Unsolicited Advice

So, I have a Kindle. (I actually have several Kindles, but sidetracking myself on the second sentence would be a new record, so we're going to leave that for now.) I get a lot of ebooks from the public library, both because I got tired of hauling 20 lbs of dead tree back and forth and because sometimes I need to feed my brain something new at 3am when nothing's open. Amazon keeps a closer eye on me than the NSA and Santa Claus combined, so naturally whenever I open the Kindle Library, they do their best to sell me something I want. A few weeks ago, the New Releases lineup showed me a book called Red Side Story , by Jasper Fforde. Though Jasper Fforde is probably better known for the Thursday Next books, Red Side Story is the second book in his Chromatacia series, the first of which, Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron , I read and loved quite a long time ago. It's been fifteen years since that one came out, and I had frankly given up in despair. Red Side Story is als...

It has come to my attention that May is supposed to be Ehlers-Danlos Awareness Month. I've neglected to post anything, on account of I've been busy coping with the consequences of Ehlers-Danlos. May is a busy month for me. I perform, I do technical work for live theater, and I admin at a couple of places that deal with both of those things. This May, I ended up working for 21 consecutive days without a break. I didn't exactly mean to, but a combination of a coworker having to go out of town for a family emergency and several people who scheduled their spring recitals in September and then failed to do any planning until April slowly whittled away my days off until I had Things To Do every goddamn day for three solid weeks. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is officially a genetic disorder of collagen formation. The direct effect is that all of the connective tissue in my body is basically made of Silly Putty. Collagen keeps all of your various bones and muscles strung together, so it ...

Hello from the floor, where I once again find myself. Lying face-down on the floor as an adult is an experience. I can trace all of the steps I went through to get here, and all of them made perfect sense at the time. But then I end curled up like a pillbug on my bedroom carpet next to the rat cage, flat on my shins and the top of my head, and I have the nagging feeling I'm somehow doing something wrong. The rats are vaguely curious, but that's mostly because they're convinced I only get out of bed to feed and/or love them. They're not really wrong, but they don't understand the idea of an economy, and gloss over a lot of the intermediate steps. I assumed I was the only one who's been slowly melting into a puddle over the past month or so, but I know a few other people with the one-two Ehlers-Danlos/hay fever punch who have been similarly reduced to primordial sludge, so iunno. Objectively, my seasonal allergies are more annoying than disabling, but anything tha...