Well, I've finally found one. A walk for lupus. See, they exist! And raise...less than $10,000. I actually would really like to do it, if only for the potential hoodie, but I am extremely hesitant to ask for donations or bring anyone along with me.
WHY, HANNAH, WHY?!
Because I haaaaate asking for things from people who know me? Or because I hate being lupusy around people who know me? Or perhaps I just have a problem with people who know me? Sad but true: the thought crossed my mind "I could just donate a bunch of money and pretend like it's from multiple people."
...
I actually declare this to be too stupid a psychology for me to bother thinking farther into. Bigger point: should you be interested, people-who-are-not-around-me, you can find a walk near you here. $50 donation gets you a tee shirt. $100 gets you a hoodie. Hooray!
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
The books, we reads them
HELLO HI HEY I AM HOME and it is disgusting because my father is in India and apparently with resident neat freak gone everyone's become disgusting. I have taken up the post of Temporary Neat Freak, i.e., she who does the week's worth of dishes left in the sink and getting smelly. I had thoughts, dreams, hopes, for this bloggy post but in the end I am sleepy and lazy and the house is gross.
A while ago, the Rejectionist (I link that an awful lot, if y'all aren't following yet you should be) said something along the lines of "write me guest posts about if you are a minority/woman/disabled person, what do you read and what bugs the shit out of you?" (paraphrase.) I submitted and was rejected (star-struckedly, if that is a word. I was star-struckedly rejected. In that I was star-struck at recieving an actual return email even if it said no). In addition to "no", the return email and also R. on her blog said something along the lines of (again, paraphrase) "blahhh only five chosen, so many recieved, go post on your own blogz plz" and also something along the lines of me being "really great." Oh, wait.
Regardless, I give you The Post I Wrote While At My Internship, three words per 5 minutes because I felt guilty not doing actual work. Very little revising happened between then and now, because that would require effort and there is laundry to be done and piles to be made and sleep to be had!
---
Hello, friends! I almost chickened out of writing this little nubbin of a piece because, as I sat in the car with a screaming cousin-once-removed, I thought to myself “Well, this is silly. The Rejectionist wants marginalized people, not random isolated person who feels totally separate even from the others in her situation.” And then I thought to myself “well that is an arrogant way to consider oneself, especially with all the energy you put into functioning like a normal person.” And then my head started to hurt because Cousin Smudge has quite a pair of lungs.
To remind you, I was diagnosed with lupus during my 9th summer Alive, and I do not think I need to explain that there is not much in the way of lupus advocacy unless you really look for it. (I mean, we cannot even decide if our Awareness Month is October or May. And then we are shocked when no one knows what lupus is.) Furthermore, I can find a handful of people my age who have the disease, but have never found anyone my age who’s had it this long. I haven’t, in other words, found anyone else whose childhood was both kind of normal and completely enveloped by terrible health. Lupus is usually treatable, but it can be completely debilitating or fatal. But I am so not here to tell you about all that. I do that enough here.
Only thing you really need to know about me: I didn’t tell anyone I was sick until I was 17. I mean, my peers. My parents and teachers knew. But talk about isolating yourself.
Inconveniently, the year of my diagnosis my class read a book about a kid with muscular dystrophy. Well, specifically, we read a book about a girl whose brother had muscular dystrophy. (I cannot for the life of me find this book, but I swear it exists.)
I started to get uncomfortable really quick.
For one thing, I became painfully aware that my disease, despite the swollen fingers and the years of chemotherapy and the no-end-in-sight, is really pretty un-epic. In fact, the phrase you’ll see snarkily referenced on pretty much any lupus site is, “but you don’t look sick!” …And we really often don’t.
Furthermore, little MD boy was pretty nice to his sister. Actually, he was full of hugs and smiles. I’m not full of hugs and smiles, I thought to myself. Not only am I healthier, luckier, and going to live longer than Fictional Character, but I am also a way worse sport. Fuck.
(I probably didn’t think “fuck” back then, but the sentiment has held pretty firmly.)
It’s true, all things considered, I am capable of appearing to have a good attitude. But this is more a matter of keeping my mouth shut, or of being embarrassed to speak up. And for many, many years I did not read very much at all. I read and re-read Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, and Ella Enchanted over and over basically until my senior year of high school, apart from what I read in school and the occasional Other Interesting Thing. (Hrm, Ella Enchanted, huh. A young girl who looks totally normal but is cursed, can't remember ever not having her "disease" and self-isolates to avoid having to face her condition. Fascinating. Found one that makes sense!)
I think I discovered the pattern with Disabled-Character-Books early even though I really couldn’t put it into words until, like, now. Ill characters seem to be used in literature as props. I’ve found very few books where the main character the one with the illness and I think there are several reasons for this: 1. healthy authors are not willing to presume to know what being unhealthy feels like. (Also, the few things I HAVE found suck, so I think in general healthy authors are correct in shying away from it.) 2. sick people tend to not have particularly exciting lives and 3. blah blah blah it’s the family and friends who blah blah blah. (No, really, I believe that #3 is totally true and valid and shiny, but we’ve all heard it before)
(And here’s the part where I try really hard not to get beat up by a cancer survivor.)
With an “epic” disease – the sort I both envy and fear – I think that life gets sort of snatched away from the victim for however many years or months, but eventually there are one of two outcomes: survival or death. (And then after that – uh, survival, that is – there can be relapses that are incredibly tragic and no one ever gets over these things completely and I would never, ever EVER minimize that sort of suffering.) But in my little un-epic disease (and chronic pain, and fibromyalgia and diabetes and asthma and endometriosis etc.) there may never be those months and years of lifelessness. I went to school and I never got held back and I even participated (kinda) in gym and (some) extracurriculars. But this is while my immune system was tearing me apart and I was supposed to have not-so-many years left pre-kidney-failure. But this does not lend itself well to literature because how on earth do you balance something that is has both absolutely no place in your world AND affects everything you do? Did I mention my head hurts?
So I cannot read books like My Sister’s Keeper (didn’t even try)...and have in general avoided any cancer-esque anything (me and cancer, you may have noticed, have an interesting relationship. Rest assured, not all of my refusal to deal with the matter is due to bitterness that people care about cancer and not me. Most of it is due to utter terror that I'm going to get it any second because, in an almost hilariously painful irony, all the years of chemo I had? Yeah, it increased my risk for certain cancers by like five billion. Okay, exageration, yes.)
You know what I can and do read though, is psychologically...messed up?...main characters. That’s where you get the real story, the half-conscious self-isolation, the still-going-through-life-but-invisibly-different, all of that. Like, try Fun Home, Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir about the death of her father and her coming out as a lesbian, the former of which happened too-close-for-comfort after the latter. In fact, creative nonfiction memoirs (as opposed to celebrity memoirs. I'm talking the people you know BECAUSE OF their memoirs, not people whose memoirs you read because you know them) tend to be fantastic for me because writers are so often, oh, what's the phrase? Fucked up? Yes. Or I obviously mentioned Ella Enchanted. Sometimes I go hardcore into psychologically harsh novels, but that can be hard too because it's also important for me that my characters are functioning like I'd like to be, and sometimes if I sink into that deep depression in a novel no one's functioning anymore and it is at once frustrating and discouraging.
Seeing a hole in the market (observational genius that I am) I finally started writing about lupus when I was a senior in high school. I wrote a couple short stories and a long-ass novel (I mean, it wasn’t good, let’s not get ahead of ourselves) with lupie main characters. Then I wrote several personal essays in college. And then I thought to myself, hmm, this is strange. I want to try and get some distance on this. Maybe I’ll make a non-main-character ill instead, and see if I can get both sides of this. After all, I’ve had to live with myself more than anyone.
Friends, I fell into my own trap, and my lovely little lupie character became a prop like everyone else’s sickies. Only, because I am painfully aware, I have the opportunity to shred myself and make it better.
So I guess I can’t complain. Well, yes, I can. And I do. But when I come across these stories/books/obnoxious-pretentious conversations, I have to shrug a little and say ‘well, at least they’re trying.’ And then I wander into places like this where I try to yell loud enough for people to hear.
A while ago, the Rejectionist (I link that an awful lot, if y'all aren't following yet you should be) said something along the lines of "write me guest posts about if you are a minority/woman/disabled person, what do you read and what bugs the shit out of you?" (paraphrase.) I submitted and was rejected (star-struckedly, if that is a word. I was star-struckedly rejected. In that I was star-struck at recieving an actual return email even if it said no). In addition to "no", the return email and also R. on her blog said something along the lines of (again, paraphrase) "blahhh only five chosen, so many recieved, go post on your own blogz plz" and also something along the lines of me being "really great." Oh, wait.
Regardless, I give you The Post I Wrote While At My Internship, three words per 5 minutes because I felt guilty not doing actual work. Very little revising happened between then and now, because that would require effort and there is laundry to be done and piles to be made and sleep to be had!
---
Hello, friends! I almost chickened out of writing this little nubbin of a piece because, as I sat in the car with a screaming cousin-once-removed, I thought to myself “Well, this is silly. The Rejectionist wants marginalized people, not random isolated person who feels totally separate even from the others in her situation.” And then I thought to myself “well that is an arrogant way to consider oneself, especially with all the energy you put into functioning like a normal person.” And then my head started to hurt because Cousin Smudge has quite a pair of lungs.
To remind you, I was diagnosed with lupus during my 9th summer Alive, and I do not think I need to explain that there is not much in the way of lupus advocacy unless you really look for it. (I mean, we cannot even decide if our Awareness Month is October or May. And then we are shocked when no one knows what lupus is.) Furthermore, I can find a handful of people my age who have the disease, but have never found anyone my age who’s had it this long. I haven’t, in other words, found anyone else whose childhood was both kind of normal and completely enveloped by terrible health. Lupus is usually treatable, but it can be completely debilitating or fatal. But I am so not here to tell you about all that. I do that enough here.
Only thing you really need to know about me: I didn’t tell anyone I was sick until I was 17. I mean, my peers. My parents and teachers knew. But talk about isolating yourself.
Inconveniently, the year of my diagnosis my class read a book about a kid with muscular dystrophy. Well, specifically, we read a book about a girl whose brother had muscular dystrophy. (I cannot for the life of me find this book, but I swear it exists.)
I started to get uncomfortable really quick.
For one thing, I became painfully aware that my disease, despite the swollen fingers and the years of chemotherapy and the no-end-in-sight, is really pretty un-epic. In fact, the phrase you’ll see snarkily referenced on pretty much any lupus site is, “but you don’t look sick!” …And we really often don’t.
Furthermore, little MD boy was pretty nice to his sister. Actually, he was full of hugs and smiles. I’m not full of hugs and smiles, I thought to myself. Not only am I healthier, luckier, and going to live longer than Fictional Character, but I am also a way worse sport. Fuck.
(I probably didn’t think “fuck” back then, but the sentiment has held pretty firmly.)
It’s true, all things considered, I am capable of appearing to have a good attitude. But this is more a matter of keeping my mouth shut, or of being embarrassed to speak up. And for many, many years I did not read very much at all. I read and re-read Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, and Ella Enchanted over and over basically until my senior year of high school, apart from what I read in school and the occasional Other Interesting Thing. (Hrm, Ella Enchanted, huh. A young girl who looks totally normal but is cursed, can't remember ever not having her "disease" and self-isolates to avoid having to face her condition. Fascinating. Found one that makes sense!)
I think I discovered the pattern with Disabled-Character-Books early even though I really couldn’t put it into words until, like, now. Ill characters seem to be used in literature as props. I’ve found very few books where the main character the one with the illness and I think there are several reasons for this: 1. healthy authors are not willing to presume to know what being unhealthy feels like. (Also, the few things I HAVE found suck, so I think in general healthy authors are correct in shying away from it.) 2. sick people tend to not have particularly exciting lives and 3. blah blah blah it’s the family and friends who blah blah blah. (No, really, I believe that #3 is totally true and valid and shiny, but we’ve all heard it before)
(And here’s the part where I try really hard not to get beat up by a cancer survivor.)
With an “epic” disease – the sort I both envy and fear – I think that life gets sort of snatched away from the victim for however many years or months, but eventually there are one of two outcomes: survival or death. (And then after that – uh, survival, that is – there can be relapses that are incredibly tragic and no one ever gets over these things completely and I would never, ever EVER minimize that sort of suffering.) But in my little un-epic disease (and chronic pain, and fibromyalgia and diabetes and asthma and endometriosis etc.) there may never be those months and years of lifelessness. I went to school and I never got held back and I even participated (kinda) in gym and (some) extracurriculars. But this is while my immune system was tearing me apart and I was supposed to have not-so-many years left pre-kidney-failure. But this does not lend itself well to literature because how on earth do you balance something that is has both absolutely no place in your world AND affects everything you do? Did I mention my head hurts?
So I cannot read books like My Sister’s Keeper (didn’t even try)...and have in general avoided any cancer-esque anything (me and cancer, you may have noticed, have an interesting relationship. Rest assured, not all of my refusal to deal with the matter is due to bitterness that people care about cancer and not me. Most of it is due to utter terror that I'm going to get it any second because, in an almost hilariously painful irony, all the years of chemo I had? Yeah, it increased my risk for certain cancers by like five billion. Okay, exageration, yes.)
You know what I can and do read though, is psychologically...messed up?...main characters. That’s where you get the real story, the half-conscious self-isolation, the still-going-through-life-but-invisibly-different, all of that. Like, try Fun Home, Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir about the death of her father and her coming out as a lesbian, the former of which happened too-close-for-comfort after the latter. In fact, creative nonfiction memoirs (as opposed to celebrity memoirs. I'm talking the people you know BECAUSE OF their memoirs, not people whose memoirs you read because you know them) tend to be fantastic for me because writers are so often, oh, what's the phrase? Fucked up? Yes. Or I obviously mentioned Ella Enchanted. Sometimes I go hardcore into psychologically harsh novels, but that can be hard too because it's also important for me that my characters are functioning like I'd like to be, and sometimes if I sink into that deep depression in a novel no one's functioning anymore and it is at once frustrating and discouraging.
Seeing a hole in the market (observational genius that I am) I finally started writing about lupus when I was a senior in high school. I wrote a couple short stories and a long-ass novel (I mean, it wasn’t good, let’s not get ahead of ourselves) with lupie main characters. Then I wrote several personal essays in college. And then I thought to myself, hmm, this is strange. I want to try and get some distance on this. Maybe I’ll make a non-main-character ill instead, and see if I can get both sides of this. After all, I’ve had to live with myself more than anyone.
Friends, I fell into my own trap, and my lovely little lupie character became a prop like everyone else’s sickies. Only, because I am painfully aware, I have the opportunity to shred myself and make it better.
So I guess I can’t complain. Well, yes, I can. And I do. But when I come across these stories/books/obnoxious-pretentious conversations, I have to shrug a little and say ‘well, at least they’re trying.’ And then I wander into places like this where I try to yell loud enough for people to hear.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Lowly Intern no more
I dunno, man. I feel weird. I left work forever today with a 30 year anniversary book that the magazine made, a card signed by all the editors that says "BEST INTERN EVER" (thank you, thank you very much.) and three submissions with a post-it saying "A few of my favorite crazies to remember us by!" (They're pretty psychotic.)
I figure (now it is like 2 days later) I should give a little What I've Learned talk. What have I learned?
1. Canadians have fantastic envelopes. No, really, Canada, I commend you. Some of those envelopes are like butter. I want to keep them and touch them all the time. (That doesn't sound weird and slightly creepy, right?)
2. People who tape envelopes shut are unspeakably obnoxious
3. When interning, one's day consists almost entirely of envelope rants.
4. I am a workaholic. In that, I leave only after begging nonfiction editor if I can borrow the science book I've been working my way through, so that I can finish finding useable excerpts and email her a type-up of everything I have.
I actually do want to write more, but I am currently back on campus for a couple days being happy, if exhausted, and am running off to Maryland to cure my stir-craziness and see some friends who are running away to France next semester, and I can't think of what I meant this post to be about, except that I've been wanting to tell y'all about Canada's envelopes for, like, DAYS. Anyway, I promise I'll reflect more on my future career later.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Reactions
"I have lupus."
"Uh wha?"
"Long explanation of lupus."
Acceptable responses:
1) "Dude you are a wreck." (my personal preference)
2) (If you have the need to be sympathetic) "Aw I'm sorry. My aunt has that. It sucks."
Unacceptable responses:
1) "Oh my god. I am SO sorry. Oh man. But you're so young. That's just terrible. I'm so sorry. I mean, that's horrible - you're like, what, twenty? That's so unfair. Are you okay? It just sounds awful" with a teary look in your eyes.
While I do not want to speak for all lupies, I want to say for myself that I have plenty of guilt for worrying my family and friends and I really, really, REALLY do not need to feel as though I have just torn your heart apart. What's more, I have no way to react to that except to kind of smile, shrug, and say "oh it's fine, really." Yick.
One other thing: If you are, say, a dentist, and a lupie has just given you her medical history, and she happens to not be on meds, the best response is NOT "I'm sorry to hear you have lupus - but you've never exhibited any symptoms, right?" First of all, look at all the boxes I've checked for "things I have/have had" and second of all, whoa, way to cut me off at the knees.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that the dentist's office failed my reaction test. I had the practically-crying nurse (? the dentist equivelant of?) followed by the your-disease-is-just-a-concept-without-reality dentist.
"Uh wha?"
"Long explanation of lupus."
Acceptable responses:
1) "Dude you are a wreck." (my personal preference)
2) (If you have the need to be sympathetic) "Aw I'm sorry. My aunt has that. It sucks."
Unacceptable responses:
1) "Oh my god. I am SO sorry. Oh man. But you're so young. That's just terrible. I'm so sorry. I mean, that's horrible - you're like, what, twenty? That's so unfair. Are you okay? It just sounds awful" with a teary look in your eyes.
While I do not want to speak for all lupies, I want to say for myself that I have plenty of guilt for worrying my family and friends and I really, really, REALLY do not need to feel as though I have just torn your heart apart. What's more, I have no way to react to that except to kind of smile, shrug, and say "oh it's fine, really." Yick.
One other thing: If you are, say, a dentist, and a lupie has just given you her medical history, and she happens to not be on meds, the best response is NOT "I'm sorry to hear you have lupus - but you've never exhibited any symptoms, right?" First of all, look at all the boxes I've checked for "things I have/have had" and second of all, whoa, way to cut me off at the knees.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that the dentist's office failed my reaction test. I had the practically-crying nurse (? the dentist equivelant of?) followed by the your-disease-is-just-a-concept-without-reality dentist.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Drug Profile: Prednisone
(Disclaimer: Am not a doctor, etc etc don't make choices off my nut-fucky opinions, etc. etc.)
I've been toying with the idea of throwing out some interesting tidbits on the lupus treatments out there, basically in the order that I went on them. Be aware, it's been 50+ years since a new drug was approved for lupus. (Though apparently CellCept is doing well in stage III trials? Been there, done that. CellCept, I mean.)
So I'm starting with prednisone, or solu-medrol (Solly!) when in IV form. You might've actually run into Solly before if you've had a bad case of poison ivy, or if you have asthma. It's a corticose steroid, and deals in reducing inflamation. And also your immune system. It's basically the #1 on the scene when you have a sudden, acute flare in lupus. Why? It's a quick-fix (you know, treat the symptoms so you can function like a person long enough to try and treat the underlying problem) and it's pretty safe! And by safe, I mean:
1. It puffs up your face, which is particularly hard on the self-esteem at this age, and so, as a special gift to Melanie, I give you Me at Age Twelve (I'm the one with the sphere face. Obvs.):
2. It kills and ramps up your appetite all at the same time. I would be constantly starving but once I found food it looked gross.
3. It tastes like Misery. At least when I was on it (has this changed?) the pills were all un-coated and there was just no way to avoid the taste except if I took it with orange juice instead of water
4. Oh, the restlessness! I would come home from treatments and just kick my legs on my bed all night long to try and get extra energy out. Also, fatigue. Huh??
5. Bone density goes down, so that if you, for example, break your toe in sixth grade, it can't heal itself and you end up with avascular necrosis that they don't realize till you're 18 and then you have to get surgery.
6. Risk of tiny micro-fractures in the hip and back so that your back hurts forever but when you try and do an MRI to find what the hell's wrong, you get distracted by the lemon-sized cyst on your ovary. I mean, what?
But what I'm sayin' is, if you're on it for a reasonable amount of time (read: not 6 years), the effects are short-term (#'s 5 and 6 being the long term risks, and you're really...really not supposed to be on it as long as I was). So that's what we're talkin' about as a starting point. Next time I'm feeling druggy: Plaquenil. The devil.
I've been toying with the idea of throwing out some interesting tidbits on the lupus treatments out there, basically in the order that I went on them. Be aware, it's been 50+ years since a new drug was approved for lupus. (Though apparently CellCept is doing well in stage III trials? Been there, done that. CellCept, I mean.)
So I'm starting with prednisone, or solu-medrol (Solly!) when in IV form. You might've actually run into Solly before if you've had a bad case of poison ivy, or if you have asthma. It's a corticose steroid, and deals in reducing inflamation. And also your immune system. It's basically the #1 on the scene when you have a sudden, acute flare in lupus. Why? It's a quick-fix (you know, treat the symptoms so you can function like a person long enough to try and treat the underlying problem) and it's pretty safe! And by safe, I mean:
1. It puffs up your face, which is particularly hard on the self-esteem at this age, and so, as a special gift to Melanie, I give you Me at Age Twelve (I'm the one with the sphere face. Obvs.):
2. It kills and ramps up your appetite all at the same time. I would be constantly starving but once I found food it looked gross.
3. It tastes like Misery. At least when I was on it (has this changed?) the pills were all un-coated and there was just no way to avoid the taste except if I took it with orange juice instead of water
4. Oh, the restlessness! I would come home from treatments and just kick my legs on my bed all night long to try and get extra energy out. Also, fatigue. Huh??
5. Bone density goes down, so that if you, for example, break your toe in sixth grade, it can't heal itself and you end up with avascular necrosis that they don't realize till you're 18 and then you have to get surgery.
6. Risk of tiny micro-fractures in the hip and back so that your back hurts forever but when you try and do an MRI to find what the hell's wrong, you get distracted by the lemon-sized cyst on your ovary. I mean, what?
But what I'm sayin' is, if you're on it for a reasonable amount of time (read: not 6 years), the effects are short-term (#'s 5 and 6 being the long term risks, and you're really...really not supposed to be on it as long as I was). So that's what we're talkin' about as a starting point. Next time I'm feeling druggy: Plaquenil. The devil.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Delicious Stretchers
(Note: I intended this to be a short, sweet, dirty post about ha ha how lecherous the 18th century is. It got a little longer than that because I got distracted by Interesting. Just remember: the fact that I'm a ridiculous dork is part of my charm.)
The title of this post is my new favorite 18th century euphemism for Really Big Penis.
Well, I promised something uplifting (snrk) and hilarious to wash away the depressing of the previous post. And what, I ask you, could be better than a quick discussion of 18th century porn literature?
I mentioned earlier that I'd tried and failed to read Moll Flanders (oh, Defoe, I know you tried) and succeeded in devouring the Marquis de Sade (Crimes of Love. Misfortunes of Virtue is, incidentally, on my bookshelf. Waiting.) You may know, too, that my favorite book in the entire world is Les Liaisons Dangereuses (in English translation, due to I do not know French, but still it is fantastic.) I am, in other words, the biggest dork for 18th century sex in the entire world. But really, I finally got to the one I've been looking forward to since I bought it over spring break: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Or, Fanny Hill, if we're feeling lazy.
My goodness, ladies and gentlemen. There are just delicious stretchers all over the damn place. Even Sade did not reach this level of "oh my!" and he was writing 50 years later. (tsk tsk, Marquis.)
What is actually kind of legitimately interesting about sex in 18th century literature is the author's silly ways of getting around it. Fanny Hill is arranged as confession, and all her sex scenes are justified by "I just want to tell you the whole story, honest!" Furthermore, she's writing to a woman, not a man, which is probably really significant. Defoe and de Sade are funnier because they blame the reader. They basically say, "My book, even though it is full of sex, is also full of VERY IMPORTANT LIFE LESSONS. And if you find yourself getting turned on by the delicious stretchers that are just hangin' out all over the place then you, fair reader, are a PERVERT and it is so out of my hands. Go see a priest or something." And of course, Pamela and Les Liaisons and many, many other seduction narratives (though Les Liaisons does this fantastic thing with the parallel narratives and there's the tradition seduction of Madame de Tourvel but then the Marquise de Merteuil is like really fucking badass and goes outside the whole seduction trope and...oh, wait, no one really cares.) I say, many other seduction narratives are in the epistolary form (letters!) so the authors are like "ohhh, seeeeee, I just found these letters lying around. I guess I'll publish them! I didn't write them, so it's not my fault if they are a little tiny bit, you know, foul."
Back to Fanny Hill - while it lacks some of the genius that Les Liaisons displays, let us not be unfair: this book is steamy. Steamy as all hell. And yet, you get past the hot lesbian sex* on page 10 (no kidding.) and you're like "holy shit why did Oxford World's Classics publish this? This is clearly just straight up porn" and then you get to the (equally-if-not-more graphic) fat people sex and you are like "um. On the other hand, my sex drive just fled to Siberia." And then at some point after four really graphic steamy scenes you suddenly hit Plot. And you stick with Plot for an awfully long time.
Now, let's talk about how difficult the thing is to read. I actually came across an older edition that I was really tempted to buy because the cover did not have a naked lady and it had the Fanny Hill title a lot bigger. It's very difficult to read your naked lady edition because people give you funny looks and you have to be like no I swear this is a very historically significant, um, gender studies, um, it's the 18th century and it's just that....okay I'm sorry I'm sorry, yes, I'm reading porn in public! So, reading's been pretty slow considering it's like 120 pages long.
Secondly, Oxford World's Classics (my favorite of the publishers of the old things) has had a lot of fun with their explanatory notes. My favorite? "Natural philosophy is the 18th century term for the natural sciences, which Fanny explores with her vagina rather than her other five senses." For real, if I could just sit around and write snarky explanatory notes like that all day, I would hunker down and get a PhD in 18th century porn VERY IMPORTANT LITERATURE.
So I am really one of Not That Many People who is interested in the 18th century. It seems like when we read old stuff (for class or for fun) we usually read the middle ages or the 19th century (ugh. 19th century. Do not even get me started.) and thus completely miss this little gem of debauchery apart from Swift and Voltaire.
Next time (next time I wander into this whack job of a century): I will rant my ass off about the modern adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons, Cruel Intentions. You will hear about what HORRIBLE THINGS they did to my favorite literary character in the world.
----
*Another interesting 18th century trope: in these seduction narratives (seduction narrative begins [I think] with Richardson's Clarissa**) there's a fantastic habit of having the old bawdy lady teach the young about-to-be-whore about sex/pleasure. In Pamela you saw the hint of that when she gets locked up in that house with Mrs. Whatsherface which was really the only decent part of the novel because at least Mrs. Whatsherface made funny dirty jokes. In Les Liaisons the Marquise de Merteuil hints at wanting to do that with Cecile, but then gets bored of her because she's stupid. In Fanny Hill...whoaaaa dude. Page ten. Everyone's naked and Fanny's learning...a lot...from an older no-longer-pretty-enough-to-be-a-whore woman.
** yes I just footnoted a footnote....so basically, Richardson got a lot of shit for having Pamela marry her seducer (it was a reformation of the rake narrative...okay, I'm not going to footnote that, but you know, rakes = creepy men). So in his next novel, he kills Clarissa after she is seduced. And so it begins. (Pamela, of course, was never seduced pre-marriage because Mr. B just keeps touching her bosom and then she faints. And then she wakes up "with [her] virtue intact." Right, honey.)
Thursday, August 5, 2010
The Mind/Body (dis)Connect Part II
So there's this weird thing that happened when I was diagnosed: I threw what was possibly the second biggest tantrum of my life (first being when I thought my cat had gone missing. We found her.) I sat on the floor of my living room and SCREAMED, friends, SCREAMED for who knows how long, because my parents tried to explain to me that "chronic" meant I would ALWAYS have lupus.
Oh, wait, that's not a weird reaction at all.
The weird part came afterwards, when I proceed to Not Cry and basically Not Worry and Not Acknowledge my disease at all. I didn't tell anyone I had it and somehow because of that (?) it was almost like I didn't. Apart from the swollen joints and the chemo and the not seeing people outside of school. At all.
And then I look back and I think to myself "What the fuck." Because at some point my freshman year of college I just totally sank down onto my dorm room floor and melted into the ground like it was the first time I'd ever heard the word "chronic" before. I was in remission, I'd taken myself off plaquenil (I'll do a fun story about my tendency to boycott medicine later), but I had a sinus infection and my knees hurt. That wasn't the FIRST time I'd cried about my diagnosis since The Tantrum. The FIRST time was my junior year of high school when I discovered a girl in my grade had a strange tattoo that was just a string of numbers. I found out from a friend that it was the date of her remission from leukemia, which she'd had when we were in 8th grade.
I cried then because I can't ever get that tattoo.
Now I'm bored of detailing my crying life, so I am moving on to this weird bit of mind/body disconnect. Why is it that back when I was really sick, I was mostly happy? It's only recently, way into "remission" that I've started to tiptoe towards the whole despair thing.
Two thoughts? The obvious one: I was too young when I was first diagnosed to understand the full weight of the thing. It's like death, right? Kids that young have no concept of eternity. So even though I flipped my 9-year-old shit the FIRST time forever was brought up, it didn't REALLY occur to me that forever is forever.
The weirder thought. So long as I was hovering near rock bottom, I didn't have to accept what was happening to me, because it HAD to get better and we were all working to make it better. Even though I was in pain and had treatments and was lonely because I'd wandered away from all my friends, I still had something to fight against. This current state is a lot harder for me, because I worry that I may have to accept that this is as good as it's gonna get. My bloodwork isn't abnormal enough to justify my being on any medication, but I'm still tired and my knees still hurt and I can't make a fist till an hour after I wake up.
I feel like we are raised not to settle for "good enough" and so I can't seem to accept that this is where I'm at and may be where I'll stay. I've tried to eat healthier and get more exercise (I walk the two miles home from work most days) and (sometimes) get more sleep (though I have pretty epic-ass insomnia), but none of that makes a particularly noticeable difference in how I feel. Partially because I'm bad at sticking with it - it's easier to slump into fatigue than to pick myself out of it.
I wonder (does anyone know?) if we pay much attention to the psychology of kids with chronic disease. Because, evidently, it can fuck with your mind. I know there are psychologists who specialize in terminal children. But I was never taken to a therapist till my senior year of high school when I think it was a little late. That may not be due to lack of therapists, it may just be because my parents have always been convinced that I am freakishly sane. Pause for laughter.
Next time: Something uplifting and hilarious!
Oh, wait, that's not a weird reaction at all.
The weird part came afterwards, when I proceed to Not Cry and basically Not Worry and Not Acknowledge my disease at all. I didn't tell anyone I had it and somehow because of that (?) it was almost like I didn't. Apart from the swollen joints and the chemo and the not seeing people outside of school. At all.
And then I look back and I think to myself "What the fuck." Because at some point my freshman year of college I just totally sank down onto my dorm room floor and melted into the ground like it was the first time I'd ever heard the word "chronic" before. I was in remission, I'd taken myself off plaquenil (I'll do a fun story about my tendency to boycott medicine later), but I had a sinus infection and my knees hurt. That wasn't the FIRST time I'd cried about my diagnosis since The Tantrum. The FIRST time was my junior year of high school when I discovered a girl in my grade had a strange tattoo that was just a string of numbers. I found out from a friend that it was the date of her remission from leukemia, which she'd had when we were in 8th grade.
I cried then because I can't ever get that tattoo.
Now I'm bored of detailing my crying life, so I am moving on to this weird bit of mind/body disconnect. Why is it that back when I was really sick, I was mostly happy? It's only recently, way into "remission" that I've started to tiptoe towards the whole despair thing.
Two thoughts? The obvious one: I was too young when I was first diagnosed to understand the full weight of the thing. It's like death, right? Kids that young have no concept of eternity. So even though I flipped my 9-year-old shit the FIRST time forever was brought up, it didn't REALLY occur to me that forever is forever.
The weirder thought. So long as I was hovering near rock bottom, I didn't have to accept what was happening to me, because it HAD to get better and we were all working to make it better. Even though I was in pain and had treatments and was lonely because I'd wandered away from all my friends, I still had something to fight against. This current state is a lot harder for me, because I worry that I may have to accept that this is as good as it's gonna get. My bloodwork isn't abnormal enough to justify my being on any medication, but I'm still tired and my knees still hurt and I can't make a fist till an hour after I wake up.
I feel like we are raised not to settle for "good enough" and so I can't seem to accept that this is where I'm at and may be where I'll stay. I've tried to eat healthier and get more exercise (I walk the two miles home from work most days) and (sometimes) get more sleep (though I have pretty epic-ass insomnia), but none of that makes a particularly noticeable difference in how I feel. Partially because I'm bad at sticking with it - it's easier to slump into fatigue than to pick myself out of it.
I wonder (does anyone know?) if we pay much attention to the psychology of kids with chronic disease. Because, evidently, it can fuck with your mind. I know there are psychologists who specialize in terminal children. But I was never taken to a therapist till my senior year of high school when I think it was a little late. That may not be due to lack of therapists, it may just be because my parents have always been convinced that I am freakishly sane. Pause for laughter.
Next time: Something uplifting and hilarious!
Sunday, August 1, 2010
My Big, Fat, Jewish Family
Hello world. I am back! I was in the woody hills of Vermont in a house the color of a large pumpkin with my Entire Family.
I have met my new cousin (once removed), Smudge, who is actually not named Smudge, but who we call Smudge anyway. She is 8 months old and we, the two Girl Cousins are going to take over the world. Just. You. Wait.
Furthermore, we have discovered, awkwardly, that I am the only Cousin who is currently single. This is a) a first and b) a pressure-filled situation to be in since my grandmother added a loud-ass aside to a toast: "And those of you who are still unattached, GET GOING!" It is assumed that my AWOL cousin woke in a sweat back in New York at those words, with a sudden urge to head to a bar.* She is thinking: seven thousand grandchildren and between all of you you come up with one lousy baby? Oy.
I feel like I have more funny stories but I can't think of them just now. Traveling is like getting my head whacked seventy times with the remains of a bull elephant, but there's not a ton of sun in Vermont so other than the sleep deprivation and the constant Loud I handled reunion okay. Now, though, my entire building has no power and I am typing this at work because I am a rebel. No really. Okay more later.
I have met my new cousin (once removed), Smudge, who is actually not named Smudge, but who we call Smudge anyway. She is 8 months old and we, the two Girl Cousins are going to take over the world. Just. You. Wait.
Furthermore, we have discovered, awkwardly, that I am the only Cousin who is currently single. This is a) a first and b) a pressure-filled situation to be in since my grandmother added a loud-ass aside to a toast: "And those of you who are still unattached, GET GOING!" It is assumed that my AWOL cousin woke in a sweat back in New York at those words, with a sudden urge to head to a bar.* She is thinking: seven thousand grandchildren and between all of you you come up with one lousy baby? Oy.
I feel like I have more funny stories but I can't think of them just now. Traveling is like getting my head whacked seventy times with the remains of a bull elephant, but there's not a ton of sun in Vermont so other than the sleep deprivation and the constant Loud I handled reunion okay. Now, though, my entire building has no power and I am typing this at work because I am a rebel. No really. Okay more later.
*This order is particularly amusing following her Birthday Question. Q: Grandma, what have you learned in your 87 years? A: To keep mah mouth shut!
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