It’s January 6. I live in Quincy, Massachusetts, slightly south of Boston and right in the heart of New England. I just went outside onto my porch in jeans, no shoes, and a T-shirt, and I was entirely comfortable. If I go for a long walk outside today, I think I might put long sleeves on, but a sweater would be overkill.

I’m glad my house is quite a bit above sea level.

[No, this is not filtered. This is the sort of thing I think it’s useful to be open about.]

So as I alluded to earlier, but haven’t talked about in a lot of detail, I’ve been concerned for a while about constant exhaustion, memory and attention problems, and various other concerns. Lately I can add breathing problems (both at night and, more recently, sometimes during the day). A lot of it looks very much like sleep apnea although there are some things that seem inconsistent with that. I talked to my (then-) doctor about that a couple years ago and at the time she was pretty sure I didn’t have sleep apnea, but since then the symptoms have gotten a lot worse. My daily exhaustion is greater and more consistent. It feels a lot like being jet-lagged: I’m outside and it’s a bright and sunny afternoon, but I feel like it’s 3:00am and I should be asleep and in bed and it should be dark. When I came home from work this afternoon (early, since I wasn’t really functional), I opened the door carefully so the cat wouldn’t get out. It’s been a long time since I lived in a house with a cat. Yesterday I got off the T a couple stops early on my way to work. It wasn’t that I thought I was at my stop yet, it was just that the train stopped at the station and that bit of my autopilot that controls what you do when the train stops kicked in before I bothered to think whether this was where I wanted to get off. I’m only 40 (well, 39 for another couple days). I’m not due for this yet.

So I’m really glad that I finally found a doctor who was seeing patients, got things straightened out with the insurance company so I can go see him, and made an appointment for September 12. I really hope this is easily treatable, whatever it is. (If not, cathijosephine, you may get your chance to feed me my strained peaches during visiting hours at the nursing home sooner than planned. :-)

All of this is on my mind because I just finished writing up my medical history and an overview of my current complaints to send to my new doctor. (I haven’t sent it yet because I want to run the family-medical-history stuff by my mother first.) I don’t angst about this all the time. :-)

All of that said, my life is pretty wonderful. I have lots and lots of good friends, a new lover, some other people who don’t seem to mind smooching me now and then, a good relationship with my fabulous ex, a good albeit long-distance relationship with my other fabulous ex, and a house I love in a town I love and whose mortgage I can even (albeit just barely) afford. And it was a sunny day today.

I have some stuff I’m frightened about, but in many ways I am blessed.

PS — Lest any of you worry that I’m going to keel over tomorrow, these issues have been going on (and slowly getting worse) for years. I’m sure looking forward to my appointment, but this isn’t an acute, sudden thing.

Here are some odd interview questions from ironrose. (The even ones will be filtered.) ( Interview meme. ) Let me know in a comment if you’d like me to come up with five questions for you. I don’t promise to come up with them in a timely fashion, but I’ll come up with them eventually.

[I started writing this on my phone on the T last Wednesday, and am just getting around to posting it now, so for purposes of the text below “today” means May 24, 2006.]

I just noticed in my Treo calendar that today is the birthday of my first real girlfriend. (I qualified that with “real” because before her, in high school, there was somebody I went out two or three times, shared tender I love yous with, and pined over for a year or so.)

She was, well, not somebody any of you will be able to imagine me dating. She was raised a fundamentalist conservative, and she was a bit homophobic (in the “uncomfortable around” sense). But when she was involved with me, she was in a questioning phase, unsure of the faith, politics, or values she grew up with, and willing at least to consider those I represented.

( Several more paragraphs. )

Karen, wherever you are, I hope you’re happy and I wish you well. I wouldn’t do it over again, but I don’t regret it a bit.

I just finished reading Jimmy Carter’s latest book, Our Endangered Values, which my mother and stepfather gave me for $WINTERHOLIDAY. What follows is sort of a review of and response to and riff on the book.

( Come sit by my rocking chair, all you young folk, and let Grampaw Beowabbit tell you a story. )

And Grampaw Beowabbit can remember when people were seriously predicting riots if the price of gas hit a dollar a gallon.

I’m back after a BiCamp that was perfect in almost all ways, and have skimmed through some of the recent LJ posts. I had assumed that by the time I got back, almost nobody made homeless by Katrina would still be without at least minimal food, water, and shelter. I guess I was wrong.

It’s always weird coming back to the news after a long time without it. I remember wondering as we drove east on I-90 what big stories would have happened while I was away. I wouldn’t have thought that Rehnquist’s death would be overshadowed by a story I’d actually already heard before I left.

Been a while since I’ve posted anything terribly thoughtful, so I jumped on scholargipsy’s offer to ask me questions. Then, of course, I had a lovely but very busy weekend, so I’m just getting to them now.

1. If you had to change your voice so that it sounded like someone else's, whose voice would you choose and why?

( My answer. )

2. Which do you prefer in fiction? Happy endings, or tragic ones?

( My answer. )

3. You're a pretty highbrow guy. Tell me one deeply, inarguably stupid comedy movie that reduces you to tears of laughter.

( My answer. )

4. How are you most like each of your parents?

( My answer. )

5. Metaphorize yourself as one of the following classic monsters: Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein's monster, the Bride of Frankenstein, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or the Invisible Man. Explain your choice.

( My answer. )

As is customary with this meme, comment if you’d like me to come up with five questions for you. No promises that I will get to it quickly.

[Warning: While I love my married friends and do not question the choices you’ve made – really and truly I don’t, not even deep down, I don’t think – this post is likely to push buttons for married people, at least married people in most of the US. If you live in Massachusetts and got married recently, the likelihood for psychodrama is less. I don’t want to lose any of my friends, so please try to understand that I’m not attacking you in this post, and not telling you you’ve made a wrong choice.]

I feel crappy, and I’m taking a mental-health day today.

My sister is getting married to her wonderful, sweet partner in early March, in North Carolina, and I’m not going. I feel awful. I love my sister, I think her partner’s wonderful and I can’t think of anything I want more for her than to spend the rest of her life with him, and I want to support her, and I want to do things she really wants me to do. But since her wedding (1) will be legally recognized and (2) will be in a jurisdiction where same-sex couples can’t get married, I’m not going to be there.

( some more detail )

(This all came up with a vengeance because a friend of my sister’s emailed me out of the blue trying to pressure me to go to the wedding. I was too upset to read the whole letter once I realized what it was about; I’m going to try to have some calming tea and relax and read it through and give her the thoughtful reply she deserves. One much smaller thing that bugs me about this situation is that a bunch of people seem to think that I am under a moral obligation to go to this wedding, even though it would be a lie for me. I believe very much in keeping promises (although sometimes I’ve failed), but this is not an obligation I ever assumed, or ever would have assumed, any more than attending Mass or saying my Friday prayers is an obligation I assumed. *Bleah*.)

Everybody should bear in mind that in most ways I’m really happy these days. It’s kind of weird having the intense happiness juxtaposed with intense stress and Big Moral Angst, but the happiness is no less strong for that.

I haven’t turned off comments, but please don’t try to offer me advice, unless it’s about what kind of herbal tea to drink to calm down. (And to anyone who suggests hemlock, I say: *LBPTHFFLBT*! :-) Doesn’t mean you can’t talk about your own similar situations if you want to, or what you would do, as long as it’s about you and not about what you want me to do. And do remember if you were married in a straight-only jurisdiction, or expect to be, that I really and truly do not feel bad about your choice or your spouse or your family. This is not about feeling bad about my sister’s wonderful fiancé or her decision or even really about her wedding, it’s about feeling like I need to tell the truth by my actions.

After this past presidential election, it’s easy to get depressed. In the microcosm, it seems like things are going badly, because we notice all the setbacks — and of course, there are some huge setbacks, and they’re real! — and don’t so much notice the steady progress in the background. With that in mind,( here are some examples of things that have gotten better. ) So taking the long view, even on a scale of twenty years or so, it looks to me like things are getting better rather than worse.

I’m listening to a BBC report on the fifteenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I grew up during the Cold War. I’m not old enough to remember Kennedy declaring himself a jelly donut, or the airlift, but I vaguely remember Nixon and the Vietnam War. (Admittedly, I remember it mostly as something my parents got upset about, but I had that sort of political context for my world.) The Cold War shaped my world. In Vietnam, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan (where US funds supported jehadis like Osama bin Laden), in Central America, regional conflicts were framed in the context of a conflict between superpowers.

I remember the exodus from East Germany, at first through third countries and then directly, as border controls in East Germany dissolved. I remember the excitement and optimism of the falling of the wall itself. And then a few years later, I remember the fall of the Soviet Union, which I followed in the news and also in Usenet posts by an Internet acquaintance of mine whom I’d originally met on alt.sex (that being the sort of place the geeks of a nation newly connected to the Internet were likely to flock to), who would go stand on tanks around the Belyj Dom (the White House, the Russian parliament building) with Boris Yeltsin behind him, and then dash off to work to post about it to Usenet and mailing lists, and then hurry back to the Belyj Dom to face down the Soviet Army again.

(And of course, that makes me think of the Tian An Men demonstrations, which ended so differently.)

In the past fifteen years, I’ve seen the reunification of one Great Power, and the collapse and disintegration of one modern nuclear-armed industrialized superpower: both things that had at one time seemed almost unimaginable. What will the next fifteen years bring?