Not a lot to report here – but that won’t stop me from over blogging about it. I did want to mention I had a nice dinner out and a gossip with “Criplishus” and then over the weekend had the “Sunday Loaf” with radgendervibes where we hung out and did little projects – I mended some things, conditioned some boots and a jacket, and tried stripping the dye from my boot toes and re-dying them to see if I could get them brighter red while she sewed something that was going to be a pincushion but turned out to be a tiny jewelry bag with a ribbon instead. We had tea and cookies and gossip and then tried some ways to modify the skirt of her dress. I am going to her dance performance soon so I heard all about that and what “heels dancing” is.
Anyway, I love mending and maintaining things. and i love my crafting stuff and sewing box(es) and tool bags and my little carton of leather maintaining stuff and the supplementary box of leather dye and deglazer etc. It is like having this quiet superpower. Danny and I are thinking to make the Sunday Loaf a regular and low key event.
I am still working out how to organize and store my wheelchair fixing and modding tools and materials, right now in 4 different toolbags, a shoebox, and a giant bag full of weird clamps and camera tripod parts, and then some PVC pipe of different widths and lengths.
I am reading through the entire series of Inspector Rostinov detective novels which are set in the USSR in the 80s. They are grossly sexist but still readable (somehow). I also started having a look at a giant doorstop of a book I got at the SFPL main library bookstore, called A Treasury of African Folklore, figuring I will at least look at the rabbit trickster stories in honor of Uncle Wiggly but it’s likely I’ll just read through it too!
I am not feeling 100% right now as some hormonal weirdness kicked off. Because of extremely heinous hot flashes I started taking estrogen a couple of years ago, which works amazingly well, except you have to take progesterone pills for the first 12 days of the month along with that in order to decrease your risk of uterine cancer and if you screw up the timing of the progesterone, or just think bad thoughts, or look funny at the sky, then you suddenly get either “breakthrough bleeding” or just a regular old period depending on if you think you are actually in menopause or not, which is NOT really well defined.
Either way, it makes me feel quite blah, with moments where it takes a huge effort of will just to get up and Do a Thing, and I am suddenly bleeding all over after months of Not Bleeding (I had to go search the basement for tampons) and also am having regular old painful cramps. I also have some fairly gnarly fibroids including some fibroids inside the uterine wall and adenomyosis which, if you have heard people complain about endometriosis I have that too but ALSO have it INSIDE THE UTERINE WALL. I am not knocking my uterus, which did its job as well as it could. But i wish that it would be done doing things, growing things, leaking, being lumpy in strange new ways, feeling heavy, sloshing around in there like a, I don’t even know what. Like a heavy sloshing crampy thing.
Have you seen those videos where guys wear a period simulator and some giggling women slowly turn up the knob from 1 to 10? It is best when it’s more than one dude at a time so they try to out macho each other but fail. I would love to try one of those machines and see if it really approximates the pain! It does appear to from the stunned look on the dudes faces and the way they bend over and then when the dial turns up higher, the pain goes skittering down their leg and they freak out. Truly accurate. I think the period pain simulator is nothing without pouring about a quarter cup of blood into their pants though.
I spent an hour on a video call with my nephew looking at bits of his college essays and offering light editing analysis. He is always a bit mysterious, has exhibited a sort of strategic flare, or genius, from a young age as well as being able to inhale vast amounts of detail and analyze things at a high level.He is a very interesting thinker and has mastered a certain kind of rhetoric that made me think he will make a quite interesting career doing policy or political work.
My ex mom in law died this weekend and I am thinking about her a lot. I am so glad I got to see her and sit with her earlier this year at my ex’s wedding (which was so lovely!) And feel that we still had a connection. She was a really amazing and very intense person. M. came over and we hugged a lot and looked at old photo albums and talked about her for hours last night. I found an old letter she had sent from her trip to Tanzania where she not only climbed to hut 2 of Mt. Kilmanjaro but also visited some hospitals and small clinics for kids with cerebral palsy and developmental delays or disorders. So most of the letter was about that and I know she worked on those connections for years getting them equipment and other resources.
It seemed so wild at the time (~20 years ago) that you could email some random hospitals in Tanzania and introduce yourself, then show up, inspect everything, give some lectures, actually work a lot, and create a lasting connection. Never mind “going on vacation” – far too dull. They stayed in hostels a lot and would cook for everyone and then just go around meeting random Korean businesspeople who lived in town. You could also count on her and her husband both to do things people told them not to that were dangerous or forbidden or generally unwise. If there was a sign saying caution stay back, they would take it as a sign to investigate…. Sometimes maddening but also endearing. She also set money aside for all 5 of her grandchildren to help them through university. But, my memories of her are more about how hilarious she was and how she was a sort of shrieker and blurter and witchy cackler, and a generator of chaos, in a way that made us kindred spirits in a certain chaos goblin way. She only retired a couple of years ago at age 86. I am sad she has died but a little comforted to know she had been doing things like, reportedly, declaring it was fine now on her way out to have THREE DESSERTS if she felt like it. Correct!!!!
As I told various stories to my kid I had more of those stereotypical Gen X moments where i was just casually telling about something and the young person’s eyes go wide with concern and shock as they go “I’m so sorry that happened to you!” and they make you stop and get a hug. I cannot remember what the things were, because they don’t even register for me as particularly bad, but sometimes I can take the hug, step back, and think, Huh. OK. I’ll take a kind of care that I didn’t think was needed. Maybe it is! I can learn things!!!! I thought a little bit about older relatives and how curious I was or would have been about their war experiences but how reticent they were to share.
We looked at several photo albums of their babyhood and toddler years and both sets of grandparents holding them and playing with them and I think that was a good grounding thing to do that made some space for emotions around loss but that were also making space for love.