Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

the universe is not my friend

...and everything else

So I didn’t want to worry anyone (yes, I know, don’t throw things at me, the body is bruised enough), but I was in a minor car accident yesterday. Per the sort of standard (and yes, I realize it’s sad there’s a standard for me and car accidents), I was in the passenger seat, and someone hit us on the passenger side. It was very low impact, and the driver actually took most of the damage thanks to centrifugal force. Or maybe I’m just getting better at this?

Anyhow. My phone and computer and text books and stuff are still in the car; I’ll be retrieving them later today, hopefully before class. (I’m on Csikorgo, my iBook, right now – which I only remembered was an option about 10 minutes ago.) I’m a little bruised, but no signs of obvious bone or tendon damage. Hurting like hell, though – I ended up with both palms flat against the dashboard, and the CRPS is screaming today. So we watch me like a hawk, and hopefully this all calms down in the next day or two – otherwise we’ll pump me full of medications to calm the pain, kill any inflammation, etc. I’d rather not go that route.

Typing hurts, so I’m skipping out for now. But I’m fine, just sore and tired and out of it.

a day of moderate success

...and everything else, Academics, Bioethics, life and living, Philosophy, Pop Culture

I actually feel moderately successful this evening. I finished working on two abstracts for ASBH, one of which was basically a rabbit pulled out of a collective hat at the last minute (but sounds very awesome, if I do say so myself); perhaps the best part is knowing that the hat-abstract (as it were) will be written regardless of its acceptance, just because my co-conspirator and I have been wanting to collaborate together for a while, and this is a perfect topic for us to tackle together. I’ve never written a paper with someone else before, so it’ll be a learning experience – and learning experiences with friends are always the best things.

I’ve got another collaboration going on this week; a fellow graduate student and I are co-presenting a paper this weekend at a school graduate conference, on the value of undergraduates having their own undergrad conferences. I’ll be drawing heavily on my experiences at NUBC, MGRS and SCCUR, but think I can easily talk for a long time on it, and especially the benefits behind it, from organizing to networking and learning how to talk to an audience.

I’m doing commentary on a historical epistemological paper, in large part because I don’t actually run away screaming when people say names like Dewey, Pierce, James, or Montague (and as a friend put, I also know they’re not Donald’s nephews). Glibness aside, I’m looking forward to it – I’m hoping that my response to the paper can double as my paper for the epistemology course I’m taking, and I need to crash my prof’s office hours to see if this would be alright with him.

I actually had some things to say in normative ethics today about Kant – in fact, I feel sort of dirty, since I ended up defending Kant, which is really never a position I expected to be in. Ever. And I’m pretty sure there’s an altar of Mill somewhere, where I need to do penance. But it’s pretty hard to argue with the idea that Kant didn’t say it was more virtuous to follow a duty you didn’t want to, only that duty is at least the base level of motivation. It was actually a really fascinating discussion that ended up being more about how Kant views feelings (passively), and how we have a more active engagement with the idea of feelings, and the very idea that to have the feeling of friendship is to automatically import a set of expected duties that are intrinsically tied to the feelings associated with the friendship. More than anything, it made me want to pick up the book that’s trying to reconcile Spinoza and Kant, especially with regard to the affects (feelings). I’m not a Kantian, and can’t ever imagine becoming one, but I can see a really interesting application here of the tied together notion of feeling/duty, and may be able to expand that out into how duty and responsibility are tied to one another.

I’ve joined a conversation with someone who does contemporary media critique on a couple of shows I really love, and had the distinct and unexpected pleasure of having that person actually compliment me on my ideas, and wonder exactly where I’ve been hiding with them and why I haven’t been involved in the conversation prior to now – the sort of thing that not only strokes my ego (which I need now and again), but makes me feel like I’m not crazy, and do actually have a knack for some of this.

I also found out that a friend’s going to be up here in April, along with several of her students, for a conference, and they’ll be staying with me. I’m looking forward to this, both because I know and enjoy one of her students quite a bit, and I’m pleased to see my friend again, but also because it gives me a firm deadline for cleaning up my apartment/getting rid of things/etc.

Things aren’t perfect – my insurance is still being a pain, my new apartment managers are being major pills, there are several other headaches (or depending, situations that make me just want to crawl in bed and cry and/or drink – H~ suggested we skip the beer and go straight to vodka shots, and I think she’s got a very solid plan there) – but for the first time in a while, things aren’t an overwhelming shade of apathetic gray. I’ve some ideas for why this might be, but I think I’m going to sit and think on those for slightly longer before I take the time to write. (Speaking of writing, I’ve been slowly getting back on the blogging horse, which a combination of power outages and allergic reactions on hands knocked me out of, and in the process have actually written up a couple of things I’m rather pleased with over at the Women’s Bioethics Blog.)

All of which is to say, again, today is the first day the world has had a bit of colour; I don’t know if you remember the movie What Dreams May Come, but a lot of the last few months has felt very much like the dim grey pictured in the movie, and today? Today I’m seeing just hints of how the colour might be able to bleed back through my life – and it’s a hopeful thing.

Flu 2.0 with strep throat upgrade

...and everything else

So as I think most people have figured out, I got sick again right after midterms. Actually, probably during midterms – I got the strep diagnosis at an insanely late hour, and when I talked to my doc the next day she sort of shrugged and said oh well, yes, people have been relapsing with this particular flu and did I do anything stupid like not get my normal rest recently, or hang out in the cold and snow for a while trying to convince my car to actually shift gears when it hit a chunk of ice or something and froze halfway shifted between two and four wheel drive?

Well, she might not have been so specific in the last bit, but that is what delayed me to getting to one midterm last Friday.

I’ve been running a high fever for three of the last four days – why my body took a break yesterday to dial back down to nearly normal, I don’t know, but today I’ve been awake a grand total of maybe five hours. I keep falling asleep in front of the computer, and I’d care if I weren’t so damned tired.

So yes, I’m sick and miserable and ready to jettison my immune system out the fucking airlock, because seriously, what point is there to it? I’ve been on antibiotics since Tuesday, so the strep part of the throat is mostly fine, although strep + throwing up is one of the least fun things I’ve experienced in a while. But the general rule of thumb is that fever == contagious, so I’ve stayed cooped up in bed. Not that I’ve had much energy to do anything else.

Anyhow, I was catching up on comics, and see RK over at Something Positive has apparently been miserably sick too. And did a comic about what happens to you when you’re sick, and you have cats. And goddamn, while I love the little fury beasts, Lunar thinks this exact thing is a winning strategy when I feel like hell. Why?

“that’s what the horse said”

...and everything else

From SKZB, a brief and interesting overview of February 29th:

Leap Day has a tradition going far, far back in time. In ancient Sumeria, it was considered a day for taking chances—for doing things normally considered too risky, such as entering a hitherto unexplored cave, descending a steep cliff, or making wisecracks to airport security. The Aztecs celebrated leap day with drunken revelry and corset piercings. To the Hunnish tribes, it was a day for telling long jokes that always ended, “That’s what the horse said.” The ancient Celts saw it a time when the barriers to faerie were thin, so they would engage in religious rites at stone circles in which they would ask the gods to please give them a better calender. The magyars saw it as a day for eating fine food and having wild, abandoned sex—in other words, they didn’t take particular note of it.

Note: the minute I saw the comment about the magyars, I knew that, in this blog of several posters, this one was Brust. And now I crave, in a mental and not at all tied to my stomach way, langos. I wonder if there’s a decent Hungarian restaurant within driving distance? (And I’d be willing to be generous in my definition of driving distance, here…)

Some interesting stuff there. When I was in grade school, I knew someone who celebrated his birthday February 28th because he’d been born February 29th. Whenever a Leap Year occurred, his family would throw a truly wild party for him; sort of, I suppose, on the same theory as kids who have parties during the school year when their birthdays are over the summer (like my sister), but bigger.

While I’d like to have interesting things to say today (and I even might), the reality is, my feeling better yesterday devolved over the night, and I’ve to go throw up. Again.

“so how are you, anyhow?”

...and everything else

Oddly, several people have pointedly asked me how I’m doing this evening, citing recent posts here as reason for concern. I’m doing okay. Not great, not bad, just okay. A step above apathetic, but admittedly only a step. In the last few days, I’ve had:
* insomnia
* an allergic reaction that started off mild and became severe enough to require a trip to the campus health center for a couple of shots of liquid benadryl and a course of OTC benadryl after that (tonight’s the last night of taking it every few hours); my hands no longer look like I dipped them in scalding water (and the rash that developed on my feet, chest, and upper arms is all but gone), but the lightest touch still makes me want to scratch the top few layers of skin off
* sleeping more than usual, after the insomnia, thanks to the benadryl
* midterms (blargh)
* an apartment complex fire that thankfully was put out by my next door neighbors before it became an issue, but still resulted in asthmatic issues for me, and the need to wash anything clothe in my apartment (as my apartment was completely filled with smoke before the fire was put out and we could air the building out)

My cats were hit rather hard with the smoke inhalation, too, and I’ve been babying them very carefully the last day and change.

On top of that, I decided that now was the time to finish dealing with some of the lingering issues around my mother’s death, and trying to figure out how to move forward, restart life, and all the trite yet true things that come up as you’re grieving. I’m working on two separate ASBH abstracts, which is a novel and somewhat stressful experience, have been buried under schoolwork, am helping with an epistemology conference we’re having, and trying to dig my way back up to the surface in a few other areas of life.

So, I’m doing okay. My life is horribly out of balance, I’m having issues motivating myself to do a lot of things – including just getting out of bed in the morning – but I’m trying my best. In some areas, I know it’s not good enough and I’m trying to just accept that, and accept that right now I can’t be perfect, and I have to just give myself credit for trying. I’m trying to rediscover balance, and I’m trying to recapture the joy in life, in enjoying my schoolwork, in seeing passion in the world even when it’s not apparent to others.

I was talking to someone on Friday who told me that I’ve not had the chance to internally process and become the next version of me, that my transition from UW/Seattle to here was cut short by my mother’s illness, and that in many ways my entire life was on hold for 18-odd months, or at least subject to the whims of others and the unpredictability of disease. It was a true statement. And now I have to figure out who I am, and how to be that person, out of order and turn, and in an environment that’s not necessarily open to me needing to do this, or kindly inclined and understanding with the issues that are strongly affecting everything right now. Which sucks, and hurts – you always hope that the people you’ve surrounded yourself with will be understanding when you crumble; sometimes you end up pleasantly surprised, and other times you just sob in your pillow. Bits of both have been common; just have to dust yourself off, say you took a risk and it didn’t pay off, and continue moving, growing, changing, being.

Which is, in all, a longwinded way of saying I’m okay. I could be doing better, I’m working on doing better, but it’s a process and not a decision.