Unsolicited Advice

The last time we met, the doctor told me she thought "we" needed to get me some "new coping methods". This is usually the part where I figure out how to change doctors, or just quit making appointments, because this is usually where they start giving me sales pitches on the wonders of CBT and stop reading things I hand them. I try not to be overly paranoid, but I got just about thirty years of "stop whining, you don't need medication, you just need to stop having the wrong feelings" and that makes a mark. I'm willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt, because she is an Energetic Young Thing who doesn't know me all that well yet, and also because she's not the therapist person. Frankly, I can ignore just about anything she says as long as she doesn't start pestering me to take something that won't end well, or threaten to stop letting me have something unless I toe the party line. The therapist person has made no such noise...

Important discovery: The Colbert Report is virtually impossible to speechread . Oh, Colbert faces the camera straight on, and enunciates pretty well, probably a side-effect of un-learning his Southern accent as a young adult. (He gets it back a wee little bit when campaigning for the President of the United States of South Carolina. I've seen him mention he learned to quash it at college when he realized it made people assume he was less than brilliant, but environment is hard to resist.) It's just that lip reading is mainly guessing what fits the visemes you can see, based on body language and context, and "Colbert" runs almost entirely on sarcasm and insane troll logic. It leads to a lot of moments where you have a graphic of, say, a convicted money launderer up on the left side of the screen, but find yourself watching the lip flaps and going, "...wait, did he just say 'banana'? Angrily? " We shall not even speak of "The Wørd", where...

So I have been down to the doctor's office yet again.  This one is actually pretty smart; she will read things I bring her and talk about receptors and neurotransmitters with me, and twice she has brought up things I had been delaying asking her about because normally they're things that make physicians pat me patronizingly on the hand and shut their ears to anything else I say. She will also listen to my arguments for and against things. I laid out my case for trying propranolol, and it was not her fault that it didn't work right. She also apparently thought I was ultimately right when I told her flat out that not knowing whether I will get the medication that works when I break down and ask for help caused me a lot of stress, and  led to me not taking my Xanax when I was actually supposed to. I pointed out that if she were worried about tolerance, she wouldn't have offered gabapentin; if she were worried about discontinuation, she wouldn't have offered gabapenti...

For those of you outside of the US who don't understand why Jon Stewart stepping down as host of The Daily Show is such a thing, it's because the program is, er, terrifying influential. I'm given to understand that most of the world gets news from America a lot more than America bothers to read news of the world, but I don't know how much of our context you can guess from it, particularly when the context is batshit insane. If you get television from the UK, it's rather like Mock The Week , only it runs Mon-Thurs for most of the year, so large portions of the program are produced on the sub-24 hr turnaround time of a real news show. I assume there are similar programs pretty much anywhere making fun of your leaders doesn't get you shot. Next time you sit down to watch MtW, imagine for a moment that you live in a world where citizens aged 18-35 peeled themselves off the sofa and voted in the next general election because they were listening to what made Dara Ó ...

I try to keep my nose out of religious discussions. I know just enough to know that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. When I discovered, in my poking around, that Stephen Colbert is in fact veddy veddy Catholic, I admit that I twitched. The public face of religion in the US at the moment, particularly Christianity, is conservative, patriarchal, and dictatorial. There are millions upon millions of people of casual to moderate faith living in America, and none of them tell me about it in casual conversation anymore, because they've learned the hard way that people who are not religious mainly know about yours from the loudest of the lunatics that end up on TV. For Christianity, it's evangelical fundamentalists like the Duggars. I've managed to avoid most of that for, say, Islam, since I had no real experience with it before, and now I live in a place where I see women with scarves wrapped around their heads all the time and nobody gives them a second gl...

I derive comfort from the oddest things sometimes. When I'm sick and/or miserable for an extended length of time -- which in fact I have been, and they have just given me another  bottle of drugs which does not work correctly , and my next return appointment isn't until next week -- with no clear end in sight, I cope by grabbing onto something, and researching the ever-loving fuck out of it. My brain is the only part of me that keeps working right when I feel lousy. I had the honest-to-God flu once, the kind where you spend a few days wondering if you're going to die and the next two weeks praying that you will, and in those horrible waking hours between one dose of drugs wearing off and my next dose of drugs kicking in, I crammed the entirety of the sci.electronics.repair FAQ into my brain. I now know far more about resuscitating dead VCRs than I will ever conceivably get to use. Another bout of problems coincided with the Doctor Who Restoration Team inventing yet anoth...

Happy Moon Day, everybody! Since I have been rummaging through clips of old news programs on YouTube for completely unrelated reasons, I thought it might be appropriate to share this playlist of news coverage of the Apollo 11 launch, flight, moon landing, and return home. And if you still need something to watch, here's the post-splashdown, post-quarantine press conference: Poor Neil Armstrong spends most of his stage time fidgeting like mad. He clearly wants to skip right to the part about Moon! MOON MOON MOON MOON MOON. I was on the MOON. Ask me what it was like ON THE MOON. I'm given to understand Armstrong was a very quiet man and never all that fond of public speaking, although he did a fair amount of it at the request of other people; Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins are much better at just wording at the assembled reporters while the slides are up. They are all using their clout as "people who have been TO THE MOON" to declare that they're just not...