Rambling thoughts are rambling

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks to ysobel for the concept, I'm declaring Dreamwidth bankruptcy. It's not that I haven't read your posts, it's just that I'm too wiped to respond.


Bella has regained enough strength to resume leaping from the floor on to the couch between myself and MyGuy. Hurray! Her steady diet, since last September, of Prednisone and Cyclosporine have knocked back her immune-mediated anemia, which is great. Also knocked down, however, was any resistance to papillomavirus. From nose to tail she's got around 80 warts. When we chide her for scratching she actually stops, and she's so far avoided infection and the cone of shame. She's so itchy though. We gently scratch the unwarty skin and she writhes in ecstasy.



I listened to the first two Lord Peter Wimsey books on audio. The narrators were busy demonstrating their grasp of a range of accents, which makes for A+ soporific companionship when I'm too tired to read.


I'm on day 40 of a ridiculously expensive psych drug, lurasodine (aka Latuda). It has helped my mood, and its physical side effects are many and notable. Of most relevance, it's deleted two whole hours from my functional daily limit. Argghhhhh.

Lurasodine makes me constantly hungry and it's infamous for causing diabetes. I've maintained a high-protein, high-fat, low-carb diet for many years, where I ate until I was satisfied. Now I'm gaining weight again and I HATE THINKING ABOUT IT.


I have absorbed almost all of LulaVampiro's blog. I particularly recommend Less of a question, more of a comment, where James Mendez Hodes completely dismantles the sort of nonsense too often seen in convention panels. Even better is How To Change Your Conversation About Cultural Appropriation with the lovely concept of "The Antenna"

I sometimes describe cultural appropriation as an antenna. This is what I mean.

Suppose that somewhere far away from me, maybe in Sweden, a white person has dreadlocks. Suppose they come up in conversation, and I’m like, hey, what do y’all think about that? It’s not that I’m so worried about those dreadlocks and how they’ll affect me and my friends. The dreadlocks are in Sweden. I’ll get by. But I’m paying close attention to this conversation because experience has taught me that if someone leaps in to defend those white Swedish dreadlocks adamantly, that someone probably harbors some other opinions about race and identity which are more directly harmful to me and mine. The cultural appropriation discussion is the antenna that tells me whether something more dire might be out there. I wouldn’t be surprised if individuals whose views are the opposite of my own use the same topics for the opposite ends.

Gauging reactions to stealth aggressions and microaggressions is a crucial survival tool for us. These lower-stakes antennae feed us information about this social space’s threats without putting ourselves at great risk. Sometimes, when people of color make facetious comments or jokes about race, we’re consciously or unconsciously doing the same: we get crucial information from who takes the comment too seriously, who doesn’t get it, who gets it and laughs, and who gets it and laughs too much.