Peeking into the rock

 Typical me; I sat down to sew, remembered I had clothes on the line, went out to bring them in: noticed I had forgotten to bring in the 2 artichokes that were ready to eat, so went back in to get the clippers. Got the artichokes & some baby kales harvested but noticed a lot of dog poops needing cleaning. Set the vegies on the back stairs & went to get the poop shovel, got halfway through that & Z came out & we realized we hadn't checked in for a couple days, so we did that & worked out strategies for a couple-few things. Untypical: I then finished poop clearance, took the veggies in, finished bringing in the laundry, & got some quite nice sewing in before it was time to go to the farmers' market, which also turned into 3 tasks at the city parking office, lunch, sharpened clippers because I  had forgotten to take them out of my picket earlier, a stop at the hardware store for things to do with water tomorrow because we are decidedly not venturing on the roads during the big Blow Things Up holiday in a year when the inlanders are suffering record-breaking heat (so they will all have come here to escape the heat and blow things up), and also a grocery store shop for cheese and milk and ice cream.

Typical: me starting things before other things are finished. Untypical: me finishing things!

 I've had one too many people remark on how amazing it is that kids under my care eat such a variety of foods and I need to get something off my chest about it.

Of course I'm going to say that the secret to getting kids to eat things is to put them on their plates and not bug them about eating them. And also that when you talk about food you do it in a celebratory way, how delicious the delicious food is, how lovely it is that we can derive our parts from it.

You know what else though? Some kids really are going to have a narrower range of food they eat for a wide variety of reasons. I've come to the conclusion that a very strong dislike is actually an intolerance, not a whim. A child who refuses all slippery foods should be offered the same respect as a child who breaks out in to hives. Don't put up a struggle until the kid gags and vomits all over the table. Take their word for it, and give them other things to eat when you're having guacamole and vichysoise. Maybe give them the opportunity to test it out later, but have something else to eat. Also, don't make them prove their case. If they loved raw vegies last week & can't abide them this week, it's frustrating, but that's life.

I treat adults the same way. No, of course, if you're an adult I am not ultimately responsible for your diet, but I will ask your restrictions before feeding you if I have a chance. It's more pleasant to me to know I can meet your needs. It's not a burden. If I can't meet your needs it's sad. I have a vegetarian friend who always has to bring her own food when eating with her sister. They've been doing this forever! If I have her over there's going to be at least a complete meatless option. Why not? There's nothing inherent to a vegetarian diet that a meateater can't eat. 

I think there's a pretty long list of foods my son doesn't like. There was a period in his childhood where he would accept so few foods for dinner that in order to have a tolerable level of variety for the rest of us I would have had to make two complete different dinners. I couldn't do that. So when he was eight I said, I was going to cook what I wanted, and if he didn't like that he could make his own dinner, as long as it had all the healthy components. Of course I  often cooked what he would eat anyway. Anyway, he learned some nutrition, and got cooking skills, and I got to eat things that weren't spaghetti, roast chicken, sweet potatoes or broccoli. Notice his preferred diet was already pretty balanced. I have a brother in law who can occasionally be gotten to eat a spinach salad but otherwise eats meat and starch. He's had a lot of severe intestinal issues that family lore attributes to his unbalanced diet but which I suspect rather derives from whatever prevents him from being able to enjoy the vast world of delicious plant food. Particularly since his daughter has a narrow list of what she will eat too. She eats white food (including white protein food), carrots and butternut squash, with occasional forays into other vegetables and fruit. People have worried about her for over thirty years but she quietly eats what she wants. She says her issues with the foods she avoids is almost always texture, and she will occasionally experiment with trying new ways to make things have a texture she can handle. My brother was a no-slippery-foods person. He called bananas and avocados "snot foods." He had a reputation for being a picky eater in my family, while my nice fellow, whose list of foods was approximately the same length as my brother's, was deemed in his family to be an adventurous eater.

So yes, "picky" and "adventurous" are relative terms. Generally a person is a picky eater if they don't eat what the speaker thinks everybody should eat, and they're an adventurous eater if they eat things the speaker would themselves hesitate to eat. My daughter used to think she was a picky eater because there was a handful of things she wouldn't eat. I kept telling her she wasn't (because she had a long list of foods she would eat and she tried new foods now and then). As an adult she's figured out that she actually does have some food sensitivities. 

Anyway. The grand goblin's favorite lunches are chicken (or miso) vegetable soup, into which I put a lot of brightly colored vegetables, and the "snack plate" which has  five to ten different types of food and a salad dressing dip (she likes thousand island, which is my fault). I'll cut up some cooked and raw vegies and add some crackers or other starchy food, fruit, and some protein (sardines, cheese, hardboiled egg, beans, or peanut butter with celery). It's not  more effort to assemble this than to do a lot of the things that people do for lunches. Also, it means I'm more likely to eat up the pretty vegetables I might otherwise have lost the ambition to prepare.

 I've never stopped reading Dreamwidth, though I've been posting like every nine months or so. Today I'm posting again! I have nothing special to say!

My one and only grandgoblin turned five a week and a half ago. She had a unicorn party with a few girls from preschool and a couple from the other grandparents' neighborhood. She lost her first teeth a couple of months ago and the first one was incredibly painful for a whole day and I think she swallowed it. It worries me because the space is so small that even a small grownup tooth would have no room in the area left by both teeth. But both her dad and his mother went through tooth replacement early and their front teeth do not seem to be completely out of wack.

A year ago I got a large amount of unexpected money from retirement funds I didn't expect and especially from an inheritance I didn't expect. I've been trying to spend it, but it's pretty difficult right now. I did give some money to vetted  relief efforts in various places. I also got a new fence and front yard, and two new computers and a new phone (a chromebook for travel, a desktop, and my old phone somehow got wet and now I already have a big crack in the glass and I don't know if that can be replaced), I have been trying to get my bathroom demoed and fixed because of terrible conditions including black mold and tiles coming up, but my guy keeps putting me off(to be fair, I put him off a couple times too). I did unfortunately buy all the fixtures and vanity and now I have to protect them from weather damage because where would I put them inside? I have also been trying to fix up the kitchen, notably redo my wiring for an induction stove, but I keep getting turned down by electricians and carpenters. My house is a smallish job and fiddly and what I want is not what everybody wants and people just can't afford to work like that now. I try to make them know I will pay what they need but it's been not enough of an incentive. It's an utterly predictable problem, and I am not blaming workers who are holding out for jobs that suit their needs, I'm just hoping somebody turns up who will upgrade my electrical panel.

The state is subsidizing heat pumps for heating and water heating, and I think I might be able to scare up enough money for at least one or the other. I'd like to go NO GAS if I can.

I think I'm making headway in curing the cognitive mess from chemotherapy and not-covid-but-bad-virus five years ago, in that I can occasionally read an actual book, and I feel like I might recover the ability and the motivation to write. It's too late for me to have an actual career in anything, so I'm thinking I need different motivation.

Also: my yard is full of flowers and I have year-round Anna's hummingbirds. I'm trying to develop a habitat that will support the return of the salamanders that used to be so abundant here, but so far I can't tell. I am leery of turning over stones and suchlike for fear of disturbing whoever lives there.

 I'm trying to see if it is doable to post from a phone. On personhead Andrew Ducker's* advice I switched from my pretty old theme to "neutral good" & that made reading possible (otherwise the reading page is fatally tiny). It's kinda maybe sorta doable to write in the post an entry box but it's pretty awkward still, and I've yet to find a better way to navigate to dreamwidth than to do a google search. That can't be right, can it?

Anyway, what I wanted to do was to mutter about gender identity as a child of the 50s-60s. I've been really hesitant because my story is quite different from the trans and nonbinary narratives I've seen. Not that I have never said anything about it before, being hesitant only seems to shut me up relatively, not absolutely. 

I have a feeling that if I  were half the age I am I might- might, not definitely would- identify as nonbinary or even trans. But I am also quite sure that neither describes my life now, not adequately. And that's okay! But it's mysterious to me, because it's such a big thing and because ideologically my trajectory is supposed to be nonexistent, or impossible except for severe transphobic oppression. Which, I recognize, is part of the background of my life, notwithstanding my odd little experience.

From earliest childhood that I can remember, and I remember to 18 months according to a conversation with my mother, till sometine in my late teens/early 20s, I was really bitter about being a girl. I never did get good at femininity (except in the eyes of my dear old late sweetie, whose ideas about femininity were his very own, thankfully). But during those early years, if I hadn't been an atheist child in an atheist family, I'd have prayed to be a boy.

I sat in front of a mirror on multiple occasions squishing down my budding breasts (which came ridiculously early) thinking "it's not too late, maybe they'll stop right here & I can pretend they aren't there." I didn't actually care much about having a penis but my vulva didn't seem like it fitted on me. When we played soap opera games in the neighborhood I was always a male. Adventure games don't count because everybody wanted to be a man in those, because who wants to be the actor that just sees the Creature (whatever it is at the moment) & just screams? You've got to at least be the guy who dies dramatically, or the goofball comic relief, if you're not one of the outright heroes or the villain (or the villain's complicated snivelly sidekick, my favorite role). One girl's mother told her to tell me to knock it off when we had too many bittersweet reunion/separation/makeup kisses.

But I didn't, like my friend Louisy, grow up to be a lesbian. I didn't grow up to be trans,  even though my sexual fantasies from preschool on all involved me being a boy with another boy. I am not exaggerating. The earliest sex dreams I can remember are two: being a boy lifted down from the bed of a pickup truck by Maverick, and being a boy gladiator under the protection of an older gladiator (I must have seen ads for Spartacus, because it was too soon to have seen it on tv & I can't imagine we went to see it in a theater. In theaters we mostly watched silent comedies, art movies, Peter Sellers, & foreign movies, bonus if they were like Soviet or Indian or Korean, which in those days were jaunty depictions of young women escaping South Korean exploitation to end up working joyfully on North Korean heavy industry).

Something happened when I was about 18. It didn't happen when I was 15, 16, or 17, when I first tried having boyfriends. Those were frustrating to everyone involved: in theory, I  was as sex positive as we all were in 1968-70, but in reality, exposing my flesh to sex felt, well, exposed, threatening but not because of a boy or any morals but because-something I couldn't name (& still can't). But suddenly sex became possible & exciting to me, & I  liked boys, & I  didn't mind being a girl.

My storytelling persona remained, usually, a gay man. The first gay romance I wrote at about 13,  involving a vampire (the vampire is straight, his friend who tries to make voluntary blood donations work is gay). I have always been concerned that there's something at least potentially wrong with this, so I do a lot if careful reading of my work to make sure it doesn't fetishize gay men, & that it is inclusive across all issues.

I was 18 when I fell in love with my fellow. When I told him I wasn't rock solid about my gender identity  he said he was the same (though honestly he didn't do much to outwardly indicate he was anything but a regular old cis man). I don't know what happened. But at some point having my fellow was enough: I didn't need to be a fellow. Though the character in my sex fantasies & my stories remained, usually, a gay man. I just wasn't bitter about being a woman. I've never gotten completely comfortable with having a woman's body and sexuality, but it doesn't make me miserable either. I did get more comfortable about the very existence of female parts, but mostly only after taking care of girl babies. I couldn't remain squeamish while also being positive and careful around them.

I don't wish I grew up now instead of then. I am not sure the ultimate gender/sex outcome would have been really different in terms of whether I  would have taken a woman's or a man's identity.

But. Some years ago a friend (or acquaintance, maybe, since we've fallen out of touch) said that she was preparing herself to give her possibly-trans child puberty blockers if it looked appropriate down the line. What I had read at the time made me think that was physically very harsh, & I said so, & she said the physical side effects were less of a worry for her than the statistics about trans kids and suicide. My immediate thought was that her child would be protected by having her as a mother but I was actually convinced after very little thought that she was right, especially after thinking about all the kids who get the same treatment for short stature & do okay.

Lately I've been thinking what a relief it would have been to get those treatments from the age of nine or ten, just to not have to be in the world of Maturing Adolescent Girl for a few more years. If you ask me what choice I would have made if I had had the choice safeguarded for me in that way, I  have to admit I  don't know at all. But. I would have liked being breastless & periodless for some more years.

I've been a widow for more than 13 years, and on an estrogen blocker for five years (to prevent a recurrence of breast cancer) I have no libido at all now, so no sex fantasies to speak of. I  mean I skip past sexy bits in books & movies now because consuming them is like eating food when your sense of taste isn't  working (I know this first hand). I  can hardly write, and when I do the POV is likely to be an old woman. I  have no idea what my trajectory illustrates.

I do know that it's not a contradiction to trans rights though! Just because my life isn't easily explained by our current attempts to understand trans development-you can't draw conclusions negating the lived experiences of trans people. The fact that, after having described an unusual gender & sexuality development path, I  have to go out of my way to emphasize this, is a reflection of the stupidhead times we live in.



edit: *"personhead" was supposed to be a placeholder till I remembered/rediscovered how to make the proper link appearance happen, but I have failed, sorry Andrew.

 through April 4. That appears to be how I'm doing this now.
Completed books:
Caramelo, by Sandra Cisneros slightly magical realist Mexican family saga
Jackaby, by William Ritter, urban fantasy/post-steampunk vol 1 of a series
I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive, by Steve Earle, fantasy/magical realism, the latter life of Hank WIlliams's discredited doctor, and Hank's ghost and...
Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell, YA college freshmen romcom
Sag Harbor, by Colson Whitehead, semi-autobiographical coming of age novel
New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson, midfuture epic
Ghostly Echoes, by WIlliam Ritter, 3rd in Jackaby series
The Cardturner, by Louis Sachar, YA comic-drama coming of age story involving bridge and awful moneygrubbing parents
A Princess in Theory, by Alyssa Cole, surprise African royalty romance with an orphan scientist
Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, by Katherine Marsh, YA historical coming of age disability science romance-adjacent


Books dropped before the end:
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
Makers, by Cory Doctorow
The Reader, by Traci Chee
Wickedly Charming, by Kristine Grayson

Let me get the dropped books out of the way first. Cloud Atlas has some cool characters in it, but it's a setup to prove that humanity is bad and terrible and the worst ones will always win. I gave up maybe 75% of the way through. I do like the gimmick structure--a series of unfinished stories, whose "and then what happened?" is revealed in the story of a later character with only tangential, but at the same time substantive and consequential, connections to the earlier character. But that, and the really quite nice writing, are not enough to elevate the book from the tedious sophomoric "moral."

I was enjoying the hell out of Makers and would have finished it but nobody I knew could assure me that the next bit coming up wasn't going to be a second life-destroying physical attack on a main character graphically and lavishly described for many harrowing pages possibly resulting in the permanent maiming or death of the character. The fact that this character was a woman only opened up even more awful possibilities than the first attack, which nearly finished me. Nobody who talks about this book even notes that the first attack takes place, so the fact that the second potential one isn't mentioned is no kind of evidence at all. There was no reason for the way the first one was written except to highlight the erection that the attacker had.

The Reader is mischaracterized in its publicity materials. It's not about a world with no readers in it, where there is one magical book and one unlikely person who learns to read. It is about assassins. It's well written but not my cup of tea.

Wickedly Charming starts out with the premise that the archetypes of modern versions of fairytales are based on distortions of the real lives of people from backward but very magical countries. The stepmothers' lives have been outright lied about. Two expats from that world, Snow White's stepmother and Cinderella's divorced Prince Charming, collaborate on a novel meant to Tell The Whole Real Truth and have a light romantic comedy of their own while they're at it. And then, halfway through the book, we jump the shark and there's a bunch of artificially injected Plot with Nasty Villains in it, and all the fun goes out of the book as we stare slackjawed at the introduction of dumb stereotyped antagonists. Talk about missing one's own point.

Okay, the finished ones:

Caramelo  This is a rush. I definitely recommend listening to this one rather than reading it, because CIsneros reads it herself andf her voice is soooo perfect for this. Also, while the title is explained by several bits in the story--the fundamental one being the name of the design of the unfinished rebozo that is handed down in the family-- it also describes the impact of the story's structure. The import of every little detail-and every little detail has import-spreads sweetly across your brain like the sugar of candy that you suck for a long time: and then, suddenly, something explodes like when you crunch down on a filled candy. CIsneros reads it in a sweet, high-pitched rush, sometimes full of mirth, other times outrage, other times, deep sympathy. Read it! Or better, listen to it.

Oops I didn't tell you anything about the story. Several generations of a Mexican family reveal their secrets to the modern daughter, especially "The Awful Grandmother" who, it turns out, has her reasons.

Jackaby A plucky middle class English maiden arrives in a fictional Massachusetts town in the late 1800s,  in need of a job after having finished out a stint working on a paleontological dig in Ukraine. She crosses paths with a Seer who is fighting mostly fairytale creatures. This is a four-book series and apparently the stakes accelerate a lot. This is a category of book I usually avoid because I'm not fond of Jim Butcher or Laurell K. Hamilton, but these are their own thing. They have a little Dr. Who feel due to the title character's eccentricity and odd clothing, but the POV character is more than an observer, and the side characters all amount to something interesting.

I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive More than a decade after he screwed up and accidentally killed Hank Williams with a drug overdose,  the doctor is a junkie, patching up gangsters and providing illegal abortions to afford his next fix. He's haunted by Hank Williams's sarcastic and apparently vindictive ghost. And then... everything changes because he provides an abortion for the granddaughter of a curandero, who is just now ready to come into her own powers and use the teachings of her grandpa. This is written by the musician Steve Earle. I believe he avoids the exoticism trap pretty well when he depicts the young woman's point of view. I liked this book a lot.

Fangirl I think a lot of people were mad at this book for one reason or another, but I liked it. The protagonist is one of a pair of twins, freshmen at college, who have always done everything together until recently. The other twin has been fighting to separate herself, and it's not going well for our protagonist, who has some mental issues she handles either well or not depending on the circumstances. While her sister gets in over her head with the fast-living frat-adjacent crowd, the protagonist struggles with the divide between fan writing and mainstream writing (with a teacher who thinks all fan writing is at its core plagiarism, but has some good points about how to write mainstream writing: and an exploitive cowriter) There's a lot more plot: a mother who abandoned them, a manic father (I think it's not bipolarism), a couple of surprise friends.  I thought it was a pleasant book.

Sag Harbor  So apparently rich kid books are a lot more interesting if they are black rich kids. This is an amiable "how I spent the summer of my junior year" ramble, which I guess wasn't really supposed to be out to show how rich kid privilege gets totally undermined by race, but it does do that, while also telling a sweet coming of age story. I haven't read his serious science fiction books yet: I mean to, but the subjects of them make me ancxious, so I thought I'd read this first to get attached to the author before going there.

New York 2140 Kim Stanley Robinson annoyed the hell out of me with the Mars books: I didn't finish the first one because of grotesque stereotyping and I only glanced into the others before giving up. But I loved the California ones. This is more like those. It's pretty damn fine. It has the post-apocalyptic setup but it's not about the post-apocalyptic premise, at all. It's really germane to now, obviously, and though it has a deus ex machina in it, it's weird enough and fun enough that you don't really mind too much, also because the deus ex machina would not be enough without the collective and political action of, well, basically, New York.

Also I'm really looking forward to N.K.Jemisin's The City We Became, which is a different take on New York resiliency.



Ghostly Echoes The 3rd book of the Jackaby series, which I read out of order because availability: I don't think it's a problem, though they afre definitely in a progression.

The Cardturner Did you read Holes? Then you'll understand why I grabbed this book even though it's about bridge. The card game. I mean, that's not entirely true, I love books that are also about a thing, a world that people inhabit, like that. The blurb was a little more saccharine than necessary, but I trust this author! It turns out it's another book that is probably improved by being read by the author. The protagonist's parents are trying to get him to develop a favorite-uncle relationship with a great-uncle because they want to inherit from him. The opportunity arises because the old man has gone blind from diabetes and he needs a cardturner to help him play bridge, since he has just fired another teenager because she questioned his choices.  There's a long-buried complicated love story, and a tentative relationship developing between the teenagers, and problems with longstanding friendships, and and and. And also hefty asides to teach bridge. I thought it was a lot of fun, though aspects of the plot were inevitable and therefore predictable.


A Princess In Theory I have a... complicated relationship with romance. In theory, I should love romance. I certainly love reading about romance books. In practice I am more likely to like reading books that are more what I would call "romance-adjacent"--there's a relationship story there, but there's another main focus to it. One rule that usually works for me is to avoid books with royalty in the title -- like anything "The Duke's Mistress" or whatever. Because I do enjoy reading about romances, I have heard rather a lot about Alyssa Cole, so I was quite willing to break that rule and test whether I would like this book. I kind of do.  The protagonist is an epidemiologist! Very timely (even before the pandemic. We always knew the pandemic was coming). (this book does not have a pandemic in it)

I did like it, and I understand why Alyssa Cole has such stalwart fans. Among the pluses: it's sort of a Wakanda novel: the fictional African country has managed to mostly avoid colonization and so therefore is more prosperous and less unequal than other countries.  Though there's some weird justification for the excesses of the palace. Cole is quite clearly trying to have her twirly princess dress and her social justice too, and that's fine. A strong plus for some people (including me at some time in the past) is its sex positivity. In romance categories I think it is what is called "sexy" rather than "erotic:" if I understand the difference, the former has sex in it, the latter is centered on sex or sexuality (and pornography is writing that is sex itself). At this stage of my life, written sex is very "meh" to me, so that after the first sex scene, I skipped forward over the others. I  don't know why!  I do the same with most fight and battle scenes. 

The romance was fine, the descriptions of not-Wakanda were very nice, the slice of life in New York were nice. I wasn't satisfied with the mystery B plot. I felt that it could have been a lot more interesting and consequential. The revelation of what happened with the protagonist's parents seemed to me to fall flat completely--as if Cole had actually worked out something that made full sense, had consequence, and actually explained what happened--and then didn't write it into the final draft because of word limits or deadlines or ennui or something.

Jepp This is based on the existence, at Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg castle, of a Dutch dwarf named Jepp and a tippling moose. It tells a fictional tale of how he got there and what he did after he got there. I tried checking on the romance but wasn't able to verify it. I hope it was true. I'm certain that the family origins are fictional, and his life at the court of the Infanta in Brussels: though her fondness for dwarfs and what she put them through is historical fact. The high drama and angst of the book are not just provided by the harrowing events in it, but also by the fact that they are the reminiscences of an innocent teenager in the wide world for the first time. Characters have depth, and the landscape is well-drawn. I just finished it and that's why I'm finally writing these books up!

My diabetes is ridiculously mild.
Edit: apparently you can't edit cut tags, so I'm just going to apologize for the typo in it.

( this is a long boring ramble about diet and cooking and of course the heaqd thing )

 Last year I read a lot of books. I have changed the way I go about reading, because I was not being able to read much. Oh wait, before I go on I should tangentize what I've discovered about my particular sort of chemobrain.

I have been really very frustrated about my brain functioning. It's been nearly three years since I started cancer treatment-more than two years since it mostly ended. I felt I had a right to expect more improvement. I don't know why I felt that! I have returned to the world of the living in so many ways. I no longer sleep four two to six hours every daytime, for example. I never got much flakier than I was to begin with. I mean, I don';t screw up my finances, I hardly ever forget my appointments or miss deadlines. Those are chronic problems I have always had. I have simplified my life so that there's less to screw up, but then there's less to my life too. So that's kind of a neither her nor there thing.

BUT. two really important functions of my brain have just been torpedoed and it is not until very recently that I've seen much improvement: reading and writing.  No, I didn't lose the basic skills. I lost the thread. It was so hard to just read a book from beginning to end. And writing-it's like the story monster has just laid down and --maybe not died, but gone into a deep state of hibernation. With occasional surfacing. I've written a few drafts, maybe three? novellas and a couple-few stories?  But not successfully? Sort of promisingly, but something's missing? And I haven't been able to do any sustained writing, hours at a time, days at a time, get the thing done. I've spent months at a time with a blank space where the story monster ought to be restlessly swimming or pacing or whatever it does. It's not like that part of my brain feels numb, either--it feels gone, a lot of the time.

I thought by now it couldn't be chemobrain anymore. It was depression, maybe. Or maybe I had just lost it. Maybe it was the onset of some sort of dementia. Maybe I actually never had a story monster, maybe it was an illusion, or it's a false memory. Or something. But recently I decided to look it up. I forget what search terms I used. But I got a revelation.

First of all, there's no expiration date on chemobrain. Secondly, some people have late onset chemobrain. Thirdly, it can be quite this specific, though I didn't see any examples quite like mine. Fourthly, while there's a lot of mystery, there's some known mechanisms for this when a person has the kind of cancer I had and the kind of treatments I had...and the kind I am still undergoing. I had an estrogen-dependent breast cancer and a large part of the treatment was starving it of estrogen. And now I am taking an estrogen antagonist called arimidex, which shuts down every last scrap of estrogen production in my body. There's a bit of redundancy in the body, so you can do without a lot of your basic chemicals, I guess. 

So one of the jobs that estrogen does is some subtle regulating in the brain. When you take away all the estrogen from the brain, cells stop reproducing in the hippocampus, and myelination in the brain is messed up. This is kind of teasingly interesting, but I've read about hippocampus function, and that seems to be fine for me (the hippocampus is implicated in several kinds of memory and some spatial functions. I have never had a great memory, but my memory is not pathologically bad). I saw some assertions that estrogen helps regulate mood, but I'm not sure that's part of its brain function, and I'm pretty sure my range of moods are not strikingly different from before. I'm less volatile than I was when I was younger, but I've been that way for a long time. And I can't say that I see things in myself that are the result of demyelination (which is a process of MS as well, but I don't see any indication that estrogen lack causes MS). 

So what I have left in this is: well, I think probably that the mental problems I've been having might be a bit related to wiping out every scrap of estrogen from my body. But the mechanism is a mystery, because my problems aren't the problems that are listed for these brain functions. But. Having a thing to blame it on does wonders for my mood and optimism! Because if there's probably a cause for it, I can fight that. If it's all completely subjective and there's no reason for it, I don't know how to not wallow.

I signed up for the electronic library that my pub lic library belongs to. I read these ebooks and listen to these audiobooks mainly on my phone. And it turns out this change works for me! Not, I think, because of any particular virtue of the format, but just because it's different. Audiobooks have the advantage that I can listen to them while I do things with my hands, and ebooks on the phone have the advantage that reading them on the bus doesn't cause me to get motion sickness.

Last year I read about two books a week, starting in July. This year I seem to be doing the same. I do still reject a lot of books without finishing them. Part of that is that the Northern California Digital Library doesn't have a lot of books in my favored genres. I end up sometimes unable to find any sff available except for stuff I really don't want to read. So I end up exploring other kinds of books, and I'm just likely to not like quite a lot of mysteries, romances, literary novels, women's fiction (by which I mean that kind of literary-adjacent novel that centers the experience of modern women), or historicals. But I'm been doing pretty well at picking ones I'm going to be able to finish, and it's a lot less frustrating to put a book down without finishing it when there's been quite a lot of appealing ones recently.

On the writing front. I don't want to jinx it, but I seem to be a bit better. I don't know what's doing it. Back in August I tried doing a lot of intensive outlining in a paper notebook, and it was fun for some weeks, but that book is still unwritten. I've been talking with some supportive (and demanding) friends, and maybe that's done it? But I think maybe knowing that my drug is causing at least some of the problem may have loosened me up also? Maybe being freed of the feeling of frustration in my self has been the thing I needed?

Anyway, that's where I'm at. And I think I want, at the end of the month, to do a wee roundup/capsule review of the books I've read this month, and maybe continue the rest of the year? 


edit: the biggest symptom caused by the arimidex that I've noticed all along is an intermittent, trivial-to-severe, nocturnal pain in my arms and hands (weirdly specific). It lasts just long enough to wake me up and rarely keeps me awake. The frequency and severity of the pain vary randomly as far as I can see. I have a small prescription of tramadol (an opioid!) which I more or less keep as an amulet. Aside from the sleep interruption it doesn't seem to interfere with my life: there's no impact on use or function. I wonder if this is a myelination issue? Or is there a different mechanism?

The thing about having had several long-lasting painful conditions in one's life is that one can assess a severe pain as no big deal, comparatively, because its duration is not huge and it doesn't accompany other more important problems.

I began to see that Agklok and Sofy did not agree about everything anymore. When it had first shown up there had been a few signs of conflict, mostly consisting of a barely-verbal Sofy shaking her head, pointing to a mess, and saying "Agklok no." But as she became more fluent in speech and began to express opinions about things beyond whether or not she wanted to put on a particular item of clothing, she and Agklok had presented a united front on every issue that I was aware of, until we had been watching the show for some time. Sofy sometimes had a short clucking conversation with herself, or I suppose with Agklok--sounding remarkably like the characters on the Gollakolla show, to no surprise at all--in an apparent dispute as to which episode to watch, or re-watch, on a particular day. I would have thought this would be straightforward--watch all the episodes in the order they were presented until the end (which was not in sight after more than a year of three or so episodes a week, depending on the other grandparents and he parents' schedule), and then rewatch if necessary.  But it was not so simple. Right from the start Agklokj had its favorite episodes, and soon afterwards Sofy developed hers, and they were not exactly the same. So some days we just poked the next button and some days we had to scroll around while Sofy clucked and gurgled till she and her imaginary friend agreed on something. I finally felt comfortable in asking her about it in a general way, mostly just because I've always enjoyed listening to the thought processes of preschool children.

By now she was four, and her language was up to describing an argument. "Agklok is looking for instructions, but I don't think that this show has instructions really. I did at first because Agklok said so but we've been watching it for years and years"--fourteen months or so seems much longer to a small child--"and nothing seems like instructions. But Agklok says some of the things are instructions and we'll understand them if we watch them enough. So sometimes we argue about it because I get bored with just looking for instructions. I just want to find out what's going to happen to Logkillak. Logkillak is the blue one with the long pink claws who keeps making mistakes. Everybody's nice to it but maybe they will get tired of it after a while? Like the neighbors gave away their dog."

That had been, of course, a euphemism, and so was "tired of"--they'd been terrified of the poor thing, and for good reason, as it had been so damaged by ill-treatment before they got it that it could not adjust to normal dog life and presented a constant danger.

This was an interesting look into a small child's anxieties, I thought, and I waited for another opportunity to get more. I didn't want to push too hard for fear of distorting her storyline by the shape of my questions. But I started asking her more often what Agklok thought of the show, and how that compared to what she thought.

I thought, myself, that perhaps the show was getting a wee bit darker? Both visually, and in the storyline. I mean that the sky seemed to tend more to the medium mauve than the light periwinkle, and the expressions and voices of the animals seemed to trend more towards distress than formerly. I thought perhaps the creators had been editing the earlier episodes, also, as when Sofy scrolled back to play earlier episodes, they also seemed to have undergone similar changes.  But it still seemed appropriate for children, but just sadder and more anxious than previously.

Sofy showed me which character was Logkillak, and it did seem as though it was being corrected more often than any other character. It was frequently taking off in a different direction, picking things up that other characters were staring at dubiously, getting tangled in vines or a yarn-like artifact that was occasionally produced by singing to a tree which extruded a material that was then twisted in the paws of the characters. I didn't see that it was doing anything so bad that its compatriots would reject it: clearly its role in the show was to represent the stumblings of younger children--someone to identify with and also to feel superior too, depending on the needs of the audience.

And after another while it seemed to emerge that, after an initial period when the point of view was relentlessly communal, Logkillak was emerging as the protagonist, or perhaps the interlocutor, of the show. A new feature emerged in which Logkillak would turn to the "camera" and ask a chirruping question apparently aimed right at Sofy, cocking its head to the side like an inquisitive bird, and then all action would pause for several long seconds before Logkillak would nod its odd little blue head and action would resume. Sofy always had two burbled little responses, apparently one for herself and one for Agklok--the one for Agklok was uttered ventriloquist-style, with closed lips and an altered voice.


It was a while before I gathered up the courage to ask Sofy what was being asked and answered at these moments.

I think of nano as an organizing method for the writer who needs something to get over the early phases of a project--I know its origins are as an inspirational event for those people who "always wanted to write," but it's clearly gone beyond that in several directions.

Well, now that I'm more or less recovered from chemo-brain/palbociclib-brain, I'm still a little more unfocused than normal, a little more unconfident than normal, a little more diffident. Which means something for a person like me, who is already plagued by distractibility, lack of focus, lack of confidence, lack of ambition, low energy, etc. So I'm thinking--let's get the ball rolling any way we can.

I mean I've been writing slowly all a,long and even submitting (as usual without any result). But see above. Anyway, I've been thinking about a project I started last year, originally called Crow Girls but now I think called Crow Girl, Pigeon Girl to more accurately reflect the story, and which was backburnered because it lacked an actual plot (beyond "two little girls are recruited by urban birds to save the world from fascism").Yesterday  I was brooding about how mad I am at everybody in politics now, especially the liberals and center-left who seem to think that the most dangerous thing in the world is antifa, but also the ultraleft who seem uninterested in mass organizing and coalition building, and I came up with the answer to the central question "but how can two little girls and all the birds in the city air save the world from fascism?" and of course the answer is that they compel the liberals and the center-left to work with the left and ultraleft, and I have almost figured out the mechanics of that. The climax is the birds drop fliers all over the city, gathering all these disparate groups to meet separately at the same time, and once they're meeting, the human allies of the birds and girls are giving speeches about unity and principled coalition building, and then more fliers and they're all marching to the central government plaza and meeting there where they simply take the parliament and...

well, the book doesn't have to go all the way. Honestly I think the war that's brewing still happens, but I think it ends faster and the outcome of the war is better, and I think that there's less damage during the war than there would have been. That's my hopeful message: unite, everybody, fight fascism, and history will still be terrible but it will be better.

This is set in the same world as The Drummer Boy and the little girls are Yanek's niece (Liby, the crow girl) )and the little sister of his godson(Mily, the pigeon girl). The girls are recruited by the birds, and they begin to understand what is going on because uncle Yanni and uncle Maxi are not speaking to each other because Max is brawling with the fascists and Yanek is a government employee (an arborist, but still) and is reluctant to support confrontation, despite having called up ghost soldiers to defend the striking miners in the earlier book. The world is not a roman a klee for Central Europe in the 1920s-30s, though it is informed by the culture and landscape of that time and place. Unlike The Drummer Boy this book is entirely urban and most of the human characters are girls and women, with a few boys and men involved. The fantasy element might be fairly limited, though I've been urged to have the girls and their allies actually become birds during the climax or the events leading up to the climax.

I'm not trying for 50,000 words. I'm trying for 30,000 and I hope the whole book comes out to 45-50K. I want to practice writing more sparely, at a more sprightly pace, with stuff happening more intensively and less subtly.

 Considering she's coming a bit more than four weeks early, Eloise(the baby) is going through a fairly normal labor. I like all of the doctors and nurses I've met, the hospital has a reasonable cesarean rate, Emma (my daughter) is suffering but normal. In a bit I'm going to go away and get her a pad for the bassinet--lots of things still undone because there was no reason to expect this so early.