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My hip has hurt for three days straight, and it's kind of getting to me. It's not a biting, omg need to vomit pain. But it feels wrong and makes me worry and overthink.
Also I miss DW. Yes I'm still commenting, but I miss the people that drop in to say *hugs*. I'm very much aware that it's a 'deal' to come to iJay and people tend to do so and catch up on a bunch of posts at once. The major thing is, however, the very reason I'm not over there (inability to save comments) makes missing it useless. Because I'd be there and anxious about not being able to save it, or just be xposting there with comments on here.
But it rankles a lot that some problem with my imported lj comments apparently isn't duplicable. It's the thing that originally made me go - hey this could get me just about 98% or more LJ free and pay attention to dw in the first place. And then it irks that you can't show comments but have comments closed. And it irks that you can't have comments open on individual posts if the comment default for the journal itself is 'comments disabled'. I mean Blogger has that. Since when has Blogger been on the cutting edge of the industry. They only figured out how to do easy jump cuts THIS YEAR. And it doesn't even work for everyone.
Meanwhile I've discovered/confirmed/reconfirmed my romance hot button trope.
But it doesn't feel very important at all given the hip pain. Seriously hip pain sucks. A lot. With rocks. Slimey rocks.
Also? Dragonage: Origins will never* drop to a price I consider reasonable given its skeezy race and trans issues *mental tantrum with fist stomping*
*[Note the dramatic emphasis]
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100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do; Parts 1 & 2
I read it all the way through and suddenly realized why as a child eating out in America confused me so much (because things were so different) and why I get so easily irked when I go out to eat now.
Here I was attributing it to me being anti-social.
'Are you still working on that?' - *grits teeth* Why are you calling the meal or the experience of eating it WORK?
And the constant hovering and pouring water that some people think is good service but which just makes my stomach tense up and cramp because there's no moment to relax without someone in your face all the time. I find nothing wrong with going out and treating myself to dinner, PLEASE PLEASE do not think, dear servers, that I need company and you're doing me a favour stopping by every five to seven minutes. I'm either reading, or enjoying the view and meal.
What's most revealing to me is the comments. People insisting they can never eat or work in a restaurant owned by the person who compiled the list because there are too many rules. People insisting that someone who has all their rules must be underpaying their staff, or that they're expecting a lot of work and formality out of minimum wage staff. As if how much you get paid to do a thing, dictates whether or not you do it well and properly.
Then there's the people who're all 'You'll go out of business if you give away recipes'
And the people who think the rules are obnoxious.
And the person who called it 'early 20th Century British servant manners' - as an INSULT.
And the people who can't tell the difference between telling a customer about dishes without stating which dishes are their favourite. I mean I only give a damn about the waiter's favourite dish if I'm trying to decide something and they say 'I'm a total chocoholic and I really like x'. In which cause I immediately know it's likely to be too rich for my tastebuds.
I finally found a comment that cements to me the general consensus of the 'WTF comments'
101. A Waiter will never, by word or sign, indicate that he or she believes he is a human being of equal worth as the patrons of the restaurant. When the Waiter accepts a check signed by the restaurant owner/manager, that proves he or she is inferior.
102. A Waiter will never, when off duty, off the restaurant premises, or anywhere else, act in a manner unbecoming to the restaurant. The Waiter is an ambassador for the restaurant and is at all time responsible to the restaurant for his or her behavior. The Waiter is permanently the property of the restaurant. So being quietly respectful, not presenting oneself as a diner's new best friend, allowing people to eat in peace and trying to be attentive to their needs is .... wage slavery? And then the US claims that it is a service oriented economy? And I find myself pondering the whole Sir, Ma'am, Miss thing. Though I'm not sure people say 'Miss' in the US. But the whole thing about Sir & Ma'am being cracks on age and not terms of respect? WTF? I know I've never felt more comfortable - unexpectedly comfortable- than when first visiting my step-family in Georgia and suddenly all the manners that got me labeled 'kiss up' etc in NYC, were just plain accepted. ETA: Geeze people. A waiter doesn't have to hover in order to be attentive and not seem to disappear when a guest/customer needs them. They can be at the front or the back of the dining area, visible when not attending other tables. It's not rocket science people! ETA2: Zvi was the one who clued me on minimum wage and how important tips were financially to American waitstaff. I grew up where tips were a bonus for good service. Given my reaction in general to American waitstaff service - I previously was not leaving any tips. Zvi still seems to me, to find not leaving a tip to be rude. But it's ingrained in me, deeply, not to pay for service I did not find desirable. And I'm ecstatic when service is such, I don't have to remember 'well, they probably don't get paid much and Zvi said it is helpful to the working stiff so I should give -something-'
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![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ragnell |
| 2009-11-21 05:00 |
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| 2009-11-20 05:00 |
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| 2009-11-19 05:00 |
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Is it me? or is Publisher's Weekly soundly putting their foot up it, right until it comes out of their arse when it comes to ignoring or bad talking female writers and readers and female centric genres?
They just got trounced on their 'best of' and now sucktastic title on a feature interview. Someone is snorting some extra strong powdered stereotypes over there.
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Hip Pain - > Often Caused By Sciatica
Sciatica - > Often Caused By A Slipped Disc
Slipped Disc - > When I Was Eleven
(Growing)Pain / Body Not Feeling Trustworthy - > Ever Since I Was Eleven
Back Pain/Spasms, Neck Pain Spasms, History of Migraines - > Numerous
History of Knee & Ankle Problems -> Numerous
History of Car Accidents - > Yes
Mentions To Doctor Of All Of This - > Numerous
Frustration At Having To 'Google' My Symptoms To Truly Know WTF Is Wrong With Me? -> Enormous
Urge To Punch All Medical Professionals In The Face - Overwhelming
Addtionals:
Fibromyalgia Related To Spinal Injury -> Yes
--
I am no longer sure I give a damn about 'professional' diagnosis if I can find deeper explanations on why my body's been falling apart for years. And I've spent too much of 2009 trying to tell myself I'm not lazy, and I'm not tired - I'm reacting to pain and that's why I'm avoiding things/doing less. I originally filtered this flocked, but someone else journaling about their experiences actually helped me get to this point. So passing the verification that this IS happening forward, I guess.
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| ragnell |
| 2009-11-18 05:00 |
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| ragnell |
| 2009-11-17 05:00 |
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News courtesy of Viridian5 - Lyrica causes SUICIDAL THOUGHTS.
My uneasiness at the casual prescription the first time the doctor suggested it, had me greatful it was getting the long approval process from my insurance. Then this second time she brought it up all 'Oh sciatica and nerve damage are helped by it' - uneasiness made me not pick it up.
Come my next appointment there is going to be a LOOOONG ass conversation and possibly me shopping around for a new doctor. Old therapist reccomendation or not. Cause WTF? I even asked her to list the side effects. She pulled her her little digital pharma guide and said 'Sleepiness'.
So that shit needs updating and she needs talking to for NOT updating it and MORE.
Shit. Not trusting a doctor means I'm less likely to go to appointments. Shit shit double shit.
Maybe I won't even wait till our next appointment. I might just leave her a voicemail or hand deliver a very pissed off letter.
G'damn 2009. I am so done.
PS/ETA: My uneasiness btw came from online research of the product where suicidal thoughts did not come up, but other side effects did. I took my doctor's claim of 'sleepiness' as her saying 'the major side effect' -- I... yeah, still too angry.
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... Was a total failure. I went to bed at 9, woke up at 2am and then crashed at 9am and slept until 3:30pm. I know some of this is the fault of my anti-anxiety medication. But whoa.
PS: Perhaps I should take a page out of America's books and never name anything Operation ______ unless I want it to fail.
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| ragnell |
| 2009-11-16 05:00 |
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| ragnell |
| 2009-11-15 05:00 |
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From here:
Topic: Glee (tv show)
...And then having a show claim to be empowering while in actuality being....
I'm not even sure, some combination of mocking, callous, ablist and - is there even a word for the ablist equivalent of the KKK? Because the wheelchair character is an actor in crip drag. But now Glee's canon has a character who was in crip drag.
And seriously outside of Tales Of The City by Armistead Maupin, which I haven't even re-read or rewatched as I've become more aware of various social injustices, I have never seen a storyline with societal and familial consequences to black/brown-face. Black-brown face, yellow face as well, (Avatar:Live Action ignorants aside, and Shirley Liquor & a few other clueless people) is usually acknowledged as a BAD THING.
So the word offensive doesn't seem strong enough for what they've done with that female character (Tina, yes?). It is easily the equivalent to me of someone casting aside their crutches and claiming they'd been faking for years to avoid dance recitals and going to parties. Or claiming they'd been faking cerebral palsy or lupus or MS or Lyme disease or blindness or bi-polarism for YEARS because crip drag is the best way to handle their social anxieties - with the implication that comfort and/or pity was some kind of fricking bonus.
And the further shit-eating of assigning stuttering as the easiest disability to fake, even a child could do it.
Yes, claiming that singing is natural speech therapy for those with certain speech difficulties has always pissed me off (my tripping over words happened there too, it was only easier to fake it -wasn't- happening if I was in the chorus and could just try to keep the note but essentially be ahhh-ing along or just move my mouth).
Crip drag in the very 'A Special Brady Disability Episode' simply reinforces the ablism.
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Out of nowhere associations come. Except it's not really out of nowhere at all.
I'm currently in mild shock. I just commented to someone who was upset about Glee; apparently on top of the very special episode, someone is revealed to have been faking their stutter. Someone who does stutter on dreamwidth exploded with rage and I went to comment to tell them I'm really sorry the show punched them in the gut. I don't watch it, but all year long I've been dealing with letting go of media because I don't want to be hurt anymore.
The unexpected associations came because I brought up the period where my tongue tripped over my words as a child. It wasn't quite a stutter, but it was definitely something my mother found very annoying. As I thought back to how it'd felt then, when my mother was angry about it, wondering why I did it, talking about attention etc, feeling all those emotions - I suddenly realized why exactly it is when I'm highly upset and end up switching, it's to someone who does not, cannot speak. I've always wondered how that happened.
Now I know.
As well? Now I know why I'm such a looking forward kind of person. Some emotions and memories are definitely better left in the past.
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| ragnell |
| 2009-11-14 05:00 |
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| ragnell |
| 2009-11-13 05:01 |
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My sleeping for most of two days? Post update from someone on my flist announces we've been getting the tail end of hurricane weather. My sleep crashing for most of the day? Self protective.
I think I'm going to risk putting a weather add on to my firefox because remembering to check weather.com does NOT give me the same innate awareness of what's gong on outside. And even if I had windows in this room, I've lived with windows before and not been able to tell by casual glance outside, much more than cloudy skies (which in fall/winter is a semi permanent state).
Also, my 'shoulding' myself...
In the same 90 min phonecall with my mother she apologized for having gotten on my case for my entire life, about sitting up straight in chairs. I tend to lean forward a lot and half slouch. Turns out it's because I've always been trying to sit on my thighs and not on my butt (issues with coxccyx and sciatic nerve).
In terms of shoulding myself - the mental 8-track of 'Lazy, lazy, lazy, good for nothing, can't even sit up straight' hits so hard and so loud that the concept of pain; recognizing pain cannot be consciously heard. So apparently my unconscious takes over and knocks me out to sleep it down until things are better.
And here I thought I'd been catching those thoughts. I've apparently only been catching the sparkly easy to see ones. Not the ones carved into my psychic flesh.
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| ragnell |
| 2009-11-12 05:00 |
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Ok, my brain is just way too exhausted to do as much research as I'd like. So flist, is anyone on here techy? I need to buy a new monitor and I'm thinking of a refurbished widescreen gateway lcd (and getting a two year replacement warranty). I currently use a crt monitor, set to 120 dpi and there's a cat in the house, so there's some worry of sneaky desktop investigating while I'm asleep; there's been mention of a wobbly stand on the gateway.
Good, bad, indifferent?
I hadn't originally wanted a wide screen, mostly because I do other things besides watch movies on my screen. But right now I'll take what I can get at decent pricing.
I'm also hesitating because quick searching did bring up that people who'd been having similar visual problems as myself with lower dpi's are fanswooning over 1600x1200 resolution in 120dpi. The above mentioned gateway? 1440 x 900. I've no experience, really (a few moments on my local library's newest setup is the only thing that comes to mind) with anything bigger than 1024x768.
I'd really like insight on the difference, since if I stick to refurbished monitors, the difference is likely to be only $10 more.
I want to do right by my eyes.
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| ragnell |
| 2009-11-11 05:00 |
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| ragnell |
| 2009-11-10 05:00 |
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This is a complete surprise to me, but then again it isn't, because it's been building for a while. I just didn't realize it. I don't miss the cliques and I don't miss the never ending celebrity comms (oh heavens no - if we all could be spared that forever, cause really a million seeming people all wanting to be Paris Hilton is just dead wrong).
What I miss is how GJ stretched me. I can recognize that part of what I'm going through with my writing at the moment, or rather the lack of writing, is stress. And juggling stress shuts down the part of my brain that's creative in a certain way. Heck these days even suspecting there might be stress shuts that part down. 2009 has been exhausting. I write this out now because I'm liable to forget in three days just how exhausting it's been; break down in tears tiring and done and gone and y'all can have earth and the stupid cause I can't take it anymore exhausting.
But GJ stretched me in amazing ways. I was so angry at some of what was going on, and so fed up with never seeing certain kinds of characters that I created them. And I was looking for something today on my computer and found myself searching through old files and it's begun to hit me just how creative* I was then. I'm staring at these character profiles and the faces I'd found for them and I don't know if there's a place for them in anything else I write, but I'm suddenly so grateful that I thought them up.
There's a whole mess of characters of colour and characters over thirty, one char in a wheel chair (for which I'd researched Boston's public transportation system and then forgotten that I was aware that Boston's subway system sucks for anyone needing mobility assistance). There are gay teenagers, a latina model, a band with albums, album covers, and I believe song titles. A band! There's the teenager on the autistic spectrum, the male character dealing with Fibro & Lupus, and the Hawaiian girl who was half South Asian, half East Asian (hmm, does the term hapa apply there?).
And of course a multitude of Xmen characters, some genderswitched, and the usual assortment of deities, demons and demagogues (huh that should be a story title). The tomboys and just plain bois. And... I totally forgot I had a transexual character - probably because no one accepted said char to any game.
Hmm, I'd probably be second guessing myself if GJ were still around, at least this year because it's been that kind of year. But that doesn't make me miss GJ any less (or at least the positive aspects of the experience) or feel less grateful. It'd odd to realize that it was part of my baby steps towards a particular kind of activism. If no one was going to recognize that the whole world wasn't white and tab and cis and het, then I would. And whether or not I ever made anyone slap themselves on the forehead for not thinking of the possibilities beyond WTaBCH, I felt better for breaking up the visual monotone.
This was a nice counter to 2009. I need to remember it when the next strain of foolish runs around that has me despairing that anything I write will ever make a difference.
______________
*ETA: Creative in terms of the multiple characters and in depth background & histories not in any terms that suggest it is creative in itself to ever think of/up social/ethnic minority characters.
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| ragnell |
| 2009-11-09 05:00 |
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indescribable
sleepy