Black Desert: Plot

I love that I have to get 200 pages into a novel before I figure out what the fuck the plot is.

Splenda Carcinogens!

I was in the breakroom this morning dumping Splenda into my coffee, and one my coworkers said, "Ah, another one who takes a little coffee with their sugar."

"Oh yeah," I said. "I once went out to coffee with a friend who wanted to try the roast I was using, and when she took a sip, made a face and said, `all I can taste is Splenda!'"

To which the woman replied, quite seriously: "Yes, there was another person who used to work here like that. He'd put four or five of those Splendas in there and I was like, `my God, do you realize the amount of carcinogens you're putting into your body?"

I did not tell her that those were studies about saccharin (which is found to cause cancer in rats when you feed them a steady diet consisting of nothing but saccharin for years) that she was thinking of, not Splenda. I merely said, "Oh yes. It's wonderful" and went back to my office.

You know what causes cancer?

Breathing air in Los Angeles.

Coffee!

Tampons!

Drinking out of plastic bottles that have been put in the freezer!

Spinning in circles under the full moon!

I hate to break this to everybody, but eventually, we all die die. We will die of all sorts of things. Most likely, we will die of things we can't control, like chronic illness, car crashes, and Getting Old.

Call me crazy and unAmerican, but I sincerely doubt that my ultimate demise will be the result of a buildup of "Splenda carcinogens."

Le Temps du Lupe

A family adapts to life in post-apocalyptic France in this intense drama, which follows Anne (Isabelle Huppert) and her family as they arrive at their country home to find the world has undergone a catastrophic event, and utter chaos reigns.

SWEET. I have found a movie to keep me and my cheeses company tonight.

Mmmmmm Health (another IUD Post)

This is another TMI IUD post. I write about my experiences with the IUD here because it's been really difficult for me to find fuck-all first-hand information about it, and I figure I'm doing a public service to other women interested in the option, though my results may no longer be typical since the whole diabetes thing.

That said, I do realize that I am, increasingly, actually meeting and interacting with the people who read this blog, and if you're not terribly down with knowing all about my plumbing and health issues and then conversing merrily with me in person, I do advise you to skip these posts.

So, disclaimer done.

---------------------------------

You know, as lovely as it is to go to the ER and have somebody tell you you're "fine," I just don't trust it anymore.

So, as you'll recall, a few weeks ago I got a knee to the gut during Muay Thai class that resulted in pretty sharp pain right there where my IUD is at its worst on my left hand side. I waited a week for that to settle down, then had my period, but over the last week since my period, the pain hasn't been getting any better, as expected. If anything, it's gotten more uncomfortable.

Now that I've got the diabetes, I don't heal as well, and I suspected I had probably knocked something badly that would have healed fine in a normal person but that was getting real gunky in a diabetic.

Last night I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep because of the IUD pain, and then I woke up at 3am with... IUD pain, and resolved that I would go to the ER first thing in the morning. As I've said, the pain's been getting worse instead of better, and Sat was bad and Sunday was worse. It's not constant, but it's persistent, and I'm eating Motrin like candy.

I made it through about four hours of work before I packed it in and took the bus over to the ER and explained the problems and pain I've been having. It was actually a very nice, efficiently run hospital. I was in the back in half an hour and saw a doctor in 45 minutes, but after that, things started to get dodgy.

Everyone seemed very perplexed about my problem.

"Shouldn't you see a gynecologist?" they asked.

Um. Well, I explained, I have an appointment on Wednesday, but with symptoms like these, the gyno said that I should come into the ER.

"Um, OK, we'll look at it, but if there's something wrong with it, we can't take it out."

I didn't have a fever, and they were expecting to find upper abdominal pain, but I don't have that, I have lower abdominal pain. Which they found Even More Perplexing. I do love that they have no Imagination whatsoever, because there are about half a dozen Very Bad Things I could think of this being a symptom for, but they were just Perplexed.

I told them it was totally fine for them not to take it out, but I'd like to get confirmed that I had an infection, because I figured they could just confirm that, and get me on a cycle of antibiotics, just as was done in November, and I could be in less pain and could sleep and sit for long periods without pain and not toss and turn for an hour in bed nor have sharp, shooting pains when sitting or stretching in certain positions.

Really, I'm terribly demanding. Life, Liberty, pusuit of happiness and all that.

So, of course, I had to pee in a cup so they could test me for the TWENTY MILLIONTH TIME FOR gonorrhea and chlamydia.

So they had a look and said well, yeah, your cervix is a little red and irritated, but really, the discharge here just looks like something from the tail-end of your period (which ENDED 10 DAYS AGO). We'll take a look at this under a slide.

And I'm thinking, great! They'll find the presence of white blood cells, which is what clued off the gyno in November who gave me meds for this exact sort of thing: just a localized infection caused by irritation of the uterus by the IUD.

But instead the friendly nurse came back in and said everything looked fine! Yep, everything is fine and normal and there's nothing wrong, but the doctor says you'll likely want to keep that gyno appointment on Wednesday because you never know!

W.T.F.??

"So there was no infection? I'm not getting prescribed any antibiotics?"

"No, no infection. And we're running those STD tests, but honestly, there wasn't anything indicating you've got any of that either."

Well, no. I have only been tested for those TWENTY MILLION TIMES.

"I'm sorry," I said. "So you're not giving me any drugs?"

"Nope, it all looks fine."

"Then why am I having persistent pain?"

"Honestly, we don't know a lot about IUDs here, so maybe Planned Parenthood will know something else."

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

IF YOU KNOW YOU CAN'T FUCKING HELP ME PLEASE DO NOT WASTE THREE HOURS OF MY TIME AND CHARGE ME GOBS OF MONEY AND CAUSE ME TO LOSE FOUR HOURS OF PAID WORK TIME TO TELL ME YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHY I AM IN PAIN AND CAN DO NOTHING TO HELP ME.

I spent over three hours of my day and fuck alone knows how much money (easily $500, I'm sure, since they had to get me up on the table) so you could tell me I'm FINE?

It's so hilarious, too, you know, cause I've been trying so hard to be better about my health, and to ask for help when I know something's wrong, and the thing is, I keep expecting somebody's just going to *know.* Some doctor will actually know something about some aspect of my health care issues, and voila! I will feel better.

It's really frustrating to feel like you're doing everything right and have the whole thing come to nothing. And it makes me even more angry because this is what happened to me last time. I kept going to doctors and saying, "Hey, yo, all these yeast infections! And I'm tired and getting sick all the time!" and everyone just looked Really Perplexed. And then I went into a coma and spent four days in the hospital.

But at least those people fucking gave me drugs.

And, in general, I didn't feel as if I was "inconveniencing" anyone by showing upat the ER with something I should "see a gynecologist" for (um, hello, the gyno says to see you with this if I can't get an appointment!). But they did seem pretty put out.

So it's Motrin for another two days and then a Weds PP appointment.

For fuck's sake.

You know what I can't wait for? I can't wait until all the fallout from me getting this illness is just done. And maybe, you know, it won't ever be, but I feel like at some point I'll have enough experience with it that *I* can at least peg things. I'll get a good enough regular doctor that I can actually have fewer issues, and I'll know how everything interacts with everything else and... someday, I'll be able to fly!

And, you know, all that.

What I'm actually starting to suspect is that I may have started developing those benign ovarian cysts - fibroids. All the women in my family have them, and I often forget that I am, indeed "getting older." Growing fibroids + IUD = persistent lower abdominal pain.

I'll have to have the PP people do some kind of ultrasound. Oh, that's going to be lovely expensive.

Mmmm health.

I'm telling you: health is tasty.

Diabetes Tote Bag

As clever as this thing is, I have such affection for my dragonfly bag and separate laptop bag... plus, you know, it's not like I'm carrying around my laptop everywhere, whereas I generally carry my insulin around everywhere; it just makes more sense for me to carry it in a purse, and being able to easily transfer everything from a purse to a backpack to a laptop bag is pretty handy.

I guess the diabetes bag part does come out, but it still looks bulky, and again, you're still stuck with just one design.



But, then, I think I'm just terribly proud of my custom diabetes carrying case. Perhaps what everyone needs is a nice portable one of these creations, paired with my red Frio insulated bag for keeping up to four vials of insulin cool, as shown here (a lovely copy of Air included as a size reference)








It fits quite neatly into my dragonfly bag.




And I can carry it around everywhere... from Spain to Switzerland to Morocco to... Dayton, OH.

Where the Fuck is Last Week's Paycheck? No, it Still Fucking Isn't Here

I think it's time to pack this day in and go to bed. Or write something really bloody.

Oh Boy!

Today is going to be fun.

Debunking Third-World Myths

With stats and neat graphics!

French Movies that Don't Suck

Inch'Allah Dimache. This one's about an Algerian woman and her children who rejoin her husband in France in the early 70s when the north Africans who've come over to work are finally allowed to bring thier families over. The language moves from Arabic to French and back again, and they do some great things with the wife, Zouina, using French more and more instead of Arabic as she makes her decision to try and assimilate.

She spends much of the movie - the Sundays her husband and mother-in-law are away - to look for the only other Algerian family in the neighborhood because she and her children would like someone to spend the holiday of Aid with. What she finds is a woman who's lived in France for the last 15 years, still primarily speaks Arabic, and calls her shameful for listening to the radio and kicks her out of her house for sneaking around without her husband's permission.

Both women are servants, kept subserviant by tradition and religion, and dying a little inside every time they try to break away. Mikkala, the second woman, throws Zouina out of her house when she realizes Zouina has not told her husband of their meeting and is going about in public without him, and as Zouina sobs and grieves outside, there's a shot of Mikkala, too, on the other side of the door, pounding her chest and grieving.

Zouina's husband does beat her, but he does so in ways and for reasons that are completely supported by Islam. He does not beat her excessively, without reason, and he is genuinely good man concerned about his children. His actions are all very much supported by even liberal readings of the Koran. Everyone acts within the traditions they've been brought up in (the mother-in-law is the only one that sticks out as a real stereotype as the overbearing mother-in-law vying with her daughter-in-law for her son's affection). As Zouina makes non-Algierian friends, there's talk of "that book by the French woman with sex in the title," and how maybe being divorced is better than having your body owned by someone else, but this movie doesn't turn out quite the way I thought it would, and it's all the better for it, because it's far more believable than the ending I would have written...

It's a film that speaks to something that Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about in her book Infidel, as well: there are two kinds of immigrants, the kind who take the good things from both of their cultures and make them work, as Zouina is doing (but certainly not without huge amounts of grief and loss), and the kind who try and insulate themselves as much as possible from the culture of the country they're living in and refuse to learn the lanaguage, adapt to the customs (and I mean "customs" like a woman going out to buy groceries on her own), and continue to live in a bubble.

Nobody's life here - Mikkala's or Zouina's or even the native-born French woman's next door - is presented as the happiest, best sort of life, but they do present a variety of choices for how we live our lives, and some of the harsh realities we have to deal with if we want to change our lives.

Creepy European Movies

Netflix has this great thing where, in addition to your snail-mail movies, you can choose 14 hours of free movies a month to watch on your PC. They tend to be older movies and/or B movies, but there's some decent stuff on there and a few classics.

Since I've been working on my French a lot more lately, I decided to use this feature to watch French movies, and the first one I picked was "Une femme de menage" (The Housekeeper).

What's up with this weird male fantasy of having sex with your housekeeper? I mean, I might make a joke about how nice it would be to have a young guy named Enrique clean the house topless, but I don't really mean that. Forming a relationship with my housekeeper isn't something I find terribly sexually appealing. When I look for relationships, I look for people I respect and admire and who I can talk to about stuff we both find interesting, you know, somebody you could actually partner up with; somebody cool. A housekeeper who never talks to me, has nothing in common with me and has boredom sex with me just doesn't sound all that sexy, so matter how physically attractive the rest of the world says they are.

See, the perfect marriage-type situation, for me, isn't being with somebody who cleans my house, makes me dinner, initiates no-strings-attached sex, and is so much younger than me that we have nothing in common and they need me around to take care of them. This is only the perfect living situatino if you're looking for a slave.

In the end, the housekeeper initiates the sex, cleans the house, and then when they go on a long vacation, ends up leaving him for another man (who happens to be her own age). She does go so far as to rebel against the idea of going back to Paris after the holiday because, "In Paris I'm just your housekeeper."

Well, yeah, a beach loving sugar daddy sounds great to me, too, if the alternative is life as a housekeeper and boredom sex in Paris.

But of course, our hero doesn't say, "Of course, you didn't want to be my slave in Paris," or even, "Yes, you probably have more in common with someone your own age," (because him and this housekeepr have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN COMMON BUT LONELINESS AND NEVER TALK TO EACH OTHER). Instead, he says, "Oh, he's young." Well, YES, he's young. But you two don't even like the same music. The most she has going for her in your eyes is that she cleans your house and has sex with you and likes to pretend you're married and you get off on having somebody like you that much. You don't even love her.

In the end, the point seems to have been that she was using him for a meal ticket and is now dating someone her own age, and he is old and alone, but it serves him right because it's his fate to be old and alone. What I find even more funny is that somebody categorized this movie as a "comedy/drama/romance."

I think this movie was confused about what it wanted to be, too.

And maybe that was the whole point: both people are kind of selfish and lonely and know what they're getting into but try and pretend it's more than it really is because it makes them feel better, and then they try and act suprised when it all falls apart because really, if you're in love, aren't you supposed to be surprised when it ends? But they aren't, and it isn't, and then the guy nearly drowns in the ocean right before the credits roll and somebody mistakes the woman for his daughter - the movie seems to say: ah, yes, all is as it should be!

I did not feel particularly sorry for either of them.

Help La Gringa Pay Rent!

La Gringa is a hardworking woman in the SF/F publishing industry who's been through a disastrous run of bad luck at various SF/F publishing houses and has been laid off and then laid off again for well over a year. Money's been running out for ages, she also has various medical bills to pay, and she has FINALLY asked the blogsphere for some dough to help make it through this month.

She's in NYC and rent ain't cheap, so please help her out. Ya'll know the extent of my financial situation, and I sent her some $$, people. Every dollar helps.

(c'mon, if ya'll can send Ben Burgis to Clarion and John Scalzi to the Creation Museum, you can help La Gringa pay rent)

Gracias!

SOMEDAY I WILL MARRY THIS MAN OH YES

My gawd. It's serious secret boyfriend status now.

One for the Road

The Best License Plate Ever
Originally uploaded by andycarvin

Be Happy I Am Shittily Insured

It's open enrollment time with the temp agency, and I went ahead and signed up for their shitty temp employee insurance that, of course, doesn't cover "pre-existing conditions."

What it will cover (up to $7500 and only 50% of costs out-of-network ha ha haha ha) is half a broken leg, me getting punched in the face during class, broken fingers, antibotics, and me getting hit by a car on my bike (up to $7500 and only 50% of costs out-of-network ha ha haha ha).

It's the worst insurance in the whole world, almost like not having insurance, but it's better than saying, "I don't have insurance."

So in addition to that $200 a month in meds, I will now pay $100 in medical "insurance" that only insures me against falling off my bike.

Why did I do this again?

Oh, yeah, cause I don't trust my luck anymore.

EDIT: It just occurred to me that medical costs now offically make up nearly a quarter of my monthly income.

I'll Answer to Just About Anything

One of the most entertaining things about starting any new job is how many different names I get called called during the course of any given week.

I've been called "Carmen," "Karsten," "Candice," and "Carmel."

I was identified in today's meeting minutes as "Karen."

And, of course, most days I'm just, "The Writer."

Man, I still get a kick out of that.

Tonight's Number:

317

Yeah. It's time to change out that insulin.

The Cost of Living

I finally broke down yesterday and went to the pharmacy to pick up a couple more bottles of insulin. I've been using the ones I have now since, well, Spain, and a bottle of insulin is only actually "good" for about 30 days after you open it.

Yes, I've been using my insulin two months past the expiration date.

I suspect that my two episodes of "dangerously low sugar after 30 minutes" were probably caused by using "old" insulin. Over time, when exposed to heat and air, the chemical composition of the insulin breaks down, and it starts losing its effectiveness and performing erratically.

I expect to get a lot of shit when I mention this to people. Stephanie was horrified when she realized I'd been using two-months-expired insulin. Then I brought home my two new bottles and two containers of testing strips, set the four small containers on the counter and said, "That's $255 in meds right there."

I make $385 a week.

When the pharmacy tech rang me up, I was a little breathless at the cost, and nearly quipped off something like, "Well, being 15K in credit card debt beats being dead," but kept my mouth shut when I remembered how annoying it was as a customer service rep to get these snapshots of so many people's complicated lives - I had enough on my plate.

So I bit my tongue and paid the piper and yay, whiz, bang! I'll live another few months.

Some diabetes blog I was reading pointed to a blogger who was writing about how we should just let people with chronic illnesses die because they're sucking off the system and using up time and resources. It was a funny thing to read about some random person who wanted me dead because I was "sucking off" society. Kind of hard to do when I'm paying taxes and paying for my own meds, but hey. I'd argue that we're making pharmacuetical companies rich and giving jobs to pharmacists and pharmacy techs and dying thousands of dollars in debt to credit card companies long after we've already paid off the actual balance; all that interest adds up, and I'm sure by the time we kick off, we'll have already been hard into the interests payments, which I'm sure the credit card company will write off anyway (in fact, the only people losing money in the healthcare industry are... the people being treated. But keep blaming all us disease-ridden chronic folk for breathing, if it makes you feel better about being screwed over, too).

It was a such a weird thing to get hit upside the head with this thing right in the middle of... everything. Of life. Of living. It's like you're going along, building this life just the way you planned, doing all the right things, on all the right roads, and then it's like somebody knocked you upside the head witha shovel, pulled the rug out from under you, and you hit the ground hard and realized things - if you want to continue - are going to be a lot harder than you thought they would be.

Life isn't exactly all that easy to begin with. Mine's just a little harder. And more expensive. Living is really expensive.

But I still have this road I want to go down, this life I want to live. And it's funny to have this extra time, as much as I can squeeze out of an insulin bottle, in any case. I keep coming back to it and I keep on squeezing it because I have such a passionate desire to succeed at all of these things, to die old and satiated. I have too many desires. I want too much. But all that desire means I'm willing to do a lot of things to get there, one bottle at a time.

But I Have 15K in Credit Card Debt!

$5700.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth

Man, I'm never going to break even!

A Day in Columbus

OK, the rest of Ohio isn't nearly as depressing as Dayton. Maybe Dayton just isn't my kind of town. I'm thinking it's the whole "few to no jobs" and "what jobs there are pay crap" thing.

But honestly, Columbus just has a far better feel. And I'm *sure* it's not just because it's packed with cologne-wearing college boys. Not at all. I mean, they all dress and sound alike, which is pretty much the most unattractive thing in the whole world.

Sure are pretty, tho.

Um, did I say that out loud?

Which probably also says something about my actual problem with Dayton.

We went to The Book Loft in the German Village (I could totally live here!) and tried to get to the only ethiopean restaurant in town, but it was fucking closed.

Like they knew we were coming.

Bastards.

Babylon 5: A Call to Arms

Sweet holy mother of gawd, how does Straczynski write this crap with a straight face?

EDIT: OMG he was a staff writer for Shee-ra Princess of Power! OMG! OMG! I think I have a secret fear that after a decade or two of writing with complete abandon, without being critiqued by friends and fellow writers and ceasing to listen to the sticky Voice of Reason that reminds me all of my kewl Epic Fantasy thoughts are not New and Shiny pots of gold, I will end up writing just like him. "They said Exacalibur would return during man's darkest hour..." oh sweet GAWD.