One of my toes hurts. It doesn't look bruised, and palpation suggests it's not broken or dislocated. It's just sort of a stabby-yanking pain, like the high-tension wire-pull feeling you get when you try to stretch a muscle that doesn't want to cooperate, only it happens kind of at random. Moving it doesn't help. Neither does not moving it. Pressing on it, not pressing on it, elevating it, dangling it off the edge of the bed, keeping it warm, keeping it cool, and knocking back more Aleve don't do anything, either. The pain is neuropathic, an adjective formed from the roots neuro- , "nerve", and -pathy , "with which something has gone wrong". A nerve has become angered for mysterious, inscrutable nerve reasons, and now my toe hurts. This happens a fair amount. Normally my brain just sort of edits it out. I pay attention to things that change state with stimuli. A foot that twinges sharply when I put weight on it or head pain that lessens wh...
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Ah, here come the think-pieces about Orlando. I keep writing and re-writing this and deleting a rant about them, uncertain whether I'm "allowed" to have feelings on the topic. The fact that I even have to ask myself, "Am I allowed to have an opinion?" rather than, "Is my opinion informed and at least kind of reasonable?" is one of the biggest problems I have with the practice of identity politics, so fuck it. Here it is. Some lady -- I think it's a lady; everyone is using feminine pronouns -- apparently wrote a thing declaring that cis het white people are not allowed to comment on anything that happened in Orlando. How dare you offer condolences now when you are so silent the rest of the time, usw. I expect in a week or two someone else will write one decrying a lack of supportive commentary from the mainstream, oblivious to the flaw in their logic. If no one is allowed to comment unless they've been commenting all along, but they're n...
I am really tired of being angry at things, so here is something adorable and cheerful. Every so often I remember I follow figure skating, and go check to see what my favorites were up to. Much to my delight, Johnny Weir and Stéphane Lambiel are working together in Fantasy On Ice this year. I adore them both; the technical jumps are impressive and all, but they both do a lot of fancy spinny things and daring layouts that I am sad I can't get up enough speed to do on a dance floor. They are also both rather interesting people. Weir's always had a smart mouth, and surprised a lot of people by being an entertaining commentator for NBC Sports -- admittedly, when you think 'professional athlete' or 'fashionista', the first thing that stereotypically jumps to mind is not 'well-read wit'. Weir's book is a hilarious, if quick, read. He wrote it when he was twenty-five. He'll probably be terrifically embarrassed about it when he's fifty. Most of u...
I don't often comment on current events here, because, to be frank, they're not about me. Most things are not about me, really. The vastness of the cosmos, and so forth. I can have whatever opinion I want, on whatever basis I want, but I am a college-educated white girl who grew up middle class in a place where the Anglo families didn't talk to the Hispanic families because they were terrifyingly brown , and nobody talked to us because we didn't go to church. I knew fuck-all about the less WASPy parts of the world before we got an internet connection, and in a lot of ways, I still don't. I try to at least think before I begin blathering on and end up with my foot jammed so deeply in my mouth I can taste my own kneecap. The Orlando shooting was not about me. But it was about an awful lot of my friends . As a rule, I stay out of advocacy. For one reason or another, pretty much every group considers me part of the Privileged Elite. My life experiences are irrelev...