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 need to connect with other secular, politically progressive, mostly unobservant Jews (maybe also who grew up ion unobservant homes) about ways to connect more  with the  history ,community, culture, and politics of being a Jew, without attempting to claim spaces that belong to other people, and without engaging in religious arguments (I know, one of our cultural values is claiming that we love to argue, but that's not what I'm primarily here for).

It's the eve of Yom Kippur, and I'm not fasting this evening and tomorrow because diabetic, and I'm certainly not going to shul (local temple is of course full up with regulars and irregular-regulars, plus see secular above) but I feel like engaging with the philosophical core of the season & don't feel like I have much of a plan for it. I've been feeling this way for some years actually & so far all I've come up with was to feel sort of introspective & uncomfortable for a while, and I know I can do better.

This is also brought on by the recognition that there's real reasons why I have never gone back to being a reliable lefty foot soldier-my health is unreliable & it's exactly when I commit to door knocking, leafletting, or phone calls that I am most likely to have a crash & fail those commitments. So I'm trying to figure out a doable role for me, When I have the energy to think about it.

Anybody have answers, partial answers, further questions of their own they'd like to share?


(I know I rarely post & hardly ever even comment, but I'm still reading your journals & I appreciate you're all here)

 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.

This is something that happens to me sometimes. It didn't happen to me today but I read a story that made me cry and so I was thinking about things while I was at the pond with Zluta. And I thought about this thing that happens to me sometimes. Well, it's kind of a thing that happens, but it's also mostly a thing that doesn't happen, not really.

I don't want to say I have a post-traumatic stress disorder. I feel that it would be presumptous: that it would dilute the label, contribute towards making people distrust it when it is used for people with more disabling issues. But this thing that happens to me: it's kind of like that. But not really, because it almost sort of doesn't happen at all.

It could happen on any kind of day. A bright summer day, like that day--with the light fog in the morning and the insistent breeze off the bay in the evening, but wait? Do I remember what kind of day it was? I can remember the way the day was on one of the days after, when it happened to me, when it was even a Tuesday morning just like that day, and it happened: that was a high-up grey kind of day, the air still and gentle, warm enough for the children to play with water but not warm enough to strip them down to their diapers and underwear and give them juice pops in the play yard. Was that day like that too? It was August, so it could even have been hot, though I don't remember that.

But it doesn't have to be that kind of day, or even daytime at all. It could be a rainy winter day with the rain drops picked out of the air like tiny glass crystals, the doggy smell of wet asphalt everywhere, happy little floods dancing in the gutters. It could be late at night, the house silent but for ghosts and rodents and the proprietary dog pursuing her claims against them. ANy kind of time at all. I could be anywhere.

When it happens to me, I could be anywhere. I could be in my house, chopping kale and parsley on my daughter's cutting board. I could be walking my dog in the neighborhood, past the firehouse, or beyond the soccer field with girls in ponytails and boys in pink shoes, all leaping after brightly colored balls. Or in the grocery store parking lot, or driving to the piond, or like that time I remember, in the play yard at my old job.

What happens to me is almost nothing. It always seems like it will be nothing this time. That's how it starts: with me noticing that it is not happening.

That's not true. It starts with a firetruck, or an ambulance, or a siren, or a person in a uniform. Not juist any uniform: a firefighter's uniform, or an emergency medical technician's uniform. Anything from the first responder's kit, really. They don't have to be responding to anything. The firetruck or ambulance can be tooling around town or parked in a parking lot. The siren can be blocks away. The person in a uniform can be standing around, or buying groceries.

The first thing that happens, as I said, is I notice the presence of the firetruck, or ambulance, or siren, or firefighter or ambulance driver. I notice they are there and I notice that nothing is happening to me. And then I notice that nothing is still happening to me.And I think about how grateful I am to the firefighters who came on that day even though they couldn't save him and neither could my son though he was almost a doctor when his father died in his arms. And then I think some more about how this used to make something happen to me but it doesn't any more. And then I think about the thing that used to happen to me when I noticed the presence of one of these things. And then I remember what it felt like when that thing happened to me, and I congratulate myself for not feeling that thing, for not hjaving that thing happen to me an hymore. And then I rell myself that I must have gotten much better because I am not feeling that thing that I can so vividly remember feeling. And then I remember several occasions when I felt that way, and I vividly recall the sensation of feeling that way.

And then I'm not really crying because there's hardly any moisture coming out of my eyes, and I'm not sobbing because my body isn't really shaking and there's no sound coming out of my mouth, and I'm not really grimacing but there's a kind of little frown if you look closely and my eyes do close tight but they open right away so you can't really say anything is quite happening to me, but it feels like something is happening to me and I really, really, really wish that day had not happened.

But it's not really quite a thing that happens, still: it's more of an echo of a thing that used to happen, over a thing that happened, years ago now.

Seriously I am eating a reasonable amount of food but I feel like nobody lets me near the victuals. What the hell? I'm having to do reality checks on my consumption instead of just following my appetite because it's never satisfied. Maybe I'm missing some important nutrient? "Satiatine!" the vitamin that makes you feel satiated.

I have a new keyboard for my laptop but I can't figure out how to get the thing in. I mean, I understand that all the components of the laptop have to come out but I can't see how that is done--there are a lot and and a lot of screws in there and many odd plastic structures. So I decided I needed a new computer guy because the guy I was using spaces me out all the time and can't be in my presence for more than a few minutes before he tells me what an asshole my son is and how much he disliked my dog (he's in the category of "old friends" but I'm thinking this category might be too broadly defined). I called the one down the street I can walk to and it was a weird conversation in which the guy seemed to be trying to convince me not to bring the laptop and keyboard in. So I guess I'll call the other one a few blocks farther away.

I drafted a new sleeve for that top but I have my doubts I did it right, so I haven't cut  new ones out yet. It's no use saying "use a well-fitting sleeve for a guide" because I don't own any. I have some t shirts that work right, but the woven shirts I own all have oversized sleeves and giant armscyes, whereas here I'm trying to make a just-normal sleeve with a tailored armscye. I believe the reason I own all these giant shirts is that normal shirts in my size are never made so that they actually fit. Usually they are too tight in the bicep and weirdly both too broad and too narrow in the shoulder--to narrow across the back and too broad across the front, even if they are too tight in the bust. That, and for a long time the dropped shoulder "big shirt" was all the rage. I think that the endurance of this style is because it doesn't matter if it doesn't fit.

What else can I complain about? I know! I can't find any more non-Company Kage Baker books! Maybe I'll give up and try the Company books again. What I want more of is stuff like The Bird of the River and the Pismo Beach sort of stories.

Last night and the night before I had almost a normal amount of sleep. I read somewhere that an important part of falling asleep is the body temperature dropping, and I had a moment of clarity. Post-surgical insomnia is quite possibly probably maybe at least partly a bit due to the body's temperature being a bit elevated for healing purposes! So I have added "sleep under only a single sheet" to my insomnia-fighting weapons. I can't swear that it is working, as the difference is really only about an hour more of sleep-- so like 5-6 hours at night instead of 4-5. But it's huge! I've gone from needing to lie down and doze a half hour out of every two hours to maybe sleeping ten to twenty minutes once or twice in a day. Normal range! (My normal normal is like seven hours of sleep)

I've also begun to be somewhat prouctive on the writing font. I forget whether I revealed here that I had recently figured out how to resolve one of the final confrontations in the not-Poland story. It does require a small but pervasive amount of revision in the earlier parts of the book so as to support and kind of foreshadow the events, but I needed to do some revision anyway. To that end I'm taking notes and also advancing the narrative. I need the notes. I have a cast of thousands to not make stupid errors about and I also have decided to change the fates of some soldiers, so that means I have to know where they met their current fates.  I'm also updating the appendices.

Yes, well. Appendices in a work of fiction. Well.

The thing is that the kind of person who likes to read the kind of book that The Drummer Boy is, also like to know how to pronounce the names, and they like to have a handle on the grography--maps and all that. So I thought I'd give them those things in appendices, so they don't have to read that matter unless they want to but they definitely can if they want to. Also, the kind of people who read this kind of book are definitely the kind of person  who will notice that there are a lot of name forms that look inconsistent, and they might be unhappy if I didn't give them a nice context in which to understand what I'm doing with that (the short answer is that Marezhkia is a polyglot country and the people use the forms they like--thus there is a Giurgu and a Yuri and a Yiri, and a Yanek and an Ivek, and so on and so on: and this fact is important to the actual plot, thank you).

I finally found the kind of real-Polish (that is to say, Polish in this world, not not-Polish which isn't Polish at all but I find it a convenient handle) folk music I could not find before. What I had found before was chorales that sounded like Midwestern a capella choirs singing church music, which I am going to just say I respect in the abstract but I would rather not listen to. I was sure that Poles had some music I would like, and given their position on the continent I had an idea what it would sound like.  But then I found a very large corpus of Polish groups who sing English sea shanties, which is charming, and I listened to that with some burbling enthusiasm. Then yesterday--on a whim I threw in Polish folkmusic to the search bar at youtube and found...Lipka Zielona (that's right, it even has a linden tree in it! and birds who are not birds). This is right up my alley-- that's one of the kinds of sounds I like the most, and when I translated the lyrics (using g. translate, my limited Czech vocabulary, and a common-sense feel for how song lyrics go) they were pleasing. Also I like contemplating the resonances the different aspects of the song and performance have with other European folk music. The instrumental elements I tend to call Hungarian though the Hungarians have no monoploy on them, and the vocal style which sounds a little more Russian to me though as soon as I say that I start arguing with myself about it, like that. That's fun.

There's another video of the same song on youtube which has an unbearable costume skit of peasantry whatever nationalist whatwhat, but whatever. If this song has nationalist implications I don't know about, well, I guess if you know it, tell me, and break my heart.

I started this to write about fooooooood. I can't get enough. I thought maybe I was going to get relief from endlessss huger today but it came back. I can't appease it. I thoguht at one point it was because I wasn't eating enough but now I'm eating more: three eggs cooked with potatoies, onion, salami and chard for breakfast, a chicken salad sandwich and a beet and a tomato for lunch, a goddamned bowl of sunflower seeds for a snack, and I'm sure other things, already today. Maybe I'm missing some nutrient and my body's protesting this?

Tomorrow is the day I get a new left knee made of shiny smooth titanium! I have spent all day cleaning and organizing because the room I will be sleeping in until I can climb stairs again (at least as well as I can now, which is not well) was flithy filthy. No excuses, but some reasons: KI had let the whole house go for some years of grieving, and then I was just beginning to clean up after myself when I had Shakuntula move in, and she promptly filled every space woith boxes so I couldn't turn around let alone clean. But now it is clean (the toip bookshelves could use some serious dusting but I dusted the ones within reach and my friend who gardens for me came over and vaccuumed and mopped while I organized a bunch of stuff). Also in the process I had Zack move my desk upstairs. It consists of two small horizontal filing cabinets in black and an eight-foot hardwood plywood slab. I've arranged it so the files face to the sides with an overhang at each end. When I am back upstairs my sewing machine will live at one end (the end where the drawers of fabric are) and my computer will live part-time at the other end and the four or five feet in the middle I will endeavor to keep clear so I can cut things out on it or lay out maps or writing notes on it. I have it set up by the humungous window assemblage, but I may bring it farther into the room later if I decide I want to be able to walk all the way around it.

Zack had found a futon frame on the street some time back, just in time to put up a number of capoeiristas from Norway on it. For this purpose he moved it upstairs. The mattress is my old mattress from when I was living downstairs. It's really a cozy little room.  Speaking of piled boxes, I still have three or four boxes of papers to go through, but I have them tidied away oin my closet and I will go after them when I am upstairs again. And I've managed to get all but a few albums and  one shoebox-sized container of photos into the old Army footlocker, so that's fewer boxes. That's another project. My family is not so huge that we should have that many photos.

I still have a wee mess to put away before I sleep, and the bed to make (I mean my actual bed upstairs: for the futon, I just piled a bunch of bedding next to it). Also some clothes to take downstairs so I can get dressed over the next few weeks. Some are already down there. Also taking the library books down and the water bottles.

I also watered thje garden pretty well because it won't get otherwise watered until Saturday.

When I get better I'm going to go to work with Emma a few times to help catalog plants at the zoo. She's making a huge map to show where the browse materials are, and also the toxic plants that animals shouldn't have.  Another project is to expose me to the capybaras because they are rodents and I am curious as to whether I am allergic to them! So far I know: rats=sever allergy, mice=significant allergy, guinea pigs=mild allergy. I don't know about voles or gophers.

She brought her best zookeeper friend over soi she could pick up her mail (19th century science books), and we pulled out atlases to show off that our family had a hand in making them. That's what we brag about.

Of course I didn't notice this before now. But apparently my mind's process goes like this:

(Some kind of substantive thought having to do with the task on hand)
Is the back door open for the dog?
(Something about food)
There is a dog.
(Where was I? Oh, task on hand. Repeat substantive thought and add something to it)
Dog exists.
Is the dog outside?
(Something about the state of my ailments)
Dog exists.
(something about food)
Should take the dog for a walk.
(something about the substantive thought. Oh, right, it is the task on hand)
Dog exists.
(something about music, or a book I read when I was nine)
Dog exists.
(what was the task on hand? oh, right MAJOR REVELATION ABOUT THE TASK ON HAND)
Dog has a need.
(what was that last thought? Oh, right, something about food MAJOR REVELATION REPEATED)
Dog

-----------
Except that today, of course, every Dog thought is followed by "Dog does not exist."

I have four stories out right now.

I looked back through my submissions tags and I see that I was about this active seven and eight years ago. I don't want to speculate on what this means because it makes me kind of sad.