jmtorres: Quinn from Sliders asleep with book open on his chest. Text: Sweet dreams. (book)
headache today, which fortunately waited until after I was done with homework to descend. It feel sinusy? except the parts where it also flashes into my scalp and the hinge of jaw sometimes? a little bit migrainey, noises and the sun were not helping it. nsaid didn't do much about it. suspect it is a rexulti withdrawal headache, despite my desire to attribute it to other things I could more immediately treat.

now that I have high hopes of getting an A in the class, I am having some of the old anxiety about the subjective part of the points, ie the discussion questions. the prof gave me full points on the last discussion question so I felt like I had to Live Up to Expectations or something? that was getting in the way of me working on it at all. I had to remind myself that it is okay to half-ass stuff, half-assing an assignment is better than not doing it, it's okay if I don't get full points on this discussion question, it might not even prevent me from getting an A if my test scores stay high.

it's after two in the morning which is about when I've been getting the sleep the last few days--last night I tried to go down at midnight but belched with GERD for three hours. Mind you now that I'm trying to write an entry I'm yawning my face off. I would like to shift my sleep schedule back so I could have actual mornings, but I am relieved that the current trend is ~8 hours a night instead of the 11ish when I was taking rexulti or the the like, 17 from a few bad days of the withdrawal.

I have an Audible account and enjoy listening to audiobooks, but I have a bad habit of buying a bunch of things during sales and then not listening to them until almost the end of the return period, which is a year. So right now I'm trying out a bunch of titles I bought last June and groaning to myself over my sale lots from july and august as well.

Stuff I've chucked back:
--The House of the Spirits, Isabelle Allende. When I bought this I had just binged all of Jane the Virgin, but I'm not longer in that fannish headspace? Because it's a year later. I did listen to about ten minutes or so to see if it would grab me, but it did not, and also had mention of someone in a cage encrusted in his own filth within that first ten minutes, and even assuming things would get better for that character, that just... wasn't quite working for me.
--The Stars my Destination, Alfred Bester. I knew very little about this but I occasionally expose myself to classic sci-fi just because, like, roots? This edition had a forward talking about the history of science fiction and how it ages, by Neil Gaiman I'm pretty sure they said, and the forward referred to the protagonist of this book as a predator, a killer and a rapist. Welp, that's very clear, thank you for the warning label, I said, and noped out.
--Existence, David Brin. I actually listened to several hours of this while driving to Phoenix recently, and I wasn't originally going to chuck it because nothing about it bothered me, but I also realized nothing about it grabbed me, either? There were it seemed like a dozen viewpoint characters and I didn't care about any of them, so.
--Somebody Tell Aunt Tillie She's Dead, Christiana Miller. I listened to the first few chapters and was super uncomfortable with how rac(ism) played in a confrontation between the white wicca protagonist and her latina Catholic landlady. Also the best friend was kind of painfully stereotypically flamboyantly gay.
--annnnnnnd safari ate half the entry because I went out to twitter to find a link so the rest of this is going to be much more abbreviated than it was before.
--The Invisible Library, Genevieve Cogman. I disliked the narrator, who made it sound as if every sentence ended with three exclamation marks, but I enjoyed the book when I checked out a hard copy from the library.

Stuff I'm keeping:
--The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker. Rocky start, as before the Golem became conscious our viewpoint character was the creep who wanted to buy a golem for a wife, but he died very immediately and now she's a free golem with no master to give her orders, and I am excited to find out what happens to her next.
--The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley. I am a sucker for time travel stuff and this loops interestingly. The final piece of causality I did not see coming, but it fit neatly.
--Fortune's Rising, Sara King. I only listened to maybe half an hour of this, but I liked the scifi premise it set up, colony world finds brain-enhancing drug, suddenly their entire economy is producing the drug and sending it back home.
--Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, Jessica Townsend. I listened to the whole book and bought the sequel because I couldn't put it down. 11-yr-old protagonist but apparently coming of age/kid's adventure is still a favorite genre of mine.
--The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson
--The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Meg Elison. Apocafic with plenty of dark stuff but like, queer characters EVERYWHERE. the narrator is gender-nonconforming and bisexual. I bought the sequel.


Stuff I need to listen to soonish:
--Servant of the Underworld, Aliette de Bodard--Aztec murder mystery if I recall correctly.
--Cold Magic, Kate Elliott. this one and the de Bodard were recced to me when I asked twitter for alternate history novels where Native Americans/First Nations peoples weren't colonized but were instead political players among world governments.
--Apocalypse Nyx, Kameron Hurley--I think this is short stories in the Bel Dame Apocrypha universe.
--A Perilous Undertaking, Deanna Raybourn. Sequel to A Curious Beginning, which I liked--a young Victorian lady figures out the socially acceptable way for her to Do Science and Travel and stuff is to study butterflies. There's also political intrigue.
--The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
--Grass, Sheri Tepper
--Dreamer's Pool, Juliet Marillier
--Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton
--Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
--Android's Dream, John Scalzi
--Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi
--Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi there was a sale okay. I recognize I'm going to have to figure out how much I actually like John Scalzi in the next couple of months.
--Imajica, Clive Barker
--Soulless, Gail Carriger
--Broken Monsters, Lauren Beukes
--Vicious, VE Schwab

That's the list through September anyway. Tell me what I should listen to soonest (after I finish the ones I'm in progress on).
jmtorres: (hide)
so, vividcon. this post is entirely subjective and all about my complicated mental health feelings, not so much about any fannish experience of the con. Will be posting the vids I took to vividcon after I write this, and that will probably be the extent of posting on fannish matters.

About a year ago, [personal profile] niqaeli and I took my brother out to the movies and pitched Vividcon to him. Every time I'm in town we take my brother out to do something even if it's as silly as wander around IKEA for two hours, because he has, since his first attempt to go away to college at 18, been living at home with fairly debilitating OCD. He is now 25. He's lost touch with all but one of his friends, he relies on my parents for a host of super basic things like turning off the water after washing his hands, he has IBS which only makes his unclean feelings worse, and I really feel like getting him out of my parents' house is a service to everyone involved.

Anyway, my pitch about Vividcon was, it's a trip halfway across the country that he'd take with me and not our parents, to do a fun fannish thing I hoped he'd appreciate, and did he think he could work on his OCD crap enough in a year to be able to go and take care of himself in the ways our parents usually take care of him at home. He does this thing, part of his OCD, where he has to come up with the exact right words to articulate himself for fear of misleading you if he gets it wrong. It can take him days to answer a question. I tend to treat this the way I would querying a computer--I try to ask an exact, specific question to elicit a succinct answer. So I asked him, first, did he want to to, and second, did he think he'd be able to. The answers were yes, and since it was a year away, he thought so.

I made various deals with him over the course of the last year--that I was going to work on making a vid, which was going to be my hurdle parallel to his OCD behavioral therapy work. (I made one! Two actually! Proving once again that the only thing that makes me complete vids is deadlines.) That I would FaceTime with him at least once a week to check in. (Sometimes I had a hard time with this, because when I was behind on my goals or having a bad brain day, I didn't want to have to admit that.) I gave him advice from my own experience getting treated for depression--that it's okay to have bad days, but you don't let a bad day become an endless string of bad days, you pick yourself up and start over the next day.

So last week, or, Saturday nearly two weeks ago, I FaceTimed him after having not for about three days. I was in the process of bleaching my hair and dyeing it pink, and I was afraid my mom would give me crap about being interview-ready on the job search, so I wanted to have the whole thing done and a fait accompli. I have the stupidest reasons for failing to call my brother as regularly as I promise. It turned out that basically the entire three days he'd spent ruminating on how he didn't think he was going to be able to go, and Mom told him he should talk to me about it but he didn't call me. Because well. He was even more internally flaily about that than I was about the dye job.

Our travel plans included me driving to Phoenix, where my family lives, the night before we flew to Chicago for Vividcon. I ended up driving out three days early to spend more time with my brother and try to convince him it was TOTALLY POSSIBLE. And meet his therapist in passing. On Tuesday, he decided that he would go ahead and contact that one high school friend he still talks to every few months, who happens to live in Chicago now. I cheered. The next day we went clothes shopping, because Mom wanted him to have new slacks and shorts for the trip. He was incredibly patient about trying on everything she found for him. There are so so many parts of why this was amazing.

So anyway: we did it. We totally got on the plane and flew to Chicago and went to Vividcon.

And I think my brother enjoyed it more than I did.

At one point around April or so I wrote him a long long description of what Vividcon was like, to my recollection. Club Vivid and the Joxer Dance and the anticipation of Premieres and stuff. One of the things I wrote to him was we'd probably go to 2-3 shows/panels per day, no one went to everything (read: I never went to everything). It's funny to me that I remembered that, but not why.

The why is, I find cons exhausting. I took like three naps a day the entire trip and I felt just beat after watching a vid show (of course, stupid, engaging the extreme focus to watch vids for an hour takes a lot more mental energy than watching an episode of a TV show for an hour). Let alone talking to people. Once we were in the consuite for like ten minutes and when [personal profile] niqaeli decided to go do something else I was like TAKE ME WITH YOU EVERYTHING IS TOO LOUD. There were a ton of people that I marginally recognized as "person I have seen at VVC the last time I was here 5 years ago" but my mental connections between faces and usernames are crap and I was never good at talking to people at cons.

PS If you talked to me about my vid and I made weird faces or said something dumb, it's because my brain was going AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HOW TO FAKE BEING A HUMAN?????? I mean, I also do not know what to say to compliments so assume what I MEANT to say was "Thank you" but oh my god, SO much alien cyborg input error brain.

I ended up hiding in [personal profile] echan's room watching Olympics during Club Vivid to distract myself from feeling that there were too many people, and too much noise, and I stressed myself out about plane tickets, and also everyone else was enjoying booze while I was not because meds and it's not that I don't want anyone to be drunk around me? It's more, I don't know, I felt like I'd left myself out of everything on that score. Or something.

It was so frustrating, that like. By almost any metric I would have thought of beforehand, this was a very successful Vividcon for me. I made vids, and people liked them. I saw other people's vids, and they were awesome. I did my hair and made a costume for Club Vivid and it was adorable and lit up. I got my brother to go on a four-day trip without my parents and his OCD did not prevent him from participating in the con or meeting up with his friend or even getting out of the hotel room by checkout time. There was no wankfest that blew up in anyone's face.

But my stress-activated GERD had me burping all through Vid Review and during the back half of Club Vivid I was watching Michael Phelps get a medal and having a bit of a cry.

This was the first time I've been to a con since getting medicated for the depression, so probably five years ago I put all the same kinds of reactions down to my brain is borked. But now a year and change into pharmaceutical unborking, I am still having these fundamental problems. The introvert problems. The, too loud, too many people, being around this many people exhausts me and maybe even frightens me, at least in the social awkwardness sense. The, everyone is having fun except me.

So I think I probably won't be going to Vividcon again. Or any con.

Which really sucks because where will I get deadlines to goad me into finishing vids now.

ahahaahah

Mar. 24th, 2015 01:36 pm
jmtorres: (scream)
so i've been trying and failing for a couple of days to motivate myself to go harass my doctor's office in person about my prescription

today i decided to call them again. played phone tag before, this time i was just like whatever if it needs an appointment let's make an appointment, i know i can motivate myself to leave the house for appointments and i shouldn't have to pay for this but i would rather pay the co-pay than the ongoing stress and worry at this point

so i learned that it would have been rather difficult to find the office in person to bother, as they had moved--which i knew, the doctor told me they were moving to the fourth floor the last time i went in--but it turns out the fourth floor of another building.

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jmtorres: From Lady Gaga's Bad Romance music video; the peach-haired, wide-eyed iteration (Default)
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