the trick is to keep breathing

So I am having a hard time dealing with this celebrity death. Which is incredibly awkward for me, because I severely dislike celebrity culture in all of its forms and all of its cultures and find admiration of celebrities weird at best and dumb at worst --- and yet, with very little actual fannish involvement on my side, I -- find myself torn up on this one.

Part of it is that she was a brutal advocate for mental illness normalization and a firm voice for feminism against judgment and ownership of womens' bodies; and, in combination, my personalization and respect for that.

Part of it is as a child, with Star-Wars-fan parents, Princess Leia was one of few lady icons I was given that I could relate to and would choose to embody in play with my brother and friends. (Keep in mind I came up in the 80s, in a family who deliberately grew me fierce, angry, and (actual quote) "one tough broad"; does it surprise anyone that I drastically, spasmodically embraced Rosa and (especially) Rydia in the first video game I played where women were fierce and did damage?)

Part of it IS that childhood nostalgia, because (the) Star Wars (trilogy) was our "family night" backup movie in the case that no one would agree; this movie series is a fundamental arterial vein in the blood of my family and my own history and development.

Part of it is her amazing script writing talent, and her incredibly self-deprecating amazing writing, and the way both of those things knit into my own psyche.

and Part of it is that literally the day before, my partner and I were hanging with my parents post-Christmas, and they knew (despite the fact he's 18 years older than me) he'd never seen the trilogy: so we watched the whole thing in one day, fueled by pot roast and wine and whiskey and more wine, and family feeling. Lots of feeling. Even if he fell asleep during the third one because it is literally against the laws of physics to keep this man awake during any given movie.

and literally The Next Day we were out for a lunch with my parents before we drove back to Ohio, and I happened to pull up my text messages, and discovered Carrie had passed away that day in 2016.

---

I am now watching Clone Wars, the periodical cartoon, in her honor; no matter that Princess/General Leia did not even exist in this time frame; I needed something that was related but wasn't her face: something to respect without it making me more tied-in with this celebrity - a tie-in I already found awkward - and making my own reaction less dealable; I am watching Clone Wars.

And I appreciate it now: there is a young lady as the protagonist --- yes, Anakin is the protagonist, in many ways; but the story is told through Ahsoka, a young badass fucking amazing and powerful padawan lady, and

right now it is what I need, to remind myself that any genre can spit out a powerful lady if it feels compelled to -- and with the bar set to General Leia, I should never expect less.

what the fuck am i even saying

I had a very weird night that ended in a horrible dream I'm still emotional about and don't want to discuss anymore plus there is still no fucking news so LET'S PLAY A GAME. A COMMENT FIC GAME.

Reply with some subset of characters (one, two, a pairing, a friendship, a team) and some kind of premise or situation and I will write you 3-5 sentences of the fic it would turn into. AU premises are totally welcome right now. The crazier the better. Crossovers, vampire AU, whatever the hell you want.

I'd prefer you leave the comments on DW because it's easier to email-reply from my phone, but I'll deal either way: LJ is totally fine, I'll just be slower.

Stick to fandoms you know I know kthx.

PLEASE DISTRACT ME :(

A quick update while I've got a few seconds'-worth of a breather here at lunch.

(edit) QUICK UPDATE ACTUAL LOL i have managed to turn "quick lunch update" into gigantic emotional tl;dr diatribe god I am the best/worst blogger in the history of the internet

general
I've been excessively shitty lately. My workload - not just job but life, because apparently the amount of general bullshittery around me increases directly proportional to my stress load due to specific work bullshittery - has been godawful. I actually started typing out a list of the many things I'm trying to handle right now but deleted it because a) it was depressing me and b) it sounded like I'm playing Stress And Workload I Am The Busiest Ever Olympics which isn't ever really what I want to sound like. Suffice to say I was up to item 12 before I stopped, and that hadn't even covered work; if you'd like to play Olympics with me I guarantee I will win, which actually means I lose, I think.

( additional rambles that got long )

There are some days I'm really glad I keep a journal; today is one of those days.

( a history of my medical woes this year as told by my blog )

It's now 8 October. My neck/back/shoulders have been bothering me since mid-June, and I've been on a variety of medications pretty much constantly - and unable to consistently work out at all - since mid-August. And I've had bronchitis for 4 weeks straight. Holy fucking shit, no wonder I have been so depressed lately. :/

I've more or less come to terms with the fact that I've got a horribly underperforming compromised immune system; I get sick more than my peers, and it sucks, but after 30 years of it, I can more or less deal. What I hate about my body is when it does this slippery-slope bullshit, this cascading series of one fucking thing after another, when I'm constantly in pain for three months running (with no end in sight) and things just continue to hit and bombard me and it's like the second I get over one thing another has been incubating and just waiting for a moment of weakness to strike. I feel so unhealthy and gross -- not only because I am literally unhealthy, but because without being able to work out at all, my body just feels useless and horrible and flabby-lumpy in addition to being in large amounts of pain and flu-achy and generally grumpy.

It's seriously depressing. And I know depression is a wily beast - I've fought her before - but it puts me in the foulest fucking moods out of absolutely nowhere. I'll start coughing or I'll sneeze and I'm reminded that I haven't felt even close to 100% in like three months and suddenly all I want to do is crawl into my bed with a cat and not come out for sixteen consecutive hours days. I end up summoning the irrational RAGE BEAST on people who don't even really deserve it, because everything fucking irritates me and I'm so frustrated at my body and my weakness and myself that I just fucking snap.

I know that being on different medications for ~8 weeks running probably isn't doing my blood chemistry any good, really. And today at lunch I'm going back to the CVS clinic to have them check out this lingering cough, and if they say I'm still sick, I'll take the afternoon off. I feel like I haven't given myself enough rest -- but at the same time I feel like I've missed so much work lately for PT and dentist appointments and afternoons where Dave kicks me out of the lab because I'm still coughing bronchitis everywhere, so how the fuck am I not better yet?

Whine whine whine J F C.

Off to go attempt to cheer myself up.

I am sitting in the waiting room of Lab Corp right now waiting for my blood draw (with bonus peeing test). I haven't eaten breakfast. I haven't had coffee. These are both cardinal sins in SevLand. It has been an expensive and depressing week for health in SevLand. (edit: I was interrupted for the test and am now happily seated at my desk with coffee post-breakfast.)

Yesterday I took Marzy in for his echocardiogram checkup. His heart murmur has gotten no better; while it's still better than it was at his very first visit (when he wasn't on any drugs or anything), it's worse than his last checkup. The obstruction in his heart is getting worse and the walls of his heart are thickening (from overwork), and while they were examining him they did see one fully stopped beat, which means he is at the maximum dose of atenolol he can be on. The thickening and the obstruction are so bad that they're starting to worry about heart failure and blood clots -- although he is still asymptomatic at home, which is still a good sign amidst all the bad news.

They've put him on another drug, one that will help prevent blood clots. There's a small chance that this new drug will act synergistically with his current dose to improve the murmur - it isn't a proven thing with the drug, but they've seen it happen in a few cases, so it is worth trying. It's an additional $10-14/month I guess (more expensive for humans but apparently I get a break because cats?) and he has to go back in 6 months for another echo.

I was pretty upset yesterday. I cried in the car on the way to giant eagle to get his new drugs, and then accidentally a diet coke from the store while I was waiting and cleaned myself up in the bathroom. My poor little baby and his little broken heart. He is so lucky that I found him and kept him, because i am a crazy cat lady who will pay $$$ to take care of him, and probably no one would have even found it until it was too late. Asshole. I love my cats more than I have loved anything ever and I hate it.

Plus I've got all these medical bills coming in (X-rays haven't shown up yet, but just refilled my inhaler, I look, $120) and physical therapy coming up and I may not be doing a whole lot of anything come September because dollars.

Bodies. Why.

I'm always surprised at how many hours there actually are in a day.

I really shouldn't be, because I've experienced this phenomenon once before, when I was still working my full-time long-day 40-hr-week job and also attending a 20-30-hr-week graduate lab class: if you literally spend every spare minute you have doing something, it's a lot of work. (And I mean it. Sometimes I see people posting, "I'm soooo busy~!" but if I've seen you posting 10K in fic in the last week, or reblogging tons of stuff on Tumblr, or otherwise hobbying-- maybe you're busy, but that isn't actually spending every legitimate moment you have on work-like things. I realize this makes me a judgmental ass and I'm sorry.)

But really, I'm still continually surprised at how much you can actually work in one day. Because I have basically spent every free hour I have had in the last 7 days helping to basically remodel a basement which is my responsibility to fix. I don't even have time to tell you everything handyman that I've done. But I'm just still for whatever reason surprised at how BUSY you can actually get. When you come home from work at 6:15 and change and eat and then drive up to the house at 7:00 and work until 11:00 and then come home and make a lunch and do the dishes and go to bed at 12 and get up at 6:30 and go to work at 7:30 and then do it all over again, for an entire week? I mean it, there is busy and then there is, "life sat on me." They aren't even really in the same order of magnitude.

Had I known the level of fucked this problem was, I wouldn't have started it now. But you don't know what's under the carpet until you pull up the carpet.

I thought I was busy before. Turns out, there were plenty of hours in my day that could be filled up with things that make me miserable.

I am stressed as fuck, I have gotten absolutely nothing done this week, my exchange ends this weekend, I am leaving tomorrow afternoon and I have not yet finished packing. This week has been just awful.

Some day I will turn this experience into a "Handyman How-To" post because I've actually learned a lot of fun shit. Today is not that day.

- - -

I just printed out all my itineraries and reservations and flight info and blah blah and it's basically a short novel, I've killed a tree doing it, it weighs more than my laptop, etc etc.

This trip-- I am not even looking forward to it. i'll be honest. Work is so awful right now, and there are a bunch of due dates WHILE I AM GONE, so I have to work ON my trip, and just. ugh ugh ugh first world problems etc but.

I carry my stress in my shoulders and neck, and I nearly can't drive a car right now. I am pretty sure my back is about to leave me for another woman.

Whirlwind tour of the US is as follows:
- to Boise this weekend for my cousin's wedding
- fly to Vegas Mon with family, night in Vegas
- drive to Grand Canyon Tues, two nights in GC
-- work due Wednesday, have to work Mon and Tues to submit Wed
- return to Vegas on Thurs, night in Vegas
- Fri, fly directly to Houston, spend weekend weeping in a pillow fort
- Sun, pick up Japanese BFF at airport and head off to the plant
- Mon, tour of plant with guest
- Tues-Wed, work at the plant
-- work due Tues, will have to work the previous week to compile it
- Thurs, return home

- THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, submit a report of the work I did on the plant trip to the Overlords because
- THAT WEDNESDAY/THURSDAY, our biannual meeting with the Overlords begins

- probably every day forever: cry into beer, from stress and frustration

- date of freedom: 20 June
- 21 June: lose self in Diablo III for three consecutive days

I am trying for serenity now and I'm not sure I'll make it. OH GOOD. When can I give up on everything and be a crazy cat lady hermit hobo who never goes anywhere?

ON THE PLUS SIDE, I now have an app on my phone that can send a postcard photo from anywhere for $0.99, so if you want a really dumb postcard from Vegas or the Grand Canyon, email me your address.

ADDITIONALLY ON THE PLUS SIDE, I've written 4 Korra drabbles in the past few days. On my phone. While in meetings or otherwise working. Seeing as I haven't written a thing since December, this is cool.

I HAD ANOTHER PLUS but I have forgotten it so.

• Today is the first day I've worked in 2012 and not had a single meeting. The next after this? 05 March. What the hell.


• At 620 comments - and growing - I'm pretty sure this is the greatest FF Kissing Battle we've had yet. Even if you're not on a team, come on in and play!
  • I'm writing tons of Final Fantasy / Gundam Wing crossovers. SHOOT ME.


• So I've been diagnosed with arthritis in my big toe. The injury's a long story; the tl;dr version is that I'm off any kind of high-impact stress on it for 2-3 weeks and I maybe shouldn't run very much in my future also (depends on how it "heals" (since arthritis doesn't exactly, you know, fix itself: HEY CARTILAGE. GROW BACK ALREADY)). On one hand: OH DARN I DON'T LIKE RUNNING ANYWAY. On the other hand: I am a stubborn Taurus fuck and I don't like the idea of my body winning the war against me when I'm only 30 years old. CUE ANGST AND SPACEHEARTING.


• Oh, and I'm on goddamned prescription drugs again. AGAIN. (No drinking for 2-3 weeks? LIKE FUCK YOU SAY.)


• It's 20 February and I have yet to do a single goddamn thing for my graduate thesis. I hate school so much.


• Speaking of not working on grad school: !! My schedule for the next few weekends is like being PUNCHED IN THE FACE WITH AWESOME. It goes like this: DISTANT WORLDS --> BJORK (!!!!!!!!!!) --> possible trip to the plant which is shitty --> PITTSBURGHCON --> LESBIAN GARAGE SALE SHIT SHOW --> Acen --> MY GODDAMNED 30th BIRTHDAY --> Katy's graduation --> CABINCON PART I ("A HOT TUB IS NOT CAMPING"). I am really not leaving my 20s quietly.


• I cleaned up my tags on DW this afternoon. I'm finally back under 1000. I really need to do the same on LJ, but LJ lacks the AMAZEBALLS "tag merge" tool that Dreamwidth has, for when you type a tag in just a little bit wrong and end up with 3 variants on the tag, "I am a vain fuck." (This is a true story!).


• The word "amazeballs" was actually in TIME magazine BTW.


• Zero ships 3x4 is one of the most hilarious things I've read all day. I would easily say "the most hilarious" on any other day but as the other things going on in my email right now are (1) a serious discussion on which crossover troll fic idea is the lube for the other and (2) the creation of an Opera in at least 14 movements about The Shit Show Of Our Lives, there's some stiff competition in my Inbox today. Nevertheless, read that shit.


• I have not played more than a couple hours of FFXIII. Don't judge me. So far the PS3 has basically been a very expensive way to steam music and Netflix. Winning.


• Going to rewatch some Sherlock this week. Might have intelligent thoughts about it. Might just reblog more shite on Tumblr.

And that's the news.