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A friend was telling me today that he's having something of a midlife crisis. I confessed that I've never really understood what that means. He said, "It's like I'm looking around at my life and thinking, Is this all there is?"

I told him that by that definition I don't expect to ever have a midlife crisis.

We were walking down Sixth Avenue toward Bryant Park. Being there reminded me, as it always does, of the year I spent as a secretary at BPRC, struggling in yet another job that didn't suit me, thinking This is it. I'm done working for other people. It never works. It reminded me of how miserable Josh was back then, how we desperately tried to find local friends and community, how Xtina and I wrestled with the transition from long-distance to medium-distance and wondered why seeing each other more often wasn't making us happier, how money was always tight.

And now I have everything. So much more than I ever thought I might have. I hear there are kids who plan their futures; I never really did, or not in any plausible way. (I wanted to be a detective. I wanted to live in a self-sustaining agrarian commune. I wanted to create a language that everyone in the world would speak. But those are dreams, fancies, not plans.) I'm not sure I believed in the concept of myself as an adult. Somehow, without a blueprint, this amazing life has built itself around me. Such riches, such beauty, such wonder, such love! To contemplate it is to be both uplifted and humbled. I look around at my life every day and I'm blown away by how much there is. I don't expect to feel the slightest bit different when I hit "midlife", whenever that is.

I guess I got my crises over with early. Can't say I'm the least bit sorry.


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Useful things I have learned or figured out recently:

* When staying at a hotel or spending a lot of time in a climate-controlled space where the air is very dry, drink coconut water--at least a liter a day. Bring it with you or buy it nearby. If traveling by air, see if you can buy some in the airport once you're past the security line. It will rehydrate you much more effectively than water, without all the artificial crap (and vile taste) of Gatorade. Also recommended: just before bed, apply lip balm and hand moisturizer. (In that order. It's hard to get the cap off the lip balm if your hands are slippery.)

* If you experience anxiety-related muscle tension, apply heat to those muscles to reduce your anxiety. A hot bath or shower works well. A heating pad is even better. Warmth is emotionally comforting, and will physically relax you as well.

What useful things have you recently learned or figured out that you wish you'd known years ago?


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It occurs to me that I haven't updated on health stuff in a while. At the moment, my right ear appears to be completely fine. No hearing loss, only the barest hint of tinnitus, no vertigo. I've pretty much dropped the low-salt diet; I'm still trying to avoid massively salty things like pretzels, potato chips, and the clear noodle soup at Rickshaw, which now taste way too salty to me, but otherwise I'm not worrying about it. My guess is that the ear problems will occasionally come back, I'll do the low-salt thing for a while (or maybe a very brief course of diuretics to kickstart recovery), and they'll go away again. This is the best outcome I could have hoped for and I am very, very, very relieved.

Otherwise I'm doing pretty well. Baseline levels of anxiety still a bit higher than I'd like, but it's been a while since I had a panic attack or even needed a calming dose of taurine. Of course it helps tremendously that the ear is behaving itself and I can eat normally; low salt -> low blood pressure -> dizziness -> anxiety, dietary change -> eating less -> low blood sugar -> anxiety, vertigo -> anxiety, hearing loss -> anxiety, etc. so being done with all of that is a great relief.

I have not yet checked out tai chi, and I don't think I'm going to have the time to do so before Readercon. I miss dancing a bit. I would like to be moving around more. But right now I really, really can't commit to doing anything weekly, and it feels marvelously freeing to be able to do a different thing every single Tuesday night!

Today's Tuesday plans involve petting the kitten (I missed her very much while I was traveling), and eating lunch, and showering, and getting dressed, and calling my mother, and answering emails from potential clients, and figuring out what time I need to leave home to get to the movie theater by 17:15 to meet Josh for the 17:30 showing of The Avengers (yes, we're the last nerds left who haven't seen it). We decided to see the movie first and have dinner after--which means not overindulging in popcorn, but see above about salty things now tasting VERY salty to me, so I may not want much popcorn anyway.

It feels so good to be feeling good.


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( Of little interest to anyone but me and my partners: my schedule for the next two months )

Okay. I can do this. I can get everything done. Everything will be okay. NOBODY PANIC.

I remember when we were thinking of having a housewarming party in May. Ha ha ha. Maybe we'll have one in August, only six months after we moved in...


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I'm in D.C. for the Nebula Awards weekend. The hotel got overbooked--apparently an enormous tour group decided to stay an extra day, and once people have rooms you can't kick them out--so a bunch of us were shunted off to a very posh hotel several miles away for tonight. This is a bit puzzling, as the original hotel is surrounded by other hotels and presumably they could have just sent us across the street, but whatever. Alas, the very posh hotel put all its money into building an enormous atrium with house-sized shops and restaurants inside of it, leaving none for soft beds.

This entire place--not just the apocalyptically empty and echoing hotel but the surrounding extruded-plastic "walkable downtown" with meticulously kept-up lawns and a complete sucking absence of soul--feels grotesquely fake. I could believe that it was once a movie set built from a demented megalomaniac's dim, warped recollections of childhood vacation fantasies. Now the (undoubtedly dystopian) movie is done and the set has been abandoned, to be intermittently occupied by confused, wealthy squatters. The bars outside the hotel, where we went in a futile search for non–room service food, were packed full of the most desperately intoxicated people I have ever seen in my life. There is no dirt anywhere. There is no sense that anyone who had a hand in designing this place put the slightest thought into human comfort and enjoyment; it all exists simply to make an impression. It's the architectural equivalent of someone who has undergone so much plastic surgery that none of their original face is left. It's the suburbia that Information Society wrote "On the Outside 2.1" about, the sort that recalls the man with red eyes and the regimented children from A Wrinkle in Time. It is profoundly discomfiting and I will be glad to leave.

The one redeeming feature is that I ended up with Dr. Danielle as my last-minute roommate, which is lovely. If I were in a room all by myself I'd be missing Josh and Xtina a whole lot. I'm still missing them, of course, but it's tempered by slumber party fun.

There's hardly anything on the program that interests me (no slight to the organizers; I have this problem at all non-Readercon conventions), so once I get back to the conference hotel, I plan to spend the next three days alternating between hot tub and bar*, using my phone to record interviews, with a break to put on my pinstripe suit and liveblog the Nebulas. I love my job, even when it sends me to strange, disturbing, non-real places.

* Because it's where people congregate, not because I'll be drinking. I don't drink when I'm working.


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Tonight Josh made dinner based on something I'd requested yesterday, and he and X waited to eat until I got home, and we had a lovely dinner all together. Then X and I tackled a heap of paperwork and developed a plan to vanquish it, and we celebrated our triumph and soothed our brains by watching (and snarking at) Thor. (Please to rec NON-slash [gen] fanfic about Sif, and about Thor and Sif's friendship. Sif is the bestest.) Next I will watch Captain America and then Josh and I can go out and see The Avengers.

I know I say this all the time, but if you're tired of hearing it, just scroll by, because I will never get tired of saying it: I am so very, very fortunate to have such wonderful people in my life, and to share a home with them.


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Xtina was feeling blue, so I went in to give her a bit of comfort, and naturally our conversation took a sharp turn into complete bizarre surrealism within a few minutes.

X: Depression is just so boring. And I feel like it'll get better, but then it'll get worse again, and it goes on forever.
R: It's like you're trying to beat the boss at the end of the level, and you've played it a million times and you can't quite get that last move, and you know that when you finally do beat it you'll just have to play another level.
X: And the next level is exactly the same! Have we not evolved beyond Pacman?
R: Depression really is a lot like Pacman, isn't it? You're running around in a maze of infinite loops while ghosts try to eat your head...
X: Plus Tetris.
R: Wow, yes, exactly. Ghosts trying to eat your head while blocks are falling on you.
X: And you have to get all these precise moves exactly right or you'll die. And you're frantically eating pills.
R: Can you imagine if someone actually coded Pacman plus Tetris? It would be the worst game ever! And yet everyone would play it!
X: "Depression: The Game." All the blocks are grey. At intervals they turn into trollfaces.

...

There were several minutes of attempting to irritate Java by precisely mimicking his complaining noises. Alas, there is no way to transcribe this, so you'll just have to take my word for it being utterly hysterical.

We also briefly discussed being visited by the Bad Idea Rat, which Josh and I came up with ages ago while tossing around ideas for children's books. The Bad Idea Rat is, of course, a rat that visits people and gives them bad ideas. That led to this:



...

R: So now that I've hit the "random" button on your brain, how are you doing?
X: Well, it's better than what was going on in there before.
R, wisely: Sometimes the awful scratching sound of the needle being pulled across the record is still better than the groove it was in.
X: Well done, Analogy Lass!
R: Thank you, Madam Metaphor!

...

And now it is very late and very time for bed.


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Josh's mother came to visit today; she's staying the night so I can drive her and me and Josh to Josh's cousin's daughter's birthday party tomorrow. (And people say polyamory is confusing! I find it much harder to keep track of blood family relationships.) Since I haven't been behind the wheel since last summer, I drove us into Manhattan and back this afternoon. I have now driven on a New York bridge, endured Manhattan Friday rush hour traffic, honked at a taxi that cut me off, and parallel parked on the right (twice) and the left (once). I got a nasty headache after a while, but eating made it go away, so maybe I just didn't have enough for lunch; or maybe the low-salt diet is bringing my blood pressure down even lower than usual (and it's usually quite low). My arms and shoulders are kind of sore. But it was fun, even with the traffic, and I'm glad I remember how it goes and still do it reasonably well.

I'm looking forward to highway driving tomorrow; it'll be easier on my arms and shoulders than all this stop-and-go nonsense. In the meantime, ice and Celebrex, and a kitty on my lap for general therapeutic purposes.


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Last night I went to bed at about 03:30, and vertigo woke me at 4. I'd foolishly hoped I was done with it, at least for a while, but sensibly kept the meclizine within reach just in case. The meds took about half an hour to kick in, and eventually I got back to sleep, more or less.

(Oddly enough, the meclizine gave me a stomachache that felt a lot like the sore abs I experienced a few weeks ago. So maybe it wasn't muscle soreness at all, and was just from the drugs.)

Today was okay for an underslept, drug-woozy day, but underneath it all was constant panic. I can't even begin to explain how triggery the vertigo is. I go spiraling down various pathways of what-if (Is it really vertigo? What if it's just a panic attack? What if I'm getting the early signs of vertigo and it wakes me up again? I could take meclizine and ensure that I'll sleep, but what if I'm drugging myself for no reason and then I overuse it and it stops being effective? What if the vertigo never goes away? What if I'm making a big deal out of nothing? etc. etc.) and it completely eats my brain. Right now I'm on two grams of taurine, and I have a heating pad on my belly to help me relax physically, and X snuggled me and talked with me and made me calming tea, and I played a lot of Final Fantasy, and all of that is only barely getting me somewhere near the point where I might be able to lie down and go to sleep without freaking all the way out. I'm nervous about trying it. My panic attacks hit most often when I'm lying down and trying to sleep, and having this fun new association with sleep and vertigo is not going to help.

I'm trying very hard to avoid reaching the point where I have a panic attack over whether I might have a panic attack. I don't really know how I'd get out of that.

The problem is that the anxiety mimics the vertigo with astonishing accuracy. I thought that "if I close my eyes and the woozy feeling gets worse and I start to feel that incontrovertible nausea" was a good test, but it turns out anxiety can make me feel woozy and queasy in a very similar way. And when I'm underslept and I've been playing video games, it's surprisingly hard to tell whether the room is wobbling because of vertigo or because my tired eyes and brain just can't track and focus very well. And since I'm essentially calling up my experience of vertigo and holding it against my current experience to see whether they match, it's so easy to fall into that memory and then think I'm experiencing it...

Oh, and I had a first session with a new therapist today; I like her a lot but these things are utterly emotionally exhausting. I am very definitely in spoon deficit (or is it sporks for brain stuff? I can never remember).

But I must sleep, somehow. L*undry will be delivered in eight hours. It would be good if I were awake for that. And then I go to work and I have two big-deal meetings where I'll have to talk a lot, and a podcast to record, and a bunch of editing to do. I can't do that on a third night of insufficient sleep, so to bed I go. Perchance to dream, but I kind of hope not. Anxiety dreams are not terribly restful.

Maybe I'll take more taurine. I really don't think the vertigo is back at the moment, because I can type this whole thing out, and when the vertigo's bad I can't even think about looking at a book or screen. I'm just really, really, really tired, and my brain is full of anxiety chemicals. That's all. And sleep will help, if I can get there.


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Yesterday was... basically perfect.

I went uptown and had a lovely lunch with d_aulnoy and her extremely adorable baby. After lunch, d_aulnoy had to go to a doctor's appointment and I had a coffee date with my mother, so vschanoes came over to babysit, which meant she and my mother got to see each other for the first time in nearly twenty years. That was delightful. Mom and I had superb frozen lemonades and conversation at a cafe just down the block, where we agreed that someday we need to take a trip to Europe together when I'm not insane.

Then I went back to d_aulnoy's place, and schrodingersgnu came home, and sinboy came up from work bearing good work news and bottles of celebratory wine and brandy, and we chorused that V should stay for dinner, which she did. The Gnu made delicious steak and potatoes and found me a bottle of dairy-free steak sauce, and for dessert J and H and I ducked out to Grom and brought back gelato for everyone, and we all had a raucous fabulous rip-roaring trash-talking conversation that the baby miraculously slept through even when we were convulsing with laughter (I may have gotten tipsy enough to tell stories from my porn-reviewing days) and shouting in outrage (we may all have strong opinions about certain novels and authors). It was so good. So good. We couldn't tear ourselves away until midnight, and then we walked down to Times Square before heading home. I was so full of social giddiness that I couldn't fall asleep until the birds sang me to bed at 6 a.m.

Dinner parties are the best. We need to get comfortable dining room chairs so we can start having some of our own.

Today is for relaxing, and then for getting work done (my coffee date with my mother was supposed to be a work date, but ha ha no). I got up when I woke up at 1 p.m.; seven hours of sleep is enough to be functional without pushing my schedule even later. I have broken my fast on celery and unsalted peanut butter. I have AIR articles to edit, and a couple of book reviews to write, and a critique to start writing, and a last letter to my In2Books pen pal. I promised my mother I'd scan in an article for her. And most importantly, I need to confirm that the Readercon sign-up software is ready for people to use (it worked fine for me but I'm waiting for an independent tester to verify) and to send out the link. Tomorrow is very busy--a Readercon concom meeting, hauling our dead printer to an e-waste recycling warehouse in Gowanus, a literary event in Greenpoint--so these things really all need to happen today. But first, the relaxing.

EDIT: Readercon link sent! Now the flood of email begins. In2Books letter written and sent. Other work successfully procrastinated so far...

EDIT EDIT: Actual paying work accomplished, albeit the lowest-paying of the bunch. Article also scanned and turned into a bare-bones but serviceable web page that my mother can send to all her Facebook friends. And while I was procrastinating, Josh and I engaged in some very thorough tidying of the living room.


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Maybe ten years ago, maybe more, I had a bowl of waterzooi at Markt, a Belgian restaurant that at the time was in the Meatpacking District. (It's moved up to Chelsea and they don't have waterzooi on the menu anymore.) It was one of those lifechanging culinary experiences. I eat seafood very rarely; I'd never encountered fish cooked with milk before. The broth was silky, the fish delicate and flaky, the strands of julienned vegetables eminently slurpable. Since then I've had many a creamy chowder, but none came close to the sublime richness of waterzooi, which incorporates both egg yolks and heavy cream (and, in Markt's version, lobster--definitely not traditional, but so delicious!).

On Tuesday we inaugurated our fabulous new blender by making cashew cream (pour boiling water over cashews, soak for one hour, drain, blend with cold water to desired consistency; we blended in a sauteed diced shallot for extra flavor). We made it quite thick and had a lot left over after making a really excellent pasta alfredo, so I'd been thinking about how to use it. Today I mixed some with water, leftover mashed potatoes, nutmeg, and thyme for the best creamy potato soup I've ever had. That made me think of chowder, which made me think of waterzooi. I hunted up a recipe that called for fish (though at some point I must try Julia Child's chicken waterzooi) and we set about adapting it for my dairy-free, low-salt diet.

( Ingredients and recipe )

This recipe has a great cooking rhythm. There's just the right amount of time for cubing the fish and chopping the parsley as the vegetables cook, and for loading the dishwasher and separating the eggs as the fish simmers. It smells fantastic while it cooks, and one bowlful is a perfect meal. Even though we used low-sodium broth, it needed just the barest touch of salt to make the flavors pop. The two of us had a serving each, and the third serving is sitting in the fridge, where I suspect the flavors will marry gloriously.

It would be very easy to veganize: no egg yolks, more cashew cream to compensate, veg broth instead of chicken broth, tofu and/or mushrooms instead of fish. Maybe some day I'll try that. The vegetables could also be varied from the classic mirepoix; as I recall, the dish at Markt had long strands of zucchini and red bell pepper. Lemongrass, ginger, and a dash of hot sauce would give it a lovely Thai flavor, perfect served over rice instead of bread. It's a superbly adaptable recipe. I look forward to playing around with it.

(crossposted to omnomnom)


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Today has been a most excellent day: sleeping the right amount of sleep at the right times (3ish to 11ish), a relaxed morning and early afternoon at home, a client meeting that went splendidly, sending an email to another client that he found extremely useful, finishing reading a third client's manuscript, finally getting to the library and reading my last In2Books pen pal book of the year, a delicious dinner with my mother and her beau, a quick easy trip home, snuggling and talking and making out with J, snuggling and talking and making out with X, and a mellow couple hours of winding down on my own. I would have preferred warmer weather, since I spent half an hour shivering in Washington Square while eating minimally salted olive oil crackers and unsalted almond butter (in squeezy packets like ketchup! Brilliant!) when I needed a bit of blood sugar, but it looks like I'll get that tomorrow.

No vertigo. No meds (other than a gram of taurine in the evening). No wobbling. A touch of nausea but I correctly diagnosed it as free-floating anxiety, hence the taurine. I appear to be entirely over the unwellness of the weekend, which a doctor friend thinks was just extreme dehydration brought on by the Dyazide. I think I need to get better at drinking sufficient fluids for when I'm not taking diuretics before I start taking them again. In the meantime, low salt (which I've been doing well enough that when I ate a few bites of something very salty this evening, I got a startling brief burst of tinnitus, something I'd heard about but not experienced before).

I'm trying to get in the habit of responding physically when I get physical signs of stress and anxiety, and to generally taking time to relax the parts of my body that get tense when my brain is wound up. If I start to feel nausea or that sinking/tingling feeling in my stomach, I relax my abs and breathe from the diaphragm. I loosen my belt, and if I'm at home I change into my bathrobe and tie the belt loosely, to minimize pressure on my abdomen. Last night I kept a heating pad on my belly for a while, which was wonderful. ( TMI, perhaps, but useful techniques for anyone who's dealing with chronic anxiety ) I also distract myself with conversation, reading, etc. and take taurine to dial down the neurochemical wackiness, but mostly I'm trying to address the symptoms as a way of getting out of the feedback loop where I feel anxious and then my body responds and then my anxiety is heightened by my body's response.

So far it's working pretty well, and I think I'm actually starting to relax a little overall. (I must be, because I relaxed enough to let other people touch me! First time that's happened in... uh... quite a while. The taurine made me too floaty to want much of it, but any at all is a lovely thing.) That's what vacations are for, right? And this vacation especially. I'm so glad to have so much time to put into doing things that feel good. I hope I can keep those habits up once I get back to work.

And now I sleep.


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I just fired my therapist after three sessions.

Hi Robert,

After some thought, I'm afraid I need to terminate our professional
relationship. Your habits of making statements rather than asking
questions, talking into silences, and interrupting me while I'm
mid-sentence may work well for other patients who don't make their
living working with words, but being able to choose and express my own
words at my own pace is extremely important to me, and all the more so
in the context of talk therapy. I understand that being challenged is
part of therapy, but I don't feel that speaking should be made
challenging in and of itself.

Please send your bill to [address redacted].

Cheers,
Rose

Yeah, that just wasn't going to get better.

Any recs for body-centric, compassionate therapists in Brooklyn, Queens, or Manhattan? Ideally familiar with basic LGBTQ and poly concepts (this guy was confused that I saw gender and sexual orientation as separate things), ideally a minority of some kind (don't really care which kind but I need someone who understands or at least doesn't stare blankly when I talk about things like privilege and intersectionality and complex shifting of roles), and must be in-network for Oxford Liberty but a surprising number of people are, so if you're not sure send me the rec anyway and I'll investigate.


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I'm coming up on 30,000 tweets in almost exactly three years, so obviously I output a lot on Twitter, but I'm thinking more at the moment about the kind of input I've opted to get. Right now, people I follow are talking about:

* National identity among U.S.-dwelling people of color: how Hispanic/Latin@-Americans generally don't primarily identify as Hispanic/Latin@ but rather as being from their countries of origin, the nuances of black, African-American, and other identifiers used by and for people and communities of African and Caribbean descent, etc.

* Doria Shafik, an Egyptian feminist activist of the mid-20th century.

* Interracial dating.

* Occupy Wall Street news: a federal lawsuit is being filed against the NYPD, the big banks keep getting bigger, etc.

Soon the U.K. critics will wake up at their usual obscenely early hour, but in the meantime most of the U.S. authors are offline, so almost no one's talking about books except ActuallyAisha in Delhi (who's chatting with me about Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island) and charlesatan in the Philippines (who's telling me to go to bed). This time of night in the U.S. is given over to the activists, the people who can't sleep for thoughts of the world's injustices and ways to set them right.

I like it. I like that this is what I've chosen to fill my mind with. I like that I'm learning; I'd never have known about Doria Shafik if I hadn't started following monaeltahawy. I like that a lot of the conversations I see are the crucial ones that go on behind the scenes among activists, people who have gone past "should we fight" to "how do we fight" and "how do we keep from fighting one another". I like that Twitter makes it easy to lurk, to shut-up-and-listen, and also to stick my nose in and get to know people I'd never meet otherwise.

Three years ago, when I claimed I wasn't going to use Twitter very much, I really had no idea what it was for. A year or two ago, I would have said it was filling the IRC-niche of casual public conversation among a group of friends. It's only recently that I've started to figure out the power of the retweet--not just that it brings a link or a pithy comment to my attention, but that it brings the person who posted that link or comment to my attention. Now, when I see a thought-provoking or amusing retweet, I check out the feed of the person who posted it, and if it looks vaguely interesting, I follow them. Those quick extra steps have introduced me to monaeltahawy, tejucole, graceishuman, and any number of other brilliant, thoughtful people, plus weird random stuff like TSElibot and brendlewhat. It's broadened my Twitter experience tremendously.

(It's also made it more of a timesink, but my long experience with IRC comes in handy there; I know that if I turn it off and come back to it later, the same conversation won't be going on, but another one will and it will be just as good. And I keep a "family" list that I check daily to make sure I haven't missed any updates from my nearest and dearest.)

If you're on Twitter, the next time someone RTs something pithy or funny or fascinating, I suggest you follow it back to the source. Dig a little deeper and open yourself up to input from people you don't know. You never know what niftiness you'll find.

There are no words for how good it feels to be able to write a post like this. Today I have taken no medication, experienced no vertigo, eaten three meals and kept them all down, showered and dressed, socialized, and gotten in good quality time with both X and J. That should not feel like such a miracle. Nor should being well enough to blog about something other than illness. But it does, and I am very grateful.


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Slept ten hours, which is not entirely unheard of for me, but then I stayed in bed for another hour with my eyes closed--not sleeping or dozing, just letting thoughts drift through my head--which I would usually find impossible. I've felt woozy and wobbly most of yesterday and today. I thought it might be an odd sort of vertigo, so I took meclizine, but that causes drowsiness, so I can't tell whether it's helping or making it worse or both.

Since weakness and fatigue are "contact your doctor immediately" side effects of Dyazide, I texted my fab ENT; his recommendation is to stop taking it for a few days and see if I feel better. Once I'm sure I've caught up on sleep, I'll try taking it again. If the vertigo shows up in the meantime, that might also give me a better sense of how the meclizine feels on its own, and also whether the Dyazide has been reducing the incidence or severity of the vertigo.

It's taken me twenty minutes to write this post. It felt like an hour. I can barely muster the energy to fix my typos.

Why can't anything just work? My body, my brain, my meds, anything.

EDIT: Shortly after this post came three bouts of dry-heaving (no vertigo); I took Pepcid with a few mouthfuls of ginger ale and then passed out and slept eleven hours, restlessly, with weird dreams. Mind you, that's the eleven hours from midnight to 11 a.m. After sleeping ten hours the night before.

The dry-heaving made it clear that the abdominal muscle aches are at least partly from the vertigo-induced nausea I experienced for much of Monday.

I'm not taking Dyazide today. If tonight passes without incident, I sleep normally, etc. then I'll follow up with my doctor on Monday about either dropping to a lower dose or not taking it at all. "Debilitating" doesn't even begin to describe it.


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Apparently my vacation week of just puttering around the house also involves meeting potential freelance clients on Monday (I've already rescheduled once and don't want to again), hanging out with a friend visiting from the UK on Tuesday (I should warn him that we may need to dodge #May1 marchers and rallyers), a book launch party on Wednesday, and my usual Friday therp appointment.

I guess it's good for me to get outside. And none of those things will take more than a few hours, other than seeing the visiting friend, and almost none of it counts as work. And Thursday, Thursday is mine.


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Today, about a mile into a three-mile stroll*, I got a stomachache. It was very peculiar. Sitting down helped. Eating sort of helped, but I didn't want to eat very much, because I had a stomachache. Pepcid helped a bit. I shrugged and kept walking.

A few blocks later I remembered that while I was in the shower this morning, I inhaled a bit of water, coughed, and thought, "Huh, my abs are sore--like I spent all of last night laughing hysterically, or doing sit-ups. That's odd. I'm still intermittently coughing a bit because the Dyazide is drying my throat out, but certainly not enough to make my abs ache."

A few blocks after that, I realized that my abs are probably sore because I've been just that tense. I carry all my stress in my belly. Apparently it has been a heavy load of late.

So I spent the rest of the night not eating much, deliberately relaxing my abs, and taking deep slow breaths from the diaphragm, which helped me stay a good hour longer at a very nice dinner party than I thought I would be able to manage (especially given that I'd gotten woozy while on an escalator and had to take a meclizine tablet).

Maybe this week I will try to get back in the habit of working out. I think it would feel good and help me to unlock some of this physical tension.

(And maybe I will stop coughing, which isn't helping anything.)

* New Yorkers do this sort of thing for fun.


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I had two very weird dreams this morning. In the first one, President Obama arranged for a meeting in a rundown apartment in the Bronx with me and a bunch of other people who were spying for him. After everyone else left, he decided I couldn't be trusted anymore, took out a small handgun, and shot me in the head. I didn't die, so he shot me again, several times, each bullet aiming at a different part of my brain, gradually destroying my functions one by one. But somehow I stayed alive and conscious, and was able to escape and run down to the street. He came after me--only he'd turned into Josh, who was angry at me about something. But I was still bleeding and dying so I kept running toward the street, where someone called an ambulance.

Then I dreamed I was at a sleepover party with friends, in a big house with lots and lots of rooms, and I woke up early and got up to join everyone at breakfast, but no one had expected me to get up early, so all the breakfast food was things I can't eat: pancakes made with buttermilk, salty bacon, etc.

These feel like meaningful dreams, in the sense that they tell me something about what's going on in my brain; but as usual with my dreams, what they tell me is stuff I already know, so I don't think there's much point to trying to interpret them.

-----

This evening, as I was leaving work, my right ear popped and for a moment I could hear again! It wasn't back to 100%, but it was better! Then I blew my nose and it blocked up again, and now it's ringing louder than it has in weeks, just to spite me. But still, progress! Yay Dyazide! Or maybe it's false hope and that was my last-ever moment of clear binaural hearing, who knows. This is all messing with my head so much, literally and figuratively.

Therefore, at X's suggestion and J's urging, I have arranged to take next week off from work. It's coming out of my vacation time, which is fine by me; I have plenty to spare. I just need some time to rest and sort myself out. My boss and colleagues were all awesome and understanding about it. I had a brief moment of "What if I spend all day sitting around feeling bored and lonely?" and then X quite rightly laughed at me. Dear formless anxiety: when you're looking for words to use to shape yourself, you might want to consider more plausible ones.

On second thought, never mind. Please stay implausible, anxiety! It makes it so much easier to scorn and shun you.

-----

X took Jasmine back to the shelter yesterday; no one had contacted us about adopting her, and we felt her chances of finding a new home would be better there. I... feel like I should miss her, I guess? But mostly I'm just glad that we don't have to do the elaborate kitty balkanization dance anymore. Jasmine was a very erratic cat, even by cat standards. I never knew whether she was going to purr, attack, or do both at once. I am not very good at handling that sort of personality in creatures of any sort, apparently.

The very nice people at the shelter encouraged X to try fostering other cats and see whether they could be coaxed to get along better with Sam and Java, a plan I fully support once X is ready for it.

-----

No one knows how many emphasis tags and exclamation points I put in these posts and then take out before posting. I am much louder in my drafts.

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I got to hear one big rumble of thunder tonight! The first of the season, I think. And when I was walking home it was all foggy and cool and lovely. More thunder, please.

-----

Time to sleep. Dishwasher repair person is showing up sometime between 8 and noon. At least X is covering the 8-to-9 shift, as it were, so I only need to get up at 9. "Only." Bah. But next week I will sleep as much as I want, and maybe even get caught up, whatever that means these days.


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Didn't need vertigo meds at all today, woo! The Dyazide made me very slightly dizzy, but I'm learning to stand up a little more slowly after I've been sitting for a while, and otherwise I'm feeling pretty good physically (not counting the right ear hearing loss, which has been consistent for nearly two months now, so I've stopped thinking of it as a thing to mention). I feel like I have a year's worth of sleep to catch up on, but I've felt like that for weeks so I don't think I can blame it on the meds.

I'm frustrated by this low-sodium diet business. All the advice I can find on Ménière's diets is basically "Eat fresh vegetables instead of canned ones! Stop going to McDonald's! And cut out all that caffeinated soda and coffee!", none of which applies to me at all. The most useful info I found is in this chart, which actually lists some foods I eat. I think my worst enemies are going to be breadstuffs (though I can eat hummus on celery sticks instead of pita chips), cured meats, and restaurant meals. Once I figure out good alternatives, getting into the habit should be easy enough.

Josh hit a stress-wall this evening, so I talked him through it until he was feeling a bit better and able to sleep, and then I went into the living room and cried all over Xtina. (Polyamory is pretty awesome.) I know, crying wasn't on the calendar until Friday, but I hear there is sometimes value in being spontaneous. As predicted, the anxiety is greatly lessened now that I've had a good cry. I took some taurine just to be on the safe side.

The main downside of crying is that blowing my nose blocks my ears, and then yawning pops the left ear but the right stays blocked despite making appropriate popping noises, which feels very peculiar.

Oh! In unrelated-to-illness news, we got back fully half of the security deposit on our old apartment, with something resembling an explanation of what they used the other half for. Sure, fine, I will take it. It is, almost to the dollar, the amount I still owe on my 2011 taxes (we'd dipped into the tax savings account to cover moving expenses, and if our ex-landlord had gotten his act together sooner... oh well, never mind, I will just send NYS another check). Works for me.

And now, sleep.


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( Blah blah blah vertigo meds blah )

In today's happy news, I got to spend lots of time with Josh's mother and grandmother, who were delightful company as always; they got us a spiffy new blender as a housewarming gift; my mother joined us for an excellent lunch, and Josh and Xtina joined us for an excellent dinner; I got back a pleased and thoughtful email from the author I just wrote a critique for; I have a poem published in the spring 2012 issue of Goblin Fruit; someone dear to me let me know that I'd screwed up in time for me to fix it; and despite all the whining and worrying behind the cut tag, it is important to note, and wonderful to realize, that I spent the whole day functional thanks to modern medicine. So much yay for all of that!


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Woke up with loud tinnitus after several days without, horrible horrible vertigo, and attendant D&V (as we say in the med biz). I managed to shower, mostly by sitting on the ledge next to the tub and minimizing the amount of time I spent with my eyes closed, but decided it would not be safe for me to stand on a subway platform while the world was tilt-whirling around me. Texted my ENT ("You know how you said I might just not have developed vertigo yet? Guess what?"), begged Xtina to come home, emailed work, and went back to bed, occasionally dry-heaving into my bedside garbage can (which I had fortunately put a fresh bag into just last night). It was Really Not Fun. At All.

Fortunately my ENT was on the ball; he called in a prescription for meclizine, an antihistamine that treats motion sickness, and Xtina picked it up and brought me some ginger ale. Within half an hour the room had stopped spinning (probably sooner, but I was being very cautious at that point) and I was able to eat some soup that X cooked up for me. Four hours later the antihistamine grogginess caught up with me and I took a two-hour nap. Then Josh made me pizza with grilled chicken, which I devoured in seconds. Yay for protein. Yay for being able to eat.

I am now officially diagnosed with Ménière's disease, so I take the anti-vertigo stuff as needed; I'm also supposed to take a daily diuretic and shift onto a low-salt diet (~1000 mg/day). The theory is that the tinnitus, hearing loss, and vertigo are caused by fluid build-up in the inner ear, so a diuretic and low-salt diet will help with that. I am not at all looking forward to this, but I also don't want to have to choose between tilt-a-world and antihistamine-induced unconsciousness, so low-salt diet it is. I didn't take the diuretic today because I really needed to rehydrate and it's meant to be taken in the morning; I'll start on it tomorrow.

(There's also a theory about Ménière's and insulin resistance and blood sugar, but I show no signs of insulin abnormality--my last round of blood tests showed very slightly low blood sugar, and that was because I'd been ill and not eating much--so I'm not going to cut carbs for now. And I already consume very little caffeine and alcohol. And I'm working on treating/minimizing stress and anxiety, which have such a strong correlation to Ménière's that I'm surprised I haven't developed it before now.)

Yay, a diagnosis and treatment plan.

Maybe tomorrow I'll have the energy for exclamation points.

EDIT: Took 25 mg meclizine at 14:30. They say "every 8 hours as needed". At 22:30, felt pretty much fine. Around 23:30, started feeling wobbly and upset-tummied again. Got up, brushed my teeth, took another 25 mg at about 23:45. That should see me through the night, and I have water and pills right here for when I wake up. I suspect I'll need them, alas.

00:22: Upon reflection, I think a gram of taurine is also in order. The early signs of vertigo feel unpleasantly like the early signs of a panic attack, enough so that I want to be sure they don't bring one on. I'm going to sleep soundly tonight!

01:38: I've spent the last hour having what I think is a very slow panic attack. Nausea, tingling hands, rapid heartbeat. Profoundly annoying.

02:00: Decided to give in to nausea on theory that it would help with the panic. Got to the bathroom, flipped up the toilet seat... and OCD immediately sidelined the nausea and directed me to scrub the toilet instead. Believe it or not, I felt much better after! Then I got the brilliant idea of taking famotidine to calm my stomach, so I called my insurance company's 24-hour nurse hotline (if I'd known sooner that this existed, I wouldn't have kept paging the poor on-calls at my doctor's office!) to a) confirm there's no known interaction between famotidine and meclizine and b) be soothed by a trained medical professional telling me that everything will be fine. It worked very well on both counts; the nurse was so soothing, in fact, that I almost started pouring out all my worries on her shoulder and had to choke back tears. I think it just hit me that today has been a really hard day.

02:19: Took 20 mg famotidine; once it kicks in, I'm going to try to sleep. The landlord spilled bleach in the basement or something and the fumes are not helping me feel any better, blech.


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I still can't tell whether I'm hypomanic or just cheerful and functional. I shelved lots of books; I also took breaks, and iced my shoulders (which are feeling it more than the arms today), and I didn't get obsessive over sorting the books or cleaning my room. I finally wrote a critique that's almost two weeks late (stupid being sick), and I think I did it really well. I went out to a late lunch with X, and even though it was late I didn't get particularly irritable. I tidied up a bit but didn't hyperfocus or obsess over it. I got angry about someone being a jerk (as I said on Twitter, if I tell you that you've screwed up something gender-related and you reply "I have trans friends", all that tells me is that you can't hide behind the excuse of being ignorant), but then I distracted myself by writing the critique and the anger faded. I had a bit of caffeine and it didn't make me crazy hyper. I don't feel the urge to write paragraphs about my feelings or how the day went. I'm about to go to bed at something close to a reasonable hour, which is especially good given that I stayed up until 5:30 and then slept until 1.

So I guess that's just cheerful and functional. It's really quite pleasant. I like it. I wonder what I can do to feel like this more often.


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Today included a surprise visit from the always fabulous mangosteen and stakebait, who hung out at our place for a bit and then went out with me and Josh for sushi. Afterwards Xtina and I had one of those entertaining "We both speak English and yet" conversations.

X: "I thought they were coming over to hang out."
R: "They were."
X: "But you went into a whirlwind of tidying up the place and getting dressed up--"
R: "The velvet skirt was the first thing I grabbed!"
X: "And then we all sat around and talked and you got everyone drinks and put out cookies."
R: "Well, I can't just have someone over and not offer them food and drink! And it was an excuse to tidy, which I'd been wanting to do anyway. And of course we sat around and talked; that's what hanging out is."
X: "But there are more and less formal ways of sitting around and talking. It felt like what I think of as having company, which is totally different from hanging out."
R: "...I think I lack this distinction."

As soon as I think of someone else seeing my home, I get very self-conscious, or house-conscious. I want guests to have a pleasant experience of my home, via all their senses, and I bustle around trying to make that happen. I probably care far more about it than they do, but better that than the other way around! So yes, I guess I do always see having anyone over as "having company" even if they're good friends who really couldn't care less if it's a little crunchy underfoot.

Having identified this, I should figure out whether it's something I want to keep or change. Though obviously I'll keep it for now because I just don't have time or energy for digging around in my brain.

(But seriously, for me a velvet skirt is not dressed up at all. I wear velvet like other people wear t-shirts with funny sayings.)

After Josh went to bed, X and I went into a whirlwind of book-shelving, which was AWESOME. The living room is starting to feel like a proper library again! Mass markets and trades have been put roughly where they're supposed to go--they need to be separated into novels, anthologies, and collections, and sorted within each category, but unpacking first and sorting later is the rule--and I shelved a bunch of cookbooks as well. Then I iced my arms a lot. They're still achy; I'll take Celebrex before bed.

And now it's 4 a.m., augh. I meant to go to bed earlier. I guess I'll force myself to get up at 11 so I can shift back towards sleeping 2ish to 10ish.


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