feminist blogs

Dear Dr. Gilliam,

I was stunned to learn only tonight of your passing. I had just worked up the nerve to make a new appointment after having not seen you for months; Linda Love from your office called with the news.

If I understand correctly (not a sure thing, as my sharp, jagged sobs punctuated that conversation), you were at Mardi Gras - one of your favorite celebrations in this world. You’d had a fine meal and some ice cream, followed by a third course of Massive Heart Attack. You died instantly, moving straight into the next mystery. (Your schedule always was pretty busy.) I can only imagine that realm’s cuisine and music and art. Or, if it’s too formless for that, then its textures and resonances, faintly echoing sound waves. Whatever it is that might characterize that place (or lack of place), I hope it’s rich, full of whimsy and depth.

If you found God, please verify for me that S/He has an offbeat sense of humor. S/He might appreciate, perhaps, that just above where I’ve written “I hope it’s rich, full of whimsy and depth,” that at first, I accidentally wrote “death” instead of “depth,” which would have been fairly horrifying to me had I inadvertently uploaded such text to the guestbook accompanying your obituary (we are so modern now we have online funerals!).

I want to say here that I’m grateful to you on quite a few counts:

• You were objective. When I told you about certain events, where you had knowledge of some parties involved, you did not let that knowledge color your judgment; you listened to me and you believed me. (Also, you’ll be proud of me: today I finally worked up the nerve to consult with a lawyer. This time, I’ll follow the process through, however far I still can, given the various statutes.)

• You didn’t try to cram the complexity of me into any kind of one-size-fits-all treatment model; you were fine with discarding what wasn’t working (for example, the course of Ambien that had me driving to Wal-Mart and making strange vegan casseroles in the night - not to mention leaving long, loopy voice mails for various friends and ex lovers), and adapting stuff that seemed like it might work. You gave me the space to work through things at my own speed.

• There were, over the last 3-4 years, various gaps (sometimes lasting months) between our appointments. You pushed me in ways I needed to be pushed. And backed off when pushing wouldn’t have helped.

We speculated, once or twice, as to whether we might be some kind of distant kin, both our families having roots in the Appalachian segments of Virginia and Tennessee, and with the name of “Gilliam” having made at least one appearance in my own family tree. It may or may not have been, but it did not matter nearly so much as the fact that I felt safe with you, at a time in my life when I felt safe with almost no one. (Linda gave me a few names of other doctors to call. Already, I feel sorry for them, considering the tests I put you through.)

If you carry into the next world some C.V. concerning your accomplishments in this one, please feel free to include among the numerous details this item: that you helped to save my life. S/He can call anytime for a reference; I haven’t moved and am not likely to, until such time as my living here might also come to a natural rather than unduly hastened end. Perhaps also in the context of vacation. (The grammarian in me feels compelled to note, here, the root of ‘vacate’ in this word; damn if you didn’t take this most recent ‘vacation’ quite literally.)

Rest peacefully, Dr. Gilliam. My best, also, to your partner Roy (another fine and gentle soul), and to your children, friends, colleagues, and patients.

We were all quite fortunate to know you.

___

More on Dr. John Hilliard Gilliam:

Richmond Times-Dispatch: Obituary
Bipolarity: The mental health community has lost a hero
Dr. John Gilliam: Memorial page

So, long time, no post. Lots going on. And a monster of a post is percolating quietly in the background, trust me. Meantime, the only stuff posted here in some time has been via the feed from my twitter. Which I realize is kind of annoying. Ah well.

But I just wanted to share a quick, kind of wacky observation. Some background first: As those of you who have known me for awhile are already aware, I deal with sometimes debilitating PTSD and depression issues. It’s terribly unfun and unglamorous, and I don’t talk much about it, because the very nature of it revolves, for me, around silences. Once I can articulate something that’s going on, then by definition the fog of the depression has lifted.

As some of you also may know, it is generally believed now not just that depression can be the result of chronic illness and pain, but also that the reverse can be true - that depression itself can cause pain. Well, I’ve gone through enough of that - days of feeling so utterly sucker-punched by my own psyche’s resident demons that it literally hurt like hell to move. That whole business about being bedridden by the blues has everything to do with this. It can feel, sometimes, as if I’ve just run a marathon (only I never got the endorphin high), and the idea that I should walk across the room to get a glass of water, or answer the doorbell, or anything else is laughable. (Only, you know, not at all funny, so not ‘laughable’.)

Well, today has been shaping up to be one of those days. I’ve been languishing on the couch, and when I have gotten up to try to get some work done upstairs or get a glass of water or whatever, I’ve found myself wincing with that very old, familiar pain.

Then it dawned on me: Yesterday I actually got my butt to gym for once. So the pain I’ve been in is from working out. My body’s Pavlovian response, “Oh, I’m having this pain, I associate this pain with depression, I must be depressed!” is kind of funny. Had it occurred to me earlier, I might have short-circuited this reaction by reminding myself, many hours ago, that I actually earned this muscle-soreness, dammit!

But the nature of the depressive beast (whether it’s triggered by memory, chemistry, or confusion over one’s own bodily state as has been the case today) is to obfuscate: Since I felt soreness, I assumed malaise; since I felt malaise, I assumed depression; since I felt depression, I assumed it would be futile to even make a cup of coffee and the whole day was as good as lost; since I didn’t get any caffeine, I became even more muddled and sluggish, which contributes to feeling depressed - and so forth.

Which is a lengthy way of saying, I’m going to make some coffee now.

And maybe not push myself quite so hard next time I go to the gym.

This is me, wedded to the nebulizer as per usual, with headphones on because I can’t hear the Colbert Report over the din of the damned machine. The DVR’d broadcast of which, I should note, I am watching at 3:40 in the morning, given that the three different kinds of steroid medication I am on*, combined with the jarring effects of inhaled albuterol every 4-6 hours, along with my normal sleep disturbance issues, along with the fact that resting in anything other than a completely upright position would likely cause me to expel my left lung, means that sleep just ain’t gonna happen tonight.

This shit had better be significantly cleared up before the conference.

Facial puffiness courtesy of prednisone.

*After having my doctor severely scold me for having gone off one of the maintenance drugs (because it’s expensive, and I had actually been enjoying a few asymptomatic months), all but yelling at me: You Have Severe Asthma Young Lady, Do You Know I’ve Had Two Patients Die From This Before (And One Of Them Was Even Younger Than You), You Don’t Want To Die Now, Do You? - and so forth.

With thanks to Chris who entreated me to resist my stated urge to nuke this blog altogether, and to Joriel who didn’t push either way, but was just her unfalteringly kind self in response to this Twitter-hosted text message tantrum. And everyone else whose emails, phone calls, and blog posts I haven’t been responding to - you know who you are.

After experiencing absurdly complicated (and also utterly uninteresting) technical difficulties dating back almost a month, this blog has been more or less comatose.  Suffice it to say the new version of Wordpress seemed to me designed with the specific intent to render, if not all blogs, then at least mine utterly inoperable, so after pulling my hair out over various fix efforts, I finally had my hosting company restore me back to the old version. 

Once I finally got the tech issues resolved, I had another mini-crisis in blogging faith: What the hell am I doing this for? At any given time, I have too much going on to stop and attempt to render comprehensible, bloggable entries about same, hence my habitual silences. But I dislike the feeling of isolation that results. I rely on others’ blogs everyday variously for news, reality checks, entertainment, provocation and enlightenment (not necessarily in that order). Seems like it wouldn’t kill me to respond every so often.

But that’s the thing, I just can’t. I start long, soul-searching responses that I can never complete, which then languish as drafts for months on end.

Take for example last year, after I Blame the Patriarchy’s Feminism and the Feed Bag. Its author, the infamous Twisty Faster, had been responding to an article on Alternet, “Is Dieting Anti-Feminist?” about Ariel Meadow Stallings’ effort to reconcile her feminism with her experience as a Weight Watchers participant. In taking issue, for example, with the article’s final sentence, “And the vanity pay-offs make me forget all about feminism, if only for a minute,” Twisty could not have known this was an editor’s alteration of Stallings’ sentence as it had originally appeared on her own website: “And the vanity payoffs are great.” (Which, while it doesn’t invalidate all of Twisty’s criticisms, it clearly does change the implications of the piece.)

As a reader of both IBtP and Ariel’s site, Electrolicious, I was dizzied by the fracas, with hundreds of commenters weighing in (no pun intended) on numerous post threads. (See, for example, links tagged on del.icio.us by Ariel herself, tellingly, with  “shitstorm.”) I had lots to say in response, both generally (on the politics of feminism and body image) and specifically (my experiences around both voluntary and, during periods of extreme poverty, involuntary weight loss), but for the life of me I couldn’t complete the post I started about it.

The draft’s first working title, Evil, thy name is Pillsbury Toaster Strudel was patently ridiculous. The relevant excerpt: 

I am not the one in this house with the gall to have purchased the box of Cream Cheese and Strawberry Toaster Strudel (oh no: when groceries are left to me, it’s nearly all Good, Sensible Hippie Food - to the spousal unit’s and my childrens’ chagrin), but I am the one who has consumed most of it. (Specifically, while in a week-long PTSD-driven anxiety haze, with obvious roots in - need I say it? - patriarchy.) 

The draft title that took its place, meanwhile, was sinfully clunky, not to mention opaque: “Eating the peaches” as metaphor for symbiotic gain and loss, with discursive commentary on recent skirmishes in the “Feminist Fat Wars.” Another mericifully brief excerpt (if only to explain the ‘peaches’ bit): 

Yeah, I get that fat doesn’t mean unhealthy per se. For me, the issue is not the weight itself, but the ways I acquire it. Or, for that matter, the ways I have sometimes lost it. I was as distressed in 1993 with my sudden weight loss of around 35 pounds as I would be later over weight gain I’ve experienced at other times, precisely because the weight loss was involuntary: my very ill, unemployed and unemployable girlfriend at the time needed my constant care, and what little food we could scrounge up from various sources went almost exclusively to her. And in that summer, the pattern for our next four years together was set: if, at any given time, we had a can of peaches, I would drink the juice; she alone would eat the peaches…

Here, I was grappling with issues reaching well beyond feminism and body image per se. My weight has varied by as much as 65 pounds over the last eight years, during which time involuntary deprivation of food (even while economic struggles have continued) has never been an issue.  It’s pragmatically and philosophically useful for me to explore why I continue to be caught up in this cycle. But in the process, do I want to expose myself to others’ (even well-meaning) criticism of what is, after all, a deeply painful situation? Besides my inability to fully process events as they are happening (witness this post, or, say, my entire The Past is Not Dead blogging category), I’m just not as tough as women like Ariel when it comes to dealing with the scorn of the (variously well-meaning and vicious) blogular masses.*

Audre Lorde famously wrote, “Your silence will not protect you.” I am conscious, always, of how true this is, even as I retreat again and again into silences of all kinds, constantly going ‘off-radar’ whether in response to specific post-traumatic triggers or seemingly random stimuli, like post threads in the blogosphere.  Why can’t I just come out with it?

Of course, the answer to this question is as obvious as it is excruciatingly painful to admit: I’m confronting a confluence of shame-sources, from past experiences with poverty to sexual harassment and abuse, which have engendered intense and seemingly implacable feelings of body-hatred, to the variously maladaptive strategies I’ve cleaved to over the years for coping with such events.  My present weight isn’t a consequence of blithely rejecting patriarchal paradigms about the female body; I’m (comparitively?) fat because I eat to excess (while engaging in no appreciable physical activity) whenever I am completely freaked out, which is often. THAT is why my present physical dimensions are unacceptable to me; as unacceptable, indeed, as was my previous (albeit brief) experience of involuntary, rapid weight loss. Just as my human functioning is grossly undermined by my perpetual insomnia and sleep deprivation, so it is also undermined by my being overweight; both problems are the direct result of maladaptive and, yes, disabling coping strategies.

Certainly, I’m not impervious to those cultural messages that seek the “purposeful physical diminution” (Twisty’s phrase) of women as a class - messages which are at the misogynist center of the diet industry as a whole. (Here, the midnight actions of radical feminists who have, for example, superglued the locks at Jenny Craig centers make perfect sense to me.)

But as I struggle to change my life, to improve both my physical and emotional health, there is a lot of experimention to see what does and doesn’t help.  I feel as conflicted about “dieting” as I do, for example, about psychiatric medications; as such, at any given moment I may be dieting or not, “on my meds” or not.

I do know that I feel physically and emotionally better when I am able to refrain from compulsive eating habits (as when I’m sticking to a given diet), and when I am able to force myself out of the house (despite anxiety attacks over environments like our local gym) in order to exercise. This, in itself, is not about kowtowing to patriarchal expectations about female behavior and appearance; in fact, it’s ultimately about rejecting the residual influences of all that internalized, sexist rot.

Which, essentially, is what I was trying to get at with those original, unfinished drafts, almost a year ago when that ‘fat as a feminist issue’ brouhaha erupted. I suppose it’s better to have finally summoned this (still partial) response, than if I’d continued to stew in silence. Now of course, having knocked out this, I still have hundreds more languishing drafts on other, equally if not more important subjects, few of which I will likely return to.

But, hell, I had to (re-) start somewhere.

*For two excellent examples of this enviable ‘toughness’ quality in feminist bloggers, to which I can only hope to aspire, see here for how Ariel summed up the aforementioned shitstorm situation, and Twisty’s characteristically hilarious Guidelines for Commenters.

Will be offline for some time while I mull over some major decisions, medical and otherwise, which I’ll have to make in the coming weeks, and which (for now at least) are unbloggable.

Nothing to get panicked over, it’s just a… thing, that’s all. In any event, do know that my silences (as always) should not be taken personally.

[Note: The following post was written under the duress of both a migraine and pain related to a hematoma in my abdominal wall following my surgery last month. And also, asthma, which might not seem significant here until one factors in the effect that asthmatic coughing can have on two such sources of pain. Which is to say (duh) that it’s all rather amplified for me right now.]

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There is something about the physical plane that seems like such an affront to me lately (indeed: it’s been an affront to my whole family).

Five weeks and one day ago, I was in the ER with an ovarian cyst, said to be in the process of rupturing. I was led to believe, at that time, that it might resolve on its own. But then, days later, I learned I’d have to have surgery, though it wouldn’t happen for several more days. (Which gave me lots more time within which to worry, also - bonus! - without ever being wholly out of pain.)

There was one little event that happened between the date I found out I’d have to have surgery, and the date I finally did, which I never wrote about (much less, told my doctor). That is to say, I spent a great portion of one of the nights between the diagnosis and the surgery throwing up. (Which, in itself, is never a pleasant feeling, but with the Abdominal Demon in residence, it was that much more fucked up for me at the time.)

I didn’t tell the doctor because I was afraid he’d postpone the surgery, and I was in so much pain that I was desperate to get it all over with. I figured it was just some passing bug (which, in fact, it may have been; also, my eldest daughter had similar symptoms around the same time). But now, of course, I can’t help but laugh over recent news of a salmonella contamination of peanut butter products affecting people in our state (among others).

Though I didn’t think much of the story when it first aired, I finally got up the energy earlier this evening to go to our shelves and make sure our (mostly empty) jar did not have the dreaded “2111″ at the beginning of its lot number.

Um. Oh well:

So while I have no idea whether the respective barf-fests endured by my two children and me, at various points over the last several weeks, have anything to do with this peanut butter fiasco, it is beginning to seem a certifiable truth that, lately, the physical universe is out to get me.

Perhaps, indeed, I am being punished for a lifetime of gross overindulgence in peanut butter. (I am, in fact, responsible for most of our current peanut butter supply’s disappearance.)

If so, then perhaps the (ewwww, yuck, icky icky ewwww) hair in my pizza tonight* was also a sign from the Great Beyond; God is angry with me for eating more cheap, crappy, fatty foods (which I don’t even particularly like) than, say, blanched organic vegetables (which I would love).

To which I say, Okay, fine, God - but who’s going to finance all these nice healthy groceries?

---

*At a cheap pizza joint that shall remain unnamed, and which I did not complain about at the time, as 1) I was too grossed out to speak and 2) I was pretty sure the only result of such action would be that some minimum wage worker would lose his or her job, or at least get yelled at. I must say, however, that it deeply disturbed me to have Lou Dobbs issuing anti-immigrant invective from the television set there, all the while young Hispanic women and men worked at furious speeds to bus the tables. The clientele was comprised of mostly working class black, white, and Hispanic families, and it seemed to me that (on the macro- level, at least) our accumulations of buffet plates were, on some collective level, compensatory indulgences, responses to learned deprivation. (I, for one, never qualified for the medical moniker of “obese,” until I’d been through involuntary periods of severe hunger, at various points in the late 80s and early 90s, following which my metabolism was screwed and I was far more prone to binge eating.) How many of us in that room had, or will eventually develop diabetes, I wonder?

Oh, and if you think it’s funny that I can take a post about peanut butter and turn it into some self-conscious political screed, see this post by Morgaine at The Goddess (a blog of which, I might specify, I am a fan). She actually manages to work in a tangent about Anthrax!

Tags: classism, immigration, Overtly Political, Parenting, The Body, womens healthclassism, immigration, Overtly Political, Parenting, The Body, womens health

Yesterday I wrote about my youngest daughter’s all night barf-fest (among other medical matters of late), during which time she was running enough of a fever that her little body had approximately the same energetic tone as a giant wet noodle.

Then, as if by magic (actually, it was Gatorade, Tylenol, and lots of naps), she became reanimated late yesterday afternoon, resulting in this picture of supreme goofiness. (I especially like the neck rest pillow’s redeployment as a hat.)

Anyhow, she’s better now, though still not operating at 100% of her usual energy level, so I’m keeping her home from school for one more day. We’ll have to recheck her kidney function once she’s been free of symptoms for a few weeks (because of the HSP; this viral tummy thing appears to have been a whole separate issue, says her doc), but I’m optimistic.

Really, after that goofy grin, how could I not feel optimistic?

Tags: Parenting, The BodyParenting, The Body

More than a week ago, my youngest daughter Annalisa was diagnosed with a vascular disorder called Henoch-Schönlein purpura, or HSP. I’m really not a big fan of diseases with that many syllables (or those that involve blood as such, after the same child’s terrifying hospitalization about four years ago with Septicemia), but I was reasured by the pediatrician that HSP wasn’t a particularly uncommon or alarming problem, and would likely resolve on its own.

Which, as of the day before yesterday (when I actually had Annalisa with me while we were at the doctor with her big sister, who was sick with something entirely different), it seemed like it was. The spots on her legs had faded to almost nothing. And the blood test from the week before hadn’t given any indication of the most serious complication of HSP: renal disease. So I wasn’t worrying.

Then after dinner last night, she threw up. I crossed my fingers. Maybe it was just some minor stomach upset. But then it happened again. (Three more times, as I’m writing this - at 2:47 AM the next day.) I give her a bath, I cuddle her, I set her up on the couch with cartoons while I scrub everything she’s barfed on. (Meanwhile in the bath, I’d noticed she has a fresh crop of the red lesions characteristic of HSP on her shins.) Only so much I can do until the morning comes.

Kids complain about all sorts of things, you know? They don’t want to do their homework, so they have a stomachache. They’re mad at having to pick up their toys, so they have a headache. (Probably because they’ve heard their mama gripe about headaches.) Then they want to stay up all night instead of going to sleep, so they emerge from the bedroom mere minutes after the requisite tucking-in, and state emphatically that they have just had a nightmare - when it is not possible, given the amount of elapsed time, that they could have slept, much less entered into the REM state (and also there are also those giveaway smile dimples that betray them as they make the nightmare claim).

But now, this nagging worry. Her complaints about very odd things: feet and legs hurting, her wrists, her back. I ask if she means on the inside or outside, and she says inside. She further clarifies that she means in her bones, not her muscles. She’s a very articulate seven-year-old. (Who only just turned seven, last week. I had this whole “Chuck E. Cheese is the Devil” draft of a blog post* about it, which doesn’t seem as funny to me now as it did at the time, so I don’t suspect I’ll be fishing it, much less posting it.)

So tomorrow, we go back to the doctor. It’s helpful, of course, that I’m finally recovered enough from my recent surgery and whatnot that I can be schlepping my spawn about town seeking their relief. (Which their father would just as gladly do for them, but for the fact that with his having taken off so much time to care for me, he really shouldn’t miss more work if he can avoid it, particularly given that his income is all that materially supports the four of us.)

So forgive me, dears, if I’m off radar again for awhile. I’ll post updates as warranted and possible. I’m sure everything will be fine, yes. This is a disturbance in my universe, to be sure, but (alas) most of my life has been spent in one kind of crisis or another, to the point that it’s one context in which I actually function much better than I do in times of relative calm.

In any event, whatever blogging rhythm I might have had going for awhile, with an unusual torrent of blog posts/commentaries, has since been pretty well thrown. (And about that blogroll. As if anybody is even going to believe me, at this point, when I make crazy claims to the effect that I’m trying to fix it, really I am.)

Right now I’m watching a rerun of Branford Marsalis on Sesame Street with the kid, who is starting to show signs of sleepiness again. I’ve given her a Zofran tablet from however many of her nonstop-barfing-illnesses ago (the expiration date isn’t for another six months, so that’s good). Hopefully that will keep the dogs at bay for the rest of the night (I keep forgetting now it’s) early morning.

Various animated creatures are doing an interpretive dance number dedicated to the number 10. And Big Bird teaches us about the letter Q, has written Q is for Quack on the blackboard. One of his apparent pupils, a duck, moos. One wonders if, next, a cow will quack. Zoey, the orange Muppet who was always good chums with more well-known Elmo, still has a delightful voice. Children are shown playing with refrigerator magnets, spelling out their lives. Segue back to variations on the theme of the letter Q; adults and children of all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities are shown saying, singing, and in one case signing the word “Quack.” My daughter and I are still rooting for the duck’s recovery of its Quacker when the most obvious of all Sesame Street segues occurs: Ernie’s song, Rubber Duckie.

And as Ernie sings the familiar words, I remember that “Annalisa” has the same number of syllables as “Rubber Duckie,” so in my head, I sing it that way.

*It’s been a week for beginning, then abandoning so many drafts of things: blog posts, poems, emails, stories, comments on others’ blogs. One is supposed to strike while proverbial irons are hot, and by now damn near all of these have cooled. Clearly, taking care of my kids is more important, but as a writer this ‘unfinished business’ business is nonetheless a great bother.

Tags: Parenting, The BodyParenting, The Body

I promised earlier that I would post an update once the biopsy results following my recent surgery were back, and the news is good (even if I’m still not completely recovered) - no cancer.

Given the “complex” nature of the cyst that had been taken out, with multiple walls and masses within its structure, it was something that had to be ruled out, although they told me at the time that they didn’t consider it especially likely that they would find cancer.

Call me a high-strung healthcare consumer, but when a doctor uses the term “cancer” in the course of a consultation about my substantially aggrieved innards, I rather prefer estimations concerning the likelihood of malignancy to be more along the lines of “zero.”

*whew*

I still have to go back to the doc Monday for follow up stuff (all that most loathesome poking and prodding that I’d deferred for years, until there was an obvious crisis requiring surgery), but for right now, I’m exceedingly pleased.

Tags: The Body, womens healthThe Body, womens health

I have a monster of a post presently percolating in ‘The Past is Not Dead‘ category, the draft subtitle for which is

“In which narratives concerning the Superbowl, prostitution politics, Black History Month, the U.S. Department of Labor, and my ex-girlfriend intersect.”

It’s all about Minnesota, of course. (My tangential commentary du jour on said state, centering around its infamy as a site of unspeakable cold, can be found here. Needless to say, when Minneapolis made the news this morning for its -13° temperature - without factoring in windchill - I was not sorry I’d left.)

Is this, perhaps, prohibitively unwieldy for a blog post’s subtitle? (If one concedes that blog post subtitles are ever warranted in the first place.) Sure, but so’s my history, so whatevahz. (Hmmm. This is what happens when one is a regional and cultural schizophrenic: remnants of pidgin from high school years spent in rural Hawaiʻi* leak through, in the course of referencing my four-year stint in living hell Minnesota, while writing from the American South which gave us Faulkner and thus, my “past is not dead” blog category. Damn you, hybridity!)

Anyway, the damned thing is taking longer than I’d expected to write. Which maybe means something. Like it should be a story rather than a blog entry. And there’s stuff I’m going to have to fact-check. I have a pretty good long-term memory, but when the material is a decade old and involves other living people, of course have to do my research going to do my research.

(Then again, since I am writing about events going back to 1993, perhaps it won’t kill me if I can’t finish the story in the next few days, or even weeks.)

Other things I’ve been up to:

• Feeding my addiction to Wordie. Words contributed thus far (i.e., not already listed by other Wordies) include bligot, wrasslin’, adjectivally, The Rapture, hybridity, garrotte, blognosticate, on the q.t. (thank you, Scooter Libby!), and my all-time favorite word, again from the Hawaiʻi period: humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa.
• Recovering (still) from last month’s surgery. Hence the Demerol. The secondary problem of my surgically-induced hematoma in the abdominal wall (previously bitched about here) continues to be unpleasant.
• Finding God. Or rather, looking up from the incision site within my aggrieved navel (a different kind of navel-gazing, to be sure: but still, navel-gazing) and remembering God, among people I trust, in ways that make sense to me.
• Watching an inordinate number of movies. Via cable: In Her Shoes. (Granted, a plot line revolving in part around high heels has its questionable elements, but it satisfies the requirements as set forth in Alison Bechdel’s The Rule.) Via theater: Notes on a Scandal. (I was terrified to note the extent to which Judi Dench’s character reminded me of one of my exes.) Via our Science Museum’s IMAX facility, Happy Feet. Via DVD: Crash.
• Listening to wonderfulness that is Corntooth, the bluegrass/country/folk rock brainchild of various of our friends, some of whom are better known for their work in local punk, rock, and/or metal outfits like Alabama Thunderpussy, RPG, and Lamb of God. Who can possibly resist Janie and Matt Conner’s perfectly complementary crooning (these two aren’t just married; they’re married) over so much brilliantly executed bluegrassy rock instrumentation? At Mark and Karrie Morton’s recent wedding reception, I got Janie to promise me that Corntooth will have an EP out soon, and I’m holding her to it.

*Kapaʻa High School was rural enough by most folks’ standards, but I lived in Hanalei. Round trip journeys to and from school (down a winding two-lane road - reduced to one lane at bridge crossings) were around 50 miles. That’s what I mean by “rural.”

Tags: Corntooth, Friends, Hawaiʻi, Literary, Minnesota, Movies, The Body, The Past is Not Dead, WordieCorntooth, Friends, Hawaiʻi, Literary, Minnesota, Movies, The Body, The Past is Not Dead, Wordie