My love has concrete feet, my love's an iron ball
A significantly larger percentage of yesterday was spent trudging doggedly through snow-blasted wind tunnels than I had even prepared for. The good news is that the sunlight was brilliant, I got some great views of Boston under snow, and I still have all my fingers and toes. Today, with one unavoidable exception, I dedicated myself to staying indoors and not risking my luck a second time. It is so solidly, gaspingly cold outside that even with the heat on in the apartment I am mostly living in a pile of blankets on the couch and treasure whenever a cat comes over to add its warmth to mine. Someday I will write properly about Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), but today is not that day.
I re-read Madeleine L'Engle's Many Waters (1986) last night for the first time in at least a decade. The seraphim and the nephilim hold up: the colors of their wings and eyes, their names and animal hosts, the shape-change and nonhumanness. The quantum unicorns remain a brilliant conceit, as do the tiny mammoths. I like Yalith, taken to God merkabah-style. The ways in which the wickedness of the descendants of Cain is sexually coded and concentrated in the temptress character of Tiglah, with her shallow, selfish hedonism and too-on-the-nose metaphor of sweet perfumes covering up offputting smells, leapt out at me this time, not pleasantly. It's much more conservative than I think of L'Engle as being. I do appreciate her making Ham the fairest-skinned of Noah's sons.
In latest news of my alien biology, I am on a medication which normally increases appetite—that's not why I'm on it, that's just a side effect so well-documented I was warned about it in advance—and so naturally it's working on me as an appetite suppressant. I am finding it physically unnerving. It's not the same as not wanting to eat because of pain or depression or missing a meal because I'm absorbed in work: I am used to making myself eat under those circumstances. I am not used to my body simply feeling as though it doesn't need food, as if I had eaten recently or were still running off a substantial meal, because then when I try to make myself eat it feels like I'm going to make myself sick instead. This morning I ate the top off an oatmeal scone. The rest of the scone felt like way too much food and I passed it off onto![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch. And then this afternoon I got up from the couch and my vision turned to white noise because the only thing I had eaten all day was some maple glaze and like a micrometer of oats. For dinner I made myself squid ink pasta with tomato kipper sauce; it smelled and tasted good and I ate a little more than a bowl. The remains have been stashed in the refrigerator because Autolycus feels strongly that just because I have no appetite for my food is no reason for him not to eat it. I recognize that I would almost certainly be even more unnerved if I were suddenly starving all the time, but it really does feel like someone just flicked off a switch in my brain and it is not pleasant. Corporeality is complicated.
I re-read Madeleine L'Engle's Many Waters (1986) last night for the first time in at least a decade. The seraphim and the nephilim hold up: the colors of their wings and eyes, their names and animal hosts, the shape-change and nonhumanness. The quantum unicorns remain a brilliant conceit, as do the tiny mammoths. I like Yalith, taken to God merkabah-style. The ways in which the wickedness of the descendants of Cain is sexually coded and concentrated in the temptress character of Tiglah, with her shallow, selfish hedonism and too-on-the-nose metaphor of sweet perfumes covering up offputting smells, leapt out at me this time, not pleasantly. It's much more conservative than I think of L'Engle as being. I do appreciate her making Ham the fairest-skinned of Noah's sons.
In latest news of my alien biology, I am on a medication which normally increases appetite—that's not why I'm on it, that's just a side effect so well-documented I was warned about it in advance—and so naturally it's working on me as an appetite suppressant. I am finding it physically unnerving. It's not the same as not wanting to eat because of pain or depression or missing a meal because I'm absorbed in work: I am used to making myself eat under those circumstances. I am not used to my body simply feeling as though it doesn't need food, as if I had eaten recently or were still running off a substantial meal, because then when I try to make myself eat it feels like I'm going to make myself sick instead. This morning I ate the top off an oatmeal scone. The rest of the scone felt like way too much food and I passed it off onto
spatch. And then this afternoon I got up from the couch and my vision turned to white noise because the only thing I had eaten all day was some maple glaze and like a micrometer of oats. For dinner I made myself squid ink pasta with tomato kipper sauce; it smelled and tasted good and I ate a little more than a bowl. The remains have been stashed in the refrigerator because Autolycus feels strongly that just because I have no appetite for my food is no reason for him not to eat it. I recognize that I would almost certainly be even more unnerved if I were suddenly starving all the time, but it really does feel like someone just flicked off a switch in my brain and it is not pleasant. Corporeality is complicated.
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I'm glad to hear it! Prednisone is what I've been put on, actually, and not only is it not making me hungry, it's not keeping me up at night: because it is so far successfully treating a situation which has been causing me insomniac levels of pain, if anything I'm sleeping better on it. Both the prescribing doctor and the pharmacist were surprised to hear me report both. (The pharmacist said she'd never met anyone who had my side effects, which is not what I want to hear from someone who presumably hears about a lot of side effects in their line of work.) I am a little reassured to hear that at least the appetite thing happens to other people.
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That is also useful information and I appreciate it.
I'm glad to hear it's helping you to sleep better.
Thank you. We are hoping the issue is transient rather than chronic, because I don't need anything else chronic and I definitely do not want to be on prednisone any longer than this taper. I remember wanting to eat. I think it was nice.
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That makes sense to me. It was just jarring to be told to watch out for increased appetite and to find myself not even thinking abstractly that after six hours maybe I should have something to eat.
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Then the 'roid rage kicks in and I'm cranky, anxious, restless, and constantly hungry and dehydrated. But those two days are great.
My doctor always says things like "We don't want to do another course of steroids if we don't have to" and I say "I guess... but I'd be so productive!". Dangerous stuff.
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This is fascinating. I am on my second course in as many weeks and so far all it seems to do (on top of its actual job, which is important) is make me completely not hungry. If it's making me anxious, absolutely nobody including me has noticed.
(At the moment I am furious, but I am furious because of the inconsiderate behavior of our upstairs neighbors. I don't think I can blame the prednisone if I have wanted to punch them for a month straight.)
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No disagreement.
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*hugs*
Thank you.
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Sometimes side effects don't last the whole course of a medication, but it's not something one can count on, alas. I'm glad you were able to eat. And that Autolycus continues to be a very fine cat.
P.
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Thank you. He and Hestia are a great support system.
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A: Tiny mammoths!
B: And twincest!
A: Was there twincest?
B: Was it a threesome with a tiny woman?
A: There definitely were evil angelic pregnancies.
B: A great to-do was made about the fact that the nephilim babies were too big for the tiny women?
A: But the mammoths were tiny and adorable!
This has happened at least three times in the past three months; the conclusions remain the same and we never can remember whether there was twincest in a threesome with a tiny woman or not.
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The threesome was never physically consummated because a seraph flew off with the tiny woman into heaven/the sun.
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If you have not read Mallory Ortberg's essay (and the comments) at The Toast, here it is.
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That's the paperback edition I read in fifth grade! That was some very nineties flannel.
"When I was in elementary school, my dad read these books aloud to us, and I don't think he'd read Many Waters before that. He kept being surprised to discover that he was in the middle of describing breasts."
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* There are also some sympathetic victims — the unicorn, one of the other daughters-in-law, and said DiL’s sister Lucy who is an australopithecene.
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Whoa.
Noah's middle son is traditionally Ham: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Though if you already have one of them married to Lucifer, you can probably do whatever you like with birth order.
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Ham would make sense if Not Wanted on the Voyage is turning the flood story inside out, because his extra-Biblical reputation is as the son who was cursed.
(Textually, his son was cursed and nothing in the Tanakh says why it worked out that way, cue millennia of speculation that drifts into some pretty ridiculously racist areas, whee.)
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I read it for the first time in fifth grade and while it registered to me as separate from the original three Murry books, of which my favorite was A Wind in the Door, it also seemed to be its own, valid thing. It was one of the first retellings of Noah that I encountered. I think I looked past a lot of the relationships to the seraphim and nephilim walking the earth in those days. What interests me is that I re-read it several times after that and I don't remember ever bouncing so solidly off its mores as I did this time. Maybe I am just feeling especially sensitized to sex-shaming right now.
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Perhaps you could schedule a small but tasty bite every two hours or so? More trouble, I know, but better than whiting out from starvation.
*hugs*
Nine
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I have Dr. Hestia here beside me as I speak, taking my pulse through the hand petting her back.
Perhaps you could schedule a small but tasty bite every two hours or so? More trouble, I know, but better than whiting out from starvation.
No, it's probably what I'm going to have to do; it's just annoying and mechanical. Thank you for the encouragement.
*hugs*
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Thank you!
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It's been a long time since I read that one (and I came comparatively late to L'ENgle) but I remember hating it and now that you say that, I'm pretty sure that was the reason.
I really hope your body adjusts itself & recovers your appetite a little soon, especially since the drug seems to be working in the other ways. :-/
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It was unexpected. I am also not sure that as a retelling it has much to say about the Flood story, other than that there were women in it who are not named in the received tradition: that is valuable, but I'd have appreciated if most of them were not people who were going to drown and L'Engle I guess is okay with it.
I really hope your body adjusts itself & recovers your appetite a little soon, especially since the drug seems to be working in the other ways.
Thank you!
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I do not think I will read Many Waters aloud to the child. Frankly, I'm fussing over A Wind in the Door. However, she can now read about Loki and Sif and all those nice people for herself. She is chiefly into Loki, Loki's androgynous look in the D'Aulaires' illustrations, and how you can get gnomes to DO stuff for you. If you're Loki.