It's Only A Paper Rose

I always figured if I was going to end up in the hospital, I'd at least want a good story to go with it. And I at least achieved that goal; the nurses all agreed that "I was pole dancing in 7" heels, which I've done before, but I had a new pair with no ankle straps, and when I went to do a one-legged pirouette, my heel moved but the shoe didn't" was one of the better ones they'd heard recently.

Unfortunately it also came at the cost of a thoroughly broken ankle. Both bones, unstable fracture, bad times all around.

As it happens, I'm very good in a crisis. When it happened, there was some pain, but it honestly wasn't that terrible—thanks to adrenaline, the actual pain itself was maybe a 3. Initially I thought it was just dislocated, and having some familiarity with bodywork and first aid, my first instinct was to immediately grab my heel and pull. (This thoroughly freaked out the other girls in the class, but as I explained later, it was better to do it then than later, when the swelling would have set in and the adrenaline wore off.) As that only got my ankle partly back in place, though, I figured a doctor would be necessary, so one of my classmates was kind enough to drive me to the urgent care, where they took x-rays and informed me that no, my ankle was broken, it was time to head to the ER. Brian having fetched the car and caught up with me at that point, we drove to the Rush ER—the doctor at the urgent care said she'd usually recommend a smaller hospital with shorter wait times but the orthopedics team at Rush is legendary. (Rumor has it most of the professional athletes in Chicago go there when they have injuries; from what I saw of it, they certainly have state-of-the-art facilities. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

The ER was a seven-hour wait. On the one hand, I was grateful that my situation wasn't more urgent; on the other, by the time I got in the adrenaline was definitely wearing off and my pain levels were climbing. They gave me a local anaesthetic and set the bone into something resembling its usual shape (a painful process even with the lidocaine); the actual repair would require surgery. We thought I'd be waiting until at least Monday, but they had a doctor who was able to do it on Sunday, so back I went the next day.

To be honest, I was completely terrified. I'm used to being the caretaker in these situations, and "no significant medical history" also means "no idea how I might react to anesthesia or drugs". It was a very different experience from being nine years old and going in to have my arm set after I broke it—then, it was just Another Thing People Did, whereas as a 38-year-old woman I had a much better idea of the stakes and the possibilities for complications. That said, the team was lovely; the anesthesia team in particular consisted of several Korean (I would guess? my East-Asian ethnic identification skills are not great) girls who were super friendly and chatted with me beforehand. There was one person in particular, though, I remember—I have no idea who she was, honestly couldn't even see much of her beneath the cap and gown and mask, but she had the biggest and most sincere blue eyes, and she clearly picked up on how scared I was—she held my arm as they were administering the anesthesia, assuring me that I was going to be all right, that they'd take good care of me. (I wish I knew who she was so I could send her a card and tell her how much that meant.)

As it happened, my skin was so badly compromised from the swelling that they weren't able to do the internal fixation (where they put your bones back together with plates and screws), so I woke up with my leg in an external fixator, also known as the Hellraiser frame—it had pins that literally screwed into my tibia and calcaneus and metatarsal, holding my ankle in place while my skin healed. (The sensation of not being able to move my ankle despite there being nothing visibly restraining it was weird as heck, and is definitely going into a horror story someday.) The idea was to give things a week or so and then come back for the final surgery, so they gave me half a pharmacy's worth of prescriptions and sent me home.

Unfortunately, two days before the follow-up, I noticed a red rash on the skin of my foot. The next day I went to the urgent care, assuming it was just cellulitis (a common complication, especially with external fixator surgeries) and they'd give me antibiotics for it...but their take was that they couldn't rule out a blood clot and I had to go to the ER again. So back to Rush we went.

Luckily, this time it wasn't quite such a long wait (both because it wasn't as busy and because potential blood clots are more time-sensitive, I suspect). I got to have an ultrasound on my leg, and luckily there was no sign of a clot, so then I got to have a CT scan to check the progression of the infection, and they told me they wanted to keep me overnight to give me IV antibiotics and run my situation past the doctors. They put me up in one of the nicest hospital rooms I've ever seen, spacious and uncluttered and new, with an amazing view. (I guess there's a lot of money in orthopedics.) And after taking approximately fifteen liters worth of blood samples, they let me sleep.

(Well, I tried to sleep. About the time the urgent care doctor said "blood clot", my anxiety spiked, and it basically didn't calm down for a good five days—I don't think I got more than three or four hours of sleep a night that whole time. But that's not their fault.)

In the morning, the doctor came by and told me the good news was that the cellulitis infection hadn't progressed past the skin, although ironically, that made it harder to treat (since there weren't any abcesses or discharge they could sample and hit with targeted antibiotics). If I hadn't had the fixator as a complicating factor, he'd've just sent me home with pills, but with the fixator and especially with the upcoming surgery, it was his opinion I should spend the week in the hospital, both so they could hit me with the big guns via IV and also keep an eye on any further complications that might crop up and catch them early. Much as I hated to admit it, his logic made sense to me...so that's how I ended up in a hospital room with a million-dollar view for a week and a half.

In the way of hospital life, it was both very dull and very stressful, and also an abject lesson in how even the most proactive and driven of us sometimes have to learn to let other people help. I was surrounded by people whose literal job it was to take care of me, who were actively working to help me get better, and yet...well, like I said, five-day anxiety spiral. It was hard to trust, if that makes sense. It had honestly never occurred to me how much of the active go-out-and-make-friends part of my personality was a defense mechanism, but here I was making friends with all the nurses/assistants/doctors as if my life depended on it, because in a real way, it did. (One of the night nurses in particular was a fairly closed-up dude—not cold, exactly, but not really one for small talk. It took me three nights to get him to open up a bit, but when he did, my anxiety levels went down significantly. Which probably says a lot more about me and my trust issues than about him. Still, it was gratifying when he said to Brian and me on the third night, "I'm so impressed with y'all, you haven't messed up my name once." High praise!)

Anyway, the infection was a tough one, but by five days in they'd seen enough improvement to tentatively schedule the second surgery, which helped immensely with the anxiety. I slept much better during the latter half of my stay, and while the second surgery wasn't easy, it helped a lot that I had a better idea of what to expect. (Never going to quite get used to the sensation of someone holding an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth, though...I could breathe fine, obviously, but the THIS IS NOT OKAY signals were all going off in my brain, heh.) The surgery itself went smoothly, though pain control turned out to be trickier the second time around; they gave me a nerve block (cool thing I learned: even when drugged out and in a lot of pain, I really like listening to people teach other people things about bodies—Rush is a teaching hospital and the anesthesiologist was teaching a second person how to use the ultrasound to guide the needle to the exact nerve cluster), and after that wore off it took a few tries to find a medication dose where I was functional. (Being stoned out on pain meds is not my favorite feeling, but I'll take it over being in constant debilitating pain; knowing that the worst is over and all this is temporary helps a lot.)

So now I'm back home. Brian bought new pillows and a new mattress for the second bedroom, much nicer than the futon-with-memory-foam-topper we had in here before; we also invested in a new duvet cover and sheets from my favorite company. My ankle now has two plates and a dozen screws in it. The doctor says he sees no reason why I won't make a full recovery; depending on how well he's done his job, I may be more prone to developing arthritis in the joint, but that's a problem for Future Me. I now have a whole-ass pharmacy's worth of prescriptions to take, what with antibiotics as well as pain meds and blood thinners and I'm not even sure what all else. I'm getting around okay on crutches; for the first week I'm supposed to be pretty constantly in bed with my leg elevated, so I'm very grateful for my nest of new linens and pillows. So at this point it's just a waiting game to see if there are any more complications.

On the emotional front, I've definitely had a bit of a time adjusting my identity mentally from the "athlete" population to the "patient" population. (The nurses would profess amazement at how mobile I was, being possessed of three functioning limbs and no small amount of core strength, and it seemed almost condescending until I remembered that their pool of comparison was the rest of the patients in the orthopedics ward, most of whom were probably not athletes before their hospitalization.) It's helped a lot, though, in being less frustrated with all the things I can't currently do.

I also need to give a huge shout-out to the friends and family Brian and I have formed here in Chicago. KC (his girlfriend) has been an absolute rock; doing housework and helping Brian set up the new bed and regularly inquiring after how I'm doing/listening to me rant about feeling helpless, as well as loaning me the crutches and shower stool she used after her recent hip surgery. Evan (her husband) drove my to my first surgery when Brian (who'd been up with me in the ER the entire previous night) didn't feel safe to do so. Taylor (my boyfriend) came to visit me in the hospital a couple of times so Brian could have a day off, despite a full plate of grad school work and a difficult transit schedule; plus he's studying to become a nurse so he was able to demystify some of the odder aspects of hospital work culture.

--

So I wrote all that a couple of days ago, and meant to read it over and post it, but (in the way of things when you're recovering) I didn't get back around to it. And today Adora Belle, our eldest cat, was wandering around perfectly normally, went to sleep...and woke up in severe distress and unable to walk. Brian rushed her to the emergency vet, who diagnosed her with a large blood clot cutting off circulation to her hind legs, likely caused by a silent heart condition. There's not really any meaningful treatment, so...at least he was able to be there for her when they did the euthanasia. Even more, KC was able to be there for him, since I'm not going anywhere right now.

Feelings are strange when you're on opioids. To be honest, my strongest reaction has been "are you kidding me right now?" Not that it's that strange for an 18 year old cat to have a sudden health emergency, but it just seems like life's been one string of emergencies lately. I'm sure the grief will come later, and I'll do my best to sit with it when it does.

Maybe I'll lie back and listen to "Comfortably Numb" for a while...

I've been ruminating lately, both on my own and in conversations with friends, on the definition of "thriving". In one conversation, a friend and I compared the idea of "thriving" to "being successful"; they had felt a little weird about saying that they had thrived in their life, considering that they were only a little over the poverty line and (like most people in America) are usually one disaster away from destitution. But they had worked hard to get out of the toxic environment where they'd grown up, and to build a sense of identity for themselves based on their own experiences and values, and cultivate relationships with people that reinforced those values and helped them feel more themselves. And that, to them, felt like thriving, even if their life wasn't particularly successful. I suggested that perhaps it was an internal/external divide; "success" is something measured against an arbitrary external yardstick, whereas "thriving" (is there a non-gerund noun form?) is based more on your mental image of who you want to be, how far that is from who you are now, and how consistently you're moving towards that ideal. It was a little weird to realize, in the course of the conversation, that this has been a huge part of my self-identity throughout the years; the one thing that consistently makes me happy is feeling like I'm taking steps towards being the person I want to be. Obviously that ideal changes, over the years, but most of those changes have been refinements and additions rather than wholesale replacements.

I wonder if this isn't why I've felt so lost, these past several months. I was already in something of an identity crisis last year, what with disconnecting from the yoga community and trying to decide where to go next, career-wise. I'd been taking steps on forging a new path (joining a regular music group, building a clientele at a new company), and starting to feel like I was getting my feet under me...and then the pandemic came along and wiped out all of that. So in addition to all the grieving over massive change in the world, I also had to deal with the loss of what little sense of forward progress I'd been making. My career has never been my sole identity, but it's difficult, when you live in a capitalist culture, for it not to be one of the larger chunks.

But! The past six weeks or so, I've been doing much better. I couldn't even really say what presaged the change; just, I've felt much more stable and in an improved frame of mind. I've been writing regularly—I finished a Lost Boys story that I'd begun some months ago, wrote another story (for Supernatural, which Brian and I have been watching over quarantine) and have since been working hard on the novel-length Stranger Things Harringrove story I started last year and then gave up on when life got too hectic. I'm honestly pretty surprised about that last; I had thought I'd given up on it altogether, but, well, I started having Ideas a month or so ago. I've been trying my whole life to write a novel, and now (when I have a little more time and apparently a lot more inspiration than usual) seems like as good a time as any to take the next crack at it. I've also joined a Zoom-based writing group that meets three times a week, and have found that remarkably helpful in keeping productive.

In other news, the condo board work, while slow, continues; I feel like I now have a pretty solid grasp of what's going on with the roof, and in theory the basement work's going to be starting sometime soon. (I made the deposit with the masonry company some weeks ago but haven't heard back from them about scheduling yet, which I'm mildly grumpy about, especially as they haven't answered my follow-up email. Still, it's their busy season and a particularly topsy-turvy one at that, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.) Still need to get estimates for the deck work and the paint/carpet for the common areas, and send out the big "your HOA assessments are going up" email, sigh. And one of the other units is starting to have water intrusion through the masonry during the big rainstorms we've been having...so there's probably some tuckpointing in our future, double sigh. It never ends...

Speaking of which, I also recently saw The Old Guard, which is excellent and timely and has some amazing fight choreography. Unsurprisingly, I was particularly inspired by Charlize Theron's portrayal of Andromache of Scythia. She's been around for millennia, she's seen all this shit before, she feels increasingly like her efforts to try to improve the world are pointless...it's hard not to relate, even if I've never been anywhere near that good with a labrys. So when I went in for my (masked!) hair appointment yesterday, I basically showed JB a bunch of Tumblr posts and went, "That." I think she really knocked it out of the park.

( Pictures! )

In JB's words, "Now you just need to live for 6,000 years, become a badass fighter, get a little grumpy, and work on your vodka-pounding skills!" Well, I've got a good head start on the grumpiness and the vodka-pounding. The rest should be easy enough.

In all seriousness, it's nice to feel like I'm thriving again. Even though "intimidating immortal guardian/fighter who's just sick of all this shit" wasn't quite the direction I anticipated...I could probably be doing a lot worse.

From state and national media:

Dunleavy vetoes $444 million from operating budget

Alaska Governor’s “Unprecedented” Higher Education Cuts Could Shutter Entire Departments

And from a more personal perspective:

The Human Cost of Alaska’s Budget Cuts: Stories from the Front Lines


A quick primer on the conditions leading up to this, for those who didn't grow up in my home state:

• Thanks to the state's oil wealth, Alaskans have not paid a penny of income tax for the past four decades.
• Alaska's been facing a budget shortfall in the billions for the past decade, thanks to fluctuating oil prices.
• The effects have mostly been insulated until now by the state's reserve funds—record-high oil prices in the 2000s gave the legislature the ability to kick the can down the road, as it were.
• The largest effect most Alaskans have seen has been a smaller Permanent Fund Dividend, as the government has been funding itself partly through what would otherwise have been the yearly payout.
• Subset to the above, this is effectively a flat tax on Alaskans—everyone sees the same decrease in their income.  The problem being, of course, that it's a fundamentally inequitable system; the poorest Alaskans who depend on that money for food and heat see the same decrease as the richest, and are thus effectively hit much harder.
• HOWEVER...for all that a state income tax is gaining in popularity (the last poll numbers I saw had the populace split roughly 50/50 on the prospect, which doesn't seem like a lot but is a significant change from the lopsided 20/80ish numbers I remember seeing in my youth), nobody in the legislature wants to be the one responsible for passing it, because they're convinced it'd cost them reelection.
• Alaska is rapidly running out of reserves.
• The current governor got himself elected largely on two promises—not garnishing the PFD, and not instituting an income tax.

So we find ourselves here.  A literal 41% cut to Alaska's largest provider of higher education.  The U of A is already a lean system, and one that does remarkable work—a lot of the cutting-edge research on climate change and natural resource management, among other subjects, comes from there—not to mention providing skilled labor for the local workforce.  (For obvious reasons of cost and isolation and better opportunities elsewhere, a significant percentage of young people who go to school elsewhere don't return to the state.)  And that's not even addressing the similarly devastating cuts to badly-needed mental health services, early childhood education, and state-run media and broadcasting.

As I wrote on Facebook, I feel a little like an expatriate from a troubled country, watching the self-destruction of its dysfunctional government from afar.  There's a certain guilty relief in being far from the front lines, but it's heavily tempered with fear for those left behind, as well as just plain grief for what's likely to be lost.  It's not the end of the world—Alaskans are nothing if not resilient.  We'll survive this, and eventually rebuild.  But it'll be a different place than the one where I grew up.  And as selfish (and perhaps inevitable) as it is, it saddens me to feel like I'll be a stranger in my home. 

There’s probably something ironic in having a date set with your not-quite-partner to say “I feel like you don’t have room for a relationship in your life right now”, only to have them cancel on you (again) and send a very nice email saying “I don’t feel like I have room for a relationship in my life right now.”

empathy win, I guess.

Thanks to a flu shot and religious handwashing, I managed to avoid getting sick this year right up until (of course) the busiest two weeks I've had yet - the week before and the week after my vacation. (Weirdly, I was perfectly fine the whole time we were in AZ; I suspect I picked something up on the way back. I always wipe down my seat back/tray table/seatbelt buckle/etc. with Clorox wipes, but I can't do the same for every surface in the airport, more's the pity.) The extra frustrating part is that the most persistent symptom has just been fatigue, which is easy to mistake for "I'm overextended this week" right up until other symptoms start manifesting, like a headache or nausea or sore throat. So (for instance) on Monday, I felt a little tired but figured I could make it through the day, and proceeded to have lunch with a friend and get up to Sauganash and teach right up until I got three-quarters through my afternoon class and suddenly I was so exhausted just standing up was making me dizzy. Luckily Breanne was able to help me find a last-minute sub for my evening class, so I was able to go home and rest; after a three-hour nap, I felt far better.

Of course, this opened a whole separate can of worms. I'm well aware that I work in two physically intense fields and that if I don't take care of myself when I need it, I'll burn out fast––and yet all evening my mental narrative was something like "look, you're feeling better, clearly you weren't that sick, you need to suck it up and tough it out, nobody likes a flake, if you use up everyone's goodwill when you're feeling a little off you'll regret it when you're really ill". Never mind that I'd been so tired I could barely sit up; I was functioning, so clearly taking the evening off was me being a delicate snowflake.

I've been doing what I can to ignore that line of thought, and have been prioritizing rest since then, which has been no small thing, given that we badly need to do grocery shopping and a number of other errands––but at least I've gotten through work without having to cancel any more appointments. I'm trying to weigh whether I have the spoons to at least go get cat litter today; the litterbox situation is rapidly reaching emergency status, but I have tutoring this afternoon, two classes to teach tonight, and a jam-packed workday tomorrow. I wish I had a nice little status bar that would tell me how much energy I have and how much I was using for any given task; it'd make judging these things so much easier.

Hello, book-friends! Capping off my weird week, today I finally managed to defeat my car's idiot-proofing and lock the key in the trunk. (Literally every time I've locked my keys in the car, this has been how I've done it. Our current car has RFID keys and a system that senses whether your key is in the trunk; if you try to close the trunk with the key in it, it pops the trunk back open and beeps twice, like "Hey dumbass, you left your key in here." Unfortunately, it's not a perfect system - I suspect the aluminum water bottle in my backpack was shielding the key from the sensor.) Like the rest of the week's challenges, though, it was fairly easy to surmount - the AAA guy got the car unlocked without too much trouble, and it turns out Land Rover's warranty covers roadside assistance, so I'm only out the hour I waited for the service. And today I talked to the insurance adjuster about our claim; she seems pretty competent and was a little impressed at how much documentation I'd sent her. (Joys of being a lawyer's daughter/former admin; you learn to keep records, especially of things that're attractive targets.) At this point, my mood is somewhere between "Okay, week, what else are you going to throw at me? Bring it on!" and "...but for reals, can we get back to just the usual level of crazy?"

What I've just finished reading

Nothing this week, partly due to the craziness and partly how fragmented my efforts have been. I did make quite a bit of progress on Lamb, though - I've needed some goofiness in my life.

What I'm currently reading

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. I continue to enjoy this rather more than most of Moore's work; the dynamic between spiritually-wise-but-innocent Joshua and worldly-wise-but-spiritually-hapless Biff really drives the plot and gives Moore an excellent opportunity to both discuss and poke fun at all manner of different philosophical beliefs. I was somewhat less than pleased, however, with the episode involving the first of the Magi's Eight Beautiful Chinese Concubines, each trained in martial and sexual arts and given a ridiculous name and the personality of a sheet of toilet paper, and whom Biff sees no problem with deceiving into sex. I mean, I get what Moore is going for humor-wise, but there's just so much racism and exoticism and sexism and other -isms going on here that the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth, especially when there've been literally no other female characters with any kind of agency in the story, period. (You'd think Joshua would have something to say to Biff about lying in order to get into bed with the concubines, but apparently they're not really worth his interest.) It's not that I have any problem with jokes about sex, but when it's literally at the cost of the women involved...let's just say I had no particular sympathy towards Biff when the next of the Magi started beating him with a bamboo cane whenever he stepped out of line.

Yoga Sequencing, by Mark Stephens. As with a lot of yoga books (I'm finding), I'm alternately frustrated and engaged by the prose here. Some chunks of it feel more than a little self-aggrandizing; maybe it's just that I already went through my "yoga is amazing and everyone should try it!" stage and no longer have much interest in proselytizing, but that kind of rubs me the wrong way. What's maybe more frustrating is that I can't deny that the passages about the benefits (both physical and mental) speak very much to my experiences, so I can't say they're *wrong*; I just know they're not going to be everyone's experience, so listening to someone go on like they're Great Universal Truths just makes me kind of sigh. Also, there are some parts that could really use an editor - there's one paragraph in particular that talks particularly about what I want to do as a teacher...but it's smashing so many different concepts together that I just want to take a red pen to it and separate it out into three or four paragraphs. (Entertainingly, I sent it to a friend and she was quite enthusiastic about...a completely different concept than I had meant to highlight. Editing! It's a thing!) That said, I'm seeing quite a bit of value from it and the associated journaling I've been doing, so I'll keep going in spite of my frustrations. (This seems to be becoming my theme for this whole week, heh.)

What I plan to read next

I need another big long housework day so I can finish listening to Symphony of the Dead, haha. (I've tried listening to it in small chunks but there's enough going on that my brain does better listening to it when I have time to go on for an hour or three.) Other than that...my mother's been recommending Radical Acceptance, which I already have a copy of because she's like the fifth person to recommend it to me. She recently listened to The Body Keeps the Score (one of my favorites) and says she likes them as complements to each other, since one focuses more on the physiological and one on the psychological side of the same subject, but there's lots of overlap. So that's high on the list too!

Hello, book-friends! Much of the past week and a half, in amidst classes and work and social engagements and massage bookings, has been spent trying to set up our Christmas tree. Short version, it's a quite-well-made and also huge (nine feet tall, five across at the base) artificial tree that came pre-lit with incandescent bulbs; sadly, the bulbs were nowhere near as well made as the tree, and in addition to being obscenely expensive to light, after ten years of use over half the strings weren't lighting. We spent a few days trying everything we could think of (replacing bulbs, replacing fuses, even rewiring a few parts) to fix the built-in lights, with no luck...so it was either time to buy a new tree, or strip the old lights off and re-wire it with new lights. Since we're hoping to buy a place in the spring, we decided the latter made more sense - it'd kind of suck to have a brand-new tree and discover it didn't fit in the new home. Advantages: we can put on LED lights, so no more three-figure power bills in December; we can continue to use the tree for the next ten years instead of giving it away/throwing it out. (Most of the 'needles' are made of PVC, which is fantastically toxic in landfills.) Disadvantages: I'm pretty sure we're spending as much as a new tree would cost for the lights (no one ever said being environmentally friendly was cheap); I vastly underestimated how many lights it would take and had to run to multiple Home Depots all over Chicago yesterday trying to find enough to finish the job; the amount of time it's taking has basically turned it into a second (or third, in my case) job. But! It's over half lit now (insert holiday booze joke here) and with any luck, by Saturday we'll have a properly-decorated tree!

What I've just finished reading

Too Like The Lightning, by Ada Palmer. (Stripping lights off a nine-foot tree gives one a lot of time to listen to audiobooks, heh.) I have mixed feelings on this story. It's certainly one of the most ambitious and intelligent books I've read lately, but I'm hesitant to call it a novel; it's clearly meant in the style of its Enlightenment forebears, where the worldbuilding and the plot (such as it is) serves entirely to set up numerous philosophical debates. Once I realized that and stopped trying to follow the thread of the story so closely, I enjoyed it much more; if you're looking for a ripping future-political thriller, this is not it. But if you're interested in Enlightenment-era European history, humanism, philosophy, ethics, the duality of human nature, etc., etc., and especially if you're fond of Neal Stephenson, you might give this one a go.

What I'm currently reading

The Price of Meat, by KJ Charles. Charles is branching out a bit here from her usual period/supernatural gay romance into a proper Victorian penny dreadful story, and I love the first line: "In the time of England's steep decline, when Victor II sprawled on the throne and lost colonies as carelessly as a child loses toys, there stood a number of institutions that should never have been permitted to exist." I think it was Ann Leckie who said in an interview that if every scene in a novel has to serve two purposes, every sentence in a novella has to serve at least three; I just love how Charles sets up the basics of the alternate timeline, the tone of the story, and one of the fundamental conflicts all at once. I've only read the first bit, but I'm looking forward to the rest.

Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie. Finally! I'm a little surprised to look at my bookmark and realize that I'm almost halfway through this book; I feel like I've had so little time to read this past week. But I'll be damned if I'm not finding this story just as absorbing as the first, even if it lacks the clear drive of the "REVENGE!" plot of the first book. Breq has gone from a very singleminded, action-driven quest to a very open-ended, human-based one - and, unsurprisingly, their typical direct approach is singularly unsuited for success. Brian pointed out that, in a very real way, the first book was about a shrinking of perspective - Breq going from being part of a nearly omniscient collective, the starship Justice of Toren, to being a single being bent on a single purpose - whereas this book is a re-broadening, with Breq having to figure out how to connect with the people around them as well as how to engage with someone important to them who's outright hostile to their overtures.

What I plan to read next

I have the new Rat Queens and Sex Criminals trade paperbacks sitting on the coffeetable...we'll see!

As I mentioned on Wednesday, it's been a pretty physically intense week; in addition to work picking up and getting back into the regular Sculpt swing, Brian and I both got flat bike tires on subsequent nights, so the time I planned to rest after class yesterday were instead spent walking back-and-forth between our house and the bike shop multiple times. (We were a little afraid it'd been vandalism; we'd discovered both flats when our bikes were parked in the same spot outside the yoga studio, around the same time of evening. Fortunately it turns out to just have been bad luck; mine was a pinch flat, probably from the local road construction tearing up the pavement, and in his case he'd run over a piece of broken glass. Chicago streets strike again!) Then in the evening I decided to hit a hot yoga class to unwind my muscles after Wednesday's Sculpt class, so by the time I woke up this morning I was feeling pretty wrecked.

Today, on the other hand, has been pleasantly quiet. It's cold and snowy outside (first snow of the season), but inside we have books, and Netflix, and a fireplace, and a couch with big fuzzy blankets to nap on. It's also, at least for me, been a day for reflecting on disconnections, and mortality, and how best to support people I care for. (Two friends are going through a messy breakup. Another friend may or may not have lung cancer, pending a biopsy. I got an email from Jim Rothfuss' daughter with information about his memorial service, which I actually could make it to - it's in Wisconsin, about a three-hour drive from here. But I'm genuinely not sure if I'd be welcome; the email was sent to everyone in his contact list, I'm unlikely to know anyone else there, and I don't know that 'random person no one else knows showing up to memorial service' is the best plan.) Somewhat entertainingly, Brian and I have date night plans to go see Fun Home, a musical based on Alison Bechdel's "family tragicomic" about growing up in a dysfunctional family that ran a funeral home; it seems an appropriate choice for the general tenor of the day - sometimes life is awful, but we find the opportunities for connection and support and humor and keep on trucking anyway.

I'm debating what to do about piano lessons. I was really looking forward to learning from my friend I'd worked out a trade with - he gave lessons for years, and is a patient teacher as well as an extremely skilled pianist. But we got through exactly one lesson and then his personal life started falling apart, and the last couple of times we've planned to get together he's had to cancel. (We were supposed to have tea today and assess whether this was a week-or-two delay or an "I can't take on another responsibility right now" situation, but given that he had to cancel this as well, I guess I have my answer.) I have another friend who offered to give lessons and would probably be happy to trade, although I don't know offhand what her experience is with teaching or what her schedule is like. I need someone who can be consistent; I do best with some kind of weekly accountability and the structure of a lesson plan, although of course I like to have my own input as well. Possibly the most promising option was suggested by a friend whose landlords are professional music teachers; she lives in the same building with them, says they're cool people, and apparently they're also marathon runners so they'd probably be down for a massage trade, heh. We'll see how it shakes out.

Hello, book friends! Today I went to Sculpt for the first time since traveling and recovering from a cold. (I hit a class last Saturday but realized ten minutes in that I was not recovered, and ended up sitting a good chunk of it out.) I was pleased to discover I could make it all the way through with minimal modifications; it's definitely tougher than it was three weeks ago but getting back to where I was shouldn't be too difficult of a climb. For the moment, though, I'm rather glad I don't need to raise my arms over my head anytime in the next several hours.


What I've just finished reading

The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England, by Ian Mortimer. Not a bad little trip, on the whole, although the criticisms about its sexist outlook are not without merit. Still, I learned a few things and laughed a few times, so on the whole I'll take it. I appreciated the picture sections with tapestries and manuscripts from the era; many of them I'd seen before, but it was cool to examine the fashions and art styles and whatnot just after reading about them.

The Ruin of a Rake, by Cat Sebastian. I've read a few of Sebastian's romances now, and unfortunately, all three have come up basically...not-quite. The dialogue feels not-quite-natural, the characters don't quite spring off the page, the chemistry never quite clicks. Which is a shame, because her setting and her plot both work beautifully. But especially with romance and especially-especially with sex, the interest is in how the characters get from civilized-and-guarded-with-defenses-firmly-in-place to primal-and-intimate-and-terrifyingly-open. And I don't think she's quite mastered that segue yet.

What I'm currently reading

The Hummingbird's Daughter, by Luis Alberto Urrea. I'm having an interesting relationship with this one. When I think about it objectively, I feel like not a lot is happening, so I end up drifting off to this or that new book...but then I finish that book, pick this one back up again, and am immediately absorbed in its colorful depiction of late-nineteenth-century Mexican life. So I can't say I'm not enjoying it, but I'm really wondering where it's all going, or if it's actually just a 528-page vignette.

What I plan to read next

I'm thinking it's time I pulled up Google Translate and Bara roligt i Bullerbyn - I got bogged down about 2/3rds through and never got around to finishing it. But man, it's hard to read in a second language - I'm so used to being able to look at a paragraph and pick up its meaning almost effortlessly, so having to work it out word by word is humbling. I know learning to read English was hard, because my mother tells me that I struggled with it, but I wanted to be able to read books for myself so badly that I was strongly motivated. But I don't remember any of that - I literally can't remember a time when I couldn't read. So the exercise in humility is probably good for me, heh.

I was working during the eclipse yesterday and it was pretty cloudy here in Chicago, so I didn't do much of anything special. I did leave for work early, expecting the traffic to be nutty - you can bet I had all my brightly colored reflective gear plus blinky lights on my bike. But if anything, it was the opposite; the on-road portions of my commute were calm, and the parks nearly deserted. I did pass a few people in various neighborhoods standing outside looking up with their eclipse glasses; combined with the quieter-than-average streets, it felt more than a bit like I'd stumbled into a sci-fi movie about a culture that takes in its energy from the noonday sun.

I was a little surprised to have three students (a not-unusual number for a daytime beginner class); I'd half-expected everyone to be busy eclipse-watching. I'd built a vaguely eclipse-themed playlist, too, but Apple Music was giving me trouble, so I wasn't able to use it. Luckily nobody there had been to my C1 class before, so I was able to reuse a previous playlist and not feel like I was slacking, heh.

I've been in a somewhat subdued place, this week. I've been ruminating on loss, and how it affects us; even something like a job or a relationship (or the hope of a relationship) ending, where there's no physical change, still causes a sense of bereavement. It occurs to me that I am experiencing a loss of sorts; even though I didn't have a lot of plans per se (it's hard to when the other party leads solely by implication), I had a lot of hopes, and ideas for the future. It's tough to realize that those are gone permanently, at least in that form. Something I'd worked carefully toward for so long has just...evanesced, and I feel a little adrift.

Relatedly, I finally finished Come As You Are, and the last section is all about emotional meta-analysis - or how you feel about your feelings. One of the things Nagoski points out that I particularly love is that emotional reactions (contrary to the claims of numerous inspirational quotes) are not something you can choose or control; what you can control is your reaction to those emotions, by either refusing to feel them - staying in the tunnel - or allowing yourself space to feel them, knowing that while they may not feel good in the moment, they will pass; eventually you'll make it through the darkness and out into the light. It's proven to be a good yoga-class theme for the week of an eclipse, as well as for my life right now.

Also, a yoga-teacher milestone reached: yesterday one of my students told me how she'd come into my CoreRestore class on Sunday night extremely nervous about an important job interview on Monday, so my theme about choosing to feel your feelings and let them go really spoke to her. Apparently she slept great on Sunday night, aced the interview, got the job, and came into my C1 class Monday afternoon to celebrate. I was so happy for her. <3