#klyaksa1

The thing is, it feels wonderful. It may look unnerving to someone who has never been pregnant, but it’s a wonderful feeling.

You mentioned that your MIL is Latvian and her condiment sets include a mustard pot. I don't know when she (or her ancestors) came to the US, but the mustard you are probably talking about is the kind sold in Russian stores. Thick (it is sold in little jars and you spoon it out, no squeeze bottles) and very, very hot. American mustard is much sweeter and almost tasteless by comparison.

Her family fled as refugees from the Soviets during WWII, and so arrived in the US circa 1945. She was born here, but her oldest sister remembers Latvia, and her brother was born in a displaced person’s camp in Germany. 

Needless to say, she is personally horrified by current politics. 

We actually do have access to an astonishing array of mustards, out in Buffalo, but I have yet to attempt Russian ones. I’ll have to consult with dude’s aunt; she’s hosting Easter this year.

A couple of years back, we went to Easter at her house and none of the cousins were in attendance, and neither was Dude’s mom so it was just the four of us, me and dude and Aunt and her recently-now-deceased husband, and Uncle Vitalis got a little tipsy and reminisced about Old Country. He was a few years older even than her, and remembered the war; her English is extremely precise and notable for its lack of accent, but he spoke with a faint indistinct accent his whole life, worsened later by teeth problems.

 He particularly remembered a fighter plane coming over and circling the farm, German I think, and he took cover under a pile of wood, and thought he’d been shot and was screaming, but when his father came and got him out it was just that a piece of the wood had nails in it and he’d poked himself. 

He also reminded us that under the old ways, Lent was a real thorough fast, and you ate no eggs or milk or meat for the duration, and so by God, on Easter morning there had better be a feast-- but it was always a great feast composed of entirely cold foods, because the women had to spend all morning at church too, you know! 

I'm so sorry you are dealing with this! Depression can definitely be paralyzing and can impair your ability to handle what seem like very minor issues so they start looking insurmountable. That said, a lot of the difficulties you describe seem to have a common cause. It might be a better investment of your mental resources to try and get treatment (and stick with it) rather then to keep playing catch-up and end up feeling constantly overwhelmed.

Pretty much everything is hung up on me needing to get health insurance, and I can’t do anything until I do that, and I know that, but I do have to attempt to live my life in the meantime. I don’t even know what you mean by playing catch-up; I have literally no choice but to continue to live my life in the absence of treatment until I can get through all the steps that are standing between me and treatment, starting with my lack of health insurance. I’m not even sure what else this is about. Have I said I don’t plan on seeing a doctor? Did I not mention the part where I don’t have health insurance and it’s becoming impossible for me to navigate?

 For the record, though, I have undergone treatment for this, years and years of different medications, and it never made a radical difference, only a subtle one, and some of the differences were actually negative. (The best was when I asked my doctor about pursuing an ADHD diagnosis and she dismissed me out of hand, but second-best was when I asked a different doctor and he said “sure!” and handed me the name of a specialist I’d need to see, who wasn’t covered under my insurance, and then that was that, there was apparently no other way to go forward. Another doctor scribbled down a list of names for me of “therapists” but they were just names, and when I Googled them, it was not apparent who this doctor had intended them to be, or what for, and I’m not entirely sure what I was strictly meant to do with this list of what amounted to random words, so nothing ever came of that either. For the record, these doctors were all part of the same practice and spent the majority of my time there writing everything down, or reviewing the previous notes, so it’s not like they didn’t know what the issue was or I didn’t have continuity of care. They sure did; that’s about all I had.) 

So simply urging me to ‘get treatment’ is a lovely bit of advice but not one that’s in any way helpful to me. I know! I know there are things that can be done! But I have no access to those things presently, and somehow, I have to go on anyway. 

I don’t mean to be snappish, at all, I genuinely appreciate people’s expressions of sympathy and apparent desire to help, I just can’t really parse what this was meant to mean. It’s great that this word “treatment” exists but it’s also great that the moon exists, and they’re about equally relevant to me just now. I have no health insurance, there are a number of hoops I need to jump through to try to get them, and then the difficulty of making appointments with medical professionals when at any given time I am in one of two 300-mile distant locations with totally different health insurance networks is not insignificant, and all of this takes mental resources I just don’t have, and especially, planning for a future I literally don’t have the dimension of vision to even see. 

And in my experience, “treatment” means “take some pills that make you gain enough weight that your clothes don’t fit, continue to be a forgetful, disorganized piece of shit that sometimes can’t have orgasms, then forget to refill the prescription because your executive function’s no better than it was, go through horrible withdrawal symptoms, tell a doctor later and have them shake their head slightly, tell you not to do that, and change the subject.”

It sounds like you both have anhedonia. I'm sorry.

He claims he’s fine and this is just how he likes to live. He has memory problems but says those are normal. He sleeps incredible amounts but says that’s normal. He hassles me that I have to get all my shit taken care of and need treatment for my various disorders, but he’s just fine and there’s nothing wrong and it’s just completely normal that he doesn’t want to do anything or move or leave the house or have friends!

OTOH, Bodhi is transporting remains of the Holy Temple of the religion that his people followed. The closest analogy that I can come up with is a Jew being contracted to transport shredded Torah scrolls. So the guilt he feels may well be far greater then it should be based on his actions alone. And as for sending him to Saw - Galen trusted Saw enough to send his child to him, why wouldn't he trust him with Bodhi's information?

I can see in-narrative justification for it, sure, and how the nature of his job would eat at Bodhi. But to say that collaborating for survival is the same whether you’re driving the supply truck or designing the superweapon is overlooking a fuckload of power differential.

And it’s still got this uncomfortable superstructure over it-- and partly it’s the whole movie, where the only way we could get all these great characters of color in the main Star Wars universe was to have them die to further the plot, PLUS how they couldn’t have their own motivations, we had to paste on a white girl and her poppa just so there’d be something people could have emotions about, because these dudes of color aren’t sympathetic-- that’s definitely a factor.

But it does come down to an older, more powerful white dude using a younger, vulnerable, powerless person of color to enable him to assuage his own guilt. And sure, Erso didn’t send Bodhi directly to his death, but you can’t tell me the Rebellion’s survival rates were very good. And he had to know how paranoid Saw was, how not-eager Rook’s reception was likely to be, and from Rook’s reactions, he clearly did not pass any hint of this along. Bodhi expected they’d listen to him instead of torturing him, and was entirely wrong. Maybe Saw’s gotten crazier as the years have gone by and Erso doesn’t know that, but there’s no way Erso didn’t at least suspect that it might go down like that. Rook was completely unprepared. 

(It’s just about the only data we have about their interactions, so it’s significant.)

I’m not saying you can’t explore this in healthy ways, and I’ve already read a few pretty great fics where the Galen/Bodhi relationship is explored in various ways-- most of them sort of desperately sad, but ultimately coming from a place of good intentions. It can be told as a beautiful story, or at least a bittersweet one. You can totally read Galen Erso’s resistance as poignant and effective, and all that. (Clearly, the creators mean for you to.)

(I’m trying to provide links, but AO3 is down for me, so I can’t access my history. Ugh.)

 I’m just saying, @kylostahp is totally justified in hungering for a story that explores just how badwrong that dynamic absolutely could have been. And I haven’t seen any, yet. 

This goes back, sort of, to the ever-present Discourse about villains-- on a fundamental level, sometimes the most interesting thing you can get about examining a source work is looking at who they tell you to root for, and thinking about why maybe there’s more to it than that. It’s not like anybody’s seriously saying “planet-killing genocidal maniacs are the real heroes”, because for fuck’s sake, but there’s a healthy element of “you’re telling me this person’s a hero but not showing me, and in my experience there are an awful lot of people who are on the right side but aren’t actually good people.” 

(If you’ve never been involved in a well-intentioned movement that was brutally hamstrung by some deeply toxic people who plausibly thought they meant well but in practice were fucking disastertrash and sometimes actually evil, then you are extremely fortunate.)

I tend not to write the stories like that, but I do believe deep in my heart that a large part of the beauty of transformative works is to refuse to hear the story that the creator wants you to, and instead look at the story the creator is actually telling.

Am I the only one that sees more then a bit of irrationality here? The author got upset at her husband because, in giving her what she said she wanted, he failed to go through the process she would have used. I don't disagree with her overall points, but her example actually sounds like she got upset because her husband didn't read her mind.

I can’t see an example in that post that remotely reads that way? The OP noted that any quotidian task the males in her family performed required much more praise and recognition than the far more frequent and difficult ones she and her daughter did as a matter of course, I don’t see how that’s requiring mind-reading? The woman who left her fiancee because he couldn’t manage to make an appointment to care for the car on his own? Which of these women was expecting a man to be a mind-reader?? I really honestly truly cannot find what you’re talking about.

I mean-- any of it, the point is, Shit Has To Get Done and if it’s been categorized as Women’s Work, then it is completely invisible to men. This isn’t a question of mind-reading, this is a question of what is actually considered to be beneath the notice of men. 

boy howdy do i feel you. day 2 is A Horror. also i am way too scared of adding anything to my already kinda fucked-up body to try any kind of hormonal birth control. so my options are pretty damn limited.

Yeah ditto. I have used hormonal birth control in the past, and it has Not Gone Super Well. It’s mostly that I have never managed to get a doctor to understand me in my entire life, but I’ve realized that since I can’t figure out what’s wrong with me, a doctor’s sure not going to, and I can’t stay on a prescription to save myself, so I’m not willing to invest like 1000% of my executive function on something that’s honestly not all that great. 

torrilin reblogged your post and added:

FWIW, I have an iud, love it, and would never in a...

Yeah see above. Plus I had a friend who went on depo and lost her fucking mind, gained like 100 pounds, and has never been the same. I’m not fucking with that. 

runawaymarbles replied to your post “continuation of tmi rant”

I'm so glad there are other people out there who can't use tampons?? I hate admitting it because I feel like a 14 year old but here we are

I mean. I can. It took me years to get the hang of it. And i can use them, so I do. But they suck. They just, they suck.

Mostly I would use my diva cup but I can never find the fucking thing. I live a nomadic life and also am a human disaster, so when I need it, I can’t fucking find it, and then there I am at like the grocery store checkout and instead of my wallet I pull out my fucking diva cup like what the fuck is it doing in my purse why would I ever have it in my purse what the fuck. So.

I can’t have things. I can’t have temporary things, I can’t have permanent things. I can only have disposable things, and only even those because I never have them when I need them, steal them from my sister, and then buy replacements way later. 

klyaksa1 replied to your post “a TMI rant”

Am I missing something? Who in their right mind seriously considers tampons a sex toy?

The problem is that a McDonalds in NYC, in LA, and in Billings, Montana, are all expected to have the same menu at the same price. So this would require a monumental shift in mentality of the country, not just adoption of new farming methods.

And everyone is used to going to the grocery store and getting exactly what they came for, in unblemished specimens, regardless of time of year. 

My family in the eastern part of the state has moved away from that, and are super into shopping at the farmer’s market, and growing their own and whatnot, and I don’t really notice it until I come back out west here and my boyfriend’s mom makes something with fresh strawberries for Thanksgiving. !!! I had forgotten you could just. Get those. Whenever. Right there at the store. Of course you can. 

But it is something that can be done, and it is something that is starting to happen, for some people, in some markets. What’s interesting is that it’s not all rich people doing it.

It mostly is. My sister’s CSA has a hundred subscribers, and somewhere between 92 and 98 of them are white. But several are very low-income, and work for trade, or are recipients of the program my sister and her husband have built into the business, where some subscribers arrange to pay extra so that there are spare shares to give out to low-income families who would use them. 

(The question is assembling the list of low-income families, but so far they’ve had plenty of demand-- and a reasonable amount of supply!)

My point is-- it’s a shift that can happen. The Troy market has been being aggressively developed, by this network of small farmers and a particular social circle associated with them, for about fifteen years now. The CSA at my sister’s farm was started nearly twenty years ago-- by a customer who reached out to the farmers, and set it up for them. It’s slow, but it’s something the culture is starting to be ready for, in places. 

I was a restaurant reviewer ten years ago, and spoke to a restaurant owner and chef who told me excitedly about how he was starting to find local sources for his ingredients and contracting with growers to make things just for him and how he truly felt this was the way of the future, and I wrote about it in my review with a sort of puzzled joy-- has anyone ever heard anything so strange, how great that sounds, what a weird and cool idea-- and now I know dozens of restaurants that operate on that principle and can’t believe I ever thought it was weird.