Adrian Turtle

12:28 pm: looking for help with a windows problem
Spring has finally come to Massachusetts. It's the season of opening windows on warm days and closing them on cold night and when it rains. My apartment has horizontal sliding windows, which has been awfully inconvenient over the years (because window air conditioners are designed for ordinary up-and-down windows), but never so inconvenient as to make me move away from the bus stop, the bike path, and the supermarket.

The type of shoulder pain I've been dealing with for the last few months makes lateral motion exceptionally hard. More resistance makes the pain flare last longer. (Pushing a shirt on a hanger along the closet rod causes a sharp increase in pain. Pushing a heavy coat, or many shirts (all at once or one at a time) makes the pain increase for hours, maybe more than a day.) The windows don't slide easily. A friend came over this morning to open them for me, and we're not supposed to have another frost until Friday night, nor serious rain all week. I don't think this is a good long-term solution.

Do any of you know of a tool that would help me open and close the windows? I can push or pull (perpendicular to the window frame) reasonably well, but have trouble exerting the kind of lateral force that's needed. A wrench is too small and an automobile jack is too big, and either is hard to clamp to the window frame.

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/8039.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: disability, household

04:54 pm: religious exemption
As many of you know, I live in Massachusetts, which has had a patchwork of nearly-universal health insurance coverage for several years now. We have religious exemptions to our health insurance requirements, but it's not nearly as infuriating as the type being discussed in national politics these days.

The Massachusetts plan tries to get as many people as possible into insurance plans, considering different reasons for doing without insurance:
1) health insurance plans won't sell to them
2) they have access, but can't afford the premiums
3) they have access and money, but want to save their money because they don't expect to need health care this year
4) they object to seeing doctors, on general principle

So there are rules for the health insurance plans to address problem 1, that they have to make their plans available to everybody, and can't raise the premiums too much. And rules for businesses, that they have to make group plans available to their employees. And subsidies to help low-income (and moderate-income) people with premiums. It's a reasonable attempt to address problem 2. In an attempt to get the 3rd group to pay premiums (whether they get insurance and health care or not), you're supposed to pay a tax penalty if you opt out of buying health insurance for reasons other than low income or religious conviction. The penalty money goes to support the subsidies.

The 4th group doesn't involve all that many people, but they're symbolically important. I don't know what religions have such strong objections to all medical care that the devout consider it wrong to have health insurance. (Maybe Christian Science?)

My Massachusetts tax form asks:
Are you claiming an exemption from the requirement to purchase health insurance based on your sincerely held religious beliefs?
If you are claiming a religious exemption in line 8a, did you receive medical health care during the 2011 tax year?

It was a religious exemption for individuals wanting to avoid buying health insurance. When did "religious exemption," in the context of health insurance, start to be about employers or insurers wanting to limit coverage? I feel like the jargon changed under my feet, and I didn't even notice it had changed until I sat down to do my taxes.

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/7694.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: health, politics

11:54 am: why is this presented as good?
In most cases where a boss pressures employees to do painful things that make them cry and throw up, the boss does not brag about it on the front page of the business section.
http://bostonglobe.com/business/2012/01/11/reebok-mission-get-its-employees-fit/p5lRtUS69SDAJj41C38PTK/story.html

I've had bosses who pressured me to overcome physical limitations to DO MORE WORK, and sometimes that hurt me a great deal. I've also had bosses pressure me (or my colleagues) to skimp on safety precautions or rest breaks, and I've seen a lot of bullying around physical weaknesses or phobias that appeared to get in the way of the work. Those bosses pretended they weren't trying to pressure anybody...that they were only concerned with getting the job done, that any effect on employees was incidental. At least in public, they didn't say things like "My idea was to find the people least likely to come," and get them in a position where they say, "I still feel sick to my stomach before I come to classes. But I still come."

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/7654.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: body anxiety

06:59 pm: how to get paid for freelance work
I know many of you do independent freelance work of one kind or another, and I'm curious about how you get paid for it. (Not, "how do you decide what is a fair price for your services?" or "how do you sell a service when similar-looking services are often given away?" though those are also interesting questions.) I mean, how do you get a client to actually PAY you, once you have provided the service?

I've had a couple of frustrating experiences. After an hour's work, the high school student knows a little more math than before, and says, "Oh, my dad was going to pay you, but he's not home yet. Can we pay you next week?" It's not a situation where I can say "no" very readily. The worst of it is when the kid stood me up the following week--empty house at the scheduled time, and no response to phone or email.

A more frustrating example involved more work. There's a grad student who hired me to teach him the statistics he needed to analyze his thesis research, and edit his rough draft. I did a big chunk of editing and met with him for a few hours...and he paid me about half what he had agreed he owed me for the editing. We set up another meeting, at which point he said he would pay me the rest (and I would teach him more about statistics), but he didn't show up. At this point, I'm sending him email and hoping he mails me a check. Considering past experience, it seems unlikely.

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/7244.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: work

11:14 am: health update
Last month, I posted about a medical procedure I was planning to have on December 16th. It was scary and expensive, but I was hoping it would stop my migraines for a few months. I knew it wouldn't be an immediate fix. Patients who have good results report some pain after the injection, even headaches as a side effect. And the good results don't happen for at least a week. The doctor told me to expect optimal relief beginning 2 or 3 weeks after the injection.

I have mixed feelings about this "optimal relief."

The first week after the injection was very, very, bad. The shoulder pain flare was spectacular, and referred to hand and jaw. And my headache got worse. And a lot of my coping mechanisms stopped working, because I couldn't use my shoulder. (This made me overuse my bad hand on the other side, which wasn't any good for me either.) Fortunately, the worst of that effect was temporary. My shoulder pain is back down to the level it was in early December, with a reasonable range of motion. The problem is that I can't lift much at all.

You might have thought I couldn't lift much before. I certainly complained about not being able to do the hands-on part of my work in materials engineering. I was unhappy about not being able to carry a preschooler, or a whole turkey with a lot of vegetables. It's different when a 5-lb bag of oranges, all by itself, is too much to carry home in my backpack. It's different when it seems prudent to return paperbacks to the library one at a time.

For all that, it DID help my headaches. I had a continuous migraine from 10/29 to 12/29. Since then, my migraines have been frequent, but not continuous. I've even had a couple of half-day intervals with no headache at all, which were just lovely. That hasn't happened since the summer of 2000.

Thus, as I said, mixed feelings.

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/7164.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: disability, health

10:22 am: my cousin wouldn't know a strobe light if it bit him
Strobes don't bite most people, so he can get away with that. Usually. Last weekend, it went bad.

I was uncertain about going to Chicago for my cousin's bar mitzvah. I thought it would be worth the strain of air travel to see that set of relatives* and maintain my connection with the family. What really worried me was the possibility of strobe lights at the party after the service. Strobes are the worst triggers for my seizures, and pretty bad migraine triggers as well.

I dithered for WEEKS. It would be an evening party, which made strobes more likely. Yet it was a party in the synagogue social hall, which might make it quieter and less likely to have strobes than a party in a more party-specific space. Last time I saw the bar-mitzvah boy, he had been a very young 12 year old...would that make him less likely to be interested in the kind of dance party that relied on strobes? The next older cousin (who'd had strobes at her bat mitzvah party, that kept me hiding in the lobby most of the afternoon, and still needing a week of recovery time afterward) seemed a lot more sophisticated.

I finally phoned my cousin** and asked him if there would be strobes or flashing lights at the party. I grew up with the idea that it's an outrageous imposition for me to ask somebody to turn off a flickering light, or not to wear perfume. Now, mostly, I can recognize that people outside my family are ok with such requests (and if they aren't, I can walk away.) But when dealing with relatives, I can't bring myself to ask them to change what they're doing for my comfort. It feels daring and rude just to ask for information, so I can be be elsewhere if I think it's going to be too uncomfortable.***

In this case, my cousin was very gracious about it. He said they'd hired a DJ, and didn't know if he would have strobes. He's be happy to ask the DJ not to use any strobes, if they were a problem for me. I made travel plans thinking that maybe it was no longer appropriate for me to go on defining that side of my family based on my mother, my aunts and uncles, and my grandparents (of blessed memory.) The kids' table takes over gradually, and I didn't notice a lot of it, because it happened between my aunt and my cousins.

I shouldn't be surprised my cousin was so gracious about this issue. We haven't spoken much in the last few decades, and weren't particularly close as children, but I have no reason to think he's a mean guy. And I wasn't thinking about it when I made the call, but he has some reason to be sensitive about this sort of thing. The bar mitzvah boy also has absence seizures, and his parents have spent the last ten years trying hard to protect him from possible triggers. His seizures are very infrequent, and he's not photosensitive, and of course parents are more protective of children than adults are protective of themselves. Even so...when they're trying hard to make sure the kid doesn't have a seizure the week before he has to do something important, I wonder if my attempts to insist "I'm fine, it's nothing," for only one seizure in an evening might be inappropriate.

So. There I was, after the service, in the lobby of an enormous Chicago synagogue. The doors to the dining room were open, and the music was starting up, and I could tell there were strobe lights. Not a single device like a photographer's strobe, or even a disco ball, that I could point to and say "please turn that off." It was a whole dramatic light show, with flickering screens in several colors. I decided to stay in the lobby, eat the appetizers being carried around on trays, and play with my little nephews and their toy trains. (They didn't like the light show, either. Or possibly the music or the crowd.) It was unfortunate to miss the party after coming all that way, but the appetizers were yummy and there were lots of them, all pareve. And my nephews and I were enjoying one another's company. And maybe I could chat with various other relatives in passing. Everybody went in to dinner, and I settled down in the lobby.

Then my sister-in-law came for the boys. They had to go in and eat dinner. "Oh, you can't stay out here and miss the the whole party!" I tried to explain. A cousin came out to chat, and to invite me in. "But they turned off the strobes! You have to come in for this part!" I explained I preferred to stay in the lobby. Eventually, I was convinced to go into the party space--just for a little while, you'll see how safe it is now, it won't bother you, you really can't miss this. It was my own bad judgment that made me go into the room. But I stayed in the room for 2 hours because my judgment was so badly impaired by frequent seizures.

I made it home with great difficulty. I've felt purely awful all week. I am recovering, albeit slowly; I couldn't have written this on Wednesday.



*I would be seeing my brother and his wife and children, all my cousins and aunts and uncles on that side of the family, but not my mother.

**the one whose bar mitzvah was in 1980, not last week. Now that I think of it, that one also had strobes that made me uncomfortable, though it wasn't nearly so bad.

***as the bar mitzvah last week was Saturday evening, the young man was talking about Lech Lecha. He spoke of how admirable it is to just *go* when told, rather than trying to negotiate. (You want me to go WHERE? What's so great about this land that you will show me?) It echoed through what little thinking I was doing, later in the evening.

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/6101.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: family, health

01:32 pm: baby steps
Late last month, I was traveling for Rosh Hashanah, and saw a relatively new set of signs in the line for the TSA security theater at Logan. One was "Hey kids! Make sure your laces are tight. You can keep your shoes on in this line." Unlike most TSA signs, it wasn't repeated at many places along the line, nor repeated at different heights. I only saw it near the entrance, and only at 3-4 feet up. A sign with somewhat smaller lettering announced that Logan was only testing possible new security procedures, and the TSA was monitoring them closely to decide if other airports would eventually adopt them later.

I thought that even a temporary local decrease in time-consuming nonsense is better than nothing. The shoes don't particularly bother me, personally--it's straining my shoulder to get my arm high enough, and the agent's hands on my breasts when I fail, that freaks me out. But harm reduction is good, and I know the shoe thing is a lot more of a problem for some travelers than it is for me.

It turned out the "hey kids!" meant that only KIDS were allowed to keep their shoes on. Adults still had to remove them. It wasn't clear what boundary they were using to distinguish kids from adults. Old enough to walk? Old enough to vote? Old enough to hear thrilling stories of an Important Cause, and want to help? Or do they just go by the size of the shoes? Wherever they draw the line, each person who doesn't need to stop/remove shoes/put shoes on conveyor belt/be scanned in socks/retrieve shoes/put shoes back on--every single time they avoid that hassle, the line moves a little faster. More than a little, for families traveling with more than one child. So it looks like a nice little harm reduction project.

If this is a new procedure the TSA is testing at Logan (or at part of Logan), that implies they're trying to measure the effects in order to decide if it goes well. That made me think, "Oh, I'm glad they're finally thinking like quality enginee--Hey! I call shenanigans!" What would it mean for it to "go well" at Logan; what can they be measuring? what do they expect/hope the results might be?

Maybe the line will go much faster with kids wearing shoes, or maybe it will only go a little faster. It's possible that the line speed won't change noticeably, because parents will still need to take their shoes off. Would that be a reason not to change? It's not like "Ok, you can keep your shoes on" would cost a lot of money.

Absurd security procedures stay in place because people in authority claim it might be *dangerous* to relax them. What can they measure to prove kids-with-shoes-on are no more of a terrorist risk than kids-with-shoes-off? If they use their spiffy new procedure and scan kids in Logan's Terminal C with their shoes on, and find no little shoe bombers in a week, or a month...what does that prove? The old procedure found no little shoe bombers in all the airports in the country, for years...so how do we know that isn't safer?

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/5882.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: travel

08:59 am: social progress
Last week, I saw somebody wearing a yellow t-shirt with the text "every kiss begins with consent." I saw it in passing, and didn't have time to parse the graphic, but there was one. Cambridge usually has a pretty high density of idealistic t-shirts (from "world peace" to "you can't tell me what to do"), but this seemed new. I like it.

After the young woman wearing it got off the bus, I thought it was an impressive bit of social progress for her to wear it. Some women my age have daughters within a few years of 20. I recall being close to that age and knowing women who organized Take Back The Night rallies and were very emphatic about no meaning no...but I don't think any of us would have worn a shirt like that in public. It would have been a joke.

Then I thought it would indicate even more social progress if I'd seen the t-shirt on a young man, alongside the emblem of a fraternity or sponsor suggesting lots of guys were wearing them. Probably not. Fraternities have such a horrible reputation for advocating rape culture that I'd suspect some kind of nasty joke ("every kiss begins with consent" on the front, and something like "don't stop 'til I get enough," on the back.) Or even simple hypocrisy, the way such organizations officially oppose alcohol abuse.

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/5144.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: feminism, neighborhood

12:35 pm: LOL is a figure of speech
It's a good thing my noise-intolerant neighbor* doesn't live directly under my apartment anymore, because I was laughing unreasonably loudly, at an unreasonable time of morning. I don't know how it happened, but the noise-intolerant neighbor now lives two floors down, and the apartment directly under mine is occupied by somebody I haven't met. They seem to have lived there since March without complaining.

I started reading "The Perilous Affair of the Batshit Blogger" (http://archiveofourown.org/works/170096?view_full_work=true) at about 2am, one of those nights last month when I was too hot and itchy to sleep. (I'd downloaded it to my Blackberry months ago, but not gotten around to it, as one does.) It was howlingly funny. It contained the first drunk joke in many, many years to get past my "that's not funny!" response and really make me laugh.

I was aware that it wasn't neighborly to laugh that much, that loud, in a thin-walled apartment at that hour. I hardly ever realized that the next line was going to strike me as hilarious, so it wasn't feasible to bite the pillow. My next-door neighbor is polite and good-natured, but I don't like imposing too much on that...maybe she has a loud air conditioner. (What? You think I wanted to stop reading in the middle of the story?)

I recommend it to my friends who don't usually read fanfic. (I probably don't have to push as hard, for the rest of you.) The basic conceit is that John Watson and the Holmes brothers live in Manchester in 2011, with personalities similar to those of their namesakes in London in the 1880s, but modern jobs. There is apparently a TV show with a similar conceit, but the story does not depend on it. (There may be references to other movies or TV shows that I didn't notice and didn't miss.) I don't think the story calls for any particular background knowledge of UK government shenanigans--I could follow enough that I think I was laughing at the right places. It was written before the Murdoch scandal broke, but I think it might have become even funnier since then.

One bit of background knowledge that is useful, perhaps necessary, is that the batshit blogger character was inspired by a real person. A woman from Los Angeles
moved to Manchester with the firmly stated intention of finding personal enlightenment and true love in six months. I think my summary is enough for understanding "The Perilous Affair," but if you want to see the direct evidence and lots of people making fun of it, you can look over here. http://legionseagle.dreamwidth.org/61556.html


*http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/3075.html#comments

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/4947.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

12:07 pm: listen my children and you shall see
As you've probably heard, Sarah Palin visited Boston recently, and said something silly about Paul Revere. That's not very surprising. Lots of people visit Boston*, and most of them say silly things at some point. The remarkable thing is that so many people seemed to take her seriously.

Dichroic made an insightful post about different kinds of mistakes:
http://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/196242.html
I think it was partly inspired by Palin's mistake, and partly by the responses to it among ideologues who really want to be on Palin's side.
(ETA: I meant to link to this post. http://dichroic.dreamwidth.org/196469.html Not the poem. It's hard to discuss mistakes without making more.)

It reminded me of a local mistake about Paul Revere. Near the border of Lexington, there's a mural of Revere's ride on a brick wall, between Mass Ave and the Minuteman Bikeway. (I think the wall belongs to the MBTA, but I'm not sure.) It's not a brilliant mural, but it's lively and colorful, and horse and rider have plausible numbers and arrangements of limbs. They both look tired yet excited, running hard. Revere is shouting--I think he's waving his hat. I walked past that mural hundreds of times before it occurred to me that it faces the wrong way.

I don't know how many murals there are of Paul Revere's ride, where the orientation doesn't matter. This one is along the path he actually rode, and it shows him riding towards Boston. For many years, I was so thoroughly non-visual, it didn't occur to me to think about it. Last year, I started reading chemistry textbooks out loud and describing the diagrams...that pushed me to think about how visual information might be useful and important, and made me start noticing misleading visual information.



*The city encourages it. So do I! All you nice people from away should come visit!

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/4574.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: neighborhood

10:58 am: waste
When my brother was 3, and I was 5, we were at a big family gathering where we overheard our great-aunts talking about his long dark eyelashes.
"Gorgeous lashes like that are wasted on a boy!"
"His sister's eyes are almost the same color; it's too bad they don't look like anything special without the long eyelashes."
"He's so adorable, with those dark lashes practically brushing the pages! Too bad he's not the girl."
I don't know if we were intended to hear. We were such little kids that I suspect they weren't quite thinking of us as human beings.

A few days after that party, my brother cut off his eyelashes. This was also considered adorable, because he used rounded safety scissors. (He knew he wasn't allowed to touch pointy scissors.) He doesn't remember doing it, much less WHY he did it. Any speculation about his reasoning has to be from the outside...I'm just glad he didn't hear them saying anything similar about the color of his eyes.

This past weekend, we were at another big family gathering. I haven't seen my nephews in more than a year, so I couldn't tell if the 4 year old is intrinsically shy, or if he was just overwhelmed by the loud music and crowd of strangers. It was immediately obvious (and not really surprising) that he is a beautiful child, with unusually long dark eyelashes. My aunt, who is his great-aunt, commented to me about his appearance:
"Look at those great eyelashes! Why did they have to be wasted on a boy?"

I couldn't tell if the little boy across the big table had heard her, or if he could hear me. My brother was only partway around the table, but the music was so loud he might not be able to hear us either. The only person I could be sure of answering was my aunt:
"They're not wasted at all. He's a beautiful little boy! And he'll probably grow into a very handsome man, just like his daddy did."

My aunt made a dismissive gesture. "Well, maybe. But nobody notices men's eyelashes. They're really important for women."

Yes. My pretty little nephew is growing up with a fair amount of privilege. I couldn't tell if my aunt was trying to talk about that privilege, or if she was just resentful. (And I was mostly interested in protecting the kid. And I had a migraine.) So I just sort of laughed and said, "You might not pay any attention to men's eyelashes, but they do contribute to the overall dreamboat effect." She kind of rolled her eyes at me, but didn't argue.

Then I suggested the little boy might follow in the footsteps of the cousin whose bat mitzvah we were celebrating. By all reports, the girl is kind and talented, as well as beautiful (I did not mention her eyelashes. Perhaps her mother will let her wear mascara soon, if the detail troubles her). Her friends seemed more impressed with her kindness and talents than her beauty, but that doesn't mean her beauty is wasted.

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/3667.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: body anxiety, family

12:04 pm: the lioness who didn't cry "wolf," and her friends
Elise had a stroke a few days ago.* She managed to communicate enough of the problem that the person with her (sensitized by having one dear friend recovering from a stroke, and another working in emergency medicine) recognized the emergency and called 911. This was all despite Elise's initial desire to lie down and hope the symptoms went away. Thanks to prompt treatment, the stroke did not do permanent damage.

Elise, and the many people who care about her, bounced from profound terror to profound relief. In the first day or so after the stroke, I saw several people posting the news that she was in the hospital, and there was a tremendous outpouring of sympathy and offers to help. From over here, it looked like caring for Elise, caring for the community she helps build, and an attempt to fight back against disease and feeling helpless. Now that Elise is back from the hospital, and her stroke is no longer a medical problem, the community is redirecting the desire to help. I understand why so many people are talking about the importance of calling emergency medical services at the first sign of stroke symptoms. I even understand why the conversation has such emotional intensity--all that energy from fear and relief and the sudden transition has to go somewhere.

It's still making me uncomfortable. ( Read more... )

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/3387.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: community, health

09:46 am: acoustical problems
I live in an apartment building with really terrible sound insulation. Street noise bothers me, though I'm really pretty high above the street. Sometimes I wish I couldn't hear so much of what the next-door neighbor was watching on tv, or the neighbor across the hall pleading tearfully with her boyfriend. I don't know how much of my feeling about the matter is generally being averse to conflict, and how much is a sense that addressing these particular noise problems would be too much of an imposition...the next-door neighbor shouldn't need to find another way to deal with hearing problems, not for my sake. And however much I think the neighbor across the hall should be in a more peaceful romantic relationship, it would be icky for her to be thinking about MY happiness while negotiating it. Overhearing neighbors can be uncomfortable, but the advantages of cheap apartment living are worth it to me.

My new neighbor downstairs is distressed by how much noise I make. It's not music or conversation that bothers her. It's that I "walk so heavily." I don't wear shoes in the apartment, nor do I run or dance here. It's just that every time I put a foot down on my floor (thinking about going across the room, or mindlessly pacing while talking on the phone) it comes through to her ceiling as if I were stomping.

She seems very averse to conflict, herself. I could tell it was hard for her to bring herself to talk to me about the problem--she could only do it when she found the situation completely intolerable.* She spent a lot of time defending against the idea that it was inappropriate for her to talk to me about being disturbed by noise.** She also checked with other people, to make sure her distress was not unreasonable.*** Visitors to her apartment have been shocked by the impact of my footfalls, and wondered how anyone could live that way. She asked my neighbor across the hall, who hears me thumping around and agreed that it's incredibly loud.

The neighbor is so distressed that she says she will break her lease if I won't walk more quietly. I apologized for disturbing her, and said that I truly did not want to do so in the future, but I wasn't sure how to avoid it. I told her I already don't wear shoes in the apartment, which would be the most obvious remedy. I asked what she would suggest. She said it was simply a matter of putting my feet down more gently, and that a person with any consideration would do so. I know carpeting muffles downwards transfer of sound, but I don't want to get it because vacuuming is such a strain for my hand and shoulder.

Her next step is to notify the landlord--actually, the management company that owns the building. She expects they will order me to stop disturbing her, because her lease gives her the right to the quiet enjoyment of her apartment. The way I walk back and forth over her bedroom at 8am, or over her kitchen at 7:30pm, is making that untenable. I have no idea if the management will value her lease more than mine.

My first step will have to wait until I can overcome my anxiety enough to get out of my chair. (This is not any more fun than being too depressed to move. Maybe less, in some ways.) While I was writing this, I was thirsty, and didn't get up for a drink because it would be too noisy. I wanted to call S, but I didn't think I could talk to him without pacing, so I didn't.



*She first brought the subject up a week ago. Redbird answered the door, and handled most of the conversation. At the time, I got the impression that the neighbor was distressed because we were talking in the kitchen and clattering dishes so early that particular morning (she said 5, but we had been up at 7.)

**Last week, I tried to reassure the neighbor that it was OK to talk to me if she had a problem with something I was doing, that I wanted to know if there was something I could fix. Meanwhile, Redbird was defensive about the accusation that we had been making noise at 5am (when we'd both been sound asleep), and the neighbor was reacting to that defensiveness. At the same confused time, the neighbor was trying to make a comprehensive defense of the idea that it wasn't unreasonable or mean to talk to me about horribly disruptive noise I was making...so defensive she couldn't hear, "Yes, of course, thank you for telling me. We really do have to go now, we need to get to South Station," as anything but dismissive.

***Knowing that LOTS of people think my walk is intolerably bad is really disturbing. I mean, I understand why she checked with them. I might have done the same thing. But I still feel like people are ganging up on me.

This entry was originally posted at http://adrian-turtle.dreamwidth.org/3075.html. Please comment there using OpenID, or here as usual.

Tags: body anxiety, neighborhood

09:32 am: when the words are exactly wrong
Last week, I saw a sign in the window of a dry cleaners: "We now use organic solvent!"
I knew what they meant, even though the words were precisely wrong. The whole idea of dry cleaning started with using organic solvents like benzene or kerosene, instead of water, to clean fabric that might be damaged by water. Unfortunately, those solvents are flammable, carcinogenic, and otherwise problematic. 70-80 years ago, the industry replaced them with less flammable organic solvents. When the environmental and cancer risks were recognized* in the 1970s, they started trapping and recycling the vapor, so workers would not be exposed to as much solvent and the stuff would not pollute as much air and water.

More recently, there has been research into methods of dry cleaning without organic solvents. Some use liquid carbon dioxide, some use silicones, and some use small amounts of steam and various tricks to prevent water from damaging the fabric. Carbon dioxide is not an organic compound, despite the presence of carbon. Silicones are considered mixed inorganic-organic compounds. And water is not organic, despite commonly being found in living things.

I think I know what happened. The dry cleaners were presumably going to some trouble to use a solvent that was safer and more environmentally friendly than what they had used before. They wanted to attract customers from neighborhood residents who prefer organic vegetables...


*I mean "recognized" by the industry. Researchers generally recognize risks before that awareness shows up in regulations or market pressure. I don't know what the time lag was in this case.

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Tags: neighborhood

10:12 am: you can always break a pilot
It can take me a long time to go from idea to post, especially when I'm depressed. I started thinking about this one years ago, when I was reading various enlightened commentary, disapproving of 24 and other mainstream/conservative stories glorifying torture. I keep being reminded of related issues, and bogging down in stuff that's difficult to even think about.

Spoilers for Vorkosigan books 1-7. Disturbing moral questions. Not for the squeamish. ANNE, DO NOT READ. If anybody is still with me, ( Read more... )

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Tags: books

05:19 pm: beetles
Yesterday, somebody on the Davis_Square LJ community asked a bug identification question, http://community.livejournal.com/davis_square/2325077.html and Icecreamempress suggested they might be Confused Flour Beetles. I don't know if there are any in my apartment (my eyes, and/or my brain, have not been reliable lately. I will need to use Redbird's), but I agree with the local consensus that "Confused Flour Beetle" is an awesome name for an insect. It's probably a band name or a piece of modern art, just waiting to happen.

Icecreamempress pointed to a fact sheet from the OSU Extension school.
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2087.html
Along with describing the diet and habits of Tribolium confusum, the fact sheet said these beetles are commonly known as "bran bugs." Aha! Now I understand! The bugs must have been named for Bran Davies. After losing his memory of the great world-changing conflict that took his effort and his loved ones, it makes sense that his name would be a watchword for confusion.

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11:42 pm: what were they thinking?
The label on the tube: "Store in a cool, dry place. Keep tube capped when not in use." Doesn't everybody keep their toothpaste by the sink? Isn't that what you're supposed to do? I thought the craft of making waterproof plastic tubes was pretty well under control these days.

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01:22 pm: debugging
All right. That's enough. That's MORE than enough. For a little while, I was relieved to know I had not been hallucinating that my apartment was infested with bugs, but that only lasts so long. There remains the fact that my apartment is infested with bugs, and it's freaking me out. They don't fly, but the ones that drop from the ceiling are disturbing.

Does anybody know if beetles* eat colloidal oatmeal? I don't think there's any exposed food or garbage drawing them--all my stored food and garbage is pretty well contained. Besides, I'm not seeing them in the kitchen nearly so much as in the bedroom and bathroom. I tend to use Aveeno-type goop on my feet in sandal weather (and even more of it elsewhere, now that they make a version with sunscreen that doesn't feel icky) but it's not worth it if's attracting creepy-crawlies.

*Mostly little dark brown bugs, about half a centimeter long, shaped vaguely like miniature ladybugs. They have wings that shimmer a little, but I've never seen one flying. They don't move fast at all. There are also some bigger bugs, brown and yellow striped, 1-1.5cm long. I don't know if there are a lot fewer of this kind than the little beetles, overall, or if they're just very under-represented among those I can stomp, because they're faster.

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Tags: household

02:31 pm: not that I'd be marching in a parade anyhow
I understand having police cars and fire trucks in a parade. The police and fire departments do good work. For a town this size, the police and fire departments do a substantial fraction of the town's organized and official good work. And it's more impressive, as well as being easier on the firefighters, to have a fire truck driving slowly down the street than to have a bunch of marching firefighters in their fireproof gear (even in this weather.) But, for crying out loud, do all those town vehicles need to have their sirens and strobe lights going as they roll down Mass Ave at walking pace?

Parades are always noisy, and they always block bus traffic on the main routes. But I don't remember previous parades being quite so aggressively nasty about migraine triggers. I had been thinking of going to the gym, or to Trader Joe's, but I think I'm staying inside this afternoon. *sigh* Though I can hope a small town means a short parade.

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Tags: accessibility, community

01:18 pm: in this world of modern technology
Why can't they make boots that will keep both my feet dry? There are expensive and/or ugly boots that keep OTHER people's feet dry. I'm a generous person, but there are limits. I can even find boots that will keep my RIGHT foot dry. Bootmakers of the world, I appreciate this. Sorel, Merrell, Cougar, Ugg (and whoever made those boots I got from Wild Women in 2002), I don't want you to think I'm ungrateful for keeping my right foot dry in slush and heavy rain. But every damn left boot I've ever bought leaks at the left toe when I need it most, and I am thoroughly tired of it.

02:05 pm: what happened to the parsnips?
I rarely buy parsnips, because I don't know what to do with them. If I'm making carrot soup (the savory kind, with black pepper and herbs, as opposed to the kind with orange juice and ginger), I might add 1 or 2 parsnips...but otherwise? Here's what happened to a bag of these admirable root vegetables. They all turned out very well.

( cottage ppie for a silly cottage )

( vegetable soup )

( lamb stew )

Tags: food

12:00 pm: it's not funny if it's still happening
My doctor's office has old-fashioned ads on the wall of the adult exam room, pitching various kinds of snake oil. They're clearly meant to be silly, with maybe a touch of nostalgia for times when medicine was simpler. Our foolish ancestors, cheerily washing their hair in listerine (while wearing shirts!) so "infectious dandruff" would not interfere with their important war work. It doesn't bother me to see the ads for cough syrup or baby powder or generic miracle cures, even though I know they were all snares and delusions.

Some of the ads, for a particular product, push my "That's Not Funny!" button, and push it hard. Dr. Haines Golden Specific was supposed to be a miracle cure for alcoholism. The ads all described it as something the customer could use to cure her HUSBAND's alcoholism. "Any lady can use it!" She buys it, sneaks regular doses into his food, and he will magically stop craving alcohol. "Save those near and dear to you from a life of degradation and ultimate poverty and disgrace." One ad purports to be a testimonial from a man, a former alcoholic grateful that his wife saved him from demon rum and the associated moral and financial ruin. The others speak to women directly, urging them to save their husbands. It's not clear if they might also use it to save their fathers, sons, brothers, or fiances, but Dr. Haines clearly never imagined that a man might want to save an alcoholic (or that a woman might be one.)

This is so wrong it hurts. I used to be married to an alcoholic, and I flinch a lot harder from alcohol-related wrongness than most people. (Sometimes I flinch from alcohol-related stuff that isn't even wrong.) In addition to the heartbreaking fact that there is no miracle cure for alcoholism, problematic drinking is a great deal more complicated than "craving alcohol." Some people enjoy the social atmosphere, the lack of constraint, they get with drunken parties ...even though they're expensive, even though unconstrained behavior can have nasty repercussions. People with access to alcohol don't stop drinking unless they want to. The idea of fixing behavior without a person's knowledge is wrong, in the sense that it can't possibly work.

It's also morally wrong, in a couple of different ways. It takes for granted that a wife is supposed to be responsible for her husband's respectability. This is still going strong in modern advertising, and lots of people buy into it. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be, in terms of responsibility without power, but the responsibility side is still pretty bad. The Golden Specific ads target the wife of a man is not responsible for his own behavior. He is not participating in changing it, so his consent is beside the point.

"Any Lady can cure the most violent drunkard secretly at home. Let no woman despair," over a drawing of a dramatic wife-beating scene, captioned "gone mad from whiskey." The victim-blaming implications are pretty clear, for those women who got themselves beaten up by drunken husbands they failed to cure.

A different ad for the same product:
Any Lady May Do It At Home:"
"can be given secretly by any lady in tea, coffee, or food; effective in its silent work--the craving for liquor relieved in thousands of cases without the drinkers' knowledge, and against his will."

On the opposite wall of the exam room, there is a rack of little pamphlets. One has information about diabetes, another about high blood pressure, another about depression. There's one about alcoholism. Like the others, it ends on the note of, "talk to the doctor if you have any of these symptoms." I kind of wish there was one for Alanon. Even though I didn't actually like Alanon.

Tags: ads

01:21 pm: I am starting to see a correlation
I do not want to see this correlation, because it makes no sense and because implies I should limit my already limited lifestyle in fairly unpleasant ways, but here is the suspicion. It looks like audiobooks are bad for my shoulder. (Books or music. Any mp3 I listen to on purpose. But in practice, it turns out to be mostly books.) I got out of the habit of listening to anything after I got my ears pierced, but went back to it in January.

Tags: health, tech

04:11 pm: batteries of handheld gadgets
I have a Garmin GPS now, which is quite useful for finding my way on foot. I've used it a couple of times in a Zipcar, too, and it finds the satellite signal fairly quickly. Obviously, I charge it from wall power, not having a car. Because I don't use it every day (not even every week), the battery runs down when it's turned off and sitting on my shelf between uses. I'm concerned that it will be bad for the battery if I keep it plugged in all the time without draining the battery...not "bad for the battery" in the sense of causing catastrophic failure, but gradually making it less able to hold a full charge. I've been keeping it on the shelf, not plugged in, but this is not really an optimal solution. When I want to use it, the battery is usually pretty close to drained, and it takes hours to charge it. (That's what I'm doing this afternoon. Waiting for the thing to charge, and hoping it will really BE all the way charged, rather than doing that thing where it looks all the way charged and really is just 40% charged.) Any suggestions?

I'm afraid partial charging was responsible for the battery problems with my Palm (which I use as an ebook reader, mp3 player, and calender, with no phone or web connectivity.) After months of plugging it in whenever I came home, whether the battery was fully drained or 90% charged, it's only good for 80 minutes at most. 40 minutes, if I take notes. Is there a way out of this, other than carrying a charger?

Tags: tech

02:26 pm: overcorrection
I went to the eye doctor last year, and determined that my glasses prescription was a little too strong. I hadn't been sufficiently aware of this for it to send me to the eye doctor. I went because I was seeing bugs that should not have been in my apartment, that should not have been on my PLANET. When I asked the doctor who prescribes my anti-seizure meds if perhaps my brain might be playing an unpleasant new kind of trick on me, he asked if the bugs tended to turn up in the same place, and where I was when I saw them. When it turned out that I was seeing them in different rooms, but always to my left, he sent me to an eye doctor. My eye playing tricks on me is very much less scary than my brain playing tricks on me. The eye doctor assured me that I was seeing a moving dark spot and just interpreting it as "bug," and that it would gradually get smaller and disappear. That's how it went, from Lovecraftian horrors to palmeto bugs to ladybugs (a few of which I could see with both eyes and even step on) to ants. And no bugs at all since the middle of December.

I've been getting less nearsighted as I age*, rather than the more common pattern of becoming both nearsighted and farsighted and needing bifocals (or transition lenses. Or two pair of glasses.) I know some people have a lot of trouble adjusting to bifocals or transition lenses, or are unable to do so at all, and I'm afraid I might be one of them. I have been really, really, bad at visual processing since I was very young and throwing up every time I tried to use a Viewmaster. This past eye exam included something I've never done before--I don't know if it's a standard thing for being over 40, or something this doctor does, or a recent part of the standard of care. After I looked at the eye chart across the room, with and without my glasses, the doctor gave me a laminated card with an eye chart on it, and told me to read the smallest line I could see clearly. "Where should I hold it?" "Wherever you like. Any place that's comfortable for you to read it." So I held it about 18-20" away and read a line with my glasses, and she asked me to read the next line but it was too blurry. And I took my glasses off, and had to move it closer because I couldn't see the text...but she'd said that was ok. At about 8-10" from my face, it popped into focus. Even the small text I couldn't read with my glasses popped into focus. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, and I wouldn't have thought to do the experiment. 8-10" is a great distance for reading a paperback in bed, in case you were wondering. The eye doctor wrote me a prescription for new glasses, and advised me to take them off for reading fine print or doing close work. And she warned me that I am likely to need bifocals or transition lenses in a few years, but that they are likely to be problematic for my migraines and motion sickness so I should put them off as long as I can.

I remember when my glasses were -8.00 and -7.50, and I had to argue with the opthamologist who couldn't believe a 10% change was significant enough to cause eyestrain. (I suppose one might not notice a 10% change in a 1 or 2 diopter correction.) That transition was really brutal, partly because I was working a full-time job with a fair amount of physical danger, and my migraines were completely out of control. Now I'm going from -5.50 to -5.00 and -4.75, with more astigmatism correction. It should be a piece of cake. Furthermore, I'm home, and can handle the adjustment period in relative safety. I think it also helps that I have more faith in the ophthalmologist. Anxiously second-guessing whether the new glasses are really a good idea makes it harder to persist through the headaches and double vision and motion sickness. This is going to be easy. Right. Easy. I am still going to go lie down for a bit.



*Note to the opthamologist in Winter Hill: this is unusual. It is not unheard of.
Note to the optometrist in Porter Square: this is unusual. It is not freakish.
Note to the medical professionals of the world: if our bodies worked perfectly well, we would not be consulting you nearly so often. Please be respectful of the ways in which bodies work differently or fail to work. It is your job to know this stuff, for crying out loud.

Tags: health, the vision thing