Unsolicited Advice

Yesterday evening, when I arrived to work front of house at one of the many theaters with which I have apparently now become affiliated, I discovered that there was no one to run concessions. So I did. After prepping the lobby, doing the administrative work for check-in, answering the phone even though we weren't technically open, and not incidentally handing out a million and one answers at the reception desk. Which were technically all to the same question -- "Where is the discussion group meeting?" -- which proved popular among many, many people who apparently did not know how to read signs. One of the full-time office staff placed herself at my disposal. Even though, being full-time office staff, she would technically have been considered in charge. They handed me control of the bar inventory and an awful lot of money. I have keys and combinations and number codes for everything short of the gigantic safe we keep the cash drops in. I wandered in and out of the offic...

This year I finally figured out what the fuck was wrong with me, medically speaking. It's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it's nice to know I'm not lying when I inform people that no, I really can't do something. It's difficult not to question that when for most of your life, the response to it was 'kwitcherbitchin and do the thing I told you to do', and then getting shouted at again when you collapse. It also solves a bunch of minor but enduring mysteries, like why no one in the family has ever looked their real age. Skin develops creases over time for the same reason paper does: Bend it in one spot often enough and it breaks some of the supporting fibers, creating a weak spot where folds happen more easily in the future. As paper is supported by cellulose, skin is supported by collagen, the same stuff that forms the bridge of your nose and the caps on the ends of your long bones. Ehlers-Danlos patients produce a form of collagen that's softer and ...

I am still boggled by other people thinking of me as athletic or physically accomplished. It is not a hat I am accustomed to wearing. I was clumsy as a kid, and I still have my moments. I feel less bad about this now that I know that it's a common symptom of hypermobility syndromes. In essence, my proprioception is made to spec, but my joints aren't; they have a lot more play, in multiple axes, than they're supposed to, and when they rattle out of tolerance my idea of where they are goes subtly wrong. The error bars build up over time to the point where I need to be able to see myself at rehearsal or I have no idea what I look like. Other people do double-takes when they ask how I got somewhere and I tell them, "I walked." My theory is that, while it might take me an hour to tromp to where I need to be, that's an hour I can count on, as opposed to taking the bus, which might be exactly on time or might be forty minutes late without any warning. It is difficu...

About a week ago, Sis caught me just as I was about to lay down for a nap. She wanted me to do the dishes. I told her I was about to go to sleep; she promptly freaked out and accused me of having left dishes in the sink, which was quite true, but also implied I was the only one who'd done so, which suggests that perhaps she thinks Jazmin eats dry cereal by the fistful straight out of the box every morning. Deciding that the fight would take longer than the dishes, I agreed to wash things. Sis promptly freaked out on me  again , backpedaling at about Mach 3, babbling about how if I couldn't then she'd do it, only she had a friend who was in dire straits and coming to stay in her room tonight, and, and, and and and. "You won," I said. "Drop it." Sis  has not yet learned that if she wants people to do things, she had to make capitulating less annoying than arguing over it. Possibly she isn't capable of learning it yet. It's possible to get t...

I'm not exactly sure when Yuki's number is going to be up, so Ratmas came slightly early this year. It's not like they keep track. Someone at a holiday party asked me if I'd come up with a mythology for Ratmas, and I haven't, really; rats are simple, and they would be content to celebrate a holiday strictly because it's the day where Mommy comes in and gives them way too much food for no reason at all. It's self-justifying. Yuki doesn't climb onto the upper cage shelf much anymore, and I can't justify buying a roll of wrapping paper to decorate for a rodent. Also, she's rather high-strung and hates change. So she got a warm box, sleeved in the remains of a cheap chenille hat that developed a hole the first time I wore it, and lined in red jersey knit; a Christmas tree made from fabric scraps that she can knock down and cuddle with if she wants to; and a layer of white gift tissue "snow" on top of her usual newspaper bedding. Das Rat...

Here's something cute, following along the language talk the other day. See if you can read this: Hint: The plaintext is in English. You don't need to know Chinese to read it, but knowing something about how Chinese works might help. Priming not required, although depending on how flexible your recognition vocabulary is, it might be faster to guess some chunks from context rather than reading them explicitly.

Today is a food-based holiday for USians, so naturally I am celebrating it with RAT. This year, Yuki is thankful she's still around for Giant Meal For No Reason Day -- three rounds of any given holiday is a pretty good run for a tiny furry ball of genetic defects. She's lost both sisters, but seems to be doing fine as an only rat. As usually happens with only-rats, she's gotten a lot more pushy about climbing the cage door to let me know it is Time For Rat-Tending NOW, but mainly, Yuki seems to be enjoying being able to nom all of the new holes in her nest box herself . In addition to her customary new box to shred and new bedding to roll around in, Yuki is also getting her own tiny Ratsgiving dinner. Observe: Salad with dressing and buttered crust of bread, rosemary chicken stew with mashed potatoes and peas, and for dessert, egg nog porridge with a dab of jam. No, I never have much to do over the holiday weekend, why do you ask? She is actually getting this over ...

I have realized in the past few years that I am not really kidding when I talk about having a 'magic language sense'. There is something about the time-worn repetition about true language that catches my attention when I see it, even if it's not a language I speak, or it's disguised as something else. There is a limit; blocks of Enigma text don't trip it, for instance, although intellectually I've inhaled enough about cryptography to recognize that's what it (probably) is. The format typically used by numbers stations says to me that there is a message there, although since it's probably an arbitrary correspondence code I have no idea what it says, or that it's not all padding and gibberish. A big tip off that I'm actually noticing something , even if I don't precisely know what it is, is that the language sense works better when I have context, and generally best when I have large amounts of text to look at. Perhaps an equally big clue i...

Halfway through On Megrim . Liveing has gotten no less astonishing. I am finding it difficult to plow through the book at my normal speed. He keeps sort of casually making connections that make me stop and stare into space for a while as I think through the implications -- which, since I'm reading this in 2015, probably involve a lot more math than he had in mind when he originally wrote this. About half of his observations are connections I had not made myself yet, mainly because I am not technically a neurologist and do not have access to the same materials Liveing did, never mind a modern neurology student. The other half are things I have been saying for years, including to actual doctors, which have mostly been ignored because, again, not technically a neurologist. Most of the relevant ones have been comparisons of the course of migranous misery to things like epileptiform seizures. The boundaries between various disorders were drawn differently in the 19th century -- whic...

Well, hell. I finally managed to sit down and get past the Preface in Liveing's On Megrim , and ho- lee mackerel, I think I know exactly why this got Sacks' attention. The very first chapter is "Illustrative Cases" -- a few case studies, both Liveing's own patients and those of a few other neurological writers of his time. He covers, in brief, Du Bois Reymond's case of a man with classic hemicranial cephalgia accompanied by nausea, erythema of the face, and blood pressure changes; his own patient, a young woman with severe headache and general 'sea sickness', whose attacks are terminated by sleep; another of his patients, a man who suffered pure ocular migraine with various fun scintillating scotomata in his central vision; a man whose migraine attacks could be brought on by either a violent emotional or physical effort or gastric upset, and comes on with a burst of flickering scotomatous lights; and mentions of patients belonging to Parry and Wolla...

I've just finished a book, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives . I recommend it highly, especially if you like pop-sci rambles through history and mathematics, salted with useful knowledge about how statistics intersect with reality, and sprinkled with wiseass parentheticals. I was actually asked for an evaluation by a friend who was unfamiliar with Mlodinow, outside of his work as a script editor for ST:TNG, and I thought I might as well try pretending to be a serious media person for a little bit and type up a review for all of you. It's a bit different writing for a blog audience than for a single person you know; you need to take into account the sorts of things people who read you would have in common, and how those things would affect their reaction to the whatzit you're trying to describe for them. I mulled it over for a while and decided it would probably suffice to say that if you enjoy the tone of my snark, you'll a...

I get the whirlies whenever I stand up too fast, and every so often it comes with a wallop of cracking head pain right at the base of my skull. I got fed up with it today and did the thing doctors always tell you not to do, which was Google my symptoms to see what came up. The verdict, after skimming several web sites and discarding the one that appears to be run by the same grade of loony who believes that not only does Morgellons exist, but that it is a secret government plot, is thus: It's probably nothing. Although there is a near-infinitesimal chance it might kill me. This is a pretty fair assessment of any non-emergency medical annoyance, so I'm not worried. 'Not dangerous' is not the same thing as 'not objectionable', so I picked a couple of the more reputable-looking sites and poked around to see if there was any consensus on how to cope with the symptoms.  Most of the advice on treating postural orthostatic hypotensive headaches centere...

Minor life mysteries: Solved! I've never been especially fond of grapes. I'll eat them, but I'll pick just about any other fruit (or artificial froot-flavor) first. It turns out that this is because I've been eating supermarket seedless grapes all my life. Those are flavored mostly fructose, with a touch of tannin. Someone brought several pounds of Concord grapes to the PMRP green room during the show run this time, and now a lot of things make a lot more sense. Firstly, I am still flummoxed by the idea that food plants grow randomly in suburban yards here. I grew up in Arizona, a place where nature tries so hard to kill you the Australians would feel right at home. Food comes from stores, and yards are covered in Bermuda grass, which looks kind of lawn-y from a distance, but is in reality made up of tiny unripe punji stakes, and not to be walked on barefoot. All the plants look like they come from Mars and eating them is a bad idea 99% of the time. Prickly pear f...

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton (and anyone who has ever been assigned a term paper on a weird topic) The library has finally coughed up my 19th c. loan book about migraines. On Megrim, Sick-Headache, & some allied disorders , by Edward Liveing. It is a rather more substantial book than I expected, especially in library-style case binding, and I did not have much fun hauling it all over town for the afternoon. I have learnt that I have to make my library run on the way into work at 1pm rather than on the way out of it at 6, if I want to have any chance at all of getting back on the Green when I come out. I've only flipped through it, but I'm pretty sure I know where Sacks got his chronic case of hyperannotatia. Liveing doesn't get quite as ambitious with the length of his footnotes, but to make up for it, a good proportion of them are in untranslated French. The fact that this book exists at all is rather...

I bought a book today. I don't usually buy books. There's not much point. I finish them too fast. I read most things out of an idle curiosity; I seldom re-read things, and especially with dead-tree format, there's no point in purchasing and storing and moving an object I'm not likely to use for its intended purpose ever again. I have cheaper, lighter junk I can use to prop up wobbly tables. One roommate has developed some highly unrealistic expectations, and the other one says she agrees with me that they're unrealistic but so far as I know has not done anything about it. I assume there are reasons for this that I'm not privy to, and I like to have some faith in humanity, so I further assume they're good ones. It doesn't stop me from feeling like a polite robo-voice has broken through the shitty phone Musak to tell me that my call is very important to them before demonstrating how much they mean that by putting me back on hold for another 45 minutes....

I've had a lot of sewing to do lately. Sewing requires my hands and my eyeballs, preventing me from reading actual books. BPL cards come with a complimentary Overdrive account, so I raided their mp3 audiobook catalog. Their recommendations algorithm is either a bit squiffy or has an interesting sense of humor, I thought, as it showed me Lena Dunham's autobio (cannot stand  her), a load of inspirational "spiritual" titles, and a bunch of stuff by Bill O'Reilly. I'm still not touching his political stuff, because I don't want to remember half a second after I throw the book at the wall that I was actually reading that on my Kindle, but he's also written a bunch of historical things that didn't look terrifyingly Republican. And you know what? They're really fun. Well, if you think reading about assassinations is fun. He does talk a lot about murder. I'm undecided on whether I should be worried about that. The point is, O'Reilly...

When Oliver Sacks first published Awakenings in 1973, he was largely ignored by his fellow neurologists. The reason often given to him was prosaic: Neurological case studies were not in the first person, did not involve the clinician's feelings, and were full of numbers and graphs. What he wrote wasn't clinical research, so it was beneath their notice. The reason slightly less often given to him was that nobody believed him. Most of the patients first given L-DOPA had a conventional form of Parkinson's disease. PD is caused by a decline in dopaminergic neurons in a small region of the brain called the substantia nigra, and the body is so good at compensating for this that you don't even see symptoms until the substantia nigra is about 80% gone. It is progressive, and the course varies; it takes a good goddamn long time for most Parkinson's patients to degenerate to the state in which Sacks' encephalitis lethargica victims were when he first tried L-DOPA, and m...

Whenever I get down to a single critter, I make them a small bolster, about the size and shape of a rat, so they have something to cuddle with. It's usually out of old terrycloth or scrap fleece, and stuffed with a bit of the bedding their late buddy was sleeping on, so it smells right. What usually happens is the rat drags their stuffed friend into their house, and nests with it. I spend a few weeks fishing it out of the old nest box and giving it back whenever I dump the cage, until it gets too disgusting for words, at which point I pitch it and make them a new one. I made a bolster for Yuki in the usual fashion, out of a dollar-store towel. I scooted it into the cage next to her and nudged her with the nose, so she'd get the idea that it was soft and cuddlable. She promptly whipped around and sank her teeth into its neck. I left it in the cage in case she changed her mind. She's bulldozed it into the far corner with her hard, hard little head, and is ignoring it ...

Requierat -- err,  requiescat in pace , Edelweiß. I am so sorry that you did not finish your quest to nom all of the tortilla chips in the entire world.

I cannot count how many times in my life someone I'm talking to has fixed me with a look and just said, "You're really  smart." The specific look varies; sometimes it's dubious, sometimes it's blank confusion, sometimes it's deer-in-headlights. They say it in the same tone of voice one might have used to inform André the Giant that he was impressively large, or to comment to one's companions that the ocean is rather wet. What makes them do this is a mystery I have never solved. I know exactly why they think I'm ungodly smart. It's because I am. Aside from my self-evaluation, I have twelve years of public school records full of standardized test scores so high they broke the software used to print the results and sent parts of the bar graph shooting off into the margins. I also have confirmation from people who have been officially certified as smart by other smart people at large, well-regarded universities, who were themselves once certifi...

You learn interesting things when you go poking through biographies. Sacks never talked about his love life in his books, aside from a few stray comments that implied that at one point, he'd had one. I did wonder from time to time, but given the depth and breadth of the things he did share, it felt ungrateful to perseverate on the one he'd decided not to. So I didn't. I was interested to note that when he passed away a few months ago, he left a partner behind: Bill Hayes, another author who published essays at The New York Times . I found I was very glad to hear that. Sad for Hayes, but you know what I mean. Not that romance is the be-all and end-all of human existence, but Sacks had opted out of it for many, many years. I am glad that he lived through enough time and tide and social change that when he found he wanted that kind of connection, he also found he was free to take it. I gather it was not easy. There are a few years between Hayes writing tactfully of, ...

I just finished a brief biography of Jon Stewart. It was a remarkably uncomfortable read. Not that it told me anything horrible, or that the writing was 50 Shades-levels of atrocious. My own brain just nagged me the whole way through, you know, he doesn't really like talking about any of this himself, isn't this obnoxiously nosy?  Jon Stewart is the sort of person who will gladly tell you what he thinks of things whether you've asked him or not; it's just almost always in the present tense. He does not seem to have oodles of patience for navel-gazing, at least not with other people present. I did finish it, although I needn't have bothered. It was cobbled together almost entirely out of things Stewart has dropped over the years in interviews, so technically it was all what I'd consider fair game. It happened to be by the same author as the Colbert one I'd dug up, and while I found it annoying that she paid little attention to internal motivation in that on...

Still rummaging through the library for things involving Oliver Sacks. I've got a book by a long-dead neurologist who is not the same long-dead neurologist whose work I was trying to beat out of the Interlibrary Loan people, but which nevertheless coincidentally also has a foreword by Sacks. It's a very Sacks-ian foreword, aside from them not letting him take up half the page with footnotes. (The footnotes in Oliver Sacks' books make me feel that my incessant tangenting is completely reasonable. Minimalist, even. He's written entire parallel chapters at the bottom of his manuscript pages, and they're fascinating .) A R Luria is not as vivid and intertwined with his case as Sacks has always been, but I see where he got it from. I owe a great many things to Oliver Sacks. Not the least of these is the idea that having a brain full of blue and purple wire is not necessarily a bad thing. Sacks was the first writer I had ever run across -- and still one of the very fe...