By request. Let me know if you want this lj-cut; I figured it was small enough that wasn’t necessary.

So there’s this wonderful family photo of me at around two years old playing in Hyde Park. My mother made a copy for me, which I have somewhere very safe, I’m sure. But my sister also has a copy, and while we were down there last weekend I scanned it in. So here I am:

Me as a toddler 'dowsing' in Hyde Park, London, summer 1968. My parents spent three years in England for my father’s graduate work. This picture of me was taken by a family friend while we were in Hyde Park in London sometime in summer of 1968. My parents always called this my dowsing picture, although I sort of think it looks more like I’m ploughing. I was a cutie, wasn’t I?

(Sorry no Rabbit Hole Day post this year; I don’t have enough brain cells to be creative right now. You get the following by virtue of the fact that most of it was written yesterday on the T.)

So last long weekend was Arisia, and I haven’t stopped having fun since. On Tuesday, I ended up at dinner at the Cambridge location of Addis Red Sea with cathijosephine, ragingamazon, and a bunch of other people in what was sort of an impromptu farewell dinner for ragingamazon. I had never tried their new location, and I hadn’t had Ethiopian food since Meskerem in DC with plumtreeblossom, bcat1, and spacechicken. It was the yum, and the company was lots of fun.

On Wednesday, plumtreeblossom and I went to a gathering at The Burren for members of the davis_square community. The bar gave us free food, and they certainly recouped their investment; there were about 30 or 35 of us there. There were lots of Theatre@First people there, among them the wonderful surrealestate (f/k/a pheromone) and joyeous, but there were also a lot of people we hadn’t met in person, and a lot of people we (especially I) didn’t know at all. It was a great time.

( A few more days, cut for length. )

As I was telling jadia over dinner yesterday, as a child I was an introvert, more or less out of necessity since I was sick a lot (and therefore out of school a lot, and often unable to run and play with other kids). Clearly I am no longer an introvert, but it’s only been in the past few years that my mental image of myself has caught up to reality. I used to think, “Hah, hah! I’ve got everybody fooled; they think I’m an extrovert, just because I get energized by spending lots and lots of time with other people!” and it was only fairly recently that I realized that everybody who thought I was an extrovert was actually right. (I am, though, an extrovert who needs a lot of quiet alone time.) Anyway, if I had lingering doubts, this past week should lay them to rest.

I’ve seen this in zillions of people’s journals. ( The privilege meme. )
I agree with the criticisms lots of people have posted about this meme; lots of the items have to do with education more directly than with privilege (although of course they’re very closely related). And my own particular answers are often affected by geography more than social class (although again there’s some degree of correlation). Still, it was kind of interesting.

(By the way, silverlibre and ka9sqb, you should feel free to correct anything I’m misremembering or misrepresenting.)

(Current hip status: beowabbit is currently very hip.)

Going to work was a really stupid idea. My theory was that if I’m going to be in pain and discomfort anyway, there’s no real advantage to not being at work for it. What I didn’t count on was it taking almost two hours for me to walk from the parking garage to my office building. (Admittedly, I’m counting the three times I sat down on benches.) That normally takes 10min if I stop to buy an apple and a coffee on the way.

However, the campus police were very kind and sent over a Safety Patrol van to get me back to the parking garage from my office when I left (early), and the drive back to Quincy was uneventful and less painful than the drive from plumtreeblossom’s to work had been.

On the way home, I stopped by the drugstore and got crutches. I’m not sure they’re an improvement over the cane. They’re better for standing still for long periods of time, and they’re much quicker, and they’re more stable, so there are fewer of the nasty surprises, but they are much clumsier to handle, harder to keep from falling when I set them aside because I can’t hook them on things (and bending over to pick anything up is not so much happening at the moment), and while the cane basically left me fine most of the time with occasional moments of serious pain when I stepped wrong or had to rebalance, the crutches basically hurt just a bit on each “step”. I think the crutches are probably net worse on my hip. If I feel like I can go out tomorrow, I may buy a second cane, and try the two-cane approach. (Assuming, of course, I’m not magically all better tomorrow.)

I left a message for my doctor’s office as soon as I got in to work today, but haven’t heard back yet. At this point, I don’t think it justifies an ER visit, because my best guess is that medical science is going to tell me to suck it up and wait, and in the meantime keep my weight off it and take lots of painkillers, which I am already doing. (Well, modulo the stupidity of trying to go in to work today, but I’ve learned my lesson. Thanks, plumtreeblossom; you were right. On the other hand, I got lots of sympathy from my co-workers.)

In other news, my flowers are still beautiful, and my kilt still makes me very very happy.

I believe that yesterday was the first day since I started growing my hair out again that I looked in the mirror and liked the way my hair looked. That’s partly because it’s finally starting to get long enough that it hangs down rather than sticking out at absurd angles, and partly because it was cool enough that I could drive to the T station with the windows most of the way up.

(I’m sure I’ll still be tempted to shave it off the next day it’s really hot and humid, though.)

So this “ten things you’d tell your 16-year-old self” meme is really interesting, and I’m learning a lot about people from it, but I’m having a hard time putting myself in the right mindset to come up with interesting answers. The point of the thought-exercise would be to change the past, but if I change the past, I would risk losing people who are very very important to me because what led up to my meeting them didn’t happen. For instance, Boston would have been a better place for me to go to school than New Haven (and I say Boston rather than Harvard because I think UMass or Tufts would have gotten me into the same urban setting), but if I hadn’t gone to Yale I wouldn’t have met beetiger, among other people, and I wouldn’t want to give her up. And if I’d found myself in Boston several years earlier, I would have found a different social circle and the community dynamics would have been different when all my actual friends and sweeties showed up in Boston (if I’d even meet them), and I might not have those relationships.

However, for the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to ignore all those issues and pretend that shuffling the deck and dealing a new hand is something I’m OK with. Otherwise it would be all “Make absolutely sure you go to this party that your friend invites you to, and be really certain you say yes when this other person asks you if they can bring a friend to your party, and don’t be late to this event, but make sure you’re late for this other one”.

So anyway, here’s some information for my 16-year-old self:( Some things I’d tell myself at sixteen, if I were going to tell myself stuff at sixteen. )

Well, in the mail today there came photographic evidence that I do in fact have a brain. I’ll probably post more of these when I get a chance to look through them all, but for now, here’s one picture.

( Read more... )

So, it has occurred to me that now that I’m growing my hair out (albeit frustratingly slowly), none of my userpics looks like me any more. So, here’s a new userpic, and at least one of my userpics looks like me now.

Also:

I had a very encouraging and hopeful meeting with my doctor today. (And an encouraging but possibly not quite on-target voicemail message from my hematologist this morning.) The short version is that I have a couple of endocrine problems, and it’s very likely that treating one or both of them will make a big difference. If I get a chance later tonight (I just got back to work after the appointment) I’ll probably post more details (probably in a locked post, which is a sneaky and underhanded way of encouraging my parents to get LJ accounts :-). [EDIT: It worked!]

(In other news, it is a marvellously sunny day here in Boston, so I was happy for the opportunity to go for a walk in the middle of the day — my PCP is walking distance from work.)