brain freeze ice freeze

At least Jeeves is helpful.
At least Jeeves is helpful.

 
Dear Internet,
There is a phenomenon that is often referred to brain freeze or zap, in which a bolt of electricity can shoot across your brain unexpectedly. Different people describe differently things, but for me it’s like an ice pick was jammed in my head and then removed rather quickly. I rarely get them, rare enough that I don’t even document them. On Monday, I got two. When the second happened, nearly 12 hours from the first, I was in bed reading email and I knew whatever I wanted to do, I had to shut down the computer and go to bed.
It was a strange blessing I wrote chocolate, chicago, train in a fit of insomnia the previous night, I was dead asleep, with an achy brain, almost immediately and then slept for 9.5 hours. I naturally woke up shortly after 5AM on Tuesday morning. But now it is after midnight on Tuesday night, and I’m just now writing my Wednesday entry. If I sound confusing at times, you were warned.
I was able to secure Wednesday The Pug a vet appointment on Tuesday to check into her balding patterns and get her bi-annual check-up. At 13.5, she is still remarkably healthy and the vet thinks the hair loss is part of her prednisone consumption (which we’re now halving) and she picked up some kind of skin infection, all cured by antibiotics. The price of her vet check up, which included blood draws, labs, drugs, and a few other things, took a good chunk of the savings I was able to pull for the month. I’m glad I can afford to take care of her and pay for her needs in cash but I’m frustrated because it seems whenever I have a few extra bucks, something happens.
On our way to the vet, the low tire pressure light came on the driver side right tire and wouldn’t go off. The first winter I had Jeeves, all four lights came on one particular cold morning and I had a massive panic attack on what to do, because no one tells you this is going to happen. Turns out the TPM device gets off-set with sever weather changes, which can be reset by the MINI dealer.
This time around, instead of hyperventilating because the TPM was off, I went to the first gas station available. Broken gauge. Drove to my second gas station. Also broken air pump gauge. At this point I’m within a mile of the dealership and hurrah for run flats! Off to the MINI dealer I went. I can drive a hundred miles with flat tire and not fuck my rims!
Turns out the tire pressure in the driver’s side front tire was actually the correct PSI but as the others were a few ticks above, the driver’s side was then registering it was under pressured. Once we got this sorted, the MINI shop clerk (who was a girl!), showed me how to check my oil and then she filled up my window wiper fluid. As an aside, on my way back from Monterey, I sat next to a mechanic who told me he used to work at a government base that was located across the street from a gas station. After watching several hundred cars come in and fill up, he noted that not one person checked their oil. Nothing like potentially running my timing chain will get met to pull out that dip stick.
At this rate, I just need a swiss army life and duct tape and then I can solve everything!
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-universe:

chocolate, chicago, train

Dear Internet,
Rude. Shit stirrer. Abrasive. Confrontational. Asshole. Mean. Purposeful troublemaker. Troll. Judgmental. Hater.
I’m sure I’m missing a few adjectives, but that’s a handful of the ones I’ve been called, at least to my face and that I know about, in the last few years.
I have an opinion. I always have an opinion. If I don’t have an opinion it is more than likely I don’t understand or am aware of something so the next step for me is to ask you, the explainer, to explain what it is you’re going on about so I can go and form an opinion of my own. If you don’t like the fact I’m asking for an explanation or to question your reasoning or you don’t like my tone (which apparently can be magically conveyed and nuanced over text because you are just that good), then I’m the condescending asshole who dared question your benevolent, everlasting wisdom. Or a jealous individual who is simply hating on your good fortune.
For quite sometime I’ve been watching from my digital grass, binoculars in hand, how people react to me and also to each other when the aforementioned scenarios show up. I found the following to be true: If you ask for someone to explain themselves when they state something as absolute, most often times they can’t offer up that explanation. Not always, not everyone, but enough that I’ve begun to wonder if anyone actually knows what the hell they are saying anymore.
If I disagree with an opinion, or ask you to further explain, it’s not with malevolent intent. I promise. I double pinky swear I’m not out to take you down like a deer to a rabbit. It is not to make you feel stupid, it is not to make you treat you with less respect, it is not to be harmful, or to troll you. But if I cannot formulate a response to your statements it is more than likely I don’t understand your point, angle, reasoning, or any other related synonym. If one person doesn’t understand your point of view, what is the likelihood others will?
I’m not quite sure what has been dropped into the water as of late, but I grow weary of constantly seeing others, not just me, treated like we’re the anathemas of society. I’m not a troll apologist, and there are some truly pretty shitty people who are out there, but there is a large swathe of land between being an actual troll and those looking for our questions to be answered. The problem, and one that is increasing, is that we become so wrapped up on protecting ourselves in a public space that ANYONE who so much as throws us perceived digital shade is a flaming asshole.
Even professing an opposite opinion on popular somethings can also carry its own burden. I’ve been called an uncultured moron for not liking Arrested Development and the person was dead serious.
The brassiness of my tactics are not for the fainthearted and that stems from living with my husband for so many years. TheHusband is not a sedate man by any stretch of the imagination and he is adamant, especially when my ADHD is running at full speed, that I compose, clarify, and make succinct when I speak. “I went chocolate, Chicago, train” may sound like gibberish to you, but in my head I hear, “I went to Chicago, on a train, and while in Chicago bought some great chocolate.” My own self-awareness of my problematic word retrieval which can spill into my thought process puts me on high alert for this sort of thing. I also know I am not perfect and I’m just as guilty of braying, OH MY GOD THIS PERSON IS ATTACKING ME WITH THEIR QUESTIONS, for no good reason. But if it not unreasonable to expect my husband or anyone to question me if something I say is not clear, why is it totally unreasonable to question others with the same respect?
What I ask from now on, of myself and of you, is that if someone asks or responds to your statements with a question to probe or rebuttal, before going into defense mode – stop. Listen to what they have to say and think about the question or statement made to you. It is TOTALLY okay, as much as I or I’m sure anyone would like to not to admit, to be wrong. It is totally okay to hear a totally different point of view and meld it with your own or be swayed by someone else’s point. It is totally okay to reject what is being said to you if you disagree.  It is also totally okay, as much as I hate to admit it, to ignore that person altogether if you don’t wish to engage.
But it’s never not been okay is to demean or treat anyone who disagrees with you like they are the problem, verbally or otherwise. It is not okay to be a coward or use passive aggressive tactics to undermine someone. It is never okay to use ad hominem attacks or any variation thereof. It’s never okay to be a narrow minded jerk when you profess to be an open minded individual. And especially never okay to start spreading rumors and gossip about someone because they do not align with your ideologies and called you out on it.
We’re all dying to be heard, to be understood, and to be listened.  But if you aren’t willing to engage in methods that will get you heard, listened to, and understood then why are you here?
xoxo,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-universe: 1998

jolly hockey sticks

Street graffiti, Fountain / Division, Grand Rapids.

Dear Internet,
I wished the other day for a burger cooked in pork fat, Friday I got my wish. Work husband #3 and I have a monthly standing lunch date which was happening that week and he suggested we meet at Reserve. The menu was a message from the gods since a large number of the plates were Lisa-friendly AND then there were the aforementioned burgers and fries cooked in pork fat; I was starry eyed on my walk down to the restaurant.
The burger and two helping of fries and lots of good conversation later, I felt full. Uncomfortably full. To work off some of the deliciousness, work husband #3 suggested we walk over to Vault of Midnight, the GR arm of the famous Ann Arbor comic book store, to check out the latest comics. After that, we grabbed coffees at Madcap before heading back to our separate work destinations.
Protip: Making an audible comment in an artisanal coffee shop that pour over coffee is nothing more than fancy drip, earns you dirty looks in said coffee shop.
But they do make a damn fine mocha.
A good Friday was had, but I could not shake the feeling of over fullness – which isn’t surprising given I had not had any meat or animal products the entire week. The uncomfortable feeling turned into queasiness and didn’t go away. There is no dinner for me Friday night and no breakfast on Saturday.
TheHusband and I went to a birthday party Saturday night, which was held at a local bar that served food. After barely eating since lunch on Friday, my eyes were as big as dinner plates and I ordered too much heavy food on a stomach that was already not feeling awesome. This was going to become a potential pattern of solid plant diet during the week and meat lovers delight on the weekends. The lesson learned is even when being mindful when eating something you’ve been depriving your body for a while, the sensitiveness of your stomach will kick into overdrive.
[And no, I am not going to go vegan. The momentary sensitivity after eating a tasty, delicious bacon burger is totally worth the price of admission.]
It was a quiet social weekend but a busy domestic one. TheHusband and I decided to turn our solarium, which I tried to capture as my writing office, into a meditative space for him (and for me), which meant spending quality time at a local garden shop figuring out plants. He wants to go back to one of the very original ideas we had upon our move in by turning the room into a meditative space with mainly plants of various flavors and sizes to create the desired tranquil environment. I do currently use the room for my own yoga and meditative practices, so when TheHusband suggested we turn it into a global meditative space, I couldn’t really object. We’re attempting to utilize as much of the space we have as possible, but we know at some point with the next few years, this house as lovely as it is, is going up for sale.
This summer after putting the writing space together, and a few haphazard attempts at using it, I then spent the rest of the summer at the cabin. School started in August, time was unprioritized but not entirely unfruitful, but I still wasn’t using the room as I had intended. And right now I’m splitting my writing time between my proper office and our bedroom since my flat ass doesn’t take kindly to the chair I have in the curated space. Ideally, I’d like to move the writing work outside the house to a co-workspace or something along those lines sometime in the future.
We’re noticing WednesdayThePug has started shedding large amounts of hair and it is not just her summer into winter coat. But instead of regaining replacement hair, she’s going bald in random parts of her body. I noticed it during the summer, but the bald spots didn’t seem get bigger or multiply until recently. Her attitude, food, and bathroom habits haven’t changed, but as she seems to continue to lose more hair at a faster rate than in the summer, I’m going to book her in with the vet this week to check on that and to get her shots up to date. Fingers crossed it could be as simple as age or the effect of her daily 1/2 dose of prednisone is finally catching up with her. She is 13.5 years old, which is bordering on extraordinary for a pug whose median age is 11.
I’m not very confident she’ll make it through the winter due to her existing arthritis, hip dysplasia, and other health issues even though she’s constantly in good spirits, will slit your throat for a pizza crust, and waits every day at the door for me to come home from work. She’s had a few close calls with death in the last few years, of which all she’s rebounded quite majestically from, but she’s torn my heart out enough with her illnesses that I feel as though I have grieved already for her many times over. I’m not attempting to be cruel or cold, but more matter of fact as I also know that once she’s gone, whether naturally or because we had to put her down due to health reasons, I will be an emotional wreck. I’ve had her for 1/3 of my life and she’s been my most constant companion and my best friend during all of that time, even if her farts can clear a room.
Well that forked path was cheery.
It’s quite late now and I’ve made the mistake an hour ago of checking the weather forecast and discovered it is going to snow sometime between now and sunrise. As much as I complain, as much as I hate driving or dealing with it, snow is quite beautiful to watch. From afar. Preferably in a house or other locale. I’m kind of sad I’ll miss tonights flurries, no matter how brief. But I will say I am looking forward to winter break in December where I’ll have nearly a whole month to watch flurries all to my little heart’s content.
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe: 2009, 1998

thank you for reading

The Vatican Secret Archive.
Courtesy of The Vatican Secret Archives, Vdh Books

Dear Internet
The other day I was checking my stats and noticed that a lonely/stalking/creepy/admiring soul had decided to go through my entire archive and read every single thing I had written. They went through 500+ pages ranging back to 1995 — and that is just what’s up online. If you go through the archive, you realise there are large swathes of time missing: months in some years, years in some decades.
I was both pleased as punch and alternately creeped out.
Conversation has been happening on Facebook about the steady stream of writing that has been coming from me as of late, and I responded to a friends comment with the following:

It IS true I get more commentary/page views when the shit is deep, but it’s mentally and emotionally exhausting to keep digging that ditch every day. I’m not sitting in a corner thinking deep thoughts all day erry day, and most people aren’t either.
Modern wisdom seems to be to have a singular mission with your site and keep on with that mission. So if you’re on about dairy free cooking, bee keeping, or whatever – that is all you’re going to (mainly) talk about. That’s how most of the big name bloggers tend to operate and it works for them. But frankly, that’s not how I operate and once I gave myself the permission to write about whatever I damn well please, writing has become a helluva lot easier.

Up until I published Live Action Sexual Harassment, EPbaB had a couple of of goals, the main being to aggressively document my mental and physical health, which so far has been fairly successful. Secondly was to document the little things and not so little things that happen in my life. Like many who keep their journals online with an eye to a public view, I also came up with a few different series’ that seem to be appreciated by the public such as my weekly wrap-up of my interests at Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes,  The Packing Lists series which always gets a lot of comments and views, and my erratically updated So, You Want To Be A Librarian/Archivist series which remains fairly popular. A few other series include Le Mi Passioni which documents the things that I love and Kalendae Januariae about the small and not so small changes I want to make to my life.
So while I’ve been writing online for a very long time (my 16th anniversary is next year!), I am no where near readership that I once was or could be. I know this is for a lot of reasons: Domain name changes, blog name changes, lost of interest by the readers, I stopped writing for a few years, and probably a few more other reasons to add to this list. In the year since I’ve started becoming more assertive in writing more regularly, my readership grows at small, but steady, clip. I was, and still am, pleased with the content I’m writing. I was, and still am, thrilled when people say they are inspired, touched, or moved by what I write.
None of that has changed and will never change.
But sometimes you feel, as you do, what is the point of all this, really? When I started doing this online writing thing in the late ’90s, it was a novel act that no one would ever imagine in becoming a way of life. Defining a “blog” now tends to come to mean a product or a brand, less about content, even less about writing, and more about selling and page views.
I don’t see myself as a brand. Or a product. But I supposed you could style what I do as any of those things when people email me to thank on the advice for being dairy free, or they found something else useful on my site. The service you could present I am selling is me and my experiences, which is not necessarily a bad thing since those experiences are freely available.
Then Live Action Sexual Harassment happened.
I wrote Live Action Sexual Harassment right after I came home from the pub, in Evernote on my iPad because my laptop was almost dead. I did not care if it was polished, grammatically correct, or even coherent. I had something to say and I needed to get out. Then. Now.
My charging brick had been dead once I got to Monterey a few days before and my laptop was nearly half out of juice when I discovered the dead brick. If I could squeak out five minutes out of the damn battery, maybe even less, to get the entry into WordPress and get it formatted and published, I would have been thrilled. Several of the WP management apps for the iPad are bonkers, and I had already lost some previous work when trying to get previous offerings up. But I had to get it written and if I could not get into my site while in California, I would do it when I came home.
I woke up Wednesday morning, booted up my laptop for the last time that trip, and was able to get the entry in, formatted, and published. I had few spare battery moments to create a few tweets to be pushed out later in the day and also enough time to double check for spelling and grammar errors before the final publishing. Once I was satisfied everything was to my expectations, I closed down my laptop and started getting ready for the day.
The entry posted mid-morning on Wednesday and within hours, my site had already eclipsed its previous record for day page views. By the end of the calendar day, the entry, and my site, would have earned 10x the traffic it would normally would have seen. In addition to the site traffic, the original tweet was RT several dozen times and variations of of that tweet pointing to the work was close to double that number.
Within a couple of hours of posting, and I was on the conference floor, I became known as “the girl who wrote that post.” Strangers I had never met approached me and talked about being brave, raw, and honest. I got emails, tweets, and comments from friends and strangers about similar things happening to them.
Having experiencing some notoriety in the late ’90s for exposing a hacker fraud, a similar chain of events had happened: I was found first, then I wrote something, I went viral, page and reader views skyrocketed, then levelled out for awhile, my life went insane, readership slowed down and then petered out.
To answer my previous question of, “What is this all for, really?” – the answer remains, and will always remain, to express myself in the only way possible. Some days it is going to be fluff, and other days it’s going to be depressing, and some others a combination of both or something entirely different. There is no theme here – unless you count the theme as me. There is no agenda – unless you count self-expression as an agenda. Some days, like today, the content is going to flow. Other days it will be halting and broken. Pitch perfect grammar, flow, and spelling and then broken words, missed commas, and lost trains of thought.
But that is how life works – nothing is always properly formatted, coherent, or sometimes even sustainable. If you are looking for a confessional, conversational tone, and often deeply revealing look into one person’s life, with occasional foray into the silly: I’m your girl.
And thank you for reading.
x0x0,
Lisa
P.S. Someone once asked me how long it takes to write an entry so I thought I’d eyeball the time for this one: From conception (a comment I posted on FB that sparked the post), to finding the image, writing, editing, re-editing, more editing, polishing, and formatting took me under two hours. The chunk of it was consecutive, but the last hour was broken up over several hour gaps while I was doing something. Total word count: 1300. On average, I can write clean 750 words an hour.

This day in Lisa-Universe in:

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: November 9, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Watching

  • American Horror Story: Coven, The NewsroomHomeland, Once Upon A Time in Wonderland
    As the fall season shows have started to slow down and I’ve gotten my chance to dig into a few of the new offerings, it is now time to stop watching a lot of the crap sitting on my DVR. The above shows, some new and some old, are ones that for some reason, aren’t doing it for me anymore. I was sad about Once Upon A Time in Wonderland being so schlocky and syrupy, as I had really wanted to get into that show. I’m over The Newsroom like woah, and Homeland? Well, I used to love this show but the constant pushing of the teen angst as the main plot line and how they use Carrie’s bipolar as a crutch explanation for everything just wore me out. TheHusband still watches, but he seems to vacillate between liking or disliking it every week, which indicates to me the show runners have run out of steam.  I’m also having mixed feelings about Sleepy Hollow and Marvel’s Agent’s of S.H.I.E.L.D., but I’m hoping soon the shows will get their act together or else I’m done.

Weekly watching: DraculaProject Runway All-Stars,  Breathless, AtlantisMasters of SexElementary, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Sleepy Hollow, Survivor, Downton Abbey, Boardwalk Empire, Doc Martin, QIPeaky Blinders,  Sons of Anarchy,  The Vampire Diaries

Links

 

What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in:

Don’t Stop Believin’

Don’t Stop Believin’
(I’m on the far left, in orange pants)

Dear Internet,
It is true, apparently, if you give me a few Guinness, I will do just about anything. Including singing karaoke.
Tomorrow (Friday) marks a few milestones this week I’m pretty proud of. The first being this is the eighth day in a row I’ve been successful in getting something on the journal. My unspoken, until now, goal, has been to write something everyday and get it posted, no matter how minute or insignificant I may think it may be. The hardest part has been the balance between raw and fluff, which has been pretty tricky.  My point is to write, even if there is nothing of major news to report, to capture moments of my day or week as I can best remember.
The second milestone is TheHusband and I have revamped our eating plan, again, and we’ve made it through the first tough first week. I also realized with the exception of some tiny chicken pieces floating in a steamed rice bowl I had for lunch earlier this week, our diet has been entirely unintentionally vegan.
I have never shat so much as I have this week.
We have local, organic delivery of vegetables every other week, coupled with our regular shopping, means we eat a lot of veg and fruit. But with our current meal plan, the fruit and veg has been amped up significantly. To help alleviate how strict the calorie counting we’re (I’m) doing in the week, the weekends will be slightly more relaxed. Hopefully with meat in the form of burgers cooked in bacon fat.
The struggle with my weight has long been documented across all incarnations of my journal. Yet here, on this incarnation I’ve been not as brave talking about this topic. I’ve got a blog post started, yet still sitting in draft format for nearly a year, on my body plans for the year. But those plans, as we know, changed drastically. The last several weeks has been well documented on how my world has been changing in fairly significant ways and part of that significance is when faced with task or a goal, I’m not shying away from it as I have before in the past.
Over my shrink appointment this week with Dr. P., I recounted everything that had happened from the sexual harassment to dealing with my mother and all the gooey bits in between. He has also noticed something has changed with me, something within. The corner I knew I needed to turn has finally come my way and as long as I can keep the wolves at bay, then all is right with the world.
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2010, 2008, 1998

scary house with the wild front yard

How I imagine others see our house.
(Batty Langley Lodge, Ireland via Janke Kloss on Flickr)

Dear Internet,
Today I taught two classes back to back, which meant I was on my feet for about five hours straight with no breaks. As soon as I could cut out of work, I came home, got ready for the following day. By 5:30PM, I was reclining with my foot propped up with an ice pack on it, hot cocoa on the table, ThePug at my left hip, and my stories on the TV screen. My goals tonight were well, none. My original plans were to finish up prep work for work projects buuut those got canceled when the due dates got pushed or canceled.
Sometimes it’s hard to dial back to learning how to relax, how to disconnect from the world. I was able to catch up on DVR’d shows, catch up on personal email, and just live in the moment.
Because sometimes all you just need  is hot cocoa, your dog by your side, and your stories on the TV screen.
x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2012, 2008

My Top 3 Future Husbands

Dear Internet,
Things are getting a little deep around here, so it’s time to lighten things up, even just for a moment. If you have ever spent any amount of time in my company, you may be aware that I keep a rotating list of my future husbands, which while they may seem to come and go with the times, is actually pretty steady. But before I go forward on that list, I should pay homage to the man who started it all:

Shaun Cassidy

I don’t remember when I first gazed my youthful eyes his way, but I do remember making massive bargains in my youth with my mother to skip the Sunday night church services to watch The Hardy Boys Mysteries. Thank the gods Catholics are obsessed with multiple weekend services or else I would have never met the man of my five-year old dreams. I also remember that same holiday season, I got a 6′ poster of my beloved which was pinned to the back of my bedroom door for years. I was also a heavy collector of his work, and while I have lost my original copy of his seminal album, Shaun Cassidy, I was able to replace it later on.
Runners up: Rick(y) Schroeder and River Phoenix pretty much defined my post Shaun Cassidy teen years.
Before I begin, I need to clarify the difference between a “future husband” and a crush. A crush is someone like Travis Fimmel who plays Ragnar Lothbrook in the History Channel’s Vikings, someone I am partially familiar with and not currently building a shrine in their honor.

A “future husband” is someone whom I probably follow their career to some extent, probably keep tabs on their love life to file away for a later date, and some whom I’d probably would leave my husband for, no questions asked. (Just kidding. Maybe.)
James McAvoy in Filth.

James McAvoy
When Benedict Cumberbatch wants to tap that ass, you know it’s legit.
I first came across McAvoy in a 2004 film, Rory O’Shea Was Here. The film wasn’t distributed in the US, but showed up in my Netflix recommendations sometime around 2005. While I’ve seen McAvoy in his earlier works, THIS would be the film that set the course for my one true love.
What I adore about him is in interviews, he’s goofy. Smart. Witty. In his work, he plays such a wide range and breadth of characters, time periods, and stories that it sometimes takes my breath away. I have yet to see McAvoy as a terrible actor in anything he does. The films may be shit, but McAvoy always gives it his all.  I also love that he has no pretensions of himself, he can go from brooding heart throb to psycho maniac in the blink of an eye.
My little Scottish imp also has a thing for the old broads – his wife is the same age as me.
Interesting fact: McAvoy and Benedict Cumberbatch were in Starter for 10 together, which also turned out to be my first exposure to Cumberbatch. Who knew!
Henry Rollins

Henry Rollins
This one should not be a huge surprise – Henry ticks off all the major boxes for me. He’s wicked smart, he’s complex, he’s got tattoos, and he’s heavily ambitious. Rollins lives the kind of life that I always try to aspire to live: balls to the wall, try anything once, no holds barred, let us go!
I got into Rollins after Black Flag broke up, so I’m not terribly sure where he kind of fell into my lap. I do know that I catch his speaking tours any chance I get, watch his stand up, and check out a book or two of his when I can. Rollins is dangerous not because he’s a bad boy and knows it kind of way, but in the he’s just such the complete package coupled with the damned charm, turning him down for anything would be the biggest mistake of my life.
Alexander Skarsgård

Alexander Skarsgård
When your own husband tells you he’d leave you for this man, then you know it’s true love.
Like most of America, I got introduced to Skarsgård via True Blood and like most of America, was getting into pissing contests with their BFFs over who was the hottest vamp or shifter we’d not kick out of bed for eating crackers.
(For my birthday, a girlfriend made me a wallpaper for my iPad of this image with “Happy Birthday Lisa” on it. Done and done.)
Ridiculously tall, especially after the shortness of Rollins and McAvoy, Skarsgård just oozes sex even when he’s playing a doofus. In addition to the amazing body that makes my ovaries kick into overtime, he’s got a biting and dirty sense of humour that plays well with my intellectual side. Every interview I caught him in, I think I’ve squealed a million times over because his mouth and mind are so damn filthy. At this point in True Blood, he is the only thing that is keeps me watching. If he gets killed off for the next season, I am done.
Runners up: Richard Armitage, Michael Fassbender, Guy Garvey, Monica BelluciChiwetel Ejiofor, Cillian Murphy
It’s interesting because when a Benedict Cumberbatch thing happens, or Tom Hiddleston thing happens or someone of that ilk, people send it my way thinking they too are on part of my oeuvre. While these men are fine actors and pleasing to the eye, there is nothing about them that calls to my soul like the above three.
Over the years I’ve kept a similar list rotating in and out of my head, and while some tastes have changed, what hasn’t changed is what I look for in a man. I need the brain and the beauty, having a lovely piece of fluff is not going to do it for me. I also, apparently, get hives around nice men. When I found out Ian Somerhalder, who plays Damone Salvatore on The Vampire Diaries, was the complete opposite of his conniving, manipulating ways on the show, I lost interest.
xoxo,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2010, 2010

what jail is like

Bipolar skull by Taiyo85 on Deviantart

Dear Internet,
As the kids say, I’m full of all sorts of feels today.
In addition to the sexual harassment shenanigans going on, I received an invite from my mother this weekend to dinner at her place for Thanksgiving with the words, “It is time to forgive and forget. Sincerely apologize” scribbled on the card. There is a metric fuck ton on that topic I need to write in regards to our estrangement, but not today.
No, today we’re going to skip talking about my pussy and boobs and my mother issues and talk about my brain.
Tonight I had a fairly final appointment with my medicating shrink, Dr. H.  I’ve been Lithium free, bipolar and ADHD drug free actually, for nearly a month and feeling pretty damn good about the whole thing. In a lot of ways, I feel like I moved over the hurdle of the mess that had become my life, sought help and while the drugs did not work, found some kind of manageable world that I can exist in the moment and not think of what could/may/potentially happen in the future.
Being bipolar is a fucked up diagnosis. You’re either vilified as being a fucking lunatic and you’re expected, thanks to the media, to accept the condition they present to the masses or treated as the ultimate muse who can spin spiderwebs of creativity at the drop of a hat.
I’ve stopped watching Homeland because I got tired of them treating Carrie’s bipolar as this alternate superhero trait and presenting that anyone with bipolar can go on a sexy times bender, complete with smooth jazz, which warrants a good reason for her demise. Another particularly interesting insight they like to allude to is at ANY TIME Carrie can go bat shit insane! And poof! She’s carted off to the psych ward and given ECT.  Against her will.
(I have made TheHusband promise, no matter how bad it ever gets in the future, he will not allow them to give me ECT. Not in a fucking million years. No.)
Life doesn’t work that way, especially when you’re chemically imbalanced. Not by a long shot. When my mother tried to commit suicide a decade ago, getting her checked in to a psych ward was fucking paper work galore – because isn’t it always? The endless amounts of paperwork when your mother has OD’d on insulin is kind of astounding and makes concrete two things I hope to do in life: Not go to jail or get checked into a psych ward.
(They also had Carrie eating Lithium like its candy and IT WILL REACT THIS VERY SECOND. Lithium takes weeks to get to a medicating level and then you have to take into account the blood work involved and the cannots that could dampen the drugs effectiveness. Lithium, when it works, is a miracle drug if you’re willing to give up alcohol, pain relievers, your sex drive, and are prepared for the amped anxiety and ADHD like symptoms to name a few lovely sideeffects.)
I also get twitchy reading these stories about people who do major things in their life — lose a million pounds, conquered a major disease, overcame their illnesses. We’re only given these tiny snapshots of their insular world in these pieces and golden road after golden road on how much better their life now is! Which is fine, but it’s so hard to relate to someone when they gloss over the details and give up this facade of a mirror under the guise of “I get you.” No, you don’t get me. This is why being crazy is well crazy. Every diagnosis may have a blanket term, but how individually we are under that diagnosis varies as widely as the color spectrum.
TheHusband will tell you living with me while going on and off the drugs, was a goddamned nightmare. What Lisa was he going to end up today? Was I going to put clothes on and go to work or would I call in sick because the thought of getting out of bed was too much to fucking bear? Would I refuse to eat for random reasons or cry for hours because of images of baby elephants triggered that particular spell on that particular day? And I haven’t gotten into the mania yet which transfers, sometimes for me, into excessive shopping and long periods of not sleeping. I’m talking days of going on a few hours of sleep and lots of caffeine.
Sometimes, both at the same time.
Being crazy is ugly. You lose friends who can’t handle the mood swings; you lose jobs, lovers, your sense of self-worth, your dignity, your grace. One minute you’re high on the world and the next, you want to burn it all to the ground and salt the earth. Sometimes the highs last for a really good long period, when the world seems that much sharper, in focus and BOOM! Without warning, it flips and you’re huddled in week old clothing why you can’t bother to get up to shower.  You can track my entire adult career in education, jobs, and relationships on where exactly on the spectrum I was for my mania or depression.
Being crazy is lonely. People turn away from you, friends wander off, lovers break up with you, you have no real outlet to say, “This is me. This is who I am. There are going to be some really amazing days and some really awful days, but if you hang on, it’ll be okay.” Because you have, in a sense, said this before at the last break-up, the last phone call, the last email to someone. They’ve heard this story before — just get some help, they will tell you. Get some help, put your world back together. But what if, like in my case, the help that is supposed to set you free actually imprisons you? I cannot physically take the drugs for my disease. I have tried numerous times and each drug cocktail has shaved off days, weeks, months, sometimes years of time that I will never get back from all the lost time of experimentation. Now what? There is no handbook for this sort of thing, how am I supposed to put my world together if my world is so fragile, the smallest of changes can send it shattering into a million pieces?
Being crazy is exhausting. Whether from the drugs or the pure, raw sheer strength of keeping yourself together during the hour, day, or even the minute. The constant on guard of your feelings, emotions to make sure they don’t explode over everyone you meet.
Today I am neither ugly, lonely, or exhausted. Today has been a good day, as was yesterday and as I hope tomorrow is. Being free is knowing I have done everything under my control to keep this disease in check, to as prepared as much as I can for when the next wave hits, and hope that it will all be over soon.
I end this with a quote from one of my favorite philosophers:

There’s no point to any of this. It’s all just a… a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details. You know… a Quarter-Pounder with cheese, those are good, the sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain, the moment where your laughter become a cackle… and I, I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt. Troy Dyer

x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2011

Librarians, Gender, and Tech: Moving the Conversation Forward

“Woman teaching geometry”
Illustration at the beginning of a medieval translation of Euclid’s Elements (c. 1310 AD) via Wikipedia CC.

Dear Internet,
Nearly a year ago, there was a small explosion over a post I had written on why men should not write about gender and technology, which stemmed from conversations that were being held simultaneously over several similar mailing lists and blog posts.  At the end of the post, I had proposed in the following to help keep the conversation flowing:

  • Donate to the Ada Intiative.
  • Start/chair an interest group for women in technology in LITA, the technology arm of ALA
  • Start a GeekGirl Dinner in your area.
  • Use Meetup.com to start/find groups in your interests (there were loads of Women in Technology interest groups on MeetUp).
  • Depending on where you work, what you do; start off-site initiative for women to have a hack-a-thon
  • Find local hackerspace communities to start a women’s initiative
  • Use professional conferences to propose panels/groups/discussions to get more people aware but also to pay it forward
  • Create a women in tech book club at local bar/coffee house
  • Donate time to do mentoring to high school and middle school girls
  • Donate to or become a sponsor for a nearby women’s conference, like GeekGirlCon

In keeping with the spirit of my suggestions, this week I presented with a load of great people on gender, technology, and libraries at Internet Librarian.
Twenty four hours later, I was publicly sexually harassed. Like I said, the irony was not lost on me.
Now that the conference is over, I am home and I have had a few days to simmer on the events of the week, I’ve decided to take up the mantel permanently on the topic. My reasoning for this is layered, but primary cause is I don’t think we’re doing enough in the profession to bring this to the forefront of our mind. I only tend to write about it when something has happened either to me or I’ve become impassioned for another and my opinion must be heard! I’ve noticed that others seem to act the same way, thus the discussion tends to dip and rise depending on what is getting peoples ganders up at the moment.
I was curious as to how others are discussing it within the profession, so here are a few examples of how we’re not addressing this topic:

  • A search of “sexual harassment” in American Libraries turns up only 23results, most on opinions on events occurring in the late ’90s and on public court cases
  • A search of “gender technology” in American LIbraries Magazine turns up 27 results, much on the concentration on gender in the classroom
  • ITAL, the journal for LITA, has no results on “sexual harassment,” and two results on “gender,” one of which about the financial disparity between men and women and discussion on the roles of women in technology, which is low, in a profession where the role of women is high
  • Code4Lib Journal has no mention of “sexual harassment” in its journal, and “gender” brings up conference reports on forums on inclusion and diversity. To be fair, a lot of the big discussions happen on their mailing list, but that doesn’t entirely erase the fact there is no discussion happening in their journal
  • As far as I can find, until now, there is no known topic or panel of women, technology, or gender that have taken place on local or national forums in terms of panels, posters, or discussions at conferences
  • There was no known Code of Conduct at ALA Annual 2013, or any other ALA related conference. When I asked and asked, I was constantly told this was a “topic of discussion” stretching back for many years but no one was actively working on it because it was assumed it was not needed. Thanks to Andromeda Yelton, who rocks my little socks, and others who helped get this out of the discussion period and into the actual tangible thing. Hopefully this will be taken up by other arms of ALA for their future conferences.

Then there is always the other side of sexual harassment — the side of men being harassed by women. I had a conversation with a male librarian while at Internet Librarian who regaled me of stories of sexual harassment occurring towards him while at conferences, meetings, and the like. Now what is interesting is social convention states that as a male, he’s supposed to not only take it, but be flattered by the attention. Why are we also not discussing this?
Another intriguing thing about this topic is the fact the discussion seems to be happening all over and around librarianship, via national outlets and personal blogs, but not within the profession itself. Some good examples of these conversations that give a lot of food for thought are:

Now some of the above writers are librarians, others are not, so when I say “within the profession itself,” I explicitly mean within professional journals, organizations, and conferences.
Now this post is meandering all over the place, but lets add more on what to do to keep the conversation going:

  • Started near the end of 2012, I formed LibTechWomen with Becky Yoose, Bohyun Kim,  Andromeda Yelton, and many other awesome people as a way to create a safe space for women and their allies to talk about these and every other issue under the sun. You can find us, mainly, via Facebook, Twitter as @libtechwomen and #libtechwomen, and GoogleGroups.
  • A national summit, Leadership-Technology-Gender, is happening at the end of Electronic Resources & Libraries conference in March, 2014. Great start, but we need to keep this at  local level as well
  • Start doing panels, proposals, forums, Q&As at at library related conferences, local and specialized
  • Use this topic as a launch pad for discussion in your classes. (Thanks, Nick!)
  • Start implementing a Codes of Conduct1 at your conferences, meetings, and other large gatherings
  • Start writing on this topic on a regular basis both in personal blogs AND professional journals, most specifically NOT just when something happens
  • Push this topic on Twitter using #libtechgender

Over on my professional site, I’ve started to curate all of this into a page of its own. You can track the updates by subscribing to the tag here when I write a new article or checking the page manually or subscribing to the page’s RSS feed to get updates when the page itself is updated.
As always, I have obviously not covered everything so if you have an article, link to an already happened or upcoming panel, or whatever, please feel free to drop a comment below or contact me.
I also encourage discussion on this topic from all perspectives, as more voices the better, whether here, your own blog, or on Twitter using #libtechgender. But please keep it civil.
xoxo,
Lisa

1. I’m going to be writing more on this topic at a later date, as I think this is just as important as talking about sexual harassment and women in library technology

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2012

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