Monday, September 25, 2023
Where I'm at on social media (literally and philosophically)
Thursday, December 22, 2022
Horoscopes
Star:
You never turn down the chance to try something new. You've got an adventurer's spirit; though, it's not just for the fun of it. You enjoy learning and exploring because it has its practical uses, too. You're loyal and kind, and you don't mind going out of your way to help people in need. You've got a big heart and an even bigger sense of humour. You find comfort and camaraderie in unique and interesting people, just like you. This year, a romantic connection or an exciting creative project might find you when you least expect it.
Domestic issues will be in the spotlight over the coming year and if you want to maintain a friendly atmosphere on the home front you may have to do things for loved ones that seem silly to you. Don’t worry, it will be more than worth it.
Both of these sound ridiculously inaccurate. My birthday horoscopes have been ridiculously inaccurate for several years (I don't remember if it's since the pandemic started or if it's since the head injury - time has no meaning) but I record them anyway
Monday, August 08, 2022
How the universe is mocking me
Sunday, June 26, 2022
Not that there's anything wrong with that
Saturday, June 11, 2022
Cause and effect
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
Horoscopes
The day brings a burst of energy and creative inspiration our way, which can bode well for work-related projects, as well as personal goals. However, as we head toward the afternoon, the vibe changes significantly, leaving us feeling a bit heavy or dejected. We can beat the blues by ramping up the self-care and focusing on what brings us joy. At the same time, it might be helpful to lean on the support of others when it comes to working through any difficulties. Being open to new experiences also can help us break out of a bad mood.
There may be a tendency over the coming year to go looking for conflict, most likely just for the fun of it. For best results, channel your aggressive instincts into positive and creative areas. Sporting and other physical activities will help burn off excess energy.
Last year's Toronto Star horoscope made the bravely specific prediction that I would fall in love in May.
I did not fall in love with a person. But, if I do flail about trying to find an interpretation that makes this statement true, it's possible that I did fall in love with no working, as I took a full month off work for the first time in my life and discovered I didn't miss it at all. (Unfortunately, I still need an income and this is still the easiest and most reliable way for me to earn an income.)
I'm starting the new years with 2 full months off work. We'll see where that takes me...
Saturday, July 31, 2021
My second COVID vaccine experience
Saturday, May 22, 2021
In which I do literally nothing for 4 weeks and then start doing stuff again
Saturday, January 02, 2021
My 2021 new year's resolution
I hadn't been planning on making a resolution, but a simple and useful one came to me a couple of weeks ago:
While the coffee brews, I'll do something I've been procrastinating.
Normally, while the coffee is brewing, I stare blankly at the internet doing nothing - after all, I can't do anything productive when I haven't had my coffee yet!
So now, instead of doing nothing, I'll do something I've been procrastinating. Something small, because it doesn't take that long for coffee to brew. Empty the dishwasher. Break down a cardboard box for recycling. Make an online purchase.
Since it doesn't take very long for coffee to brew, I might not finish my task. I might just empty one rack of the dishwasher, or just manage to remove the tape from the box, or just add one item to my cart. That's okay. I can stop when the coffee is ready. Or I can keep up the momentum, whatever feels right in the moment.
This works well for me for several reasons:
1. I respond well to "sprints" - working full-out at a task until some external phenomenon interrupts me. (Yes, I've heard of the pomodoro method. No, it hasn't solved all my life problems.) Coffee brewing time is the perfect length for a sprint.
2. This doesn't require any additional time commitment. Not even the infamous "just 15 minutes a day!" Coffee brewing time was previously unused dead time, and I've found a way to make use of it.
3. It helps me address the things that fall through the cracks in my system. Some things pile up because there isn't a place for them in my system (which I never managed to figure out how to reboot), or because there isn't enough room for them in my system. This lets me make progress on those things without having to figure out how to revamp the system, or having to take the emotional risk of completely disregarding the system.
4. There are no specific "shoulds" or tacit prerequisites on my "to do while the coffee brews" list. Part of the problem with my system is I've inadvertently imposed prerequisites on myself. I keep falling into a trap of "I can't do the thing that really needs doing because the system dictates that I have to do other things first!" (Unfortunately, removing prerequisites isn't sufficient to fix the system and sometimes would bring its own problems.) But while the coffee brews, anything that needs doing meets the requirements.
I've been doing this for a few weeks already, and have made a noticeable dent in my tangible and mental to-do piles. (If you could see my piles, you'd be like "That's an after picture???" and the answer is yes, it is.) We'll see if it's enough to affect my quality of life in the long run.
Tuesday, December 22, 2020
40
I turn 40 today!
I think I am in a good place in life.
- Apart from the fact that I'm not married, I've done literally everything I imagined doing with my life. I have no bucket list.
- I'm weathering the pandemic well, and sustainably. I was sprinting at first and had to dial it back to a marathon pace, but I can keep this up long-term if necessary.
- So many of the life decisions I made when I was younger - so many of the life decisions people tried to dissuade me from! - have paid off during the pandemic. Obviously luck and privilege also contributed strongly to my coming through the pandemic well, but it's remarkable to me how basically every life decision people tried to dissuade me from paid off during this pandemic.
- My job comes easily to me. It's harder after my head injury, but still doesn't meet the criteria of objectively hard.
- Based on information to date, buying my condo was the right decision.
- My body continues to do what I need it to as well as it ever has. Any issues are head-injury-related, not aging-related. (Of course, I'd also love for the head injury to no longer be a factor.)
- I have social capital, at least in the circles I move in. At work, with family and friends, in the community, I can say "I think we should do X" or "No, I won't be doing Y", and I'm heard and respected. I can also say "I don't know how this works, what do I do?" or "I'm frightened and confused" or "I can't lift this", and people help. (Again, privilege is certainly a factor, but it didn't work this way for me when I was younger.) In non-pandemic times, people I know will let me hold their baby, and even strangers will let me pet their dog.
- I've been following a lot of younger people on Twitter, and it makes me feel confident about the future and quite content to step aside and let the youth lead. They tend to be more radical than people I encounter in the natural course of my life (most of whom are my age or older), and I feel good about this. I like the idea of a world where people like me are dated and old-school and things are growing and evolving beyond what we could even imagine when we were visiting geocities sites with our dial-up modems.
- I've recently stumbled into a new fandom (Good Omens!) and it's really good for me. I'm going through the same kind of growth and evolution as when I fell into Eddie Izzard fandom 13 years ago, and I'm looking forward to seeing who I become when I emerge on the other side.
Horoscopes
My birthday horoscopes ceased having any remotely accurate interpretation with my head injury, but I'm still recording them here for my own reference.
Artistic activities must be giving every chance to thrive over the coming year, even if it means having to cut back on work and getting by on less financially. You’ve been promising to create something amazing for as long as you can remember, so get to it!
Profound, patient and prepared, you are in it for the long haul. A project you passionately believe in begins and succeeds brilliantly in 2022. Your strongly controlled emotions will find an outlet this year. If single, you tend to be solitary, but you do fall in love this year, in May. If attached, your relationship adds much richness to your life. GEMINI is light and almost ethereal compared to you.
As an aside, my horoscopes promise me love every year and it never materializes. This year's Globe & Mail horoscope is the first one I can remember that didn't promise me love.
(Also, absolutely everyone in the world is light and almost ethereal compared to me, and I'm not sure why that's in my horoscope.)
Thursday, August 13, 2020
Current status
I've never not had a Babcia before.
She didn't die of COVID, but the pandemic still fucks everything up. No one could sit with Babcia and hold her hand. She never got to meet her two youngest great-grandchildren, both of whom were born during the pandemic.
I don't know when I'll be able to hug someone.
Even without the pandemic considerations, this is completely different from other bereavements I've had. It's a completely different emotional arc. I think maybe every bereavement is different. No one talks about this.
Sunday, December 22, 2019
Horoscopes
IF TODAY IS YOUR BIRTHDAY: What you can expect this year is the unexpected. Once you find your life settling down and working well, do not be surprised at the wave of excitement that falls on you. Children and loved ones could be involved. If single, you could be overwhelmed by a series of passionate love affairs; with each affair, you might believe this is the right person. Let time be the judge. If attached, you will not be able to complain about boredom. It will be as if you are newlyweds or new lovers again. SCORPIO encourages you to live life with passion.
Globe and Mail:
A Mars-Pluto link on your birthday will add a touch of iron to your nature and anyone who thinks they can bully you is going to realize you are not the pushover they thought you were. What happened to your easygoing attitude? Who knows, but it’s gone!
The Star one just sounds exhausting. The Globe and Mail one kind of already happened as I tried to figure out how to make a life after my head injury.
Saturday, November 09, 2019
Not blogathoning this year
However, this year's goal is to eliminate things that don't serve me well, and blogathoning would not serve me well in the current context.
I do have a quite a few posts half drafted and they will come along in due course, it's just spending an entire day on it that would be unhelpful.
Friday, June 28, 2019
How I made my sweaters stop acting like clutter
When I'm sitting at my desk and I have to remove a sweater, I stand up. Then, as I'm removing the sweater, I take two steps until I'm standing in the door of my bedroom. Then I throw the sweater on my bed.
This means I have to hang up the sweater before I can go to sleep because it's lying on my bed, but that isn't too much of an imposition because my bedtime routine already includes putting away clothes that have ended up on my bed in the course of the day. (For example, when I'm dressing in the morning, I tend to take off my bathrobe and throw it on my bed. If I change clothes when I get home, I tend to lie the old ones on my bed.)
Yes, a perfectly diligent person wouldn't leave clothes lying around on the bed and would instead put them away immediately. But we've already established that I'm not a perfectly diligent person, and throwing the sweaters on the bed instead of hanging them on my desk chair puts the sweaters closer to where they should be while preventing them from cluttering up the room where they shouldn't be.
I don't remember when or why I started doing this, but it solves my silly problem!
Saturday, February 16, 2019
The tight bra chronicles
I conducted experiments in the days that followed, and the correlation was clear: bras were causing the back pain. The pain worsened and worsened as I wore a bra, was immediately relieved when I unhooked the bra, but residual pain lingered even after I removed the bra.
Which is a problem, because I have the kind of body where my breasts hurt if I don't wear a bra!
The weeks that followed were consumed with bra shopping and bra testing and immersing myself in solutions to back pain. And finally, after much expense and despair, I think I have a bra paradigm that's not exacerbating the pain, and, in the absence of bras that are exacerbating the pain, I think my back is healing. I have gone as long as six hours without adjusting or thinking about my bra, and the residual pain is such that I wouldn't even be noticing it if I weren't obsessing about how my back feels.
And this makes me feel hopeless.
Not for myself specifically - all signs point to me, personally, being on an improvement trajectory. Rather, it makes me despair for all humanity.
This is such a stupid problem that, despite over a quarter-century of bra wearing, I could never have predicted. Yes, I could see with my eyes that the old bras were a bit snug, but before this has only resulted in unsightly bulges, not unprecedented back pain.
And then it took significant time and resources to fix - time and resources that were only available to me because of the privilege I have that is not available to everyone. Many people can't drop everything and spend hundreds of dollars on bras - for quite a few people, it may well be a choice between a bra that doesn't hurt and food for their family. (The single cheapest available bra that didn't exacerbate the pain was $60, but I needed a fitting from a store where the cheapest appropriate bra was $80 to figure out the approach to solve my problem.) Most people don't have a comfy work-from-home situation where they can switch their bra four times a day, or sit around slathered with Icy Hot or Voltaren, or take frequent yoga breaks. Many people might have to pick up extra hours at work wearing a painful bra to make the money they need to afford a non-painful bra!
What if I had to choose between feeding my children and getting a new bra? What if I were a refugee fleeing oppression with only the clothes on my back? What if I lived somewhere where I didn't have access to expert bra fitters, or the internet access and/or savvy to find out options on the internet? What if I didn't have a credit card that I could use for online shopping?
And this is just one of the zillions and zillions of stupid little problems that could come sneaking up and disrupt people's lives! Not to mention the zillions and zillions of much bigger problems that some people reading this are having, as they sit there saying "Ha, she thinks a bra that hurts is a real problem!"
***
It was a year ago this weekend that I had my head injury. My eyesight still hasn't completely resolved, and my vision therapy progress has been stagnant for so many months that I think it may never completely resolve.
The head injury falls into an annoying space that, before it happened, I never knew existed: an injury that hinders your quality of life, perhaps permanently, but isn't serious enough to count as a disability.
I'm fortunate enough to have disability insurance, so I figured if something happened to me, I'd be fine. If I can't work, I'd go on disability.
But I can work with the head injury, it's just harder, and takes more out of me so I have less left for the rest of life. If I wanted to take sick leave and my manager asked for a doctor's note (my employer's policy is that it's up to the manager's judgement), I don't know if I'd be able to get one. I certainly couldn't get the documentation necessary to go on disability. So, basically, life is harder, but not bad enough to be permitted a respite.
As I googled around the idea of back pain, I discovered that it's similar - not even as a question of whether it counts as a disability, but just for whether it counts as a problem.
Medical criteria for evaluating back pain ask about whether it affects your sleep, your range of motion, whether it affects your daily activities. This affects none of those. It's a 1 on the pain scale. Even WebMD doesn't think I need to see a doctor unless it persists for over 6 weeks (and they probably mean six weeks from when I stopped wearing bras that worsened the pain.)
And when I read up on what happens when you go to the doctor for back pain, the emphasis seems to be on pain management, not on solving the underlying problem. (There doesn't seem much that can be done to solve the underlying problem, except take care of yourself and maybe it will go away eventually.) It seems quite likely the doctor would say "It goes away when you take an Advil? Great! Keep it up!"
So this is another area where life becomes harder but not bad enough to be permitted a respite.
How many more things like this are going to happen??? And what on earth do people with real problems do?
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Horoscopes
But here's this year's, just to see what happens:
Toronto Star:
This year you will learn to handle your temper. You might be feistier than others realize. You also can be spontaneous at times. Try to curb unexpected actions or words. You might find that you often see both sides of a problem. If you are single, you could attract a strong group of admirers. Your temper and volatile style could be a problem when dating, though. If you are attached, the two of you experience more closeness than in the recent past. Perhaps you will pursue a mutually enjoyed hobby together. CANCER can be quite nurturing.My mother's sign is Cancer and she's always quite nurturing, so nothing new there.
They say the same sort of thing about "if you're single/if you're attached" every year, and it never comes to pass. Someone more ambitious than I could look into whether they say that for every birthday.
Globe and Mail:
A full moon on your birthday suggests you will need to make a decision that not everyone will be happy with. What really matters, of course, is that you are happy with it. It’s time to let go of the past and to embrace your glorious future.I've never in my life made a decision that absolutely everyone was happy with, so that's basic reality. However, I have already decided to throw away my system and start over, so hopefully that will give me a glorious future.
Sunday, November 11, 2018
My 2019 New Year's resolution
Then, in the past few weeks, things keep happening where being perfectly diligent results in bad outcomes, but being less than perfectly diligent results in good outcomes.
And I realized this needs to be my next new year's resolution: be less diligent.
The need for less diligence isn't just a result of the bad luck I've been having the past couple of weeks. It's also a result of the fact that my system hasn't been serving me well.
My system was originally designed when I was 22 and unemployed. Social media didn't exist then, and my personal care required far less diligence.
Since then, whenever something comes up that I need or want to be part of my routine, I've been adding it to my system. But I never took anything out, because everything in there seemed just as necessary as it has always been. I did notice problems with this approach, but I still continued it.
However, since my head injury, this has all been snowballing. What with the massive amounts of rest I needed in the aftermath of my head injury, and the general need to scale back on everything, and the addition of vision therapy to my routine, I'm essentially 6 months behind. Parts of the system were designed to be cumulative, so if I don't finish the task today I have to do it tomorrow, but since the head injury it has gotten ridiculous. I feel hopelessly behind, which is a stupid feeling to be living with every single moment of every single day when you're meeting all your work deadlines and paying all your bills on time and getting ahead on your mortgage.
So my project for the next year is to destroy and rebuild my system.
I will continue following the current system until my birthday, but for the purpose of gathering data. I will note what aspects aren't serving me and reflect upon how to fix those problems.
Then, on my birthday, I will erase my backlog so I'm no longer "behind", introduce any fixes I think of between now and then, and continue following the system for the purpose of gathering data.
The next year will be spent pinpointing which aspects of the system don't serve me, and figuring out ways to fix them so they do serve me. Then I will reboot the system again on my 39th birthday, to reflect everything I've learned in the interim.
And, hopefully, I will enter the second half of my life with a system that serves me well and reflects my actual needs, rather than punishing me for not meeting some completely arbitrary standard of diligence.
*8
When I turned 18, I became a legal adult and endeavoured to start living as such rather than as my parents' child (which was difficult given that I was still in high school and living in my parents' house - both normal for an 18-year-old at the time, because this was back when high school was still five years long).
Turning 28 also felt significant, in that I suddenly didn't feel like I was cool enough for my age. I made myself a series of three anti-resolutions, that ultimately led to my Entitlement journey, which would ultimately give me the tools I would ultimately need to adult properly.
In December I turn 38, and that also feels significant because it's the halfway mark in many respects:
- My statistical life expectancy at birth is 76, and 38 is half of 76.
- I moved out of my parents' house at 19, and 19 x 2 = 38. So, starting this coming year, the majority of my life will have been spent living independently rather than as my parents' dependent.
- At the age of 38, I will mark my 16th anniversary as a professional translator. This is significant because I was 16 when I came to the realization that translation is the right career for me, so, starting this year, I will have spent more of my life a translator than not a translator. (The six years between realizing I should be a translator and starting to work as a professional translator were spent completing high school and going to university for my translation degree.)
38 feels like it's going to be meaningful, and I think I'm just starting to figure out how. That's for my next post.
Friday, July 20, 2018
So it turns out I'm not an alcoholic
Some time passed, with my brain doing a variety of strange things, most of which were extremely temporary (i.e. one day of weirdness), the stickiest of which was vision issues, and none of which were cognitive issues or balance issue or anything that could be exacerbated by alcohol.
But I never got around to going to the LCBO, so I continued not drinking.
After some time, I noticed it was taking significantly longer to fall asleep each night, and I wondered if that was because of the absence of alcohol. I thought I should go to the LCBO, get just one small bottle, and have just one standard drink under controlled conditions, for science.
But I never got around to it, so I continued not drinking.
The sleep situation stabilized. I started vision therapy. I scaled back and eventually completely eliminated my system of rest breaks. I spent more days not crying than crying. I started working on waking up to an alarm again (with mixed results).
And I still never got around to going to the LCBO.
It's been five months since I had any alcohol. It has occurred to me on and off that I should have a drink at home under controlled conditions so I can see how my body reacts, and I just keep...not getting around to it.
In the past, people have expressed concern about my drinking because I like drinking. People have expressed concern about drinking because I drink alone rather than going out or inviting people over every single time I fancy a drink. People have expressed concern about my drinking because people have expressed concern about my drinking.
But I'm pretty sure alcoholics don't just...not get around to buying more alcohol, especially when they have already arrived at the conclusion that they should drink alcohol for science.
***
Normally when people talk about not drinking for a period of time, they talk about how they feel better and don't miss it.
I don't feel better for not drinking. I don't feel worse, but I don't feel better either. I haven't lost weight. I don't feel like I've saved money. I don't feel in any way healthier. Basically everything feels exactly the same, except for the residual symptoms of my head injury.
It wouldn't be fair to say I don't miss it either. Whenever I see a mention of someone drinking wine in something I'm reading, I think "Ooh, a glass of wine would be nice!" I kind of miss the feeling of fun-twirling-around tipsy, but I'm so wary of falling now that I wouldn't risk that anyway. At the same time, I don't really feel deprived, because it isn't something I can't do or shouldn't do. It's just another thing I'm procrastinating, and I can stop procrastinating whenever I want.