Flowers
I continue to be one of the "long-term unemployed." It sucks and job searching is hard and I'm getting desperate, to be completely honest.
P. spent four days in the hospital with a nasty case of cellulitis in his right leg. He was in the local hospital, the one I've spent too much time in. We kept insisting that my infectious disease doctor be assigned to his case and ultimately he was.
I spent the better part of those days with P., and it was really hard to see him get such good care when I didn't. But cellulitis is straight-forward and necrotizing pancreatitis isn't. So that was a bit re-traumatizing. I did have the chance to catch up with my doctor, which was really nice. I asked him a few questions that had been weighing on me and got good answers--apparently the baby doctors kept wanting to send me home with oral antibiotics and my doctor had to repeatedly explain that my case required IV antibiotics because I was having such a difficult time. I honestly believe that if the baby doctors had been successful in their attempts to send me home, I wouldn't be here writing this (and wrassling with the CSS, I would very much like to have a different font going on here).
I've been doing a fair bit of reading over the last month. First up is Stephanie Foo's What My Bones Know, which is a memoir about her recovery from complex trauma. It was so compelling that I read and annotated it over the course of two days. I will say that there are graphic depictions of severe child abuse in the first part of the book--Foo is very clear about what section readers should skip if that is an issue for them. I really recognized a lot of myself in the way she interacted with other people before she finally found a kind of therapy that helped her to be less reactive and think things through.
It also made me think a lot about my own trauma, specifically everything that happened to me between the beginning of August 2020 and the end of January 2021 and I realized just the other day that it's still very much unresolved. So I'm going to briefly talk about it here, in the hopes that shining light on it will make it weigh less heavily on my mind.
I want to write more in public, but it's so hard for me because of the way I was bullied by M*ke Gly*r and R*qu*l S. B*n*d*ct, along with GRRM's public comments about how he no longer felt like Worldcon wasn't a safe space for him because a blogger with 3,200 followers on Twitter wrote a mean thing about him (cry moar while you swim in your pool full of money, George). It makes me feel like there are a lot of bad actors surveilling my public internet presence and specifically what I write about. This is the biggest reason I don't get involved in kerfuffles and no longer participate in Hugo fandom (didn't vote last year, didn't nominate this year, won't be voting this year or nominating in 2027), the latter of which I really miss.
Anyhow, excellent book, would recommend.
My current non-fiction read is Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which was kindly purchased for me by an anonymous reader along with 3 of Solnit's other books and Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant. I'm about halfway through it and I've learned so much about the history of California and the different ways Muybridge and his peers photographed Yosemite and the different technologies used. Many underlines, many page flags. I would really like to know who sent me the books, so if you're on Bluesky, please @ me so I can thank you properly. It was such a lovely surprise and I'm thrilled to have so much Solnit to read.
And finally, I inhaled Amal El-Mohtar's short story collection, Seasons of Glass and Iron. I was able to borrow it from my local library (hurrah! they had multiple copies in the system). Friends, run to your local bookstore or non-Amazon retailer of your choice and get this books. It's utterly gorgeous and I have been trying for a week and a half to figure out a way to describe it and the words I came up with were luminous and numinous, and I hate that they rhyme but there we have it. Reading all these pieces collected felt like the first time I read Charles de Lint's Dreams Underfoot over 30 years ago, something magical and transcendent. Particular standouts are "The Truth About Owls", "John Hollowback and the Witch", and "Florilegia; or, Some Lies About Flowers." My thoughts keep alighting on the last two in particular, about how people unknowingly undermine other people and the importance of restorative justice and actual apologies, and also about the ways people try to define others without listening to what the other person actually wants. It's simply a gorgeous book and I hope that I'll be able to acquire my own copy at some point. It's definitely a collection I will want to revisit again. And I hope this collection finds its way into the hands of all the impressionable 17 year olds who desperately need it, as I needed Dreams Underfoot
I'm going to be vulgur here and include buy widgets at the bottom of this post for each of the three books I've mentioned.
I'm still playing a lot of Animal Crossing--I've redone a whole bunch of my island and I'm really happy with it, but I'm waiting for my last peppy villager to move away so I can replace her with someone else. I've been using treasure islands to get items and villagers and I'm okay with that. I played it the "right" way the first time around, but am more interested in building an island that I think is interesting and more personalized to what I want. I am planning to upload it and would be happy to share the DA when I have it. I've been idly thinking that I could start streaming the game, but I can't afford what I think I'd need to get in terms of hardware (I'd definitely want to get a real dock situation going for my MacBook Mini because the USB and HDMI ports are currently a nightmare to manage). I'm also not sure how to use the required software. But it would be fun and perhaps people would show up that I could talk to while I mutter about terraforming, especially the waterscaping.
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