Where's My Virtual Race Medal?

 

(This post is a brain dump. Probably of no interest to anyone. I'm chasing focus today. Thought some word vomitus here might help.)

I finally did it. Spent a full eight hours doing medical shit. Good Lord. I feel like someone forced me to participate in one of those virtual race exercise thingies. Where's my medal? I want a medal.

It's just appointments. Nothing exciting. Schlep an hour here for this for the teen, drop teen at home, slurp a quick lunch, schlep back out an hour in a different direction, do a bunch of testing stuff. 

Bah.

Our hell month is almost over. All I have looming is maybe the colonoscopy and upper GI scope. Well, not really. I'm telling myself August won't be a bunch of medical mess, but that's magical thinking. I'll still have stuff. Teen still has some different weekly appointments, but hopefully August will be overall slower. Maybe. I am dreaming...

Someone asked me about following up the kidney stone. I...don't know? No one said boo to me about doing anything. I'm not looking for more to do. I seem fine. The docs don't care. My GFR is amazing. Can I ignore it? I'd like to ignore it? So I'm ignoring it. If I get some monster stone or something changes, I'll reassess.

I'm still really tired, but I assume I'm not having oxygen drops anymore. I haven't felt the need to check the pulse ox the last few weeks. The covid joint and nerve pain has pretty much resolved now...I'm sleeping better because the pain isn't waking me up. 

I read in the medical literature that covid stuff usually phases out within 2-3 months so I used that as my benchmark for whether to seek care for long haul or not. The fatigue is the only remaining symptom, although I imagine it would be blamed solely on the sleep apnea which...eh. We'll see.

My foot isn't super pissed at the moment so it's not disrupting my sleep.  Maybe triggering it/reinjuring it with better shoes offering more support got it to heal more fully this time? We'll see. I'm swimming a bit, but not doing anything super strenuous that would freak it out.

Yeah. I should exercise. But it seems so futile when I know something will drop me right back to zero again. I have lost my interest in fitness. I'm burned out. Maybe it'll pass. I don't even want to resume dancing lessons. I'm not sure I can right now. I'm just so tired.

Asthma still holding steady without any meds. That's a miracle. Very interesting. I'm super curious to see what happens with this. But of course, this now means I need a rescue inhaler on me at all times in case it spins out of control without warning and I'm super not used to that--with daily inhalers, I didn't typically need to worry about acute attacks out of nowhere, and if things flared, I had enough pre-installed protection that I could limp along until I got home.

I mean, I did/do sometimes carry albuterol with me just in case, but it's not been a hard core must have every day carry thing. It's been more knowing I'm going to be somewhere that presents some risk or where it won't be easy for me to access my meds.

With stopping all my inhalers, I don't know what's going to happen next, but I do know I don't want to be caught by surprise. I'm trying to arm myself for bear. Trying to be proactive here.

How strange. Stopping meds has caused the problem of remembering to keep emergency meds with me. Ha. Not really what I was going for, guys. 

Garden stuff... no one cares but it makes me happy so shush and read. Harvested green beans twice so far. They are SO fresh. Oooo. Highly recommend. They are happy growers, almost fail proof. I'm just not sure my succession planting is going to pan out. I started running out of both seeds and space. I'd like to try to plant around twelve more plants, but we'll see if I get to it or if I can even find seeds. Need to research if I can just use the fresh seeds from the beans I'm growing...

I'm getting antsy because I have garlic coming to plant this fall and no idea where I'm going to put it. And I want to get twice blooming irises and make this massive iris bed of pretty for next spring. So much to do... I don't have the energy, but hubby will spot me.

Writing wise...this got long. Probably not super interesting, but I bet there's stuff in here you haven't thought of before. 

I'm going through a huge creative period that is far outpacing my ability to work. I have a trickster imagination. It likes to produce when it knows I don't have time to work. Ergo, I'm bursting with millions of good ideas...some I've started, some are brewing, everything is gold, which is rare. It's important not to waste the treasure trove that's popping up in my head. It won't last. I need to get stuff down so I can leverage it later.

And I'm doing a ton of reading and watching different shows in my genre which is fueling all this. The market has shifted a lot and I'm finally feeling like I'm getting a sense of the voice/angles/tropes that are most marketable now as well as spotting some untapped opportunities. Hopefully my health will let me have a productive working period for a while. 

I've also been reading more lgbtqia+ bipoc fiction and it's been very helpful as I'm looking for ways to represent diversity in my work without being a dumbass. 

 So it was interesting to be reading an lgbtqia+ bipoc anthology and see a slur just casually dropped in there and not for characterization, just as a word to add flavor. Hooligans. We all use it. It's very common but it's actually a pejorative directed at the Irish.  

I can't decide if they didn't know it was a slur--it's not one you'd think of as being a slur--or if it was a commentary on colonization? Which would be an interesting spin although probably I'm overthinking it. And also some people don't consider it a slur at all, and do we even consider it a slur anymore, has usage evolved past its origin? 

I'm not sure how to evaluate it and I'm all aflutter trying to sort it out lol.  I've tried to remove pejoratives and slurs based on a nation or ethnicity from my work as much as I can. I don't think many people realize how many words and phrases used to add 'flavor' are actually slurs with a pretty awful history. 

And then you have ancient slurs that have lost their punch. Vandal. Barbarian. These were used in ancient times and it's hard to feel like they refer to any group negatively, but originally they did. (I tend to let the ancient ones that are pretty well disconnected from their true spirit slide. It's hard to decide how far to take it. However, I'm pretty sure if I used the word vandal, Germans wouldn't take it personally.  And barbarian hasn't been a slur tied to race or ethnicity for a thousand years or so.)

Some people may think this is overkill, but a lot of words we use every day literally come from colonization and the othering of people in ways that led to massacres and horrible abuse. Same as sexism is embedded in our day-to-day language and patterns of speech...you can't unsee it once you look. And if we want to do better, to be better, we might need to use better words too.

And probably I've written a bunch of dumb shit here by the way. Used words that I wouldn't now. I will probably slip up and forget in the future. This stuff ends up hardwired and you don't think about it, you just write it or say it. It's very hard to untangle it from your neurons and yank it out of the language centers of your brain. It's a default by and large. With editing I can catch a lot of it, but we don't go around editing our daily lives so cleaning up that part is more of a challenge.