In the corner playing dominoes in drag (updated)
 As I told someone a few days ago, October has been The Month of Hard Truths. There are a handful of unpleasant things going on that I don’t really want to talk about. It’s all perfectly normal stuff that happens to people all the time. It’s just been particularly intense and focused this month. It’s very easy to get lost in it and make it bigger than it really is, see patterns that aren’t really there, or assign it meaning it doesn’t have.
Dates are arbitrary, but I would like to think that when I turn the calendar page tomorrow, it will signal some sort of official transition to a month where things will start being tolerable and familiar again.
Edited to add: The hits just keep on coming. I just received news that I was not selected for a job I really wanted. Great.
Another new theme
Bear with me. I want gray and simple and it is devilishly hard to find.
Gentle cooing and soft growling
“Riding home from the fair, I think how strange and wonderful, how much flash and strut and style, and what shades of blue and green and buff there would be if all humans were banished from this earth, and the world were peopled entirely by prize-winning chickens.”
-Mama Makes Up Her Mind, Bailey White
A photo I wish I had taken
Turnip Patch Road, taken by CTG (my Dad!).
More of his photos can be seen here.
Social altruism
“Many common emotions can be understood as being built around the expectation of reciprocity and the negative reaction when it is made to fail. If we like a person, we are willing to exchange favors with them. We are angry at those who fail to return the favors. We seek punishment for those who take advantage of us. we fee guilty if we fail to return a favor, and shame it is publicly exposed. If we believe someone is genuinely sorry about a failure to reciprocate, we trust them. But if we detect they are simulating contrition, we mistrust them.”
-Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, Nicholas Wade
Catwoman slow roll
“Catwoman is its own breed of Slow Roll because everyone knows what to expect, and yet this movie unveils a thousand new and exciting ways to be terrible in every single shot. Catwoman evaporates your bitter indignation and replaces it with joyous, disbelieving horror, offering a truly unique Slow Roll experience. Who could do anything but laugh at the VeggieTales-quality CGI? Or Sharon Stone’s five o’clock shadow? Or Frances Conroy’s goofy turn as a Catwoman expert? Or Halle Berry’s commitment to the line, “Meow”? In fact, only Benjamin Bratt seems to think he’s starring in a real movie, making Catwoman much more humiliating for him than for Berry.”
This is SO worth the time it takes to go through the entire film analysis. It’s one of the funniest things I have ever read.
The Leopard has landed (updated)
And has been installed. Am playing around with it now. So far so good.
Still good. No problems to report. Here are some reviews I should have posted earlier:
MRSA
“MRSA is biologist shorthand for Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus. S. aureus is a bacterium that’s carried by approximately a third of us–we provide it safe harbor typically either on our skin, or in our nose. Most of the time it’s just another one of the many trillions of bacteria we all share our environment with; however, sometimes this cohabitation can become deadly–and the likelihood of this happening increases when you carry a strain of staph that is resistant to most of the antibiotics available to treat it, as an estimated 2.3 million Americans do.”
MRSA has been in the news a lot lately. This has been particularly chilling for me because I was diagnosed with it about three years ago and went though a couple of very scary years of flare-ups before a doctor finally put me on two antibiotics at the same time to treat it. Even better is the knowledge that my original doctor never bothered to test for MRSA specifically so he was just beating it back temporarily with not-quite-right antibiotics. It took another doctor to test it and properly treat it with the right type of antibiotics. Good times.
Understand that this was very, very scary. I ended up having several small surgeries to drain the infections and took god know how much antibiotic. I’ll spare you the details but you can imagine. I’ve got little scars all over from these procedures.
No one knows how I acquired this. I don’t have any diseases or risk factors. I wasn’t in a hospital. My health was/is extremely good. It was probably CA-MRSA, which, since the source is completely unknown, is disturbing on another level.
It started in early 2004 when I had to be taken to the local emergency room because a pimple on my side under my left arm had almost overnight become a swelling about the size of an orange. Over the next two years, I had several about 7 of these flare-ups. The trips to the doctor became almost routine. I took a lot of antibiotics. I ate a lot of yogurt. I endured a lot of questions about IV drug use and diabetes (no and no). I had to talk to the health department. I felt like this was somehow my fault and that I was unclean.
I worried about becoming completely antibiotic resistant.
And then, after the last episode, where a different doctor put me on two different antibiotics at one time, I stopped having the flare-ups and have been okay for about a year and a half.
Here’s the thing: this is serious. People die. And that is the reason I’m talking about this at all. This news story frightens me. It doesn’t frighten me for me; I seem to be okay an am hyper-vigilant these days. It frightens me for everyone else. If you haven’t been paying attention to this, you probably should.
Related:
