Good Morning, Chiklits

Another day, another dollar, another week of emotional and physical angst.

Yay!

Somebody get me some goddamn coffee.

Update.... Uterus!!

For those uninterested in their uteruses, or those of their spouses, significiant others, sisters, and other loved ones, you can totally skip this. It's about uteruses, afterall. I mean, sure, they're attached to women, but... oh, that's not important!

Anyway, IUD update for anybody interested or considering doing the same thing: still getting some twinges of pain when I sit up for long periods (like, say, at work), so my midday walk and getting up and walking around the office are great for helping me feel better. And, again, it's not any kind of pain that's not manageable with Tylenol, so all is well. I wore some looser pants, and I'm trying to work out a better way to sit here at work for at least the next couple days, until my body adjusts.

The bleeding/iodine discharge has pretty much abated, and I'm just getting a little residual iodine smearing, nothing that noticable.

I expect I'll still be popping Tylenol, especially later in the day, when all the sitting gets to me, and I'll probably still take a Tylenol PM or two at night, but... so far, so good. Things are progressing the way I was told they would, which is always a great feeling.

Tips For Modern Living

If you don't feel like doing the pile of dishes in the sink, but can't stand the idea of waking up in the morning to find that the ants that live under the stove are seething all over your dishes like tiny black maggots, spray a couple spitzes of 409 on your pile of dirty dishes before going to bed.

You will awake refreshed, and untroubled by ant attacks.

Or, of course, you could actually wash your dishes. But who wants to do that?

Jon Stewart, Still My Secret Boyfriend.

Ah, Jon.

Click "view clip" on the right hand side of the page.

George Sings the Hits

Splices of George Bush clips slapped together to create a presidential rendition of "Imagine" and "A Walk on the Wild Side."

Amusing.

(vis Simon)

Sucks to Be a Fat Kid. No, Really.

"We were wondering if obesity would be more accepted today because of its increased prevalence and visibility," said Janet Latner, an assistant professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Latner worked on a 2001 study of 415 New Jersey middle school students that indicates stigmatization of overweight children has grown 40 percent since 1961.

Not good news for the 9 million children who are overweight or obese in the United States, where the prevalence of obesity has tripled in children 6 to 11 and doubled among adolescents 12 to 19 since the 1970s.

Read the rest.

(via bigfatblog)

And it Occurred to Me, Lying There on the Table...

It took three clinicians and nearly an hour on the table to get me fitted with an IUD. The trouble was, I wasn't menstrating (though I was supposed to be - last week's breakthrough bleeding threw me off), and I've never had a child, so I've got a very small cervix, and you've gotta be pretty aggressive to get anything up there.

After forty minutes or so, they brought in the aggressive clinician.

So after forty minutes of being asked "Do you feel anything?" and replying, "Just pressure," and thinking, "What the hell is it, exactly, I'm supposed to be feeling? Some menstrual cramps? Some --"

Ohmotherfuckerchristshitdamnfucksonofabitchshitmotherfucker!!!

And my initial clinician turned to the midwife who was in there to observe and learn, and said, "That's how you know it's in."

Jesus fucking christ.

It would have been nice if somebody'd told me, "If you haven't had a kid, you'll get two short bursts of the absolute worst pain you've ever felt in your entire life... once, when they put the tube up through your cervix and again when they push the IUD through the tube."

You get this amazing white-hot burning stabbing pain in your gut that clenches every muscle in your entire body. Your whole body jerks on the table and you find yourself clutching for the nearest thing you can grab hold of so you can crush the life out of it while your uterus (the strongest muscle in the human body - male or female) engages every other muscle in your body to scream NO!

I wish somebody would have told me about that part. I would have been better prepared. I now have even more respect for women who have children. I don't know how women survive it. Being in that kind of pain, experiencing those kinds of contractions, for hours or days or... sweet fuck. Have every lawmaker in Washington experience that pain for five minutes, and then have them deliberate about a woman's right to choose pregnancy and labor. You'll get a quick vote.

It actually ended up being really nice to have that many people in there, though you feel a bit like a circus freak because it's like there's something wrong with your body because it's taking so long. In fact, all it took was getting a more experienced clinician to come in and go POP! and it was all over (painfully so, but over) in a few minutes. But having people in there to bullshit with while the clinician is poking away at you, and having someone stroke your arm afterward and tell you it's all over was actually really nice; particularly there at the end, because that sort of jolting pain is a real shock to your system, and I felt a lot like a deer-in-headlights. It's nice to have lots of people around saying everything's normal: it eases some of that back-brain fear that cloaks you when you feel that kind of pain.

Being the stubborn bitch I am, I didn't have B or Jenn come with me, so I tromped home, ate Tylenol like candy, and situated myself on the couch with a heating pad until I started drifting off around 10pm. Took a couple Tylenol PM, and spent Saturday relaxing as well. After that initial freak-out pain, the pain was pretty much what they said it was going to be - for 24-48 hours, it felt like menstrual cramps, and I took Tylenol every 3-4 hours the first day and every 4-5 hours on Sunday.

Looking back on it, I should have asked Jenn or B to be there, so somebody could get up and get me something to drink, or get me more Tylenol, or just be there to cuddle with and talk to afterward. I suppose it was a kind of shock I felt afterward, because your body carries around the memory of that pain, and it's a fucker.

Today, I've just got the occasional twinges of pain, kept in check by Tylenol, and I'm waiting for the blood/iodine discharge to abate, which will hopefully happen sometime this week.

If this works out, I can honestly say that it'll have been totally worth it. Sitting on the train today, not depressed, not hysterical, not experiencing a weird increased appetite or feeling too low to go to MA class tonight... *and* not having to worry about getting pregnant. Hot damn. I don't mind a little blood and pain if it means I can get back to my old self and have sex without worrying about it all the time. It's worth it.

And as I was lying on the table, recovering from that second bout of intense pain, I thought of all the things women have done to control their fertility, all the wacky shit we'll put up with, the shit we'll go through, because we enjoy sex and enjoy being closer to our partners, and because whatever risk we take to control our fertility doesn't outweigh the risk to our lives if we get pregnant, if we're perpetually pregnant or nursing. I'll do any number of wacky things in order to live the sort of life I want. And I do view controlling my own fertility as a basic human right.

We'll see how the next few months go.

Friday Beer Blogging

Had a whiskey and writing night last night. Very nice. Mostly productive. Felt good to be able to drink alcohol again, and better to be working on my book again.

And for tonight: my favorite beer and some Giordano's pizza. Yay. It's been another long week.

Good Morning, Chiklits

The great thing about Friday morning commutes is that you can always find a seat on the train.

It's the little things.

If You're Old Enough to Get Pregnant, You're Old Enough to Make Decisions Regarding Your Reproductive Health

Sorry.

That's just the way it is.

The world in the palm of a 13-year-old girl.

Yes. It's her body. Her right. Too bad for you, Florida. Maybe you should have been educating girls and women like her, you know, protecting her life and making sure she lived well and had regular check-ups and knew the ins and outs of birth control. Now it's a little late.

Whose fault is that?

(via bitch)

An Open Letter to Joanna Russ

I've read this one before, but I want to bring it up again:

So I'm going to tell you about it, Ms. Russ, because I think I've just discovered another strategy to suppress women's writing. You wrote the book, How to Suppress Women's Writing, describing in gory detail all the different ways that have been used to disallow, prevent, discourage, disbelieve, discredit, devalue, ignore, categorize, debase, forget, ridicule, malign, redefine, re-evaluate, and otherwise suppress women's writing. I'm sure that you meant to warn us with your book--to warn us that the suppressive strategies are still around, armed and dangerous--and that it's important for women to recognize them and to work against them. But still, I remember (or perhaps I imagined) an up-beat ending to your book and I'm surprised that there really is no happy ending. That the business is still going on today...

It was not one or two or a mere scattering of women, after all, who participated in women's renaissance in science fiction. It was a great BUNCH of women: too many to discourage or ignore individually, too good to pretend to be flukes. In fact, their work was so pervasive, so obvious, so influential, and they won so many of the major awards, that their work demands to be considered centrally as one looks back on the late '70s and early '80s. They broadened the scope of Sf exploration from mere technology to include personal and social themes as well. Their work and their (our) concerns are of central importance to any remembered history or critique. Ah ha, I thought, how could they suppress THAT?!

Gotta scream louder. Write better. It'll get done. Trouble is, after it's done, will anybody remember?

(via Mumpsimus)

Again, Funny Women Freak Guys Out

It's called reversal. Some people think that it's just hysterically funny--the shit that men do to women. Problem is, it stops being funny when it happens to them. It's not funny, dammit! When it happens to men, it's a human rights violation. When it happens to women, it's just....background. It's normal. Sexism will always be with us. Why do you keep whining, complaining, making people uncomfortable? Why do you let it bother you? Come on, it's not that bad, as it? Go look at women in Saudi Arabia! Why are you so ungrateful?

Thoughts on Medicated Depression

The problem with being somebody like me, who is very clear about what works regarding dealing with my "low" days or holiday freakouts, is that when I'm confronted with a serious depression that's actually caused by my reaction to a new birth control pill, I try to "treat" the medicated depression the same way I deal with my low days.... you know, eat right, exercise, try to figure out what it is that's really bothering you. Depression is a message, right?

Yea: IT MEANS THAT THE PILL YOU'RE TAKING REALLY SUCKS.

Which is, of course, the big problem with depression. If you can't physically get up and get out of bed for anything but bare survival (and keep hitting your alarm every morning, when you've never, ever, not in the entire year you've had this 5:15am job, ever hit the alarm in the morning and skipped your weight routine), then it's very difficult to deal with "low" days the way you're used to. About all you can do is crawl into bed when you get home and maybe get some reading done.

Now that I'm back to myself again, I'm starting to realize just how bad it was getting. I figured out what the problem was when I started to burst into tears at weird moments, like on the bus, at work. Hysterical tears for no real reason.

The rest of the stuff - the low energy, the lack of willpower - I could tack up to sheer laziness, or the stress from traveling a month or so ago, or the stress of figuring out what I was doing next, or the stress from being so sick dealing with the *other* consequences of the bc pill. But the weepiness I remembered from when I was a teenager first getting hopped up on hormones.

The great thing about being older - and getting off the pill for six years and then on it again - is that it was pretty obvious to me what was wrong, and instead of trying to continue to pawn it off as just me being "hysterical" or freaked-out, I can call it for what it is: my body's reaction to synthetic hormones.

And my body reacted with a really freaky, really nasty depression.

It's a funny thing, because it's not like I lacked the will to do things, it's just that it felt like there was this gray gauze between my will to do things and the part of me that was actually consciously doing (or not-doing) things, and every day I'd get home and my will would tap-tap me about going jogging, about not eating those fries, about going to MA class, and it's like the conscious part of me just wasn't picking it up. Just wasn't reacting. Like there's something that kept those parts of my brain from actually talking to each other properly. I got pretty disconnected from everything else around me. It's like stuff was going on, and I was aware that time was passing, but I was having trouble really connecting with everything around me.

On Monday, I was taking my usual walk at the nature preserve, and I was like, "Wow! It's spring! When did that happen!" and I actually went around, like, touching trees and stuff. Everything was so bright and shiny.

It was fucking weird, to realize just how out of it I'd been.

Getting up in the morning this week, doing my regular weights routine, hasn't been like pulling teeth, even though I've been staying up talking to B until past 10pm, my usual oh-shit-I'm-going-feel-like-crap-tomorrow-if-I-don't-go-to-bed time.

I decided Monday that I'd start turning my nature preserve walk into a 40-minute power walk, and I'd bring an extra set of clothes into work (I'd jog it, but we still don't have a shower here in the office, so I compromised), and start on Tuesday.

And, suddenly, unlike all the other shit I've been trying to do the last couple months that's been so fucking hard, like ripping something out of myself so I don't feel even worse about myself, I went home, packed my clothes, and did the power walk yesterday, and will continue today, and wow, hey, all the sudden I can really *do* stuff again, without feeling like I'm pushing through a gray curtain!

What bugs me the most about this is that I'm such a stubborn bitch. If I hadn't experienced pretty much *all* of the side-effects related to this birth control pill (depression, nausea, breakthrough bleeding, yeast infection [FROM HELL], weight gain/increased appetite), I would have probably just let the depression thing go. I might have done the adoloscent thing and just been like, "Well, you know, I'm just feeling really low. I did a lot of traveling, I'm not happy with my job, I'm starting a new relationship, I'm not sure where I'll be living in a year, I don't know what to do, I haven't been writing anything, things are just really shitty right now."

And I might have just let it go, because, hey, it was "just" depression! I'd just deal with it the way I always had, and everything would be great! Right!?

Problem was, I could track it. I could say, "It's been about two months, actually, that I've felt this way."

And the connection was just so blaringly in-my-face obvious that I had to make the connection: I started the pill two months ago. I couldn't shrug that off.

And, to be honest, a low period lasting that long was really, really scary, cause there's always that fear that maybe it's *not* the pill, and you'll be stuck that way forever.

In any case, it was a great learning experience, not only for the future, but for the way I view my past. I remember starting the pill when I was 16 and bursting into tears at work one day (in front of my boss, no less), and thinking, "What the fuck is wrong with me?" and moving through a crappy relationship like some sort of zombie.

The pill has always worked for me: no pregnancy! Yay! But it's exacerbated my own occastional tendency to have low days, and it's turned low days into one long sweeping period of gray fog interspersed with that 7-day-no-pill breather period that's just long enough for you to think, "I'm being silly! There's nothing wrong with me!"

Problem was, being the stubborn bitch I am, I never connected the dots when I was younger. Three years of freakouts. Wow. And I didn't even question it. I just told myself I was a hysterical idiot freakshow, and that's just the way things were.

Wow.

It's so great to be back in the world again.

Full of fucktards as it may be.....

Oh, For Fuck's Sake

But in one sense, contraception may indeed be the new abortion -- that is, the next battleground for reproductive rights.

I feel like I'm living in a really, really bad SF novel.

Open Letter to the Fuckers (and friend) I Owe Money To:

Dear Corporate Visa Fucktards:

Why, yes, I realize my corporate card account balance is more than 30 days past due. In fact, it stresses me out, too! It would be a great thing if my fucking employers actually reimbursed me on time, so that I could pay you expediantly and not continue to fuck up my already fucked up credit rating.

Believe me, I would love to pay you so that I didn't have to *pay* late charges incurred because my company is full of accounting snobs, late charges that are not, in fact, reimbursed!

Oh, how I would love to pay you!

But I am a lowly fucking admin, I have no money in savings, and you are just one of many, many people I owe a significant amount of money to.

In fact, you're the luckiest of the bunch, because you will, in fact, get paid within the next four weeks, when the payroll snobs get their shit together and give me my goddamn money back.

Someday, I will have a real job that pays me real money. Today is not that day.

Sincerely Yours,

Corporate Slave

___________________

Dear Great Lakes Student Loan Fucktards:

Why yes, I realize that my fucking student loan payment is due the 20th of every month. Did you fuckers look through your fucking accounts and notice that *I pay you every single month by the end of every month* before you started leaving pissed-off "you fucking owe us money" messages on my machine?

Have I missed a payment in the last year?

Why, fuck, no I haven't!

In fact, your fucking check went in the fucking mail today, so you can kiss my ass.

Sincerely yours,

Super Bitch

__________________

Dear Dell,

Yea. I lost last month's payment.

Sue me.

Your check's in the mail.

Sincerely Me,

Kameron the Great

____________________

Dear Jenn,

Yea. Sorry. You can cash the check tomorrow.

- Kameron
_____________________


The beat goes on.

Serenity

Yay!

All my friends are together again!

Chicago SF Signing

There's a big group signing here in Chicago on Sunday, May 1st at the Borders on State Street, downtown.

Signers include Cory Doctorow, Kevin J. Anderson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Eric Flint, Janis Ian, Geoffrey Landis, Todd McCaffrey, Jack McDevitt, Rebecca Moesta Anderson, Mike Resnick, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Steven H Silver, Laurel Winter and W.R. Yates.

When: Sunday, May 1, 11AM-1PM

Where: Borders, 150 North State Street, Chicago, IL (312.606.0750)

Good Morning, Chiklits

Yum. Coffee.

Reminds me I'm alive.

Fun stuff:

Penguins - the next terrorist threat!

Hô Xuân Hu'o'ng

And:

But since 1980, the two groups have taken diverging paths. Women without undergraduate degrees have remained at about the same rate, their risk of divorce or separation within the first 10 years of marriage hovering at around 35 percent. But for college graduates, the divorce rate in the first 10 years of marriage has plummeted to just over 16 percent of those married between 1990 and 1994 from 27 percent of those married between 1975 and 1979.

What, you mean, smart, older, wiser people generally make better marriage decisions? No way! Marry `em young, when they don't know any better.

::snort::

Not a study you're going to see toted around next Valentine's Day.

(thanks, Jenn)

My Favorite Phone Call of The Day

Yellow calling me from the scoping meeting with the client and having me walk the client through their own site tracking system so that they can access the files I've uploaded onto their server.

Ah. Corporate America. Nobody has any idea what they're doing.

Oh, Canada

OTTAWA - Women in Canada should soon have access to the morning-after pill without a doctor's prescription.

The drug levonorgestrel, sold under the brand name Plan B, has been approved for sale directly from pharmacies, Health Canada confirmed Wednesday.

Which, of course, begs the question: if we could do an over-the-counter plan B deal in the US, would we then have check-out clerks who refused to sell you plan B for "moral reasons"?

And yet, we've got people selling liquor and tobacco products. Oh, yes, tobacco kills! What about the Culture of Life!!??. How can those check-out clerks *sleep* at night!!!

But shit, pharmacists are hopping over the line all over the place.

This isn't what I signed up for. Where's my rights? I think we all need a little lesson of the "not everybody thinks like I do" variety.

Think of the amazing peace, love, and understanding that would engender.

Pretty scary.