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.
no subject
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!