Unsolicited Advice

I keep going through cycles where I try to convince myself that there's nothing wrong with me, I'm just a lazy sod, and I'm whining over nothing. Symptoms are subjective. Nobody likes getting up early in the morning, they do it anyway. Nobody likes hot muggy weather, but they don't let themselves melt into a useless puddle on the bed all afternoon. Then shit happens, and I am reminded that not only are all the things I think are wrong with me actually wrong with me, I am usually introduced to a brand-new symptom that I didn't even fucking know was a thing. The tech who did my hip imaging mentioned in passing that low body temperature was a known feature of EDS. Judging from the comments I got when the nurse couldn't get an IV into me last week, and the fact that she tried to fix that by heaping me with heated blankets, I don't just think  my hands and feet are always cold, or  feel chilled when I'm short on sleep, I actually am having temperature regulat...

An incomplete list of things I would like to wrench out of my head before I die: The YA superhero book I started for NaNo and had to put down because the 2016 election had me in a state of mortal terror; A "non-fiction" retrospective that purports to shed light on an unsolved murder, as written by a historian in the unspecified, but moderately distant, future; Another "non-fiction" work about a series of artists, whom the author (who may or may not be insane) claims has made a deal with the devil, the terms of which are that they will gain incredible fame and fortune, at the price of their single greatest masterpiece remaining forever unfinished; A mystery involving a Holmesian detective who, unbeknownst to himself, is not just brilliant at deduction but also psychometric. He is forced to deal with the implications when he encounters a crime to which he "knows" the solution, but cannot reconcile this with the fact that he was personally in a differe...

Is it bad when filing your taxes gives you an existential crisis? I had to monkey with my insurance paperwork when I went into the urgent care a while ago. The lady with the Official Computer Forms asked me what I did for a living, which is apparently a required question despite the fact that state insurance in MA is entirely based on income, not field of employment. I had no answer. Fiscal 2016 is the first year I've ever had to file as completely self-employed, as 0% of my paying work was as a serf beneath giant capitalist overlords. The insurance lady pulled out her phone, opened some kind of TurboTax app, and casually informed me that I was an "Artist".  I might have argued with her, but I was busy trying to pinpoint what exact part of my body was hurting so I could ask them to amputate. I probably just made some kind of non-specific noise of agreement. This feeling that you have to wear your "job" as your identity has always eluded me. Identity b...

I learn new things every time I volunteer for a research study. Today, I learned that neuroimaging researchers have no idea how the fMRI works. Oh, they're aware that there's a very large magnet in it, and that the people who paid for the very large magnet said NO METAL IN THE MRI ROOM in equally large block capitals. Beyond that they don't really have any idea. They know they're measuring brain activity, and I think  some of them know what marker they're using (blood flow), but they don't appear to know by what arcane sorcery big magnet + blood = animated GIF of the brain. [Hemoglobin is magnetically susceptible. Only very, very faintly, hence the mad scientist-grade 4T magnet in the MRI scanner. Hemoglobin that's carrying oxygen has a slightly different response than hemoglobin that's already dropped it off, and brain regions that are active get an influx of the oxygenated stuff. Awesomely powerful, but also awesomely picky, and if you don't do...

Curiosity got the better of me again, and I went out to try to investigate why the hell people are so fascinated by television shows about 600 lb humans. I should know better than to do this. I always just end up wondering how people get into such goddamn stupid arguments. Body image issues are always something I have to approach like an alien anthropologist. I have plenty of problems, but hating the mirror is not one of them. I ran into a picture of Mae West when I was maybe eleven or twelve and thought to myself, "I want to look like that when I grow up." And lo, for it came to pass. I am wasp-waisted and hourglassy. It's not necessarily the fashionable shape of the day, but neither does anyone complain at me about it. Nothing fits quite right when I buy it, but when your problem is "I always have to take the waist in several inches," you don't get a lot of sympathy. Worrying about weight is especially weird to me. I don't normally know exactly w...

You know how, if people find out you enjoy something you have a talent for, they like to tell you to "follow your dream"? They give you this advice on the assumption that the terrible consequence of not doing that is that you will have a tedious mundane life in which you will always wonder if you could have made it. The dichotomy there is 'stay safe' vs 'challenge yourself', with a side order of 'you can always go back to being boring and normal if you totally bomb'. Nobody ever gives you career advice for when the arts are your only option. I assume there was some at some point, but it was discontinued when 'circus freak' stopped being the only choice that won out over 'sidewalk match-seller' and 'homeless beggar' as the prestige career for the terminally different. Although, I seem to have accidentally run away from home and joined the circus already, so maybe there's still some merit in that plan. I try not to post to...

My trip to the urgent care clinic got me, in addition to some pretty decent drugs and a set of X-rays done by a tech who also has EDS run in her family, a referral to Sports Medicine over at a nearby hospital. I never in a thousand years would have thought to ask for that. Sports medicine is for people who do, you know, sport... type... things. Right? I just dance. Maybe a lot. Like an hour a day. Or so. Plus I'm at the studio twice a week. And I'm starting to pick up students. Someone recently asked my rates. Unprompted. Shit. I'm not good at this, okay? My computers can all update themselves without supervision, I don't know why I can't. I did tell the doctor at the urgent care that I was aware that I should stay active so that my joints didn't rattle around quite so much, and that to that end I'd taken up dancing. The referral to SM suggests that she took "dancer" and filled in "serious" or possibly "professional" on her ...