"sweat, tears, or the sea."

I haven't updated in a while, and I have a half-dozen hypotheses as to why, but I think it's in large part due to being fed up with myself.
 

I had a spasm of pretty intense depression, the kind where everything feels insurmountable and huge and the world feels like a hostile place actively engaged in finding new and different ways to try to ruin me, and I'm just this pulsating ball of self-pity about something that has already fucking happened and can't be changed.  I finally pushed myself into making a doctor's appointment, seeing a pcp, getting various medications and scheduling other tests to be done.   I'm tired of having this body that fast-forwarded twenty years, I'd like to feel a little less dessicated, a little less fragile.

And I'd like to imagine a world in which I am naked in front of someone other than Light and Hands and Hips without immediately becoming belligerent, defensive and full of hate of my own body, but I don't know if I can get there, and I don't know how to get there.  And I'd like to think on someone else, I would read all these scars and absences as beautiful, because they would tell the story of having done a fierce, brave  thing.  But to me, my body reads as just another way I'm damaged.

I had ambitious plans, for this evening, for this post, for all sorts of things, but I think instead I'll huddle under a blanket with a dog, watch chat windows and wait for the migraine meds to kick in.

 

In more light-hearted news, I have left myself a note that says "New Brighton archraooo ft stitchery" and I'm desperately curious as to what I meant.

(no subject)

Well, the meds have taken the edge off of the world.   My cheeks are kind of numb, and I'm feeling okay about the world.  I'm married to a saint who is making me delicious dinner, I'm smiling smugly about something, which is always a grand feeling and I said a soppy thing and I feel really good for having said it. 

March was a month.   It contained a lot of despair, a killer cold and no small amount of tears.   But it also contained making pancakes for Media and getting to hold Coolidge for a substantial amount of time, a fabulous new coworker, discovering that coloring is the perfect way to spend the time between taking ambien and loosing consciousness  (I can't read because I forget it, and I can't cross stitch because I fuck it up).  I went to a party I actually enjoyed, went to Northampton, got to have Kumquat stay with us, as well as Curmudgeon.   I saw Spring Breakers, GI Joe and the MoS butterfly garden.  I had a lot of convention-inspired thinky thoughts about community and senses of belonging, and how I really do need to practice failure.

I read some graphic novels and adored Morning Glories.  I remembered to put a couple books down because requiring myself to slog through meant I just wasn't reading.   (The Cold Commands by Richard Morgan, Stray Souls by Kate Elliot and some uninteresting mystery novels because I keep thinking I should be someone who enjoys mystery novels, but either I don't, or I'm reading the wrong ones.)

I did read, however,  Father Gaetano's Puppet Catechism, by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, The Shadowed Sun by NK Jemesin, the ekaterina sedia anthology Bloody Fabulous, Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore, The Demon's lexicon by Sarah Reese Brennan, Home Improvement: Undead Edition, Blackwood by Gwenda Bond (roanoke! john dee! ghost ships!) and the hospitality industry tell-all Heads in Beds.  My favorite of the month was Marie Brennan's A Natural History of Dragons.

I didn't make a lot of new dishes this week, but I had a pretty high success rate.   We made awesome pozole, awesome potpie with dill biscuits and something from Joy the Baker's cookbook called a Single Lady Pancake.    I made some gingerbread cookies for a work potluck, and I was very disappointed in them, but it turns out they actually got better with age.

I've had breakfast with Delight two weeks in a row, and it's awesome.  Precise pulled my ass out of the fire with regards to a Readercon thing.   The flute class got canceled, and I'm wondering if there's another thing to do with the same regularity that's going to stretch my brain in some interesting way.   Now I'm going to go investigate the sleeping part of the program.