Friends

Me: *reads bit from work in progress*

DSM: You do use a lot of commas, don't you. And synonyms.

Me: ...Yes. Do you have a problem with that?

DSM: I don't have a problem, issue, concern with that, no.

Me: -_-

Nature abhors a (power) vacuum...

...but alecaustin doesn't.

This is it -- the last call for stickers. If you don't reply to the original posts (links below) by NOON PDT (which is UTC -8), Friday, May 18, you'll have missed out! The original posts give all the details and the procedures and the whatnots and the wherefores.


DW: http://wiscon.dreamwidth.org/51610.html
LJ: http://wiscon.livejournal.com/346860.html


See you soon! We're looking forward to it!

Remember the houses made of Emily Dickinson's words? Well, it seems I will be able to interview their creator, so watch this space!

Meanwhile, I was back at his website, and I found a list of all the quotes. Wonderful treasure. With rearranging they could make a renga...

• Morning without you is a dwindled dawn
  
  
• Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door
  
  
• The soul should always stand ajar
  
  
• One need not be a chamber to be haunted
  

There are some surprising quotes that must come from letters rather than poems. I liked these:

• I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
  
  
• Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.

This one on death makes it sound like an adventure:

Dying is a wild night and a new road.

Then too, there are aphorisms for writers and other creative types:

• The Possible’s slow fuse is lit by the imagination.
  
  
• Luck is not chance, it's toil; fortune's expensive smile is earned.
  
  
• Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.

And this I loved:

Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.

Anything else I had to say about the Criminal Minds season finale is subsumed in ZOMG Reid knitted it himself!

He makes a pretty good Four.

Also, I'm glad they did the Emily thing the way they did the Emily thing; it's good to see Will but he should have known better; I'm pretty sure that UNSUB plan fails on usual the Evil Mastermind overclever subroutine of relying on a coincidence they could not have known about in advance; I bet that's Kevin's cousin; Penelope needs a Stern Talking To of the variety she just gave Morgan a few weeks back; I'm still the only person in this fandom who likes Strauss, but dammit I still like Strauss; and FASTER JJ KILL KILL!

Discussion in comments of parallels between JJ in Hit/Run and Hotch in 100 is open for business.

I am still having massive resistance to my writing, because the way this novel works is that I am digging up Deep Personal Painful Shit whether I intend to or not. And I took leave from BARCC to do this damn thing and I gotta. I can breathe without coughing now. Time to stop slacking.

But the thing that's got to be written now, it is a personal big bad, and I do not want to feel the way writing it is going to make me feel.

I have realized that what I need is to stop being so damn mean to myself about the resistance to writing. My hindbrain has reasons. For one, and I realize that this probably makes no sense to most people: When I'm writing Cicatrix in particular, I go into sort of a fugue state. This reminds my body and hindbrain of having seizures. My brain is perfectly aware that seizures are the thing what will probably kill me. So every time I sit down to work on this thing my brain is like JESUS CHRIST IT'S A LION GET IN THE CAR.



I'm aware that this is ludicrous! Unfortunately, my awareness does not fix it!

So I freak out and don't write and then I yell at myself for not having written, and then I get upset because someone is being mean to me, but I'm the someone, so "well, just don't hang out with them anymore" is not the solution. Plus, in writing this, I'm excavating pieces of my kid-self, and my kid-self kinda went through a lot of shit and needs to not be yelled at. So I'm looking at ways to reward my kid-self, and all I'm comin' up with is puppies. The kid-self has this fixation on puppy ears. But really, have you felt puppy ears?

I can't have a puppy because my husband loves me insufficiently is allergic. So I must come up with something else.

So yes. I need to find a way to apply self-discipline that is productive and not mean, because I need to get this novel the hell done. The only way it's getting done is if I manage to sit down and self-eviscerate every day.

I am so awesome to be around when I get like this, y'all.

In conclusion, I need to work on this thing now that's gonna mess me up for the rest of the day, hooray for me. Hi. Bye.

From the Baby Name Blog:

Today, the National Zoo introduces a new family of elevn otters to the public. According to dcist.com, Whole Foods sponsored the otters' voyage from California to DC, so the grocery chain was given the honor of naming mom and dad otter and 8 of their 9 children. The ninth pup was named by the public via a Facebook poll. That unconventional naming process gave us otter parents Chowder and Clementine, and this sibling set:

Pork Chop, Pickles, Saffron, Olive, Peaches, Turnip, Radish, Rutabaga and Kevin.

(In other news, I have no otter icons! How did that happen?)

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. comments at Dreamwidth.

The following contains discussion of fitness, health, and weight issues. If that is triggery for you, please page down now!

Ob. Disclaimer: I absolutely support anyone's right to live in their body as they choose, at any size they find comfortable. This is entirely about me, and my efforts to reclaim my health and strength after half a decade of abusing and neglecting my poor body.

---

Well, I'm wearing a pair of jeans that, based on the brand and cut, must date back to 1987 or so.

They're Chic, size 14 tall, and in high school they would have been baggy on me. Now, they fit loosely except for the waist, which is a bit snug--but then, that happened when I was sixteen, too, though the jeans were size 11 then. This is because eighties jeans were cut to fit absolutely nobody except a young Brooke Shields. They do, however, still make my ass look fantastic, a characteristic generally not shared by modern lower-rise jeans, which make nobody's ass look good. Not mine, not yours. Possibly Jessica Simpson's.

But they do let one bend at the middle without pinching one's ribcage on the waistband, which I suppose is a win.

I guess that means I am officially back in my high school clothes, generously speaking. As I also have a black bat-winged sheath dress from Chico's that I loved in high school, and have been hanging on to for sentimental reasons. I might dust it off for an eighties party later this year. If only I had some slouchy elf boots.

I suspect I will save the jeans for eighties nights at goth clubs. I think I still have one pair of slouchy socks hoarded away somewhere... ;-)

This is all prelude to saying that I'm hovering somewhere around 187, and have been for about a month now with the usual ups and downs--but I'm obviously building muscle, because I seem to be shrinking. At one point a month or so ago I noticed I had obliques, there under the slack middle-aged tummy. This week, I noticed the top set of ab muscles. Also, my thighs are no longer getting in my way during most of yoga--that stopped after scott_lynch and I walked somewhere around 40 miles in three days of NYC. I can do Hero's Pose and Lightning Pose without cheating now, and my body doesn't actually interfere with my ability to do a lunge anymore.

It's still getting in the way of twists, and my biceps interfere with Eagle Pose, but that's not new. I'm a solid girl.

I can also wear most of my beloved old corp-goth work clothes again, justifying my hoarding tendencies. Two suits are a bit tight, but they were always on the skinny end of the rack. I had to move the buttons back on a green suit I love, that I had expanded a bit when I was gaining weight. It's a size 12.

I am facing the surprising possibility of shrinking out of my wardrobe again. In any case, look for a much better-dressed Bear at conventions this summer, since I love these clothes and don't have a dayjob to wear them to anymore.

Curiously, I'm about 17 pounds heavier than the last time I fit in these clothes, which tells us about the power of rock-climbing. Muscle is heavy!

My current weight goal is somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 pounds. Which should make the same size, roughly, as when I was in high school and weighed 150-ish. I was on track and field then, and at my most muscular before now, but I'm pretty sure my upper body now dwarfs what I had then. (Shoulders! They're awesome!) Also, um. Boobs. Some cup sizes have come to roost since then. Ahem.

So I'm less than thirty pounds from my goal, which is very pleasant. My body is behaving as it should; everything physical is so much easier than it was in 2004, when I couldn't walk a half-mile without agonizing pain (now I can run five 12-minute miles back to back); and I'm enjoying the reduction in back and joint pain and the ability to sleep comfortably on my side or back again without feeling like my own belly is crushing me.

I seem to be part of a coterie of SFF writers and fans on the "get healthy the old-fashioned way; move more and eat less crap" bandwagon, which pleases me. (personally, I have been following the efforts of Scalzi, Doctorow, Lynch, Sykes, Downum, Silverstein, Connolly, Buckell, and I'm sure a few others whose names are eluding me because it's time for lunch.) It pleases me because I'd like to see a lot of these people around for a damned long time.

I'm also noticing changes in appetite, which tell me my body is adapting to its new lower caloric demands. Two whole pieces of fruit is too much to eat with lunch now; I am contented with half of each (plus some protein and vegetables and brown carbs, of course). (I eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, about ten servings most days; I've finally figured out how to reach my RDA minimum of potassium, and it goes like this: a cup of fortified cereal in the morning (Special K protein plus, since I can't find Total Protein around here anymore), half an orange, a small banana, eight ounces of green coconut water, and half a sweet potato. Some strawberries or mango don't hurt either, or some beans.))

For those who are curious about how I did it (my doctor was, and she laughed out loud when I said, "Counting calories, restricting sweets and saturated fat, and getting off my ass!" She then replied, "So doing all the boring shit we tell people to do, huh?"), here's my plan, fondly called The Discipline:

It's a refined version of the Hacker Diet, which relies on good old thermodynamics to make things happen. I'm keeping my caloric intake around 1700-1900 calories a day, exercising for about an hour a day on average, drinking lots of water and not too much caffeine, avoiding refined carbs (mostly: I get 100-200 calories of "treat" a day, which could be a glass of wine or a beer, or a brownie, or... PRO TIP: Guinness is lower in calories than most "lite" beers, and tastes a fuckload better. Now you know.), eating roughly twice as many vegetables as the FDA suggests, and trying to keep my protein intake around 20% and my fat intake around 25%--and also trying to keep my protein intake above 100g a day without too much reliance on red meat, or meat at all. (I do use protein supplements--whey and soy, mostly.) I eat a lot of high-protein dairy (skyr!) and I try to limit myself to 100-200 calories a day from refined sugar, which is roughly 20-40 grams. Or, well, half a can of non-diet Coke.

Managing sodium intake is a killer. But I'm working on it.

Sleeping eight hours a night also pisses me off, but it seems to be necessary. I got six last night, and noticed the difference on my run this morning--I kept having to walk up hills I normally cruise up in second or third gear.

I also exercise six days a week--usually two days of climbing (with a little yoga); three days of running; one day of yoga. I also try to get in some vigorous outdoor time when possible--kayaking, hiking, walking the dog. Walking to the store. Picking up my jump rope for five minutes on an otherwise sedentary day.

As I said, one of the most successful weeks of the Discipline recently was when Scott and I were on Manhattan, eating every goddamned thing in sight. But we also made a point of walking two-thirds the length of the island at least once (Riverside to Chinatown, with side trips), and we walked as much as time permitted, otherwise. I know it sounds like my fitness routine is crushing, and seven or eight years ago, it would have crushed me. (Hell, I had the pleasant experience recently of putting in a Rodney Yee video that, in 2006, I could do maybe fifteen minutes of, and having the full hour workout be only just pleasantly challenging.)

But remember, when I started out, I weighed 285-290 pounds and could not walk a half mile. One good habit builds on another, it turns out--and I find myself drinking more green and herbal tea because black tea doesn't taste good after the first mug, and I find myself not hungry for seconds unless the food is exceptionally good, and even then not always. There's not actually a lot of privation; I just want more of what's healthy for me.

It's okay if I have a measured ounce of cheese on my beans and rice, instead of as much as I can fit in the bowl. It still tastes just as good! Better, since it's as easy to afford small quantities of really delicious food as it is large quantities of sort of icky food. And far more satisfying.

Who knew?

Which is so different from all my old pathological ways of dealing with food and drink that it's a little croggling.

Most of this, of course, is just basic health maintenance stuff, and not too hard once you get the hang of it. And it's not like I don't give myself days off: I will in fact have two or three drinks on a night out, for example. I'm fully planning on onion rings after archery tonight when I get dinner with the Thursday Night Shooters.

Just... not too damned often. And budget for it.

It's not the extremes that set one's level of health; it's the baseline.

The more I thought about buying a smartphone the more my sentimental side rose up in protest against buying an Android device. So I got a Nokia N9. I've compared the N900 to the Apple Newton. I don't know yet what I'll compare the N9 to.

Geeky details follow, for use by future searchers who happen upon this entry if they find the same mystery I did:

My N9 came running MeeGo 1.2 (Harmattan), PR 1.2, 30.2012.07-1_PR_005. When I went to manage my applications, I saw that various updates were available. But when I hit Update, I got this warning: "to complete updates, conflicting applications need to be uninstalled". Even when I just tried to update the User Guide to 0.3.5+0m7, I got the message: "Dependency notice: To complete updating User guide, conflicting applications need to be uninstalled".

However, there was no way to actually figure out what the conflicts were. I talked it over in the #n9 channel (thanks, mgedmin). I hadn't yet installed any new apps from the Ovi Store, so it couldn't be that. I tried enabling developer mode so that I could just use apt-get to check the dependencies, but got "Dependencies notice: To complete installation of developer-mode, additional applications need to be downloaded and installed. To complete installation of developer-mode, conflicting applications need to be uninstalled...." so I would have run into the same problem even before being able to use apt-get. So I didn't accept that offer.

So I decided to just inventory my user-visible applications and then check to see whether any of them disappeared after the update. It looks like none of them did. For reference, these are the apps visible on the app screen (NOT in order of how they appear on that screen -- generic stuff first, then branded stuff like Twitter):

• Phone
• Contacts
• Search
• Web
• Messages
• Mail
• Calendar
• Clock
• Camera
• Gallery
• Music
• Videos
• Maps
• Music Store
• Store
• Accounts
• Settings
• Calculator
• Documents
• Feeds
• Notes
• User guide
• Wi-Fi Hotspot
• YouTube
• Skype
• Track & Prot. ("Protect")
• AccuWeather
• Angry Birds
• AP Mobile
• Drive
• Facebook
• Galaxy on Fire 2
• NFS Shift
• Ovi Music
• Real Golf 2011
• Twitter

Sometime soon I'll enable developer mode and see whether the logs tell me what got uninstalled today. Until then, if anyone has insight, please feel free to mention it in the comments.