In which universe does this make any sense?
Okay, so I don’t really know how wi-fi works. I assume it’s some sort of transmitter/receiver relationship like radio or old-style television. I figure there needs to be an appropriate amount of proximity and an inversely appropriate lack of obstacles between the two stations, but once you’ve got a device that’s transmitting and a device that’s receiving, it should just work barring interference on the same frequency, right?
So why does my wi-fi signal degrade over time?
I have a cheap-ass Encore wireless DSL modem. It’s in the guest bedroom, which is at the front of the house. I do 99% of my computing from my bedroom, which is upstairs and at the opposite end of the house.
I can get online just fine most of the time; but then everything gets really shitty. I can barely surf, let alone watch vids on Netflix (which is, yes, my main use of my connection these days. So sue me). If I run a tracert, the first hop – between my computer and my modem – takes FOR. FUCKING. EVER.
And here’s where it gets weird: no standard troubleshooting (refresh wifi adapter, reboot computer, reboot modem, etc.) has any effect whatsoever, BUT if I just carry the netbook down to the router I can then put it back where it started and it WORKS JUST FINE for a week or more.
In my room I get two bars. Next to the modem, duh, I get five. All I have to do is get the netbook close to the router for a few minutes and my problems are solved for days. I have experienced this phenomenon too many times to dismiss it as coincidence. I don’t have to reboot anything, or even reconnect: I just have to get physically closer for a few minutes and my connection stabilizes for up to a week.
My question is this: WTF, over?
In which I’m going to go on and on about “women’s troubles,” so depending on who you are you may just want to stop reading right… about… HERE.
This morning I felt noticeably better than I did yesterday.
At first I attributed my calmness and clarity to my recent daily intake of Vata tea, but then The Curse™ arrived so I attributed my lack of misery to the fact that I was starting a new cycle.
Within two hours of the arrival of The Curse™ I had peed five times and probably weighed five pounds less. WATER RETENTION SUCKS, OMG, SO VERY MUCH. YOU CANNOT EVEN BELIEVE IT. Until it’s happened to you, it’s just one of those weird and stupid symptoms you only know about from Pamprin commercials. But until you yourself have gained twelve pounds in a mere two days, you simply have no idea what it feels like to suddenly wake up one morning in what is arguably the wrong damn body.
Every second or third cycle my body decides to bloat up, and for two weeks when I get out bed in the morning my feet feel like they’re going to split open when I step onto them. All my joints feel swollen and scratchy. I have to avoid salt, alcohol, and caffeine, and stay hydrated even though I’m already FULL OF WATER, because that’s what all the home care articles say to do… and I’m nothing if not dutiful when I’m verging on miserable.
And I am. Kinda miserable, I mean. During my luteal phase, at least. All my discomfort – the annoying tendency toward anxiety, those effing palpitations, and the damned stupid bloating – happens after ovulation. This makes no sense to me since the older I get the lower my progesterone levels are, but I’ve been charting long enough to know that it’s true: I hate my freakin’ luteal phase these days.
I feel fantastic the first half of my cycle – just fantastic! I have energy, I exercise, I start projects! I feel like myself. Then an egg no one even cares about explodes out of a follicle, and it’s all downhill from there: fatigue, lethargy, anxiety and panic and their attendant mild depression, water retention, and what has to be nothing other than dissassociation. I feel literally heavy: simply moving around is a chore.
And if that weren’t enough I’m far too inward, too: I more or less quit paying any kind of real attention to my environment and coast through on autopilot. I’m lucky that I’m smart or I’d have a hard time passing for normal. And I get so spaced out it’s amazing I don’t get hit by cars. I become absorbed with my thoughts and my internal bodily perceptions, and weirdly detached from the actual external world.
Maybe I feel better during the first half of my cycle because my estrogen is highest then? I don’t know. What I do know is that up to half my life these past two years since the PMS started in earnest is unacceptably blah, and there doesn’t really appear to be much I can do about it that I’m not already doing.
Please enjoy this totally unrelated
image of orange star-shaped lamps.
My diet is good. I quit smoking, I quit caffeine (well, mostly: I still eat chocolate). My alcohol consumption has lessened dramatically. I do my sun salutes. I walk every single day. I’m mindful of my sodium intake. I have a good attitude about my body. In short, I CAN’T TRY ANY HARDER WITHOUT BECOMING A RENUNCIATE.
And it keeps getting worse. Gah.
I’ve officially decided that I’m coming back male in my next life, and that’s all there is to it. I realize that males are simple creatures, many of whom can probably only perceive the middle range, but at least they don’t have to put up with the bewildering and fucked up “miracle” of female fertility. They appear to pretty much feel the same every day unless some outside force intrudes. Day after day! Consistently! And for that, I envy them. Lucky ducks.
Maybe being female is worth it if you actually use a female body for what it really does, but mine was pretty much bad out of the box. Apparently this body just doesn’t function that well reproductively, and I’m tired of having to live in it when it’s being stupid.
Female fertility is ineffably complicated. (It’s amazing people manage to get knocked up at all, really.) From menstruation through ovulation you’ve got your rising levels of estrogen and your follicle stimulating hormone. There’s your luteinizing hormone. There’s your testosterone and progesterone from ovulation through implantation. And several other hormones I can’t even remember, all doing an intricate, weaving dance in month-long cycles.
Frankly, it’s a mess.
And even if it mostly works (I do ovulate, for instance, have no luteal phase defect, and have been, for most of my fertile years, nice and regular with no pain or PMS whatsoever) it can still be just broken enough to cause quality-of-life-affecting symptoms like mine.
Actually, nothing’s “broken.” Not really. This is just what they call perimenopause. As a(n ex) smoker who has never delivered a baby, I am – hooray – statistically likely to begin perimenopause earlier and have more severe symptoms for longer. Go me.
And for some perspective: I’m not in pain, I’m not sick, nothing’s really wrong… it’s just that sometimes I don’t have any enthusiasm, I don’t feel engaged, and I don’t want to do anything. During those two weeks each month, my tiny life is almost unmanageably large, and all I do is live in my grandmother’s attic in a redneck town people only know of because its name is a joke! I have very little to accomplish, and I barely manage to get even that much done. Which sucks. And that’s what I’m bitching about, really.
I’m fairly certain that I had my first hot flash the night before last, in the evening, while sitting at the kitchen table. AND THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT.
I’m beginning to suspect this is, if not just something really good to complain about, also a journey of surrender. As in, “Oh, yeah. Human body? Idiotic bag of fluid, amazing they work as well as they do, turns out I’ve located mySelf as an entity other than my wacky body after all. Lovely day then. Cheerio. And by the by, it turns out that Self transcends gender after all! Hah!”
In which I review my weekend.
Mostly it was rainy and chilly, and it’s getting dark way too damned early, and for some reason this year I’m just NOT READY FOR SUMMER TO BE OVER YET.
Caturday:
I slept in. I did laundry.
I got my nails done. Finally. It had been five weeks and I really needed a fill. Aren’t they cute, with the little airbrushed designs on them?
I have no idea why my otherwise fairly earthy thing needs to be destroyed with long fake plastic nails, but I love my long fake plastic nails OMG so so so much. They totally don’t go with my look – if I can go so far as to imply that I do in fact possess something as unified as ‘a look’ – but I get such a lot of silly happiness out of them that I keep getting them done.
I mean, hello? They’re pink! AND AIRBRUSHED!
I sang in the Tricities with the boys Saturday night and made a hundred bucks.
Sunday:
Another chilly morning and overcast day, damn it. Sometimes, you just gotta make a big ol’ pot of awesome Indian food to warm up the kitchen and make the house smell FANTASTIC:
Sambar, delicious sambar!
Enough said.
I will be watching movies in my room Sunday evening if you need me.
In which I write about a topic that is probably only interesting to me.
I really dig smoking.
A lot.
But I’ve done a great deal of it, and for the past year or so it’s been becoming less and less fun. I’m a judgmental bitch, so let me inform you here and now that I’ve always had a big problem with smoker’s coughs because I think they’re just utterly tacky and icky.
Which is why it was Not Good when I realized I was developing one myself. It was mild and inconstant, and thank God I hadn’t begun those nasty daily morning hacking sessions, but still. I was clearing my throat all the time.
And the smell is bad. Period. I don’t smoke in my house or in my car (only because I don’t have one), but that didn’t stop me from smelling like an ashtray. I was always aware during hugs that I was probably offending whoever I was hugging.
The cost was getting absurd, too. Sure, I was only smoking half a pack a day, but that’s still over $120 a month. (I could buy entire Etsy outfits for that!)
And it’s not like I haven’t already smoked enough. I’ve smoked upwards of 180 thousand cigarettes in my life! I’m quite certain I have the whole thing grokked by now, and that further research into the subject would only reveal me to be stupid.
Then there were the stains on my fingers, which I simply never considered. I mean, I knew they were there, and I scrubbed them in the shower, but I just didn’t think about them.
Then there were all those cigarettes I didn’t enjoy. I started noticing when I cut down to half a pack that my first one each day was yucky, and that I was only smoking it for the nicotine: the actual physical experience was one of dizziness, nausea, and mild discomfort.
My hygienist never failed to mention my “smoking habit” and its effects on my oral heath when I went to get my teeth cleaned.
I was still enjoying my before-bed cigarettes quite thoroughly, booyah, but the more of those I had, the worse my mornings felt. Nasty mouth, gummy eyes, hard time waking up. Fucking fuck.
I got laryngitis one weekend and went and read the article about it on WebMD. In the home care section it said, “especially avoid smoking,” which was just about par for the course since every other goddamned illness or symptom I’d looked up on the Internet in the past year had said exactly the same thing. Fucking fuck!
Then there was the really gross stuff. The kind of stuff you do but don’t think about because it’s just so foul. I have, during my smoking career, done all of the following more than once:
- gone through all the ashtrays and garbage cans in the house looking for butts to smoke
- smoked multiple very dirty, stinky, short butts because I didn’t have any whole cigarettes
- smoked butts out of strange or public ashtrays
- chosen to buy a pack of cigarettes instead of a meal
- stolen cigarettes out of unattended packs
- gone to get cigarettes when I would not have left the house for any other reason (like when ill, or practically snowed in, or profoundly lazy and comfortable)
- smoked when I was not only sick, but very sick. Like bronchitis sick.
= = =
The Internet tells me that nicotine is really hard to kick. As in, more addictive than crack, with only 10% of quitters staying quit.
The Internet also tells me that it’s really easy to quit smoking ’cause all you gotta do is, like, quit smoking.
The Internet also also tells me that it only takes three days to get over nicotine (or get it out of your system, I’m not sure which), which means that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life.
= = =
I don’t feel any better, but the compulsive throat-clearing has eased. And I’ve already saved fourteen bucks. And I don’t smell like smoke.
I just WANT SOMETHING all the fucking time. Which is really fucking annoying.
Since I’m pretty much always on a diet, I gave myself several days of carte blanche eating while I quit smoking. Instead of caving and buying a pack of smokes on my lunch hour I’ve been buying stupid junk food instead, like cups of Starbucks Signature hot chocolate, or entire bowls of soup from Quizno’s (AFTER I’d already eaten my lunch), or giant cookies. For dinner last night, I ate an entire chile relleno platter from Rosita’s. That’s about 2.5 meals worth of calories, and at least two days worth of sodium.
I’ve been avoiding places I smoked (like the porch on my house), I always have a beverage in my hand, and I can barely even look at an ashtray without being half-disgusted and half-jonsed.
On Monday, the extra calorie shit will stop; I’m just being nice to myself this week. (I would much rather have lung cancer than be obese. I know that makes me shallow, but I’m just sayin’.) I think if someone handed me a cigarette right now, I’d go outside and smoke it even though I know it would be gross and taste bad and make me lightheaded.
Luckily no one is going to hand me a cigarette, so I’m safe for the rest of today.
But tomorrow will be another story, because I’ll be riding with a smoker to and from a gig in Richland. Hopefully remembering all the things I’ve written here will help me resist nicotine’s damned powerful siren call during those two hours.
In which I bought treeware.
For my birthday, I quit smoking.
On my lunch hour, instead of smoking I went into the bookstore and bought myself The Eyre Affair, a book I’ve been meaning to read since it came out eight years ago.
I mean, what the hell, right? It is my birthday, after all, and at least in this format G’ma can read it when I’m done.
Then, still wanting something – namely nicotine, which I was not having – I went into Starbucks for a hot chocolate. And they gave it to me for free, since it’s my birthday! Cool, huh?
In other super awesome news, dad’s taking me (and my brother) out for a birthday dinner to T. Mac’s after work tonight. How lucky am I?
In which I review my weekend.
Thursday, I was on the cover of the Marquee. Considering the lame interview I gave her, my girl Sheila did a really fantastic job on the article! I sound totally interesting!
Friday, I fronted the Coyote Kings at Merchants on Main street. The place was packed. People started dancing about four songs into the first set, and danced all night! My dad and Rocket’s mom were in the audience. We rocked the house and I had a metric ton of fun.
Saturday I lounged around during the day, and went to dinner at my aunt’s house with my dad and my brother. We had a nice dinner, and then I heard an awesome story from my uncle about how he got his head smashed at work up at the airport one day and nearly died.
Sunday I knitted, did laundry, watched streaming Netflix videos and went to Walmart with G’ma, where I bought some shoes. Later I made a bunch of Indian food for this week’s bentos.
Today I woke up late and barely made it to work on time.
Tomorrow is my birthday! Send me presents!
In which there’s an amazing cake!
Today was the office “comfort food” potluck. (I brought a casserole.)
There are two birthdays in the office this month; mine is one of them. And Dani, whom I didn’t even know was a baker, brought in this fantastic cake:
Isn’t that thing just freakin’ awesome?!?
In which there’s a vague overview.
The character that’s been living in my head for the last decade is an alien.
The premise is that extraterrestrials have always been here; a ship (which happens to be self-aware and is currently hidden from human satellite surveillance at the bottom of the ocean) crashed on earth during the time of the pharaohs. The beings on it were capable of extreme self-directed genetic mutation. Being bilaterally symmetrical, they made themselves look like humans and have been here the whole entire time, a secret subculture among us.
They have their own government and social hierarchy. They have wealth, access to advanced tech they can use but not produce, and lab-like enclaves around the globe. They live among us, worldwide. There are about five million of them.
They had their own version of the Prime Directive, but they certainly didn’t hesitate to direct the shape of human science. After all, they had a freakin’ supraluminal spaceship and we didn’t even have steam engines yet, let alone anything that would help them get their boat back into space, so one could argue that they had to help where they could.
Some of our greatest scientists? Are them. Reinventing the wheel.
Languages around the world contain words we’ve learned from them. Insert a lot of sci-fi genre jokes… Roddenberry would have known one of them, for instance, and many Star Trek words and concepts would actually be out of their culture. They’d be the source of Heinlein’s “grok,” as they’d eat portions of their dead in order to avoid genetic flaws.
Human behavior that makes little sense would have been learned from them. They mate for life. When one of the pair dies, the other dies as well, so it turns out that they actually introduced humans to life-long commitments because they have a biological drive to pair up even though we don’t.
They’re dual-gendered like humans, but for reasons unknown to them they quit having daughters a generation after arriving and have been breeding with us for thousands of years. They breed true because they have incomprehensibly long, complex DNA. I have no idea how to explain that, but humor me here.
They’re called T’Kaa (though it would probably be better if I chose a well-known alien race name out of sci-fi cannon). They even go into kemmer (nod to LeGuin), a hormonal/sexual state during which they achieve, say, adolescence, or mate-bonding, or conception.
The character in my head is one of these aliens. His family has been breeding for beauty and intelligence for well over five thousand years; he is an omnibus prodigy and has multiple unrelated PhDs by the time he’s a teenager, including one in music performance of classical guitar. In his early twenties he blossoms into a phenomenon that even his own species hasn’t seen in three thousand years: massive strings of dormant DNA activate and he becomes a walking miracle… or menace, depending on how you look at him.
He can manufacture anything he wants in his own body and secrete it any way he likes; he can compel all members of his own species at will, and humans too (only with less subtlety), by simply sweating or breathing. He could, if he wished, manufacture a plague and exhale it into the world, wiping the face of the earth of all life. He can heal his own body of any illness or injury. He’s a genius. He’s insanely rich. He’s terrifyingly powerful.
He’s also a pop star, who basically keeps himself famous by filling concert halls with excellent pheromones. Everybody loves him. His orgies are legendary.
He’s called a sh’corne, which is a type of creature that only emerges when there’s a great need for one. Past bearers of the title have stopped plagues, healed millions, and changed the course of T’kaa history.
He has authority among his own kind by virtue of his House (although he’s House Mondavi, not Atreides), what he is genetically, and their own biological imperative to obey him because of both, but most of them think he’s fairly ridiculous. No one knows why a sh’corne has manifested since there doesn’t seem to be a particular threat against the T’kaa.
Then it turns out that the ship – repository and Archive of all things known to both species – needs to be moved; seismic activity indicates that she’s about to fall into a terminally deep fissure in the bottom of the ocean.
So a flurry of activity among the T’Kaa occurs and the upshot is that our hero, the pop icon Jake Mondavi, goes on TV amd says, “Hey, I know y’all think I’m a rock star, which I am, but it turns out I’m also not human. Here’s the documentation of my weird physiology etc etc etc. Oh, and we need help from several earth governments to move our mothership before she falls into a freakin’ chasm where we can’t get to her ever again.”
And hilarity ensues as humanity realizes that it’s been manipulated by aliens for all of recorded history, and that a bunch of us are actually them.
In which I ramble.
Money
Since I’m going to New York, I need money. Which is why I agreed to work on Sunday.
It was quiet. Very quiet. And after the other guy left, it verged on creepy… being all alone in the Drumheller building made me glad I had Bindu with me. I watched two feature-length films and three episodes of Red Dwarf, season one, and took fewer than ten calls all day long. And got paid overtime for it!
All of which is another way of saying that while you may think that today is Tuesday, it’s actually Wednesday for me.
Music
I’m hoarding gig money, too. The band still owes me $200 for gigs paid by check (who DOES that? pays a band with a fucking check?!) and I’ll probably make another bill this Friday (if I’m lucky. We don’t have a guarantee for the Friday gig; if the upcoming Marquee article doesn’t drive traffic to the venue I’ll be walking outta Merchants with maybe fifty bucks).
Reading
I’m reading three books simultaneously. None of them are really doing anything for me.
I discussed this vague dissatisfaction with G’ma and she says that years of reading heavily will make it hard for you to be charmed; you’ve read it all before. The three books that I’m reading are all good, they’re just not giving me that excited rush I have come to miss… maybe this is the period of malaise that will cause me to start actually writing. I’ve noticed myself lately reading about writing, and maybe it’s a sign.
I do happen to have an entire cast of characters in my head… it’s just that the main character, the alien? Would require WAY TOO MUCH RESEARCH to ever write convincingly. And is there any serious science about pheromones in humans? Yeah, my point exactly. Way too much research.
Eh. I’ll find something good to read sooner or later. I hope.
Human Gender
In other news, these are the Wikipedia articles I read today: eunuch, hijra, Brihannala, third sex, GID, proprioception, pomosexuality, and vestibular caloric stimulation.
I looked up eunuch to verify the spelling, then read the article by accident. Which led to reading about Hijiras, and then discovering that Arjuna spent some time as a transgendered male in the Mahabharat, which I totally did not know. I re-read the third sex article ’cause I haven’t done so in awhile, then arced off into the biological-vs-psychological arguments about various gender identifications and ended up at GID and pomo.
VCS was something I just didn’t know about. I mean, who knew that pouring water into the ears was a test for brain stem death? Certainly not I.
I fucking love Wikipedia!
VSCO
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4 random books from my Library!
