almost exclusively on mutual affection and devotion; from a business merger between families to a partnering of individuals based exclusively on "love."

Coontz isn't a great writer, and I think that she sometimes tries too hard to appeal to a mainstream audience with all her little jokes and exclamation marks, but that also mean this isn't dry as old toast like some of the history tomes you dust off about, say, ancient Assyria (which could be really fucking rad if written with some oomph). She's entirely without theory, which also helps with the play-by-play reading.

What struck me, reading this history, is how successive women's movements paired with technological advances were key in the shift from women and men partnering as purely economic helpmeets to making it possible for us to make partnering decisions based on something so fickle as love and affection.

Polygamous marriages, she explained, were highly valued not just because they 1) produced more heirs, in the case of one man with multiple wives or 2) in the case of multiple husbands, helped land stay in families, but also because marrying more than one person increased the number of inlaws an individual had. This wasn't only a concern for the rich and powerful: powerful inlaws kept you alive. Without a strong kin network during hard times, you were a goner.

In a world of modern convienences, living wages, and social welfare programs, an extended kin network is no longer as vital, and instead of chiding men and women for putting affection for their partner above that of their kin, people are now often seen as a little loopy for dumping a partner based on what their mother thinks. Back in the day, your mother told you to drop somebody, and you dropped them. The saying went, "You have only one family, but you can always get another wife."

That's not to say, of course, that "love" never existed. Certainly there was lust and mutual affection, but the word "love" was rarely used as an expression of affection between husbands and wives until, I believe, the 19th century. In the early 18th centurey, American lovers said they were "in candor" with one another. The definition of "love" in 1828 was "to be pleased with, to regard with affection. We love a man who has done us a favor."

It was also surprising to see that the more autonomy women had, the more independence, the more taboo homosexuality became among women *and* men. Sleeping in the same bed, women kissing each other, these weren't big things until the 1920s, when women got the vote, a lot of guys died in the war, and women were setting up Boston marriages and fending for themselves. All the sudden, the idea that the sexes could get along without one another was a very real possibility, and marriage conservatives freaked out.

In fact, there's a long history of conservative backlash every time divorce and marriage laws were liberalized. Predictably, we're seeing the same thing now, with some of the same arguments. However, despite all of the doom and gloom, *more* people are actually getting married today than were getting married back in the 1800s when you needed to work up enough capital to start a family. A lot of people just never came up with the money they felt they needed in order to conduct a proper household.

The doom-and-gloom that *did* come true was the conservatives' fear of divorce: yep, we do have a 50% divorce rate. That rate has saved a lot of people from bad marriages, but the ease of divorce has also convinced a lot of people who wouldn't have otherwise gotten married to get married anyway. More people getting married hasn't "destroyed" marriage. It just means more people get married. The same panic happened when people started pulling down the interracial marriage laws. There were more marriages, more divorces, but the world didn't end. In fact, more marriages goes a long way toward improving the economy. I think expanding marriage rights would be a great economic strategy, really...

Because even with that 50% divorce rate, people still get married. Maybe cause we all keep hoping we can love forever, for longer, than any other group of folks in history. Believe me, the people living now are some of the first in the history of the world to have the opportunity to spend 70 years or more married. When we first thought up marriage, marriage was, at most, a commitment of 15-20 years. Usually more like 10.

I think what fascinates me is our expectation that we can live up to some far-off ideal, something that we think existed somewhere, somewhen, when everybody paired off perfectly and lived in harmony for 70 years with the love of their life.

No. You were lucky to end up with somebody who you respected and cared for and didn't beat you for 15 years before one of you dropped dead of influenza.

Man, I'm such a romantic.

My Boobs Make Me Smarter!

Great conversation over at Pandagon about advertising and breast augmentation.

Living Fiction

I just finished re-reading Jeff VanderMeer's Veniss Underground. I read it and loved it when it first came out, lured by a stunning review of the book by Michael Moorcock.

This time around, as I re-read Veniss I started to think about what draws me back to particular books. I don't re-read a lot of books, but when I do, it's because there's some kind of emotional core to the story that speaks to me, something that claws at my heart and makes me go, "oh." I had different reasons, I thought, for loving some books and not others, but as I read, I realized there was something more to it, something that the ones I re-read have in common.

Oh, sure, there's the awesome stuff, too. Veniss is probably the most beautifully nightmarish city I've ever clawed through in fiction. People selling their parts for bread, programmers running a dying city, independent governments ruling various sections of the city, Living Artists who hack up themselves and others in the pursuit of the perfect organic creation, sludge-filled seas and vast underground caverns and weird, fantastic, horrible creatures that slurp and crawl and beg and grovel and fight and tear; creatures full of rage and sadness.

But there are other books that do a lot of great worldbuilding that I haven't re-read, that I thought were good or at least interesting reads, but never loved: Perdido Street Station, In Viriconium, Move Underground, Calenture, and Tainaron, to name a few. There are similiarly nightmarish qualities to The Book of the New Sun cycle as well.

The difference between books I like and books I keep returning to out of love (as opposed to reading to see how something was pulled off, technically, which you do a lot more of as a writer than a reader) has to do with how well it resonates with me. As a writer, this is sort of terrifying: you can cut yourself open on the page and put all the good stuff there, but unless you have a reader who's also bringing something to the table, emotionally, it's going to fall flat.

And it's true. When I looked at the few books I've reread: Veniss, Lust, The Hours, Flesh and Blood, The Etched City, The Affirmation, Dradin, in Love (I even went so far as to buy the hugely expensive Buzzcity Press edition) and The Book of Revelation, I realize that each of them touches on a core emotional truth or emotional journey that I can relate to in some way.

Veniss is told from three points of view: Nicolas, a selfish, starving "Living Artist" and compulsive liar who sells himself out to the mysterious crime boss-like Quin, creator of the city's most beautiful and terrible creatures. Nicola is Nicolas' twin sister, and works in one of the big highrises as a programmer who keeps all of the city's vital systems functioning and once worked as a sort of social worker/guide who helped people who won the lottery to come up from the level upon level of cities "down below" adjust to life in the above-ground city. Shadrach is Nicola's former lover, a man who spent the first twenty-four years of his life down below and fell in love with Nicola at the same moment he fell in love with the light, with the world above ground.

Nicola, in turn, fell in love with Shadrach:

His eyes held the light, except that somehow he made you smile. His eyes held you, and you found yourself thinking how odd it was that to find the light you must descend into darkness. He eclipsed your senses, and you still do not know whether you fell in love with him in that instant, at first sight, or whether it was his love for you, as radiant as the sun, that you came to love so fiercely.

But over time, her love faded as she realized he did not love her, but the idea of her:

Eventually, he became familiar to you, which you didn't mind, for no one can long sustain passion without the relief, the release, of domestic tranquility. What you could not tolerate was the inequality that crept up on you. It was the inequality of worship, for Shadrach mastered the city, became a part of it, and in this mastery he gained a distinct advantage over you, the resident, who had never needed mastery to make the city work for you... Somehow, you realized one day, as he surprised you with flowers and dinner at a fancy restaurant; somehow, instead of becoming more real to him, you had become less real, until you existed so far above him and yet so far below that to become real again, you had to escape - his body, his scent, his words.

On a bare bones level, this is a quest story: Nicolas gets himself into trouble with the mighty Quin, Nicola tries to rescue him and is, in turn, captured. Shadrach gives up everything and goes after her into Hell itself, down below, the place he never wanted to go back to. Because without Nicola - even a Nicola who he knows does not love him - he has nothing. He's lost the light.

Shadrach's journey is heart wrenching. He does literally descend into hell, full of bloody, flayed creatures, crimson light, millions locked in eternal, purposeless drudgery, piles of limbs, organs sold for bread, and he does it all to find a woman who does not love him.

There's a terrible moment when, after he's already shared her memories while she's comatose in order to find out who threw her into a donor scrap heap of body parts and left her for dead, that he knows with utter certainty, without a doubt, that she really, truly doesn't love him. And sure, he knew that all along. They've been apart for five years: but experiencing that from her point of view, to know it, to feel it, nearly breaks him. But even after all that, there's this moment:

... then he realized he had seen the forest in Nicola's head, in her mind. And he wondered whether there really was such a place above level. What if he had entered a series of dreams in her mind - of things that actually happened, but that were distorted, unsound, mirror images. For a moment, this thought disoriented him (didn't it mean she might love him after all?).

And this is, I think, why I keep coming back to this story. Because in the end, the guy doesn't get the girl. He does everything a hero should do in a fairytale. He fights for her. He loves her to the point of obsession. He goes out to avenge her. He fights the monsters and brings her back up into the light.

But when he looks at her in the end, under the stars, he does so knowing that she does not love him and will not love him. He did what he did out of love for her, knowing it wouldn't change anything (hoping, maybe, during the worst of it, but always knowing she did not love him).

It's a story that always makes me think about unconditional love, and hero tropes. After proving one's love, you're supposed to be rewarded. You're supposed to get the girl. That's the payoff. That's how it works, right? But in real life, no, it doesn't work that way, and even better: I think VanderMeer did a really fantastic job working from Nicola's POV and making us understand *why* it wasn't going to work that way. If we just got Shadrach's POV - here's the woman I worshipped, who I did everything right with, who scorned me - I don't think we'd understand. It's getting Nicola's POV that sells this, that explains why she can't love him. She can't be worshipped. She needs to be a real person.

And I think that was where I really connected with this story. I've loved people who didn't love me back, yes, and that makes the Shadrach parts of the book even more heart wrenching, but I have even more experience being somebody's Best Thing, being made up to be better than I am, to be perfect. And to have to turn away from someone because you feel you're being held up as something you're not, going from equals to unequals over the course of time, slowly losing yourself to someone else's idea of you... that's what I always connect with, every time. And the truth of that, of how that feels, always strikes me as terribly true, and terribly sad.

Sad, even more, because Shadrach realized, finally, what he loves so much about Nicola, something he's never told her:

So perhaps he had believed in symbols after all - perhaps the frame of the light as he ascended that first time drew him to her as it touched her body: blind moth to blinding flame. And maybe it was just this: when he came up into the light, the light shone upon her and she was not perfect. She had a face a trifle too narrow, a dull red birthmark between her thumb and forefinger, hair framing her face in tangled black strands. Such perfect imperfection, and he fell into her eyes because now, and only now, could he believe in this new world into which he had been reborn. It was populated with imperfect, beautifully imperfect, strangers, and how it had broken his heart that first time - to know that after so much darkness, the light could be so real, so alive. Not perfect, but real - all of it, the world, the woman, his life.

The paragraph above also illustrates something else that many of the books I've reread (particularly Lust and The Hours) have in common: a deep love for humanity in all of its imperfections. In Veniss, we're shown the full horror of human abuses and vices, and also shown what one person will go through for love. And then you get this sad, joyful acceptance - even love - of the good and the bad; of people, of life.

It is this, from The Hours:


Yes, Clarissa thinks, it's time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

And it's this doomed love of humanity; despite or because of all of our faults and miscommunication, that speaks to me most, that keeps me coming back to these sorts of books; this shared idea that sure, life can be crap, and it can be so lovely and light, and light or dark it's ours, it's what we have. We make do.

And hope for more.

It's this love that makes me fall in love with these books; it's the passion, the acceptance and celebration of imperfection.

When Did You First Realize You Were A Girl? (or Boy?)

There's an interesting conversation going on at Jed's about gender identity.

He actually asks *how* you know you're a girl/boy, but I'm also quite interested in when?

When did you know?

Eat, Shoots & Leaves

The Game/Quiz.

If I ever publish GW, I want to make a flash game where you go around cutting off people's heads and collect bugs that give you special powers and healing abilities.

That would be kewl.

One for the Road

But Don't Ya'll Just Lay There?

Gazing at the enormous organs (of male ducks), she (Dr. Brennan) asked herself a question that apparently no one had asked before.

“So what does the female look like?” she said. “Obviously you can’t have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car.”

The lower oviduct (the equivalent of the vagina in birds) is typically a simple tube. But when Dr. Brennan dissected some female ducks, she discovered they had a radically different anatomy. “There were all these weird structures, these pockets and spirals,” she said.

Somehow, generations of biologists had never noticed this anatomy before.

Arg.

It's About Damn Time

And, suddenly, my phone is ringing off the hook with temp agencies submitting my resume to people. Is there some kind of quarterly budget thing happening where people are eager to hire all of a sudden, or what?

Hey, I'll take what I can get...

Breathing Air

My credit card company, for some inane reason, decided to up my credit limit (I mean, I'm unemployed! What better reason to up my limit!).

So I took the opportunity to stock up on my meds, since as soon as I can't make that CC payment, they're going to cut me off.

This cost me:

2 50-count containers of testing strips (I test 4-7 times a day): $60.00
1 bottle of Lantus (long-lasting insulin): $86.59
1 bottle of Novolog (meal insulin): $95.99

Technically, this is only supposed to last me about a month. If I push it (which I will), it can last me two months (except the testing strips, which I'll have to buy more of in a few weeks).

For serious, when I have health insurance again and the chief topic on my mind is no longer, "How can I afford the drugs I need in order to keep breathing air?" I will likely blog about them less, but for better or worse, these are the life details that are sort of consuming me at the moment.

Also: faxing resumes costs me $14. And there were stamps to buy (going up 2 cents on the 14th) and manilla envelopes. And $32.99 for computer ink.

Don't bother to add that all up. It was a lot. I closed my eyes and swiped the card.

Things will get better.

Some Candid Answers to Common Interview Questions

Q: What would you say is your strongest quality?
A: My ability to bullshit on the fly

Q: What would you say is your biggest weakness?
A: This hole in my foot.

Q: What methods would you use to priortize tasks?
A: I would sort them by color and shoot them.

Q: Do you have any questions for me?
A: What kind of cheap ass has a benefit start date of 90 days after hire?

Q: Where do you see yourself in five years?
A: Drinking the blood of my enemies.

I Have a HOLE in my FOOT

So, I went in to see the podiatrist yesterday to have this callous on my toe checked out. I first noticed it last year just before I went into the hospital, and since then, I've been frantically looking up horrific pictures of diabetic foot ulcers, worrying that this was going to turn into something gangrenous that would eat my whole foot off (warning: none of these are happy pictures).

It was, thus, with much trepadation that I finally went in to have my foot looked at. Why now, you may ask? Because it felt like so much had gone wrong this year that this would just turn out to be the icing on the cake. It would just figure.

After a long wait at an understaffed office (I really should think about going into the healthcare field. God knows every single office is understaffed), I settled up on the podiatrist's chair, waited some more, and he came in, took one look at my toe and said, "Oh, that's a wart."

"Oh, thank God," I said.

But can you blame me for being extra paranoid these days?

We chatted about diabetes. He wanted to know how they'd figured I was a type 1 and not a type 2. Did they do a test?

"Uh, well," I said, "I was brought into the hospital in a coma."

"What did they say triggered it?"

This question didn't surprise me, because the "cause" of type one is still apparently a really contentious thing. You'll hear different things, but what my doctor told me, and what sounds right as far as my experience goes is, I was already predisposed to be a type 1 (my dad and his cousins in France are type 2s, and if you have diabetics of any kind in your family, you're going to have a bigger chance of having t1 or t2) and then I got some kind of virus. The virus triggered my body's immune response, but instead of just killing the virus, it caused my body to turn on the beta cells in my pancreas. The reason I didn't get t1 sooner is because whatever it was that triggered the response didn't happen until I was 25. It could have happened at 5 months, 5 years, 15... or 25. It just so happened mine got triggered at 25 (I then spent a year getting progressively sicker until I went into a coma).

The podiatrist said he's always interested to know the sugar # for a type 1 who was brought in to the hospital for the first time. I told him I was a 680, which I used to think was pretty impressive, but Anne Rice apparently had something closer to 1100, and the podiatrist insisted he had a guy come in who said he'd gone into the hospital fully conscious with a 1300 number.

I'm not so sure I believe that one, but it sure does put my little 680 to shame. I was comatose for a whole day at 680? Sheesh!

I asked him what a "real" foot ulcer would look like in the first stages, and he said it would start out with some red swelling and then look more like a blood blister, not a callous.

OK, I'll keep that in mind for next time...

The med assistant brought me into the room with the little laser thing to zap the wart, and asked me why I'd been diagnosed with type 1 instead of type 2. I realized that at this particular clinic, which is in an upper-middle class neighborhood full of older people, they probably hadn't seen a lot of type 1s. Still, dude, you've worked here EIGHT YEARS. Treating DIABETIC FEET. You should know these things.

"Uh," I said, "it's not that I produce too little insulin or that it's not absorbed well. I don't produce any insulin at all. My body ate all of my beta cells, which is what produces insulin."

"No shit?" she said (she was a very entertaining, gruff, and disillusioned med assistant).

So they shot me up with some anasthetic and the doctor lasered out a GIANT HOLE in my foot.

I was astounded at its giantness this morning when I took off the dressing. And here I'd gone into the podatrist to AVOID giant holes in my feet.

Ah well. I have a follow-up in two weeks to make sure I don't get an infection and get a REAL foot ulcer, and in the meantime, I have super antibiotic cream and band aids.

Oh, and an interview today.

The excitement never stops, I'm TELLING you.

Someday I Will Learn...

That it is OK to ask for help.

But, still hard.

Medieval Map of Empires

What I love most about this interactive medieval map of the rise, spread and fall of empires during the period is the fact that the soundtrack is from the movie Conan.

Boy, I Had to Work For That Number

This morning's number: 92

This is supposed to be a *normal* morning number for me. It shouldn't take effort to get there, just routine. Not having a routine is probably what's ruining it for me.

After yesterday's appalling numbers (178 196 152), I broke out my aggressive testing/dosing strategy that I used to curb my numbers after I got back from Spain.

I made sure I had a reasonable number (100) before bed at 10pm, then set my alarm for 2am. Woke up at 2 with a 145, took 2.5 units. Woke up again at 6:30 am for my Lantus shot and tested at 140 (!!?? Yeah, that's how I know my body's just fucking out of wack), took 2.5 more units. And now, finally, at 10:30 am, I'm at 92.

Fucking sugar.

Thought for the Day

"The majority of people aren’t sad because there is something wrong with their brain. They are sad because their lives suck."

Other Cultures Are Icky

Hannah had a post up a while back discussing Megan Lindholm's short story "Cut," which is about a girl speaking to her grandmother about her decision to be circumcised because, bascially, "all the kids are doing it these days."

This one stirred up a lot of complex feelings for me (I read it when it first came out several years ago and again recently), and today I figured out one of the things it got me thinking about. Female mutilation is a hot button topic. I have a violent aversion to the idea of circumcision; I'm not big on the whole mutilation thing. I like all my parts where they are. I think other boys and girls should keep theirs too.

Now, I know this ain't Somalia (thank God), but things aren't perfect here. We've got some questionable practices, and there's nothing more annoying than somebody yelling at feminists to be grateful because, "You know, in Saudi Arabia, women can't even drive."

There are a couple of things that can happen when you present another culture's "beauty" practices to a Western reader (the big reason given for the continuation of female castration is that any girl who isn't circumcised will never marry any sort of decent, respectable man. Sound familiar at all? How about "If only my breasts were bigger, boys would like me!" No? Moving on, then). Talking about it can raise awareness about the practice and break the silence, which is great, but it can also lead to that whole "holier-than-thou" reader reaction. It can lead to cozy fiction that lets us marvel at the brutal exoticism of of some "backward" country and reinforce our feelings of superiority.

If it's just, "Those crazy Africans are MONSTERS. How could ANYONE mutilate ANYBODY???" and that's the central message of the story, then you end up with some jacked-up piece of uneducated drivel like this whose basic message is ALL MUSLIMS HATE WOMEN. ISN'T IT GREAT WE'RE NOT LIKE THAT????

Instead, you want to do something a little more like what Lindholm does, which is put that practice that we see as "barbaric" into proper context right there alongside equally barbaric practices we ourselves engage in. That's how you use SF to get people to think about current practices, accepted ideas, and challenge them.

It's easy to criticize the Other. It's a hell of a lot harder to turn the mirror back on yourself.

Because then you might end up with something like this.

This May Not Cheer You Up, But it Cheers ME Up, So Really...

Husky puppies! In Alaska!

The Cold Equations

Having a rough night tonight, basically because I've got some medical stuff I want to take care of (like the callous on the bottom of my toe that's going to get me my foot chopped off if I don't get it scraped someday this century, and I'm down to my last bottle of Lantus and Novolog, and I need to buy another 2 bottles of testing strips), and weekly groceries to buy, and thinking about money makes me think about my bank account, and when I total it all up, it doesn't work.

I can make it about 3-4 weeks out here. More like 3. That doesn't include buying any backup insulin. What I have is what I've got. The podiatrist will have to go on the credit card. Which I can't afford to pay the minimum payment on next month unless something changes.

This means that I'll need to move out of Dayton right after Wiscon unless I can pick up some work somewhere. As said, I'll spend this weekend and next week looking at food service jobs. I've got to have something soon, because as much as I try to keep upbeat and not talk about bad stuff and impending doom, you know, things aren't exactly rosy on the financial front. Which means stuff like eating and living is in jeopardy.

The last option, which I didn't take before this one cause it really is a last resort, is to move back home. My parents can help with food and meds. I'm screwed as far as credit card payments and student loan payments go, but there are also way more jobs that will pay me far more money in the Portland/Vancouver area than in depressed Dayton. Problem is that means I'll eventually be paying for gas, too, which I can't afford. My parents will have to front that, too, until I can. Then there's insurance to consider, and etc, and you know, my parents aren't exactly rich. They have enough trouble paying their own bills.

So that's the last-ditch option, and just looking at the way the numbers add up, it may in fact be something I have to do very soon. Not exactly looking forward to it, but it beats dying.

Sometimes I try too hard to be stubborn, to try and do stuff on my own, and then I end up in these really desparate situations where I wait until the last minute when I've blown through my other options, and then it's almost too late. I should have jumped at the opportunity to move out a long time ago, but I had other committments. And this is where I've ended up.

Deep breath. It's OK. It's not over yet, and then even when I've blown through this option, I have one final fall back.

Deep breath.

Take a Tylenol PM.

Go to sleep.

Tomorrow will be better.

Did Someone Say Something?

"I'm ashamed to be seen with such a skinny gamer!"

Ah, Wii.

Sugar Sugar

Before bed test revealed!

232

Blast that damned barista!

According to spreadsheet, I'd correct a 232 with 8 units of insulin, but that's only if I'm going to eat something beforehand, and it's also bedtime, so I subtract 2 units.

But I know that if I take 6 units I'm likely in for a nighttime low, unless my sugar's doing that weird nighttime jump that it did all last week, so I take the 6 anyway.

2 hours later, I'm lying awake in bed. I start to feel lightheaded.

This is the signal to get up and test.

44

Trudge to the kitchen, measure out 8 ounces of orange juice. About 20 carbs.

Try to get back to bed.

Feel too cold. Put on sweater

Start to shake and sweat.

Take off sweater.

Throw off comforter.

Still hot and shaky.

OK, that didn't do it.

Test again.

35.

Still dropping.

Back to the kitchen for a granola bar (yes, I keep lifesavers and jelly beans by my bed for emergencies, but if I can make it to the kitchen, I prefer the variety). Another 20 carbs.

Back to bed. Sweat some more. Shaking increases, but heartrate levels out.

Get up to write blog post about how much I love low sugar episodes.

Shake some more.

Shaking begins to subside.

Finally feeling a bit sleepy. Must be coming back up, cause lord knows I can't fucking sleep when my sugar goes low (a blessing, really).

So I guess this means I take 4 next time instead of 6.

This is what it is: trial and error, trial and error, until you get something that works well, except when it doesn't.

It's all estimates, never an exact science.

But at least it's not the year 1900.

Bed now.

Thinner Than Thou

In the not-so-distant future, worshipping God not only goes out of vogue, but becomes illegal, and worship of the body takes center stage.

Too fat? Too thin? Too old? Too ugly? If you don't look like Ken or Barbie, it's all right to rejoice, because gyms, spas, lipo and face-lift clinics have become places of worship. You can have a cookie cutter body forever... almost.

But if you don't want to get fixed... then heaven help you.

I've been meaning to read Thinner Than Thou since it first came out a couple of years ago, but that first chapter is a bitch to get through. The prose is set out in blocks, and for snappy teeny-bopper dialogue gosh-bang stuff, it needed Chuck Palahniuk-like breaks. I found the teenage protagonists annoying (as many non-loner/non-geek teenage protagonists tend to be - it's always tough to sympathize with physically perfect people who don't have anything interesting going for them except physical perfection).

It gets better as it goes along, because you get some more interesting characters: an overweight executive who signs up for a "however long it takes" fat-camp run by the Reverend Earl, who's cult of thin dominates the country's economy, and the mother of an anorectic teenager who realizes that she's let her obsession with her looks overtake her concern about her daughter's health, as well as the locked-up, spunky anorexic herself.

There's good worldbuilding in here, and plenty of stabs at our current obsession with the body. There are the infomercial/"religious" programs put on by the Reverend Earl admonishing fat people, telling them they're disgusting, telling them they can achieve "success through sacrifice." Telling them. Telling us.

The world outside is one long superhighway of fast food joints and food advertising but inside, among and between is the cult of thin that's grown up around it. The 24 hour gyms, the face lift clinics, and the seedier sorts of places, the places inbetween. Because porn is about everything forbidden, the fatter you are, the more deviant, the more fetishized. A lot of this book ends up being about food porn, and sadly, along with that we end up with this sort of hyper-satirized stereotype of a fat person, these enormous, insatiable people who are so fat they can't walk, who can't stop eating, or thinking about eating. They just can't help stuffing themselves. I mean, aren't all fat people like that? I don't even bother with utensils!!

Eh.

Though I realized that a lot of Reed's plot hinged on the whole "unable to be satiated" thing (as this is also part of the Reverend's plan: make it so that people are always hungry, always fat, and yet always yearning to be thin), there's only one anorexic in the book, and she's not shown as wild, ridiculous, and out of control as the fat characters are. In fact, there are no fat main characters in the book (one of the POVs starts out heavy, but goes to a fat camp and slims down by his second chapter). The fat secondary fat characters are all these gross stereotypes, the women who steal food, gorge themselves on Hershey's bars (not occasional binge. Gorge. All. The. Time) and those who become the Reverend's "Queens" - the women he feeds in order to get them fat (the term for this suddenly escapes me) so that he can get off on watching them eat and then revel in their fatness.

The obesity's all about women, about uncontrollable women, uncontrollable desires, and OK, yeah, that's traditional and all, but I get kind of bored seeing the fat female body as a symbol of out-of-control rebellion, even in this book where the rebellion is "good." Not only was fat forbidden, but it was then linked to sexual desire, and then, in every case, linked to the desire for a fat female body. So fat, boundless, overstimulated, insatiable women. Gee, that's a new one.

But that's just on reflection. It doesn't become really crude in its obviousness until the end.

One of our primary characters is an anorectic teenage girl whose parents, horrified that she's too thin and sickly to look the part of the perfect teen, sign her away to a hard-core hospital/spa/nunnery where a bunch of "Dedicated Sisters" preach to her about food and body image and coax her to eat. Her brother and sister and boyfriend go off on a big cross-country roadtrip in order to find her. Her mother leaves their father and goes off on her own to search for her, too. When the "Deds" get a hold of you, they don't tell you where they're taking your daughter.

The book starts to unravel toward the end, as all of the disparate characters come together in an attempt to topple the Reverend. The thing is, this book was a satire from the start. It's supposed to hit close to home and then go over the top, so I shouldn't have been surprised. It reminded me a lot of Egalia's Daughters, in that respect, though this was vastly better written. Both were difficult to take seriously, especially toward the end, even knowing it was *supposed* to be over the top and it wasn't really serious because it was... serious.

Because there's beautiful stuff in here, as when the army of "big" people who don't fit the Reverend's ideal go on the March (and again, when we see the massive "army" they're all "big" people. These mysterious anorexics and others who don't fit the mold [I'd assume being too tall or too short or otherwise "malformed" would count, too, but no, it's really all about those out-of-control fat people] are no where in sight).

And the army declares:

We are tired of it. We are just plain sick and tired of it. Why should we slave and suffer and waste our lives trying to please you? We are done smiling and pretending that we eat like birds just because you say normal people do. We are fed up with dieting and suffering in gyms because you think we should look like you. We are fed up to here with you and your impossible standards. Who put you in charge of standards anything?

All nice rah-rah stuff, but again, here's an army of fat people saying, "we just pretend to eat like birds!" and it clunks into that stereotype of the-out-of-control fat person, the one who must eat piles and piles and piles in order to gain that twenty extra pounds that makes them imperfect, and that's the most annoying stereotype. The difference between a "normal" (ie BMI blah blah whatever) weight and overweight person is about a 100 calories a day.

An extra three tablespoonds of peanut butter does not make somebody a wild, crazy, insatiable pig. The thing is, in the cult of thin, it's not just about people who weigh 800 pounds. There just aren't going to be enough of those people to fuel your dieting industry. It's about the people who are 140 and want to be 120. It's about dying for "perfection."

But anyway.

So after the anthem-march comes the convergence of everybody to bring down the cult of the body, and it's a little silly and over the top, as the anthem is, as the book is, but...

I think there are places where Reed might be writing from her own fat prejudice, and that comes out in some of the language and the big-fat-slob stereotypes (and the fact that NONE of the main viewpoint characters are these uber-monster fat people this society so fears), but well, you know, there was enough in here to get me thinking about the cult of thin, and how far we're willing to take it. It does what a lot of SF and satire like to do, which is take what we've come to see as "normal" out of its everyday context and blow it up, bright and shiny and ridiculous, and slap it over a new background so it shows up in stark relief, and we can look at it in horror and tried to figure out how the hell we could think of any of that behavior as "normal."

Interesting experiment, but not a grand slam.

Bedtime Sugar Check Reveals...

Mmmmmm nothing more annoying than when the barista puts in regular syrup instead of sugarfree, except maybe not realizing that until four hours later.

Dear American Idol,

Africa is a continent. Not a country.

That is all.

Grindhouse

Like everything I've seen of Tarantino's, Grindhouse is a rollicking good ride, but a disturbing, uncomfortable one that remixes cliches and then one-ups them by taking everything just that much further than anybody else does.

You want blood and gore? Oh, indeed, there will be blood! Buckets! Cheesy dialogue? You bet! Strippers with hearts of gold? Loads! Sharpshooting hero with the Mysterious Past? (I never miss!!!) Of course!

The first feature on offer is "Planet Terror," which runs after a couple of previews for "upcoming attractions," including "Machete," an action movie about a machete-wielding Mexican assassin hired to kill a Senator who's pro-immigration. Yes. It's this sort of movie.

So, Planet Terror is a bloody, slapstick zombie flick complete with Iraqi scientist Naveen Andrews, who I'm sure some people actually do think is Iraqi cause he plays one on tv. But anyway. So Naveen is dealing with some ex US soldiers who were exposed to this zombifying gas. Now the only thing that keeps them from zombifying is small amounts of the gas. But the deal goes bad, there's some castration (you know how it goes), and then the gas gets loose in small town Austin and... Planet Terror ensues!

Anyway, the "plot," such as it is, really isn't all that important.

Iraqis and zombie gas, OK?

In the meantime, Rose McGowan opens the film with a gratuitous go-go dance ("It's go go, not cry-cry." heh heh. Sorry, the dialogue is just great). Rose McGowan is pretty buff. And the dance is pretty gratuitous. Which is the point. Everything in this SF spoof blood bath zombie terror homage flick thing is supposed to be about 800 times crazier than in a "regular" movie.


So maybe that's what made the whole camera-devouring-half-naked-McGowan thing so uncomfortable for me. I really want to love all of of the cliche-fucking stuff, the over the top blood and gore and SF ridiculousness and hyper-masculinity and silly femme fatales and their lesbian lovers, and mostly I do, but...

You know, I was reading one of Patrick's posts where he pointed out to a board commenter that both male and female characters in Jade Empire are dressed in rather revealing clothing, and he argued that if you complain about one character's dress being provocative, you have to admit that the other one's is, too.

Though I don't personally think either character's poses and clothing choices are terribly provocative or objectifying as gaming characters go (they were pretty tame, really), male skin is still treated differently than female skin, usually in the posing. Not only are the guys already being presented as, well, men and so have that whole male priviledge thing going on, coming from a place of relative power over women, socially, but when a guy takes his shirt off and strikes a pose, it's never the pose of someone being looked at but somebody who's looking. Or posing to intimidate, not to sexually excite. Taking off his shirt isn't an invitation to be sexually ravished, it's an invitation to size him up for a fight. If he was posed the way women usually are, it'd look something more like this. But probably more skin. I'm thinking thongs and assless chaps.

So the hyper-cliches in the movie really do a lot to show off the sexism inherenent in the cliche standards themselves. You can let it go in Casino Royale, but during the sex scene where our Hero takes off his shirt, and the camera spends all of its time lovingly licking over McGowan's body, not the Hero's, it's tougher to pretend that it's all just good fun and totally normal. One of the things that happens when you turn up the dial on movie cliches in these sorts of movies is that it forces you to look some of the absurdist sexist crap in a real stark light, too. It doesn't get glossed over as "Well, you know, action movie, whatever."

Anyway, McGowan does in fact lose her leg to zombies at one point. For better or worse, this is the highlight of the show, cause her Boyfriend with the Mysterious Past (TM) retrofits her with a machine gun in place of her leg, and so she gets to weild bloody revenge on the zombie hordes. And though her Boyfriend with the Mysterious Past (TM) may not make it, he does of course, Go On. Cause he Never Misses. The Holy Womb allows him to carry on.

But I really didn't care, cause she had a machine gun for a leg. I'll forgive a lot.

Most people (including me) liked Planet Terror better than the second offering, Death Proof, though this was the one that made the most of the cliche-fucking. Unfortunately, Tarantino takes his own sweet time getting there, and after all the blood and gore and suspense and booty-shaking in the last movie, you're not really sure what to make of this one until, like, the last ten minutes.


This one was a tough one to watch. Kurt Russell stalks a bunch of women who are out having a night on the town. Tarantino spends a lot of time letting you get to know the women, their relationships, careers, gets you to at least sympathize with them if not like them, and talking, talking talking while they're stalked by this guy in a big black car. Rose McGowan shows up again, getting hit on by the stalker and eventually going home with him.

She doesn't make it home, of course. He has a stunt car with a closed-off passenger seat, and straps himself in while allowing her to go unbelted, then kills her with some fancy driving. It's bloody and stupid, especially after you just watched McGowan machine gun a bunch of zombies in Planet Terror with her machine-gun leg and lead a colony of survivors in Mexico. I mean, really.

Said stalker then bashes his car into the car carrying the four women you've spent half an hour getting to know, and they all die a bloody, horrible, dismembered death. There's sex and drugs in there, too, which is another of the reason's he's able to get away with vehicular homicide.

So, movie keeps going, and now he's stalking another group of women. I'm really uncomfortable by this point. I hate stupid bloody needless stalker violence against women. Probably for personal reasons. I mean, getting killed by nerve-gas zombies is one thing, but killed by crazy stalker hits a nerve.

Anyway, so here are four more women you're getting ready to watch die horrible, bloody, needless deaths because they're out having too much fun instead of staying home sucking cock in the kitchen.

But these women are a little different.

This *is* the same guy who wrote Kill Bill. The first one was good, anyway.

One of the women, Kim, is a smart-talking stunt woman who carries a gun. Zoe is another stunt woman with "cat-like" agility who's a gearhead New Zealander. There's an actress cheerleader type tagging along for variety and Rosario Dawson, who is some sort of cameraperson or something.

Anyway, this bunch wants to con a car out of guy and go stunt riding with it cause Zoe's always wanted to stunt ride on this certain kind of car (no, I'm not a gearhead. White thunderbird? Some car. Anyway). So Zoe, Kim, and Rosario Dawson leave the cheerleader behind to entertain the car owner and take the car out, attach their belts to the window frames of the car, and Zoe lies down on her back on the hood, hanging onto the belts on either side, and Kim drives like a bat out of hell down the back roads of Austin with Zoe freeriding on the hood.

Kurt Russell the stalker is in pursuit.

It's got all of the elements for Gory Female Death. Independent-minded women in tight clothes who talk about sex and con a guy out of something - ie act like bad girls - and go out joy riding and having a good time while being stalked by crazy white guy.

In movie cliche terms, They Have It Coming.

I kind of wanted to leave just then, cause if this was all Tarantino had to offer me, I'd call Planet Terror worth my $7 and leave it at that.

But it turns out these women have guts, and when he finally runs them off the road, Kim pulls out her gun and shoots him. He's injured, but manages to drive away.

All the women - still alive, miraculously - hop back into the car and gleefully decide to go after him.

And the hunter becomes the hunted.

It was a fun little reversal, and being a rah-rah women need to be strong and fearless and defend themselves sort of person, I thought it was a cool money-shot there at the end, but I don't think the preceding 80 minutes of the movie were really worth the ten minutes at the end. I was also concerned about that whole potential message of the, "Well, if women fought back they wouldn't be raped/killed so if they are, it's their fault," thing, which does come up in a conversation among the heroines before the stalking. Kim - the gun carrier - insists that it's her right to do her goddamn laundry whenever she feels like it, and she's not going to avoid her building's basement at midnight cause she's scared of getting raped. She'd rather pack a gun.

I'd rather guys just didn't rape and murder people. But you know. You do what you gotta do until we live in a culture where that's not OK. I'll keep lifting my weights and going back to boxing lessons as soon as I'm employed.

To sum up, there was good stuff here that entertained and even got me thinking about how fucking stupid the whole "bad guys rape women!" cliche is, and how tired I am of seeing go-go dancers without machine guns for legs, and stuff like that. I learned that Indians are Hollywood's best stand-in for Iraqis, and I take Rosario Dawson much more seriously when costume designers don't dress her like a fourteen year old.

Also, I still like blood and gore and women beating people up, which is a fine substitute for being bloody and beating people up in real life. It's very cathartic.

Also, if I lose my leg to diabetes when I'm 100, I want a machine gun for a leg.

I'm just sayin'.

Creativity and Education

"If you're afraid to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

Math is Hard

One of the toughest things I've been dealing with the last month - aside from (and relating to) negotiating personal relationships - is depression. It's not bad enough that I can't function, but the longer I go without a job, the worse my health gets, the less money I have for stuff like meds and food, the more down on myself I get.

There have been good days. My recent depression is related to stuff in addition to all of that, but no matter the cause, it's something I deal with. Chronic illness, starting three relationships and ending two in a year, losing one of my best friends, getting laid off, dealing with a crazy homelife while coming to terms with the chronic illness stuff (physical and emotional), and a sudden and rapid move to another state without the benefit of moving here with... well, with anything to do but keep going (no job prospects, living on the good graces of friends)... it gets to me.

I remember trying so hard, in the beginning, when I was first diagnosed, to just get up and brush myself off and carry on. But that became impossible as I began to feel terrified and constricted in my personal life and started making all sorts of crazy decisions in order to set back the clock to my pre-illness days. But you can't erase a year's worth of pain that you've put other people through while thinking you were doing the absolutely most rational thing in the whole world. And that all took a toll on me, and on other people in my life.

If somebody cares about me, I haven't exactly been a fun person to be around for the last year, because when I'm in a high stress situation, what I want, more than anything, is to be left alone. Something that I've realized the more I've dealt with the diabetes stuff is just how wacked out I can be when my sugar's off. Overly anxious, sometimes hysterical, so *certain* that my hyper-crazy feelings are totally *right on.* Panicky. Cloudy. I've learned to shut up when I'm feeling this way. It's best just not to talk to me when I feel like crap, because if I start getting all sorts of questions, I'm likely to explode.

Which means, something innocent like, "Are you OK? Are you sure you're OK? Do you still like me? Do you hate me? Are you sure you're OK? Is there something I can do? Why aren't you talking right now? What's wrong with you? Is it me?"

Is likely to get a response like, "NO I'M NOT OK I FUCKING HATE YOU AND I NEVER WANT TO TALK TO YOU AGAIN," and at the time, that feels like a totally valid response.

I've gotten a lot better with just saying, "It's not you. I just don't feel well," or "I just have low sugar, so I'm over anxious," or "I can't talk right now, I have high sugar and I'm fucking pissy," but it's taken me a lot of experience and a lot of effort to get there. One of the great things about living with Ian and Stephanie is that they don't ask a lot of questions, they give me a lot of space, and there isn't somebody hovering over me asking me all the time if I'm all right.

Frankly, if I had to answer that question, half the time no, I wouldn't be all right, and then talking about how not all right I was would make me feel worse, and then I'd get really depressed, and then I'd start resenting whoever it was who was pulling all this bad feeling out of me.

And around and around.

I've been putting on weight again, which, once again, is an issue because I can't afford to buy new clothes, so I'm giving up some things that I've come to use as a crutch - particularly stuff like candied nuts, which aren't great for my sugar anyway. The upping of my food consumption directly cooresponds to my decreasing bank account. The more I spend, the more I want to buy more food, the more I eat, the less money is in my bank account...

So I'm cutting out some of that stuff. I need to wean myself back off that crutch. Including all those morning pancakes. I've had a couple of bad weeks out here, and my initial couple weeks were just getting settled in. Back to weights *every* morning, 6 days a week of cardio instead of just 4, that sort of thing.

You know, it's a funny thing. People are always asking skinny people how they stay skinny. They're not asking heavier people how *they* stay in shape. I don't think anybody looks at me and goes, wow, she's only 200! She could be 270, but she takes care of herself! How *does* she stay at 200 pounds!!???

Cause yeah, you let it go for four weeks, and whoa boy, time to get back on track. It's something you have to be aware of all the time, if you want to have cool biceps. And feel less doughy. And keep your pants on. This is what it's like to have no metabolsm. The diabetes doesn't help. Reasonable eating and exercise just doesn't cut it. It's 6 days a week, and no peanuts. And that's just to keep me in pants.

In the meantime, yeah, my sugar could be better. I keep vaccillating between 16 and 18 u a day of Lantus, my long-lasting insulin. I don't want to go all the way back up to 18 cause back when I was working all day in a high rise and biking to work, I got away with 14 u a day, and that was pretty sexy. Going back up to 18 feels like a defeat.

The solution would be 2 workouts a day. Or, you know, just taking 18 units of Lantus.

Blast.

Anyway, this post isn't really about anything at all, except to say that boo-hoo, life is hard, and I'm sick of giving myself shots, and I'm going to miss my cinnamon almonds, and I need sexier shoulders, and I have enough money for about 3-4 more weeks of groceries, and some days life really sucks and boo-hoo math is hard.

I'm sure tomorrow will be better. It usually is.

Not Much Worse...

... than wacky sugar numbers and the resulting cognitive fuzz that makes you just not care.

So tired.

Minimum Credit Card Payments for April:

$410.00

Yup, that's the last time I can pay those without being employed.

If nothing comes up next week, I'll pick up those food service applications. I'm not going to make it, otherwise.

International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

In honor of the first annual International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, here's Two Girls. This story's been freely available on and off for years, but never sold.

In addition, of course, there are the stories freely available on the sidebar.

Decision

I turned down the job offer yesterday morning, after speaking with family and friends about it.

As much as I need the money, and the first-day health benefits, well, if I took that job, packed up my shit, and started Monday, I would *really* need the health benefits because I'd break myself down.

It took everything I had left in order to get to Dayton. The time between when I realized things were so bad in Chicago that I had to leave and when I actually left was less than 7 days, and I'd spent the last six or eight months there giving everything I had to repair a broken friendship. I haven't talked here about just how bad things were there.

Out of respect for Jenn, I haven't gone into the details, but it was really, really, really bad. The worst it's ever been in any relationship - friendly or otherwise - that I've ever had. There was duel blame and mutual fault and a lot of shit in there because I was desperately crazy and sick last year for the initial push that got things to that point, but no matter the reason, it was fucking bad.

I wouldn't have come to Dayton unless things were desperate.

And what I need now is to take care of myself and recover. I need to pull my health and my self-esteem back together, and that's not going to happen in Chicago working a high-stress job in a place where I have absolutely no support network.

It was a hard decision, because I'm stubborn and prideful, and I wanted to gun through the move and the job just to "prove" I could do it. Sure, I could do it.

But I've been pushing myself to "just keep going" for a long time now. It hasn't made anything better. It's just prolonged all the badness.

So I'm going to keep trying to get some work here in Dayton. I got a surprise check from my 401(K) payout and just got my last paycheck from my old job, so I can keep going for another 6 weeks or so before I can't pay my bills. Hopefully I'll have some temp stuff by then. If I don't have anything in another couple weeks, I'll give in and work at Starbucks.

There's always food service.

In the meantime, I finished up a draft of the GW synopsis, finished rewriting the first 30 pages (for the fourth time, officially), and am working through the rest of the manuscript. Query letter et al will go out by the end of the month.

Struck Dead By Technology

For various reasons, I'm up late tonight, unable to sleep, and began obsessively clicking on my "stumbleupon" button in the upper right hand corner of my toolbar.

Suddenly, I was brought up short with a pop-up window stating, "Unknown error - database failure."

I continued obsessively clicking on the button, and continued to get the stumbleupon error message.

"Oh my god," I thought, "How will I surf the internet?"

Job Offer

Well, my old boss back in Chicago pulled through and made me a job offer. I asked for 45K and a 5K moving bonus. I received a job offer letter for 43K and a 4K moving bonus and a 30-day "free stay" at the company residential "service center" place.

Medical starts right away. 3 weeks vacation after the first year. They'll be operating near my old office (not in Palatine), and I've got a title, "Leasing Specialist" which I assume I'll be trained on how to do, cause I don't do leasing.

But anyway.

Sounds lovely, doesn't it?

The catch?

The catch is, they want me to start on Monday.

This means putting as much stuff as possible into boxes between now and Sunday, buying an overpriced plane ticket ($700), spending the week "working" back in Chicago, then spending the weekend in Chicago finding a place, then flying back to Dayton the next weekend and paying movers to move my stuff to said place.

And working for my old boss. Who, yes, I do love. But the work is hard, and life-consuming. These guys get eaten up by this industry. And I'd be doing it again.

But it's 43K plus health insurance.

If I had money or a job here, I'd say no.

Going to sit down and talk with Ian and Steph about it tonight and decide what I want to do.

Insulin Calculator

Put this Insulin Calculator (scroll to the bottom) at the top of the list of things I wished I'd been made aware of when I first got diagnosed.

It probably took me about 6 months to figure out the exact same conversation rate (base sugar number, plus amount of carbs you want to eat = take X amount of insulin).

It's a neat little pop-up window calculator, but Jenn rigged a spreadsheet for me that does the same thing. Just wish I would have had this a little sooner...

Collecting the Set

I have an interview with my fourth Dayton temp agency tomorrow.

Four.

I'm curious as to how many more there actually are in this city. I suppose I may as well collect the set.

The Anonymity of the Internets (or lack thereof)

But even women who don't put their pictures or real names online are subject to virtual harassment. A recent study showed that when the gender of an online username appears female, they are 25 times more likely to experience harassment. The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, found that female user-names averaged 163 threatening and/or sexually explicit messages a day.

Sugar Acrobatics

I've been having some issues with my sugar since I got back from Spain, so I've been running numbers like this

(as a refresher: a normal person has a fasting glucose of about 80. I need to stay under 150. Over 200, you do permanent damage. I record three times a day: before breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I test more than that, but generally, these are the only ones I record):

185 - bad
91
91

142 - OK
122
82

125
70
70

148 - OK
99
157 - OK

119
177 - bad
108

These aren't horrible numbers, but I've only been able to make them by adjusting my insulin in the middle of the night. When I test at night because I've woken up for some reason - usually because my feet are bothering me (poor circulation caused by high sugar) or I have to pee (also caused by high sugar).

So at night, instead of running around 100 - which is what I test at before bed, my sugar has been climbing by nearly a hundred points at night while I sleep. So I'll test at 185/200/175 around midnight/three am (no, unless I wake up because of some discomfort, I don't generally test in the middle of the night)

Ideally, I'd like to get these sorts of numbers from a few weeks ago, which I was achieving *without* this odd midnight adjustmentof 4-5 units:

96
88
99

144 - OK
157 - OK
68

95
126
97

118
116
68

153 - OK
105
98

Of course, looking at the actual differences between those numbers now, side by side, I realize I'm being kind of anal about the whole thing.

But you know, high numbers in the middle of the night (which I generally don't record, so they don't show up in this comparison) make me feel like shit the next morning.

This particular morning, I blame the two pieces of pizza I had last night, but you know, after covering for said pizza and going to bed 4 hours after eating with a 75 number only to wake up at 3:30 am with a 207 is just *weird.*

Bodies are *weird.*

Infidel

I've spent the last couple of days devouring Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel. It's been a long time since I devoured a book with this kind of desperate hunger, and I think my compulsion to lock myself in my room in order to finish the book surprised even me.

Hirsi Ali is the Somalian-born former Muslim woman turned atheist, women's activist, and member of Dutch Parliament. She is best known as the woman who wrote Submission, the short film that criticises the Quran's pronouncements about women and the carrying out of those prescriptions toward women in Islam. In answer, there were protests and riots throughout Holland, and director Theo Van Gogh was stabbed shot, stabbed 28 times and had his throat cut in broad daylight in front of 30 witnesses by a Muslim fundamentalist. A death threat to Hirsi Ali was pinned to Van Gogh's chest. She's been living under high security ever since, and currently lives in the US.

I'd first read about Hirsi Ali when I was in South Africa, and I remember feeling uncomfortable about what she was said to believe in an NYT piece about her rise to Parliament. Hirsi Ali - first and foremost an advocate of Muslim women's rights - believes that in order for Muslim women to become truly emancipated, there's going to need to be a revolution within Islam. She calls it an Enlightenment: a concerted study of the Quran not as the Holy Absolute Word of God but as a text written by human beings, and therefore a text open to interpretation. One of the reasons her film was seen as so obscene was because words of such incredible holiness - the words of the Quran - were written on objects of such incredible baseness - women.

What she wants Muslims to do is, roughly, what Christians have had to do in order to reconcile the words and prescriptions of their faith in the Old and New Testament with modern ideas about freedom of expression, women's rights, the rights of children, incest laws, corporal punishment, and etc.

Though "an eye for an eye" is still set down in the Old Testament and having sex with your father and marrying multiple wives and bloody stonings and chopping people were seen as OK in the text, most Christians like the idea of following the far less bloody New Testament teachings of Jesus: the he who casts the first stone school.

When most Christians describe their faith, they call it a faith of peace, of love. Hirsi Ali argues that when Muslims call Islam a religion of peace, they're flat wrong, because according to their faith, the Quran is holy and absolutely right, and if that's true, it advocates the beating of women, flogging in the streets, hands getting chopped off for stealing, and above all - the slaughtering of anyone who doesn't believe as you do. A number of fundamentalist Christians who insist that the Bible is the absolute word of God can get themselves stuck in the same line of reasoning. She insists it's a package deal, and until Muslims deal with this and come out and say, "Well, really, we understand that we're interpreting the book and we're not to take it literally because these were the ideas set down for the bloody, brutal world the prophet lived in a thousand years ago," then they can't pretend it's a religion that preaches peace.

This is, among other things, why Hirsi Ali is such a controversial figure. The liberal hippie in me was appalled at the idea of telling people how they had to observe their religion. Afterall, what about freedom of religion? That, too, is a freedom of Western society just as much - if not more so (certainly historically!)- than the equality of women. On the other hand, watching anyone justify rape, beheading, slaughter, the confinement of women, and etc. to a holy book of any kind pisses me off. Instead of opening your eyes, making observations, and coming to your own conclusions, there are people who want to swallow somebody else's ideas about the way the world should be as set down a thousand or two thousand years before.

One of the fascinating things about reading Hirsi Ali's book is watching her go down the road of working through all of the contradictions of her faith. When she first questioned the teachings of the Quran, she was told to shut up and believe; to be silent, to submit. Submission to one's husband, one's clan, one's God, was what Islam was all about. Once she escaped to the West she began to delve into these contradictions more deeply with the help of access to a broader range of thinkers, of ideas.

As a writer, one of the most moving parts of the book is when she talks about the impact reading books had on her as a teenager and young adult. They gave her windows into other worlds, into other ways of thinking, and they got her to question the way the world was. Until she was exposed to other ideas, the harsh, brutal world in which she lived, where women believed that their endurance of violence, spousal rape, and etc would put them on the path to Heaven, she believed this was simply the way things were. There was nothing else. Being exposed to other worlds, she realized things could be different. Incredibly so.

I was admittedly uncomfortable with Hirsi Ali's complete embrace of the Western world and her turn from Islam to athism, because I worry that her example is going to be "this is how all Muslim women should be!" She does make very clear, however, that she does not want or believe that her path is the right path for anyone; only the right path for her.

For better or worse, as Westerners, we love stories like this: the brutalized woman who is emancipated in a Western country; gosh yay, look how much better we are than other cultures! We get to pat ourselves on the back. But Hirsi Ali talks about many other women from similar circumstances who did not embrace the West so whole heartedly. I do get the impression that she believes it *is* possible to reconcile Islam with Western values of free speech, individual freedom, but it's going to be a long, bloody road, and she doesn't seem terribly optimistic about it.

And, to be honest, yeah, the West is loads better than anywhere else she talked about for somebody like me. I wouldn't trade places; but I do know that much of the violence in the world, particularly in former colonies, is taking place because of the shitty way things were and are being handled by Western countries. That's not to blame the despots any less, but a number of them would have had a lot less hardware if we'd stop giving it to them.

Radical Islam is very much a reaction *against* the West, and it's going to be the moderates, not the radicals, who are going to work on reconciling these ideas, according to Hirsi Ali. There are always going to be radicals - there are radical fundamentalist Christians who blow up abortion clinics, after all. Above all, though, I feel like Hirsi Ali's crusade - if you want to call it that - is to tell the truth as she sees it. She lived in a world where you didn't talk about the way things really were, how you really felt, what you really wanted. You submitted everything to the will of your parents, your clan, your God.

I trolled Google video for some interviews with her, and one of the most striking things about her is that she's actually incredibly soft-spoken. She's this little, fine-boned woman who does not raise her voice or make wild gestures. She takes her time answering questions. She doesn't let anyone rush her.

Above all, this is a powerful book, and an incredible read. How do you go from being the daughter to a Somalian revolutionary who's got three wives scattered across three countries, living in a two-room concrete block and getting beaten by your mother and cicumcised by your grandmother to becoming a member of the Dutch Parliament and living with constant security because so many people want you dead? I think what struck me so much about the story is that it wasn't that it was impossible. It was that it took courage. Huge amounts of courage. And will.

Anyone who stands up for themselves, for their right to tell the truth: it's not as if that's a physically difficult thing. Sometimes it just takes getting on a train. Buying a ticket. That first step. One foot. You just stand up. You refuse to shut up. It *sounds* so easy. And yet the guts it takes to do that - and to keep doing it, even after suffering bodily harm and being threatened with more of it as a result of your actions - that's the most incredible thing.

The New Routine

Called in available to my temp agencies and scheduled another interview for tomorrow at 10am with yet another temp agency. That'll be three agencies I'm registered with.

In the meantime, on my tax forms, I put down that my occupation was "writer."

It felt much better than writing "employed."

Anyway, more GW edits. The book's going out before Wiscon, come hell or high water.

And So

If I declare myself and business and report my writing income ($4500), then I owe $1221.

If I don't declare myself a busines and report my writing income ($4500), then I owe $421.

This probably wouldn't have happened if I'd kept all of my con reciepts.

EDIT: Final Federal taxes owed: $553

Yeah, right!

I wonder if I have anything left on any of my credit cards?