badger cannon

Still sick! Harrumph. I have resorted to T3s, which finally make my throat feel like it isn't trying to secede, but which also rob me of my ability to use apostrophes correctly.

Still have a fever and adding codeine on top of that makes me sooo sleepy so naturally I have a case of THE FEVER DREAMS! They are not very different from my normal dreams, except they seem more real or anyway I'm worse at telling if they were dreams or not.

1. I have stolen Avi's baby, for the second time, and taken it on the train to Portland to try to sell it to Powell's Books. I remembered the enormous hall of cans from before, a sea of multicolored cans which are simultaneously paperback novels. But alas! Unlike the jolly free-for-all of prior years, now they've sorted the cans by colour and used them to pave the hall in an orderly way, and while they will technically still allow you to buy a can/book if you spot one you like, they unofficially disapprove of it, since it will leave an annoying gap in the flooring of the book stadium. Hmph! I bought a few hardcovers from the indoor sections and took the baby and left. I went to a football game where Avi was waiting longsufferingly for me to give back his baby. I left it in a basket in his box, with an apologetic note. "Boy, he puts up with so much from me," I thought. I was all set to apologize again on IM this morning, only, er, wait, Avi doesn't have a baby.

2. Oakridge shopping centre has a secret passage to Juli's house! My camera has broken in two, but Juli fixes it with an astounding yoga move. She feeds me carrot sticks and pats my head while I lay upside down on her bed trying to decipher a national geographic map on the wall, which turns out to be a cunning forgery - there isn't actually a country called the Corivatican, and so it is no surprise that the chart of their principal exports is somewhat fanciful. I am busy trying to decide if I'd rather take the Amtrak train the long way home or go through the secret passage and take the Canada Line home when I wake up and am rather annoyed to realize that there /isn't/ actually a short-cut to Olympia.

Oooh, I can have more tylenol now! Yay. I think this dose will make my throat not-hurt enough to actually eat some food. I am craving celery so hard.

I hope I'm well enough to work tomorrow - it's injection clinic day, damnit! But also don't want to cough on people coming in to my store for a preventive intervention, so well, we'll see.

Title: Tidal Creatures.
Rating: PG.
Fandom: Irish Mythology/Talis Kimberley's "Still Catch the Tide." This is a story structure called a literary echo.
Synopsis: What are the holidays like for the ones left on the shore?

( What are the holidays like for the ones left on the shore? )

Today's fandom suggested by judifilksign. To suggest a fandom, pairing, or situation for tomorrow, please comment on this post. Only comments on THIS POST will be considered for tomorrow.

21-year-old raises money for her own funeral.

The widow penalty has been eliminated. Basically, those applying for US residency that have their spouses die before the marriage has lasted for two years can still apply now.

The remaining 24 residents of a Japanese town have decided to let the town die with them.

Mexico City legalizes gay marriage and adoption by same-sex couples.

Anti-trans crap is going on in Minnesota and it's the governor's fault. He's going to run for president in 2012. via soundingsea

Rwanda refutes claims it is planning to criminalize homosexuality.

Price Edward's Island updates their legal language to conform with the 2006 legalization of sam-sex marriage in Canada. via brigidsblest

The end of the Boys Choir of Harlem.

Because some of you care: You can now order Girl Number 9 on DVD.

IMPORTANT YULETIDE PINCH HIT NOTICE.

I can't really believe I'm reporting on this, but Duane Reade's shitty random store brand now sells fudge that's pretty damn good and gluten-free (it does contain glucose the source of which I don't know and that may be at risk of gluten-contamination if that source is wheat-related).

cruentum, I've written a page and a half of your story request so far.

We had the money for none of it but this is the New York in which I grew up. Check out the snuff box on slide 6. I will never stop being grateful for living in the hidden world.

If you happen to care: THERE IS DESCENSUS IN THE COMMENTS.

Current Music: Mortiss - Fanget i krystal

Can't the slugs live one day longer?
There's so much math to do...

Liking the current schedule variant - which is more or less the old schedule, except if K isn't up when I'd start math, I work on Strogatz (yes, that's not math - amusing as heck, but far too hand-wavy) or Horowitz and Hill until he is. (Or, I suppose, until I start Apostol anyway, but so far this has sufficed to accommodate the difference in schedule regularity.)

I think my brain is broken. I'd just put together my lunch, which involved a layer of hot rice and another of frozen vegetables, and I realized I needed a peltier junction.

Sparring: K relaxes, steps forward and throws a beautiful rolling spiral. I kind of ride most of it, but end up getting hit the face, kind of hard. (Kind of hard is a relative term - not even enough to make my lip swell noticeably, but we've been doing really light impact, especially at speed, and especially in the face.)

Me: Ah!
K: I'm sorry!
Me: (touching lip) It's okay. That was awesome!
K: I was trying to channel L Sensei. I need to get better control.
Me: That was completely worth it! Do it again!

(paraphrased)

General consensus is pretty much than 2009 sucked. Absolutely, positively completely. It treated me fairly AOK though, even if it was strange, even if it left me with a few close calls and as a bystander to a lot of personal tragedy.

And tonal quality of it all aside, a lot happened.

At the beginning of the year, Patty left for a dig in Oman. This is relatively unremarkable -- I live with an archaeologist and going on digs is what she does and this was the third one since we got together. This, however, was also the one where she didn't have an address (so I couldn't send her letters) and the one where she wound up in the hospital with pneumonia. She recovered just fine and was able to finish out her time in Oman (and pick up some extra archaeology work along the way), but there was a chunk of time where I thought I was going to have to fly out there.

Right now, she's visiting her family back in Ohio. She'll be home on January 1 and then we get to go on our awesome trip together. She's great. She's awesome. I adore her. We're silly and sickening and really, really, really, really are so schmoopy we're like the fanfiction you hit the backbutton on in the first three sentences. That's okay, we sort of like our privacy, such as it is.

Anyway, the pneumonia thing was stabilized but still going on when I headed out to Los Angeles for Gallifrey One so I could spend four days getting trashed (I don't drink much or often, so this is rather easy to do) with redstapler, marchek, and _tonylee_ while dressed like Captain Jack Harkness. This was lovely. This was easy. People were good to me, so much so I often blushed. I should never be the person at any table someone is too shy to talk to, especially considering some of the people we sat at tables with.

The Whoniverse is a funny thing. It's a land of rather low boundaries, and I'm, even more than other people, often an observer to the resulting shenanigans. As much as I may often be catty about this, the fact is I'm fascinated and moved and sort of honored by this weird little world where people on both sides of the pro wall do so much of their fumbling with identity, relationships, celebrity, status and a host of other things in public.

Anyway, by the time it was time to put on normal clothes for the dead dog party, I found myself feeling miserable and fragile in one of my hottest but utterly casual female outfits. The moment wasn't about cosplay, but about being unarmored, about being a girl, about being delicate, about being judged on a set of standards I feel less comfortable with even if I do happen to have a very societally approved female body. The whole it scared me a little bit, and it's not a feeling I ever want to have again, quite frankly. I doubt I'll be so lucky.

Torchwood and suits. On some level, that really is what 2009 came down to for me. Even at WriterCon where there was Fail and habitrails and I got to talk about violence. None of these things are related.

kalichan and I finished I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling, and I'll confess I still reread parts of it all the time. That story matters to me in a way I can't explain to you. Assuming I don't get too scorched on my big cruise vacation with Patty, I'm hoping to get my tattoo of "be grand" before Gally 2010. That'll surely be wank fodder (another amazing feature of 2009 we'll address later) in some circles, but I've lived my whole life that way (taking up space through sheer force of will, not the wank), and while sometimes I get smacked down for it (both deserved and not); the reality is that it works for me. It helps me do stuff; it helps me make an impact on others; it keeps me happy.

With a lack of anywhere better to mention it, I didn't get back to flying lessons this year, and that is sad. But I did get to go up in a 1929 biplane, and that soothed a lot of hurt. If I had a car and/or lived near the Old Rhinebeck Aeodome, I'd be there every weekend volunteering.

Anyway, on to Torchwood and fandom at large: God. Well. Can I just say I'm going to Bristol and leave it at that? I gotta say, identifying with the guy who's in love with the character that dies is about a hundred times worse than identifying with the guy that dies. That's what the transition from Harry Potter fandom to Torchwood fandom has taught me. And as much as I hate what CoE did to fandom (and still don't understand why it had to be a virus that killed Ianto -- poison gas would have made so much more sense!), I'm glad I was there when it happened. It was a moment, and it was neat to be a part of it; I really, really do wish we had all been a little more gentle with each other though. Well, I wish a lot of things. In case it's unclear though, I want to say I largely liked CoE; it was brilliant TV as it was happening and I actually believe Ianto got a good death.

Moving long. Suits! Duchess Clothier has been awesome to me. I have two beautiful suits and some shirts in my closet from them now. My tux, at the time of this drafting, is expected to arrive next week. I still struggle sometimes with how I look in the suits. I am not tall and lean as a man; I can't be and hide my hips. And it is strange to have the privilege of authority that the suits bring without the privilege of the more ideal measurements I have in female form. I would wear the suits much more often than I do, yet sometimes I worry they will be perceived as costume (oh, brick shirt, you make me blush) or that I am putting myself at risk by making other people uncomfortable with my gender presentation. Also, it's a process. A long process, and not one I can deal with every day.

I would like to learn how to dress casually in masculine clothes for next year; just as I would also like to learn how to reclaim authority when people compliment me in feminine presentation in ways that I find awkward (i.e., I gave a speech you liked, and now you're telling me it's because I'm pretty). I love how I look naked and I don't necessarily associate that with male or female, and it's everything else after that that's some level of fun, weird, difficult and stressful for me; I suspect this would be the same if I had a male body. None of this isn't anything new; I just talk about it these days. It's interesting and fundamental, but it's also not very important.

Wank. Well, it is the Internet. This year we learned that I eat babies and that peerage is powerful. Probably a bunch of other things too, but then I decided that "if you want to be a celebrity, you better behave like one" means I'm not allowed to read who_anon anymore. *Waves to the mousies*

Travel. As crazy as 2009 was (LA, Minneapolis, Boston, Atlanta, Switzerland as just some of the highlights), 2010 promises to be even crazier (LA, Atlanta, DC, London/Cardiff/Ireland, Bristol, the Carribbean, Florida, a few weekend getaways here and there, and possibly a return to Swtizerland). I feel pretty blessed by all this stuff, even if most trips Patty and I take are working vacations on some level or another. 2010 cons seem likely to be: Gallifrey One, Lunacon, Infinitus and DragonCon.

The work:
- I started my novel ConSweet and I love it with every fiber of my being. It's going to be great and it's going to get published and sell. 2010 is for finishing that. It's currently about 16,000 words; I'm guessing the finished product will come in around 70 - 80K and I've already figured out the plots for two more books in the series. I'm not even kidding.
- I got "A Tangible Reality of Absence" accepted to that damn conference in Bristol.
- A bunch of essays I wrote for LJ Idol are in Idol Musings.
- An ancient LJ post of mine will be in a Modern Library anthology that's coming out in 2010 or 2011.
- Dogboy & Justine got accepted to a short play festival here and will be back on stage in NYC in January.
- I am still trying to finish a damn werewolf story for someone.
- I got my first residuals check for feature film work I've done.
- I gave presentations on writing fight scenes, on porn and plot, on JKR's treatment of Snape's gender identity and a whole bunch of other stuff. Someone actually asked me where I teach.
- a lot of super uninteresting non-fiction stuff for the web, but hey, a check is a check.
- I earned out my advance on the HP trivia book.
- I did a tiny bit of background work and had some important auditions that went nowhere. On the other hand, I finally got my damn IMDB page up and running.
- I modeled a little bit and remembered that I hated it. Or hate other models. Or something. I wish, I suppose, I could get paid for being a man even remotely as often as I get paid for being a girl.

Meanwhile, I also had an essay I should have been able to nail rejected from an anthology and blew scads of deadlines.

And while it's not "The Work," it's work that's important to me: Other than IHNIIHBT I wrote a bunch of other fanfic, a couple of which I really care about. Those are Because Men Once Went West and Red and Fourth.

As the year's been drawing to a close, I'm been sort of torturing myself about my weird life with a foot in both fandom and pro camps. In a lot of ways, it's my value proposition (can you tell I used to work in dot.coms?). But it's also uncomfortable for me and everyone else. My ambition and my fannishess are, if not at odds, at least supposed to be at odds. I do not like it, and I do not wish to choose. And if I must choose, the truth is I fear I will choose wrong, blinded as I am both by my ambition and the nature of solace for my peculiar heart. This is compounded by something I fear is a function of my female socialization -- I do not ask when I should, I do not pitch... I think "oh I don't want to be that 'read my script' asshole" and while that's true, that's also me protecting myself. I don't know what to do, guys, and I don't have the heart to ask the one person I can think of to give me advice because it'll change everything and because I protect myself far more than you think.

Leadership. Somehow, that brings us to the other theme of 2009, which has been a really hard one for me. Leadership fail. Mine. Other people's. It's been tangled up with shit I love (fencing, dance, fandom); it's been tangled up with my self-perception and with gender. It's been tangled up with anger, with my belief in the sanctity of teaching and my utter impatience for authority figures. It's been tangled up with my ability to say "hey, kids, let's put on a show" and get everyone to play, only to have everyone get upset later when my vision is too austere and personal and serious. I want us to have fun doing what we do, but I want to believe that what we do is very serious business. It doesn't make me easy, or lovable. And it does't make me a good leader. And my propensity to try to step into vacuums and fix that doesn't make it better. It tends to make it worse. 2009 was the year I got authority. 2009 was also the year I let people down. Where it wasn't enough. Where I didn't know what the fuck I was doing and where I felt betrayed because no one's best was good enough.

Now look at that... we're back at Torchwood. I've always been great at this circle crap.

;)

I'm at a point where a lot of things I'm supposed to want have fallen away; I've either gotten them or realized I never wanted them in the first place. But what replaces them? That's a tough question to answer. Some of the things I want I suspect I'll never get to have, but I'm trying to face that more directly. It hurts. I still need things toward which to aspire, things to look forward to with more than a feeling of going through the motions. I have an aspirational gap that I desperately need to fill.

If you consider the concept of Neil Gaiman's book "American Gods," that gods all over the world were brought to this continent in split-off manifestations by the immigrants who believed in them, then in the forests of Alaska there are fairies in the meadows and dwarves under the tree-covered hills, because my dad's parents homesteaded there, and their children read books of European literature.

If I had things my way I could do this thing more regularly but ALSO be a more interesting writer!

My parents lick the boots of Michael Medved. Mr. "Your argument is understandable, caller, but here is why what you're saying is completely stupid..." who is actually rather amusing at times...
Except when he argues that food stamp users are "stealing tax payer money," he doesn't take into account that many of those food stamp users are taking back taxes that they have paid themselves at some point. Ahem.
He was making a mock-argument about whether Santa Claus is evil, with his promoting greed to children and scaring them with his garish costume.

I do recall making at least a couple of posts around this time of year about my love for Santa. To me he is not the media's bitch, he is not the silky fake beards at the mall, and of course not Jesus' granpa. I perceive him as an ancient, earthy, wise, loving being, sort of Tom Bombadil-ish. Or if you prefer, a more cheerful Gandalf. (Man, have I mentioned how psyched I am to see the Extended Edition after finishing the books? And I heard that kid from Goonies is in it.) The source of his warmth and comfort is not "innocence" or ignorance but eons of witnessing the alternative-- humanity at its most wretched, falling to despair, cold and darkness.

I sort of enjoyed parts of the Christmas concert I went to at my parents' church. There was some tearful sincerity in its production, and I strove to keep myself respectful and sane by re-analyzing the carols that the choir sang. There was also a lot of the un-guided fluffy parroting of scriptures that I remember so much of in my church-going years. Dim avoidance of all the juicy fascinating stuff about the holiday that may or may not contradict what people are supposed to mildly, blandly Have Faith in. It's all something of an intellectual, even spiritual cock tease.

Okay, that's my belated teenage rebellion for the day.

What I mean to say is, I dig this solstice celebration thing of let's huddle together and splurge on our food stores and remember what we're surviving the winter for. The dark and lean times are as ephemeral as anything else. And being self-aware, we have the ability to create a bit of light, for a while. Fire, love, little light bulbs on strings.

I'm always in my own little world anyway, so the buying angle of Christmas and the crappy holiday movies and obligatory same-five-songs-over-and-over are just irrelevant background noise in my mind. If I could do a Krampus event, or belt out songs of gore and violence with bosom buddies or threaten to put children in bags and beat them with reeds (scaring children! The great holiday tradition Medved is pooh-poohing!), Black Peter style, I'd be a hundred times merrier. Perhaps my Norwegian ancestry calls for it.

Okay maybe that doesn't make sense to y'all. I was just talking about warmth and comfort. I'm talking about knowing what it means to be alive, knowing the harshness of the world and matching it with beauty.

Speaking of Norse-ish awesomeness, the latest Metalocalypse is so much better than the holiday episode.

http://video.adultswim.com/metalocalypse/fatherklok.html

( Recent Shared Posts )

Yo. I'm Rebecca. I introduced myself once ages ago but I never posted here after that, though I occasionally comment. I never thought I had anything to say or bring to the proverbial table. Then I wrote this journal entry and I was like, "Hey." So anyway this is my first non-introductory post.



Tonight, my girlfriend asked me if I had ever considered a sex change. This partially excited me because I feel like in most places where I work or live, it is a taboo subject, and I really just want to be able to talk about it freely and openly, like we'd discuss what we want for lunch or what we think about this book or movie. Any gender stuff at all, whether or not the discussion involves transsexuality, is so interesting to me--yet for some reason a lot of people willingly block transsexuality out of it.

Anyway, so I was just sitting here being awake and on the Internets and pondering this and being like, "Why not use this as an opportunity to ramble about myself in a public sphere? It's fun!"

I have indeed been in periods where I heavily contemplate the state of my femaleness, or lackthereof, or total differentness, and whether that is "male" and whether I am unhappy with anything about my femaleness, or whether I am desiring of physical maleness. I even picked a male name out for myself in the possible event that I concluded a sex- and gender-change is "for me."

Definitely, there is a maleness to my personality and my sexuality. Although I tried to deny and to push it toward the back of my consciousness in early childhood, and only timidly and privately addressed it throughout my adolescence, having it manifest many times more frequently and unwittingly through outlandish, rebellious, and overtly sexual ways (one could argue it was a sort of secondary "male adolescence" I guess), when I began reading about gender in my early 20s (feels weird to say that, haha, since I'm still technically IN my early 20s...), I became excited and, soon, liberated by coming to see the various ways one can experience and express their gender and sex. It is not so set in stone, so ~binary~. It is fluid, amorphous, many things, a spectrum.

It's okay to be female and male at the same time, in varying degrees and intensity. This doesn't have to be a conflict. It can be a marriage.

Words: 6,064.
Total words: 87,401.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter sixteen.
Music: Girlyman and Glee.
Lilly and Alice: sleeping in my backpack.

As of this evening, I have managed to break three hundred manuscript pages. Exactly. (To be fair, I cheated juuuuuuust a little, and went ahead and wrote the blog post that opens chapter seventeen. Come on, it was that or walk away at two hundred and ninety-nine pages. That's the kind of choice that leads to getting up at three in the morning to start writing again, and that's just no good for anybody.) I'll probably break 90,000 words by the time I get to Seattle, what with that whole "airplane ride" that I have to take to get there. Great Pumpkin bless my Netbook, that's really all I have to say about that.

My page proofs for Feed have been finished and returned to my publisher. I have cover proofs for the US and UK editions of the book; they keep surprising me when I see them out of the corner of my eye, like "Who wrote that? Who's Mira Grant?" followed by "Oh, yeah. I did. That's me." It's like having a secret identity, only instead of being a superhero, she's a total bad-ass horror movie heroine, ready to kick ass and take names (all while having fabulous hair, naturally).

I estimate I have about another 38,000 words to go on this book, give or take a couple of thousand. That's a lot of wordage...but it's a lot of plot. And then I get to revise, and rewrite, and finally stand on the edge of yet another precipice, looking out over the unexplored country of Deadline. I'm almost there.

When will you rise?

Let me do a total re-introduction. Nat 22, gender chopp`d & screwed.

( lots of books. lots and lots. of which a significant number were written for an audience under the age of fifteen (231-244/275). )

Those of you who know about my completed but unpublished novels will know I’ve got Queen of Souls, a Persephone and Hades story on the queue to be edited into queryable shape. So it should surprise none of you that I’m quite interested in checking out Frayed Tapestry, by my fellow Drollerie author Imogen Howson. In fact, as the cool kids like to say, her post for this month’s Drollerie Blog Tour, on the topic of dangerous writing, is Relevant to My Interests indeed.

Check it out, folks! Here’s what Imogen’s got to say.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Stolen entirely from hsifyppah, I present:

It's time for Retroactive New Year's Resolutions! The regular kind are way too depressing - who can keep them?

Here are mine! I mean, here were mine, which uhh.... I totally just found in a sealed envelope from last January.

1. Neither Anna nor I get more cancer or injuries. 10 days to go! STAY ON TARGET
2. Paid-to-show-up-and-play gigs. <3
3. Get a show in Boston!
4. ...and Vancouver!
5. Win NaNoteWriMo9!
6. Go YAY a lot as Anna's first book gets published. YAY! See? I'm still doin' it. ^_^
7. Buy a bouzouki with help! ^_^
8. Steal a meme about retroactive resolutions from hsifyppah. Freakishly specific, and yet I feel very good about this one at this point!

There are further notes in the margin but I can't quite read them so this is enough for now. What're yours?

Having planned out a busy day, I have instead "decided" to stay in bed with a high fever and no voice. Whee! I AM my solstice candle! Burning with fever's delicate glow, glistening sweatilydelicately in the light of the setting sun! Am I not elegant and heartwarming? Well the latter at least. Technically speaking.

My icon is from a charming solstice card reluctance gave to me many years ago, a poem rendered in ridiculous TheDraw fonts. Heart heart heart. It is, ironically, getting a bit hard to read after being pinned on my wall and exposed to sunlight, so I will reproduce it here while I still can:

"When days grow short and dim, we must resist responding in kind, instead setting ourselves alight, blazing brilliant and tall, bringing the sun back in our own thoughts and actions. Burn low and long."

=====

I still /want/ to go to the oldtime jam tonight, but Joe looked at Fever Dream Action Figure Brooke this morning and asked me to, er, consider not leaving the house. Sigh. I'll be good. Probably. It is a struggle.

If I'm still sick tomorrow, everyone's gonna get postage stamps, neo-citran, and slightly-used hats for christmas, wrapped in pages from atheist magazines and attended by fruit-flies. This probably wouldn't go over all that badly with my family, since they're, y'know, MY family, but I am hopeful I can actually make it out to the shops tomorrow anyway.

Still at B&A's. Things going well again though took a serious turn for the worse Friday. :/

Friday was Day Four. I was doing really well all day! I could get up and sit down by myself mostly (which meant I could go to the bathroom unattended, yay!) and was in good spirits. I ate real dinner - pasta with B's homemade sauce and (whoops) garlic bread. B was working on a commercial till late, but since I'm on their seminocturnal sleep schedule anyway, we went ahead and got me showered a bit after midnight. Worked much better this time as we didn't decompress me till we had me already in the shower on my shower seat (brought from my house). B helped me get washed, rinsed, and dried, and to my immense relief I was CLEAN. We even borrowed a spare post-op binder from a friend so that my sweaty, somewhat bloody one could be washed and have time to dry. It wasn't as tight/high a fit, but it worked... right?

Well, maybe not. As I was getting ready to go to bed I was feeling a bit nauseous (kind of like I do unbound, though I'm trying to spend some time decompressed every day to get used to it). We attributed this to the shower plus real food plus my (comparatively high) exertion plus the other binder... figured it would pass. A stayed with me to keep an eye on me till I fell asleep, hold my hand for company and to make sure all was well. Unfortunately all was not well and within about half an hour I was very, very sick. Let me tell you, throwing up with a cut-open chest is no picnic. We called my surgeon, who was (fortunately) on call that night and got back to us right away - no, we shouldn't be too worried, the stitches should hold, and some upset tummy is not unusual. I was dealing with constipation too from the opiates which undoubtedly was not helping - we'd planned to address it in the morning but evidently I couldn't wait. Once the worst of the nausea was passed we got some milk of magnesia in me and then it was a waiting game. I had the worst abdominal cramps I have ever, EVER had - literally all I could do was curl up on the floor, trying not to lie on my incisions, and whimper. I have so rarely been in pain severe enough to make me cry out, and this lasted with this severity for HOURS. A went to bed, so he could get to work in the morning, and B stayed up with me... till 9 am. I have never, ever been so violently ill or so painfully, freezing and shivering between waves of pain, and sweating and crying during. AND, to make things SO MUCH MORE FUN, my uterus got in on the action and decided this was the PERFECT time for my period. Fuck you too, body.

Sooo I spent the weekend (Days Five & Six) on a bland diet with no pain meds but Tylenol. It was not very fun but at least I didn't throw up more. We checked my incisions again last night. The bruising and swelling on the right side is GNARLY. Huge yellow area of swelling and mottled red-puple clouds in the middle. The incisions themselves are pretty gnarly too under the steri-strips. Getting some lumpy areas in them which I'm gonna make sure my surgeon checks at my followup tomorrow. So tender right between the two incisions, over my breastbone. Any pulling or movement on that area is insta-nauseating. The most swelling is on my sides, under my armpits, which makes sense, since that's where gravity'd pool the fluids, as I can only lie on my back. There's a little blood spotting from my right side, nothing much and seems to have stopped, and (a little more worryingly) a little yellow crusty from either my left side or the incision running down from my left nipple (have I described the incision pattern? I forget - if not, there's a curve that runs from almost my armpit down underneath the curve of each breast almost to my breastbone; from the center of that incision, on each breast, a vertical line runs up to and then encircles the (newly relocated) nipple; so, the end result is sorta anchor-shaped on the underside of the breast).

There will be photos, of course. B is kinda excited about documenting my bruising and scarring for special effects makeup (her job) research purposes. :P

(And I'm fascinated by it, and of course, wanna record the healing process for my own/posterity's sake. Though mostly I just think it's cool. I have New & Improved Hand-Sculpted Boobs! Currently held together by invisible stitches and tape while my body magically puts itself back together in this new configuration! Dude! Cool!)

Day Seven (Today!)

Woke up feeling pretty good! Banana bread for breakfast stayed down well and as of last night I can tolerate pain meds again, thank HEAVENS. Some of the swelling/bruising ache still and bunches of stabby nerve ("omg what did you do to me!") pain. But I get to try real (if simple) dinner again tonight and I am wearing Real Clothes, because B and I are about to make my first mission out of the house, to the grocery store, so we can make Christmas cookies tomorrow. :) Wish me luck!

One extra minute of sunlight today. I've missed you.

Happy solstice, kids!

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