My love has concrete feet, my love's an iron ball

[sovay]

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 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.

Comments

[redbird]

Corporeality is definitely weird. The second time I was taking (prescribed) steroids, my body decided prednisone was a stimulant: little appetite and about four hours of sleep a night, and significant weight loss. Fortunately, once we tapered me off the drug, my appetite and sleep went back to normal and my weight stabilized.

[yhlee]

*support support*

[pameladean]

That kind of thing is so unnerving. I was once on an antibiotic that suppressed appetite. And they did mean APPETITE. I was very hungry indeed, but the motivation for doing anything about it had just gone missing. It seemed like a lot of trouble. It seemed like it wouldn't really help. I felt like I was living in the wrong place somehow.

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.

[skygiants]

shati and I have developed a recent habit of attempting to explain the plot of Many Waters to each other, which neither of us have read since probably the late nineties. It usually goes something like:

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.

[nineweaving]

Sleep is good. Effective medicine is good. Cats are priceless.

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

[thawrecka]

Bodies are very strange. I wish you increased appetite soon!

[thisbluespirit]

The ways in which the wickedness of the descendants of Cain is sexually coded and concentrated in the temptress character of Tiglah

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. :-/

[selkie]

I hope the sleeping is still persisting. I can't do steroids because I literally wish to filet innocent people just to make them stop NOISING at me, which I know people talk about in some level of jest but it's real and my moral compass is already wobbly?

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.