My Squick Is Not Your Squick

Yesterday I read Brier's Bargain by Carol Lynne, and it kind of squicked me out.  You see, Brier was abused as a child, and brain damage from that abuse left him mentally handicapped.  His partner, Jackie, is of normal intelligence.

Brier is a sweet, caring person, and he's described as being high functioning.  He holds down a 40 hour a week job (although it's at a company where his twin brother is a long time employee, and it's not entirely clear what he does for those 40 hours), he gets his driver's license during the course of the story, and buys a car with his own money saved for the purpose.  But he's also described as being child-like and having problems controlling his temper (a not-uncommon problem for people who've had head injuries).

This book was actually kind of odd.  It's labeled as being the first book in the series, but it obviously picks up in the middle of the story.  After reading it I did a little research and discovered that Lynne changed publishers, and she had to change the name of the series, although it's a continuation of the old one.  As the story starts, Brier is going about his daily life and missing his lover, Jackie.  Jackie is on assignment in the Middle East.  Brier hasn't heard from Jackie in a while, and as a reader it's not clear if the relationship is real or if it's all in Brier's mind.  It turns out that Jackie was injured in an explosion, and everyone kept the news from Brier.

Jackie comes home missing part of his leg, and Brier settles in to take care of him.  At this point it's clear that there really is a relationship between the two men.  What's not clear is why.  We never get to see the falling in love portion of the relationship, even in flashback.  Why did Jackie, a man who's highly skilled and speaks at least two languages, fall in love with a man with the mind of a child, who at 35 is just learning to take care of himself?

There was more that left a bad taste in my mouth, like the fact that Brier was sexually abused while institutionalized.  It left me wondering if Brier really had the capacity to consent to a sexual relationship.  At one point Brier asks Jackie about sex with girls.  His only knowledge or experience of sex was with his abuser and then Jackie.  Can anyone really be gay or straight when they're so ignorant of their options?  I don't doubt that Brier loves Jackie.  But in a way it feels like a continuation of the abuse, not a choice freely made.  Would I feel differently if this was a straight relationship instead of a gay one?  I'd like to think not, but I might.  Would I feel differently if Brier was of normal intelligence?  Definitely.

My discomfort with this story has me thinking about disability and my attitude toward different types.  Brier has no problem with Jackie losing part of his leg.  It makes no difference at all in the way he feels about him.  He works hard to learn how to care for Jackie, because he doesn't want his lover to be in pain.  And yet it's a little creepy to me that Jackie takes the same attitude toward Brier and his disabilities.  People who are mentally handicapped are just as worthy of love as everyone else.  But it squicks me when that love comes from someone of normal intelligence.  It feels like the partner of normal intelligence is somehow taking advantage.  And in this situation Brier's history of abuse just increases that feeling.

Am I a terrible person for feeling this way?  I like to think that I believe that everyone is equal and deserves equal respect.  (Except, you know, for asshats who have personally shown that they don't deserve my respect.)  Does this squick come from a reasonable urge to protect someone who may not have the capacity to make the best decisions for themselves, or is my inner asshat showing?  I don't think any less of Jackie because of his physical disability, and would think quite a bit less of anyone who would hold it against him.

The choice of Brier as a romantic lead was a bold one.  I'm all for pushing boundaries and giving all kinds of people a voice in fiction.  But this one left me unsettled.

If anyone wants to check out the book in question, Brier's Bargain will be available tomorrow, Monday, for free from All Romance eBooks.  Or, you can weigh in now and tell me I'm an asshat.

I Really, Really Wanna Go

If you're at all plugged into the book world, especially anything to do with romance, you probably noticed that the RT convention was last week.  I've been wanting to go for a long time, but with one thing or another-- the expense, travel, work, being sick and having no money-- I just haven't made it.  Next year it's in Chicago, and I really want to go.

There are a couple of things holding me back at this point.  One is the expense.  This is not a cheap convention.  It's almost $500 just to sign up.  If I don't have a roommate, which with my weird sleep and bathroom habits would probably be best, I'm looking at about another $800 would be my guess.  Transportation shouldn't be a biggie.  Amtrak has a train that runs from Indy to Chicago, and the schedule looks like it should work well for me.  Only $50 round trip, and I don't have to borrow one of my parents' cars for almost a week, pay for parking, and then be alert enough to pilot it for several hours.  All together, I figure this thing will cost me $1,600.  If the social security comes through between now and then, it might be doable.  If it doesn't (and I've learned at this point not to bank on anything when it comes to the government turning over the benefits I'm owed), then there's no way in hell I can afford to go.

The second problem is as much a deal breaker as the money.  Can I physically handle it?  At this point a trip to the grocery store wears me out.  I only leave the house on average about once every 3-4 weeks.  Am I going to be able to manage 5 days of workshops and brunches and chatting in the hotel bar?  I can tell you right now that there are some events I'll take a pass on.  The cover model pageant?  No, thanks.  The awards ceremony?  If an author I really love is up for an award, and present to accept, maybe.  But I'll likely skip that, too.  In fact, I'd probably skip most of the evening parties.  I expect to be nearly comatose from exhaustion and over stimulation by dinner time most days.  I don't know if I can do this, and I'm afraid that it will end up making me really sick.  But I still want to go.

Why?  I want to connect with readers in real life.  I'm getting active on Goodreads, and I have all my Betty friends.  It would be beyond awesome to get a chance to meet a few of them.  And then there are all those other people out there who love to read and talk books.  There will be authors there.  Maybe I'll get a chance to meet some of my favorites!  And as much as anything, it would be amazing to go out and do something like a normal human being.  A late-thirties adult woman who actually goes places without her mommy and daddy taking her.  Adult socialization with someone I'm not related to.  NO Little House on the Prairie or The Waltons on TV in the background.  Does that not sound magical?

So, all I have to do is convince the government to give me my money and then somehow find the energy to manage a five day conference.  Yeah, not likely to happen.  But I still really, really want to go.

March Review and April Goals

At the beginning of last month I set a few goals, so I thought I'd update you on how they went.

Goal #1: clean

Weeeeeeel, I made some progress here, but it was cancelled out by new mess.  There are still two baskets full of clean laundry in my room, but one of them is a new basket with new clean laundry, so that's progress.  I did some dusting, but I made all new dust.  (I feel this is completely unfair, by the way.)  I got rid of some of the junk mail and random paper that I collect like a magnet, but not much.

Bottom line on this goal: my bedroom is still a pit, but not as much of a pit as it would be if I hadn't worked on it a bit.

Goal #2: get my Goodreads Books to Read in 2011 list under 100 titles.

Hahahahahahahahahaha!  I did manage to read 12 books that had been sitting on my list for a while, some of them over a year.  But I added a bunch of titles, too, and the current total stands at 116.

Goal #3: blog more than once a week

Personal stuff derailed me on this one.  I'm getting a handle on it, but no guarantees that I'm going to be any more regular this month than I was last month.  But I'm going to try.

And I want to say thank you for all the kind comments on the last post.  I appreciate the support.

Goal #3: return movie to Netflix

I did it!  And I managed to watch and return a couple other movies, too.  Success!

So that's March.  Goals for April are:

to finish my taxes (I'm working on them, but slowly)
clear some more floor space in my room
dust and tidy my dresser, which is currently piled high with holiday cards and an inch of dust, in addition to all the usual stuff
blog more
continue to pick a lip balm flavor of the day, because it makes me happy
try to keep my 2011 reading list from growing past 116 this month-- read at least one book for every book that gets added to the list

Sounds good, I think.  Doable.

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Lavender Lemonade

Rest in Peace, Laura

Two weeks ago today, my friend Laura died.  You know when you hear people say, "oh, I've known them forever"?  Well, for Laura and me that was pretty much true.  We met when we were in kindergarten.  Her house was my second home, and her mother was my second Mom.  Through cross country moves and changing life situations, we maintained a friendship for 30 years.

There's a formal obituary here if you want the basic deets, but I've always found those to be so dry.  They don't really tell you anything about the person.  So I'm going to write my own obituary and tell you about my friend, Laura.

As I said before, Laura and I met when we were in kindergarten.  Our dads had just started working at the same company, and so we both moved to Iowa at the same time.  We were both from the east coast-- her family was from Delaware and we came from Pennsylvania-- so there was some common ground right away.  We had even more common ground when we realized that we'd both spent our summers, or as much of it as we could manage, in the same beach town-- Ocean City, NJ.  Ocean City remained important to Laura for the rest of her life, and as an adult she went back as often as possible, even though she lived only a half a day's drive from the Gulf.

We didn't actually meet in class, though.  We lived out in the boonies (in Iowa even the boonies have boonies), and I was in the AM class with all the other bus riders.  Laura lived within walking distance of school, so she was in the PM class.  This was excellent scheduling, because Laura didn't do mornings.  (This never changed.)

We actually met through a baby sitting co-op.  Our mothers, both being new in town and not really knowing anyone, signed up, and we ended up at each other's houses.  You'd be hard pressed to find two less-alike 5 year old girls.  Laura was always the girly one.  Everything with her was always pink and flowery.  I was the tom boy.  But the two of us got on like a house afire.  When we played Star Wars (hey, it was the early 80s), she was always Princess Leia, and I played everyone else.  But we could go at it hammer and tongs, too.  I was the hair puller; Laura was a biter.

In many ways she was more like a sister to me than a friend.  When we told my brother last week, he said, "More than any of your friends, Laura was like another big sister to me."  And then he tacked on, "You both treated me like dirt."  Laura would have laughed as hard as I did at that.  And then she would have laughed some more when I responded with, "Aw, poor baby."  She would have laughed even harder when his wife chimed in with, "Well, that's how you're *supposed* to treat little brothers!"

Laura had a sense of humor, and she loved to laugh.  She also liked to tease and play pranks.  She once convinced me that there was a stranger with a gun in her closet. Scared the crap out of me.  It was the middle of a bright, sunny Saturday afternoon.  She was a very good actress.

Her first love was music.  She loved classical music and hated country.  She played the piano beautifully as a child, but I never heard her play as an adult.  Laura was the one who introduced me to the music of the mega star of our junior high years-- Madonna.  She also liked acting, and for a while she took voice classes and even had a manager for voice over work.  Once she got a small role in a between bout skit at a big, televised wrestling thing in Austin.  Smackdown, Raw, one of those things.  I laughed for days at the idea of my girly friend at an event like that, let alone in the ring in front of all those people.  But apparently she had a ball.

Laura (and her mom) gave THE BEST slumber parties.  We always had a ton of fun.  And that is where we discovered the iconic movie of our junior high years, Girls Just Want to Have Fun.  We LOVED this movie.  I'm pretty sure we could both recite whole sections of the movie, including song lyrics, if asked.

My family moved away the summer before high school, and although we didn't lose touch completely, we weren't as close in those years.  But after college, with me settled in Houston and Laura in the Austin area, we were able to reconnect.  She'd come down every year to go to the beach house, and various things would take me up to Austin for a visit, including two hurricanes.  I stayed with Laura and her husband, Greg, for almost 3 weeks during the aftermath of Ike.

In some ways, Laura was a very 1950s kind of gal.  Her goal was always to marry and be a housewife.  She met her goal 5 years ago when she married Greg.  (In fact, their 5 year anniversary is coming up in about 6 weeks.)  I was a bridesmaid in the wedding.  My parents came down for it, and Mom still talks about how beautiful and gracious the wedding was.  Back to that 1950s thing, the planning was all about how to make her guests feel comfortable and welcome, not about being the diva or the center of attention.  That wasn't Laura at all.  She didn't mind hamming it up-- she liked to act and perform, after all.  But she'd rather look after others than make herself the center of attention.

Her mother's childhood pet name for her was Laura Lady Bug, and I always addressed my emails to her that way.  Sometimes she called me Beckers.

In the last few years, things weren't quite so rosy for Laura.  She started having pelvic problems.  It was diagnosed as one thing, and they tried every available treatment option, including surgery, with no success.  They consulted doctors all over the country, and even explored international options.  Last fall a new specialist decided that she'd been misdiagnosed all along, and they moved off into a new treatment plan.  All this time she was in pain.  Years of pain.  Sitting was misery for her.  Can you imagine not being able to sit through a movie or a long dinner out with friends?  We talked about this stuff frankly, I think because with my own health problems I could relate.  But she never complained.  We'd crack toilet paper jokes and then move on to more interesting topics, like what books we'd been reading lately and favorite TV shows, like Ugly Betty or True Blood.  (I was staying with them for Ike when True Blood premiered, and after that it kind of became our thing.  Or you know, another one of our things.  She devoured the books, and we were both devoted Eric fans.)

In the end, it was her disease that killed her.  Whatever that disease was.  As of her last email to me, they still weren't 100% sure what the problem was.  A few weeks back she felt a tearing sensation in her abdomen, followed by intense pain.  They had to put her on heavy duty pain medication, and she moved back in with her parents during the week, because she couldn't be on her own while her husband was at work.  On March 11th, her mother left her peacefully sleeping at the house while she went to the grocery store.  When she returned it was to a yard full of paramedics.  Laura passed in her sleep.

I'm trying really hard to remember my Laura.  The one who used to make up dance routines with me to perform in front of her ever patient and interested mother.  The one who loved pink and ruffles and all that crap.  The one who looked for every opportunity to gush with me over our favorite hot actors.

But it's getting harder and harder to forget that she suffered for a very long time.  There was something very wrong with her body.  Her doctors knew it, but they didn't do such a good job of figuring out why.  Was all that suffering necessary?  Could they have treated the problem more effectively?  Maybe even cured her?  Might she be alive right now if one of those dozens of doctors had taken her more seriously?

Those are questions I'm going to have to learn to work through and release over the coming weeks and months.  They aren't helpful questions, unless they in some way help another person going through what she did.  Mostly they're like an inquisitive tongue, constantly poking at a sore tooth.  I need to learn this new landscape and then let the unproductive poking go.

In the meantime, I'm going to think about ponytails.  I'm going to think about the way she would use every little molecule of a tissue before throwing it out.  I'm going to remember how she smelled.  I'm going to remember how beautiful and serene she was on her wedding day.  I'm going to remember my friend, Laura.

Kiss Me Baby!

I've got some stuff going on right now, and I'm not quite ready to talk about it yet.  But I will say that I'm still kickin'.  I'm in the mood to do a little cleaning today (I know.  I don't have a fever, I promise.), and Prince is on the headphones, urging me along.  I wanted to embed the Kiss video, but apparently His Royal Purpleness is pretty emphatic about keeping his stuff off the internet.  So you'll have to make do with this picture instead.

Meow!

Loss and Gain

After multiple "you really look like you've lost weight" comments from my mom this week, I dragged out the Wii and checked.  (I haven't been feeling up to getting my Wii on lately, so it's been collecting dust for a while.)  Lo and behold, I've lost another 6.6 lbs.  That's a total of 22 lbs since the end of August.  I'm not really sure where it's come from, since I don't see the difference at all.  But 22 fewer lbs crushing down on my joints can only be a good thing.

And now on a completely different subject.  If you look over to the right, under the About Me section, you'll see a little ad.  In mid-January I signed up with a site called Swagbucks.  Basically, you're letting them market to you and in exchange you earn points that can be used toward "swag".  A lot of it is stuff I wouldn't be interested in, but they do have one piece of swag I can definitely use-- Amazon gift cards.  Got to feed the Kindle somehow!  So far I've earned $25 worth of Amazon gift cards, and I'm just over half way to earning another $5 card.  There are other gift cards available too, like Barnes & Noble, Travelocity, Paypal, Target, iTunes, or Starbucks.  If Swagbucks is something you think you'd be interested in, I'd appreciate it if you'd click on that banner or use this link to sign up: http://www.swagbucks.com/refer/fibrobabe.  I can earn a few points through referrals, and there's always another book I want to buy!

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Shamrock Shake

Update on Last Week's Goals

So, some stuff got done, some stuff didn't, and some stuff is worse than it was before.  The DVD finally went out in the mail.  I managed to do some dusting and clear out a bag full of packing materials, catalogs, and general crapola.

But the laundry is still in the basket, taking up way too much space.  And instead of reducing my "books to read in 2011" file, it's increased from 107 to 120.  (A couple ebooks finally came available at the library, and I picked up a few others cheap.)  But 21 books in the rest of the month is still doable, if tight, as long as I don't add any more titles to the list.  (HA!)  Maybe I should just change the goal to "somewhere near 100" instead of "under 100".  Might be more realistic.

So that's about it right now.  One step forward, two steps back.  You know, the usual.

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Cat Pee (not as scary as it sounds- pink grapefruit, orange, and lime)

Enough With the Tattoos

I've read two book recently, both published within the last year, with heroes who are presented as scary, intimidating guys.  Why do the heroines feel this way?  What's the cue that these guys are threatening, criminal, and/or low class?  They have tattoos.

Really?  Because I'm about as non-threatening, law abiding, white bread as it gets, and I have two of 'em.  You can't swing a cat without hitting one of us tattooed weirdos.  They're so routine on college campuses that they've practically become a cliche, and have been since the late 80s/early 90s.  For God's sake, Jenny Crusie has a tramp stamp.  (Which I read about on her blog once, but can't find the post now and therefore can't link to.  I did however, spend a lovely hour rereading posts from 2008, and laughed so hard I scared the cat when I came across a reference to the Korean Restaurant Story.)

So please, authors, lay off the tattoos as Signs of Evil Intent.  There's a pretty good chance that a large portion of your readership has them, too, and we don't appreciate it.

Lip Balm of the Day: Peacock Puffs (lime, blueberry, cake)

Goals

Hello!  I'm not dead!  I'm just up to my eyeballs right now.  (How anyone who doesn't work or take care of a family or do anything really can be up to her eyeballs I don't know.  But whatever.)

Anyway, I'm here to set a few goals for myself.  First (and I can't believe I'm making this my first goal, but that should tell you just how much it's annoying me), I need to clean.  I have not one, but two laundry baskets full of clean clothes that need to be folded and put away.  There's precious little floor space in this room.  I don't need to take it up with laundry.  There's about an inch of dust covering everything in the room, and what's not covered in dust is covered in cat hair.  Or my hair, because I'm shedding like mad again.  At this rate I should be completely bald by next Tuesday.  And there are piles of junk mail and general crap everywhere.  I can't take it any more.  The room must be cleaned.

My second goal for the month is to get my Goodreads "books to read in 2011" list under 100.  That's really not all the books I intend or expect to read this year.  It grows constantly.  But most of the books on that list are things that I've already bought and are languishing in the TBR of Doom.  (Sorry, I just read Shannon Stacey's Undeniably Yours, and now everything gets an "of Doom" tacked onto the end.  Plus, it really is the TBR of Doom.  It's where books I want to read go to be smothered to death under the stack of all the other books I want to read.  Scary, scary place, my TBR file.)  There are 107 books on the list right now, so if I can read 8 of them, without adding any others (Ha!), I'll meet that goal.

My third goal is to blog more than once a week.  That's really kind of pathetic.  Even I, who go nowhere and have no life, can usually come up with something to say more often than that.

My fourth goal is to remember to return Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to Netflix.  I've only had it for a month now.  I've watched some of it, and it's only meh, plus it keeps acting weird and skipping.

So, those are my goals for the month.  I think I'll start out strong by sticking the Scott Pilgrim disc back in its envelope (if I can find it) and putting it on the table with the rest of the outgoing mail.

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Gummy Bear

Happy Days Are Here Again!

Another round of good news on the medication front.  My doctor's office called this morning.  The makers of Savella (my other Fibro medication) approved my patient assistance, and there was 3 months worth of free meds waiting for me at the office!  Yay!  My Fibro meds are the only ones I take that are too new to have a generic, which means they are the most expensive.  Now that I'm getting both of them for free, my monthly med costs have gone down by about 3/4.  That's huge-- a significant line item in the monthly budget slashed.

In other news, I've got the Kindle down to 724 items.  So far it hasn't made a bit of difference.  In fact, the battery is dying even faster.  But that might be because of all the clicking around to delete stuff.  I'll go back to more normal usage for the next couple of days and see if there's any improvement.

And more good news-- I have a solid story idea to work on.  Last night I was thinking about a story I started almost 15 years ago and abandoned.  The actual pages are long gone at this point (trust me, it's no loss), but the idea lingered.  As I was falling asleep last night it fused with another scrap of an idea, and suddenly I have a viable story idea.  In the next few days I'm going to work on Kelley Armstrong's Outlining 101, and then I want to start writing March 1st.  I'm not going to push myself to NaNo it.  I'm afraid I'll flame out in a couple of days at that kind of pace.  But I'd definitely like to finish March with a nice chunk of pages.  I've also had a little bit of a brain wave about the story I was working on last fall during Discovery.  So I think I may end up outlining both at the same time.  We'll see how confused I get.

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Gingerale

Cleaning Up My Act

I've noticed lately that my Kindle is chewing through its charge at an alarming rate.  I don't leave the wireless on, so ideally it should be good for 10 days or so.  At a minimum it should last for 7 days.  My most recent charge lasted 4 days.

So today I called Amazon customer service.  Apparently, I have an astonishing number of files on my Kindle, more than almost anyone the rep has seen in the 3 years he's worked for Amazon.  There were only 837 files on my Kindle at the time, almost half of them samples.  And the K2 (the version I have) is supposed to hold 1,500 books.  So even if a sample takes up as much space as an entire ebook, I'm still only a little over half full.

I didn't really understand all the tech-speak, but I guess the problem isn't the number of files on my Kindle per se.  The problem is with one of the 837 files.  There's a glitch in one of them, and it's making the Kindle continuously try to index itself, which is eating up power.  Supposedly there's no way to figure out which file it is, so the only thing to do is delete as many excess files as possible.  Either the bad file will be deleted and the problem will stop, or with fewer files it will spend less time indexing.  As the number of files goes down, hopefully the battery life will go up.

I accept that there's probably no way to know for sure which file is causing the problem, but this still annoys me.  I barely ever leave my room, let alone the house, so it's not like I'm ever in great danger of being Kindle-less.  But the charge really should last longer, and I don't want to have to clear that much stuff off my Kindle!

It kind of boggles me that the customer service guy was so surprised by the number of samples I have.  I can't be the only weirdo who uses her Kindle the way I do.  I find shopping directly from the Kindle to be a bit of a pain.  Also, I spend a lot of time cruising around reading websites, so I probably hear about another 2-3 books I want to check out every day.  I pop on over to Amazon, download the sample, and move on with my day.  When I want a new book I go through the samples until I find something interesting, and then with a couple of clicks I can purchase directly from the Kindle.  I can be anywhere to do this, including a doctor's office or the bathroom (prime book buying locations for me, btw).  As far as I know, the Kindle can't tap in to your Amazon wishlist, so adding all those books I'm interested in to my wishlist just won't work as well for me.  (I do wishlist books that haven't been released yet, since there are no samples for those.  Then, I check the wishlist every once in a while, and anything I'm still interested in I'll sample.)

I spent a good bit of my reading time today working my way through samples and deleting books that I didn't love and won't be reading again.  But the rest of my day was spent trolling Goodreads and adding more samples.  So I'm only down to 829 items-- a net decrease of 8 files.  Unless I got really lucky and deleted the problem file, I'm pretty sure that's not going to make a difference to my battery life.  I guess I'm going to have to spend the next couple of days reading samples.  That's fun in its own way, I guess, but I'd rather do it on my own schedule!

Feeling Weepie

After reading several really good books lately I'm in that moody, creative place where I feel like I want to start writing again.  I've been listening to music again, something I haven't done much of in the last couple of months. 

I don't have much on my mp3 player, comparatively speaking.  (Someone I follow on twitter said today that she has 10,005 songs on hers, and was pondering if she should if she should delete 5 songs to bring it back to a tidy 10,000.  My old but serviceable mp3 has about 1/10 that capacity.)  But there's still enough stuff on there that I forget what I have.

So I was cruising through the other day, looking for something good, when I rediscovered The Weepies.  I only have three of their songs, but I've been listening to those three songs on repeat ever since.  I'm thinking about taking the $2 in free mp3 downloads that Amazon if offering right now (promo code: VDAYMP3S) plus some of the gift certificate credit that I have saved up and downloading a few more songs, or possibly their whole catalog.  I could see this music being the core of a soundtrack.  I know I said this before, but I just logged in over at Wiz IQ, and I'm going to go through the Discovery class again, this time with less moving and distractions.

And here is a video I found for one of the songs I've had on repeat.  It's not an official video, they don't appear to have made one, which is a shame.  But it's still pretty good.  I'd love to know where the images are from, if anyone knows.  Looks like something Japanese to me, and while I have wide ranging tastes, this is an area that I'm completely unfamiliar with.  Some of the clips look pretty romantic, and I'd like to check them out.

And now, Take It From Me!

Why Can't They All Be Ebooks?

Small pet peeve time, folks.  As I'm sure I've mentioned 8,000 times around here, I love my ebooks.  Now that I've moved into a tiny room with no bookshelves and no storage, they are vital to my existence.  That's not hyperbole, y'all.  If it weren't for ebooks there'd be no books at all.  And I can't live like that.

So why, oh why, must so there be so many books I want to read that don't have a digital edition?  In the last week I've been all over Josh Lanyon (in the metaphorical sense), and now I want to try some f/f fiction.  (Apparently it's Gay Week here in The Little Bedroom in Indiana.)  I've done some research.  I found a title that comes highly recommended.  It looks like it has a lot of humor.  Score!  Except that it doesn't have a digital version.  No score!  No score!

The problem isn't so much that I want to buy, download, and begin reading an ebook while never leaving my bed (the only sitting surface in my bedroom), because I could buy it off Amazon and have it delivered right to the house without having to risk contamination by any of that icky ice and snow that's going around right now.  The problem is, once I have it, what do I do with it?  It's gone beyond a little scary and right into "call the EPA" at the moment.  I desperately need to CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!  Or more realistically, CLEAN SOME OF THE THINGS!  If one more thing comes into this room, it may just pop like a zit.  (Now there's an image for you.)

So all that means, no lovely, funny f/f story to read.  It makes me very sad.  The moral of this story?  (My mother would say it's "clean your room," but that is never the moral of any of my stories.)  Publishers, put out digital versions, please.  Because those of us with small living spaces and snow allergies want to read your books, too.

Indiana is Pissing Me Off

Usually I avoid the news, because I don't have enough energy to waste any being annoyed.  But I caught just enough of a news broadcast to skate past annoyed into pissed off.  The Republicans are currently pushing an amendment to the Indiana Constitution to ban gay marriage.  It's already state law, but they want to make really, really sure that no judge can overturn it.  This piece of asshattery was particularly irritating:

“Two percent of the population does not have the right to define marriage for the rest of the population,” said Micah Clark of the American Family Association, referring the minority of Americans who are gay and lesbian.

Does he not see that his 98% (not that I believe that 98% is even in the ball park for those who support this amendment) don't have the right to define something so personal as marriage for that 2% either?  Marriage, from the government's point of view, is a contract.  That's it.  As long as all parties are of legal age to enter a contract and freely consent, the government should be satisfied.

It's religion and the couples' beliefs about marriage that give it personal meaning.  No one is saying you have to let two men or two women marry in your church, if your church does not accept gay marriage.  (It's called separation of church and state.  We'll keep our government out of your church policies, you keep your church out of our government policies, and everyone will get along just fine.)  More than that, marriage is a union of hearts and lives.  It's what each couple brings to the table that makes a marriage.  You can't define that.  You can't control it.  And you have no right to impose your ideas on this most personal of relationships.

For anyone who wants to read a little bit more about the proposed amendment, here's an Indianapolis Star article that explains the situation in more detail.

I'd really like to end this with telling all of those GOP bastards where they can stick their stupid amendment.  But I won't.  I'd just as soon stay out of their bedrooms, and I wish they would extend the same courtesy to the rest of the world.

Playing Nice

Mom was pretty cranky today, so in an effort to pacify and play nice, I spent the evening in the living room with them instead of in my room.  I picked a movie off my Netflix queue, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and we watched it.  Or I watched it, Dad slept through the whole thing, and Mom slept through a good chunk of the middle.  That's not really a comment on the quality of the movie.  Dad's got pneumonia right now, so he spends a lot of most evenings sleeping in the chair.  And Mom falls asleep in front of any movie that isn't overtly Christian or produced by the Hallmark channel.

Other than Harry's Law, there are no TV shows that we both enjoy.  And I've pretty much exhausted my supply of Instant Netflix movies in the Family category.  So if anyone has any suggestions, that would be great.  They don't have to be animated, and they don't have to be kiddish.  They just need to be low on cursing and adult material.  And for my sanity if they could be low on the religious references and cheese factor, that would be good, too.

Even though Mom was snitty today (she is totally freaking out about all the ice outside our front door and getting the cars and driveway cleared out, even though we have no where to go and no way to get there, since the roads are just as bad), I had a pretty good day.  I read a book I enjoyed by a new-to-me author.  If Dad listened to Rush Limbaugh I never caught him at it.  And I, surprisingly, got a good night's sleep last night after my 3 hour nap.  I think I'm almost caught up.  Or as caught up as I ever get.

So that was my day.  How was yours?

Attitude Adjustment

I took a three hour nap this afternoon.  It's made a world of difference in my mood.  There's been a few minor annoyances today, but my nap armed me to deal with them like a rational(ish) human being and not fly off the handle or rant on the internet.

Tonight we watched Harry's Law as a family.  The usual thing is that I retreat to my room after dinner and do my own damn thing.  (Mom and Dad have an unhealthy appreciation for Hallmark movies, and movies she finds at the Christian store.  It's February and they're still watching Christmas movies.  I don't mind an occasional cheesy/sappy movie, but there's a limit.)  But we all enjoy Harry's Law, so we usually watch that one together.

It surprises me greatly that Mom and Dad like it.  The language alone would normally be enough to send my mother flying.  And you can't deny that Harry comes at things with a liberal world view.  Dad listens to Rush Limbaugh.  Also, the show's by David E. Kelley.  There haven't been any dancing babies yet, but there is a certain wackiness that you might expect from this guy.  (Harry, who is a woman, has set up a law office in the ghettos of Cincinnati? Columbus?  I don't remember.  Somewhere in Ohio.  The storefront she took over used to be a shoe store, and the former occupant left quite possibly thousands of dollars worth of designer shoes.  Did I mention this was in the ghetto?  Anyway, her assistant answers the phone, "Harry's Law and Fine Shoes," which should tell you all you need to know about the show.  Oh, and Kathy Bates plays Harry.) If I were to make a bet on the one show Mom and Dad would not like, this is the one I'd pick.  But I guess to them it's less objectionable than the cut 'em up, shoot 'em up shows I like to watch, like SVU and CSI.  There's very little on screen violence in Harry's Law, and so far she's managed to help somebody who really needed it by the end of the episode, so I guess that fits with their tastes.  I just like that Harry is a broad who's willing to call it like she sees it without having a hang 'em high kind of attitude.

I think I'm actually starting to get tired, so I'll cut it off there.  Today was a better day for me, and hopefully tomorrow will be, too.

In Which I Am Unpleasant

I have many annoyances and frustrations today.  And so I thought, why not share them with you?  That is what the internet is for after all.  Ranting and porn.  Sorry, no porn today.

Annoyance #1:  There was a cop killed in Indianapolis recently.  It's a terrible thing.  He pulled someone over for a traffic stop, and the guy shot him.  There are many things about this which are bad, including the fact that the guy was erroneously out on bail, and shouldn't have been out and free to be shooting people in the first place.  But the reaction to this has been extreme.  They rented out a sports arena to hold the funeral.  Reportedly, thousands of people attended today, in the middle of an ice storm.  They televised the service.  It was on for hours.  Literally, multiple hours.  My mother watched the whole thing, TV cranked to the max as usual.  I had to hide in my room with the door closed, listening to ABBA and Katy Perry to drown the whole thing out.

I'm willing to admit that my less-than-ideal emotional state is at least partially, if not mostly, to blame for the aggravation this is causing me.  But I can't handle listening, even second hand, to two or three hours worth of funeral right now, even if the whole thing didn't strike me as an overblown media circus.  I'm very sorry the man died, especially when he was serving the public and the man who killed him should never have been out in the first place.  But the hoopla is distasteful. 

Annoyance #2:  This one is both gross and embarrassing, but since I'm being unpleasant anyway, I'm just going to go ahead and (over)share.  I can't shower every day.  My skin (like the rest of me) hates the cold and dryness, and showering daily makes the whole thing worse.  Plus, showering is hard work, and I just don't have the energy for it.  Last week I went for several days, it may have been like 5, without showering.  Objectively, I know that's gross.  It's embarrassing to admit.  But I didn't want to, so I didn't.  (In the rational part of my mind, I know that this is a fairly big red flag that there's something not good going on in my head.  Unfortunately, that's only a very small part of my mind.  The rest is saying "fuck it", which is why I think I probably need to find a psychiatrist pretty soon.)  I finally took a shower on Sunday night, when Mom refused to serve dinner until I'd bathed.  And then I showered again last night (but didn't wash my hair, that was just too much effort) when Mom started in on how we were going to lose power and I might not get a chance again for a while.  We didn't lose power.  (Obviously, or you wouldn't be reading this post.)  Today, after showering two days in a row, I am in itchy misery.  I'm scratching my pits like a monkey.  It's not pleasant, and it's not pretty.  And Mom is hassling me again to take another shower.  Fuck that.  I am not showering today.  Maybe not tomorrow either.  Go away.

After venting Annoyances #1 and #2, Annoyances #3-5 don't seem so significant.  I want to hide out in my room, reading and listening to the most cheerful music I can find.  I don't want to interact with my parents.  I don't want them coming and standing in my door and talking to me.  (Which my mother does all the time, and which is bugging the ever loving fuck out of me.)  I want all my interactions to be on my own terms.  The internet is perfect for that.  Living with other human beings is not.  I don't want to live here any more.

***

My plan was to try to post every day this month.  February is a short month anyway, so why not?  Although, after that screed I'm not sure anyone is going to want to read any of it.

Going back in my hole now.

Hanging on to the Happy

I've been dealing with some difficult internal stuff this past week, and there have been a few things that have saved me.

1) Comfort food.  Last night I made a Mexican casserole that I used to make in Houston.  It wasn't quite how I'd have done it if I were working from scratch (I'd rather start off with chicken and rotel in the crockpot instead of left over cooked chicken), but it was still pretty good and a taste of home.  Then I made a Strawberry Dream Pie.  Tonight Mom made mashed potatoes and gravy just for me.  Yum.  I had a bowl for a midnight snack, too.

2) I'm reading a really fantastic book called A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness.  Really.  It's fab.  I'll be reviewing it soon.  I'm about half way through the book, only 275 more pages to go.  It's a big 'un.

3) I've been listening to a LOT of Katy Perry.  Very peppy.  My favorite is Teenage Dream.  But I don't love the video, so here is the boys' choir from Glee doing their version.  Hope it makes you as happy as it makes me.

Happy, Happy Day!

The doorbell rang a few minutes ago.  FedEx delivery.  It was addressed to me, although I wasn't expecting anything.  I open the package, and lo and behold-- medicine!  Three months worth of Lyrica, free!  That's almost $750 retail.  I sent in paperwork to Pfizer's patient assistance program a couple weeks ago, and they've already sent me my first shipment.  Thank you, Pfizer!

If I Had a Million Dollars

I have a rich fantasy life.  Lately I've been imagining what I would do if I won the lottery.  The short answer is that I'd move back to Houston.  I'd buy a little house and I'd get set back up with my old doctors and go back to my old life.  (Mom has been nagging me about getting on the ball and finding new specialists.  I know I have to, but I don't wanna.)

Then, I would buy a car, because I really miss having my own wheels.  I loved my old Camry, but if I won the lottery and had virtually unlimited funds, I think I'd buy a hybrid.  Houston may be oil country, but I really like the idea of spending less on gas.  And while I'm going green, I'd want solar panels on my house.

I'd hire someone to come in and do all the cleaning and maybe some cooking.  I'm just too run down to keep up with that kind of stuff, even if I didn't hate cleaning and avoid it whenever possible.

And then the biggest thing, the one that probably won't be practical even if someone handed me a million dollars right now, is that I'd travel.  I'd love to head out to California and go to the RT convention.  I'd like to go to NYC to the RWA convention.  I love all things Disney, and I'd love to go to Disney World again.  I haven't been there since I was a freshman in high school.  They've opened like three new parks since then.  I'm pretty sure that just one of those trips would leave me scary exhausted, let alone doing all three this year.  Maybe it's a good thing I'm broke.

On a smaller scale, when/if the government ever comes through and decides to pay me my social security, I'd like to take some of the back benefits they owe me and buy some bright yellow paint and get rid of this drab gray/purple color on my bedroom walls.  (This dingy room is enough to depress a person all by itself.)  I'd like to get some sort of media cabinet organization thingie so that I have something to unpack what little stuff I have into.  More yellow paint for my bathroom.  And maybe some new towels and bed linens.  (Not yellow.  I'm thinking blue for the bed and bright pink and green for the towels, to go with my flamingo shower curtain.)

My realistic fantasies are much more modest than my fantasy fantasies, but at the moment they're all out of reach.  Maybe I should start buying lottery tickets.