(no subject)

I spent some time yesterday deleting DW comments that I know I'm never going to answer. I apologize if I've left you hanging on a comment response, but I keep losing track and then not being sure if I've got the wherewithal to go back and answer. Right now, I'm mostly saying that no, I don't, but I might still respond to comments that have been sitting for months. Maybe.

I do wish that DW and AO3 gave me an actual date stamp for inbox comments (I can get a date stamp if I click through to the entry, but I shouldn't have to). I hate looking at something that says, 'five days ago' or '350 days ago' or 'seventeen weeks ago' and trying to figure out the date of the comment without pulling up a calendar and toggling so that I can count. I really shouldn't have to do that.

Is there a setting I can change in either place? It's seriously worse than useless to look at an AO3 comment that has a time stamp of '3094 days ago.' Who thought that was a good idea? It has to be perpetually recalculated which must use resources. I don't even care what time zone the comments are anchored to as long as it's consistent from comment to comment. It's not as if the date isn't recorded on the comment on the actual post, so why???

(no subject)

I don't think my body is liking the lower levels of caffeine in the mornings. I'm having trouble waking this morning and had some issues yesterday. I slept pretty well last night.

Then again, I'm pretty sure I didn't get enough iron yesterday or Friday. I need to eat about 4.5 oz of chicken liver to get what I would have gotten from my multivitamin. I had been eating at least 3 oz of chicken liver a day on top of the multivitamin. (The amount in the multivitamin is 18 mg. 3 oz of chicken liver averages something like 13 mg.) I don't want that much chicken liver.

We can only get safe liver sausage (no nitrates or nitrites) for me if we go to Whole Foods, and that's less iron rich (about 6 mg per 2 oz) than pure chicken liver is. It just has the advantage that I don't have to prepare it or scrub anything to clean up after cooking it. It also costs three times as much as 20 oz of raw chicken liver.

Fortified cereals have a lot of iron. If it looks like I'll need to keep going without the multivitamin for much longer than until Tuesday, I'll look into those, but I find most cereals difficult to justify. Either they've got a lot of fiber that will make me sick, or they're 90% refined sugar.

(no subject)

We ended up going over to a friend's place in the evening yesterday. The original plan had been to go to a metropark, play games in the afternoon/evening, and then watch fireworks, but the weather prediction was rain, so plans shifted.

I wouldn't have gone to the fireworks. Something that long and out of doors would be too much. For the indoor gathering, we were in a place that we could leave pretty easily if I got overwhelmed or headachy or whatever.

Scott and I got food at Zoup on the way. I got what I usually do, the chicken pot pie soup, it tasted different, though, and I started having reflux trouble right after I started my pre-levothyroxine fast. I don't know if they changed the seasoning and now include something I can't have, or if they cross-contaminated with something I couldn't have. The soup tasted as if it had traces of curry which seems like a weird idea for a soup that's supposed to be so basic and bland, and there were curry based soups in the set of offerings.

After I took my levothyroxine and had waited for it to absorb, I had four dates. That stopped the reflux. Apparently, what I need when this happens is more food. I knew that vanilla ice cream would work, but we were halfway through a movie and would have had to leave in order to get some. Water doesn't settle the problem. In general, it makes things worse once the reflux starts.

When we were at Kroger on Friday evening, I looked at something my gastroenterologist recommended-- Gaviscon tablets. She thought that they wouldn't have the same issues with regard to interfering with my meds that, say, Tums do. The liquid version isn't an option for me because things that texture trigger my gag reflex. Sadly, the tablets contain sugar alcohols. It doesn't take very much of those to make me quite sick. I wonder if the liquid version would be damaged by freezing it? If I could get it more solid (or a lot more liquid), I could swallow it more safely.

(no subject)

(I've been trying to write this for several days and haven't managed to express what I want/need to say. I also feel like I should attach a big 'My feelings, my reactions' disclaimer to the whole thing.)

I read a book of poetry the other night that made me wish for a less neutral term than 'cultural appropriation' because that sounds like it's trivial or harmless, maybe the equivalent of farting in a crowded elevator when it's not.

Or not necessarily.

Sometimes, it's the equivalent of attending an orchestra concert by kids who've been learning for a year. It's not pleasant, but maybe they'll improve and maybe they'll appreciate other people's music more. Other times... Well, 'cultural appropriation' sounds like no one gets hurt, like no one ever could get hurt.

Like anyone who says they have been or are must be exaggerating.

I understand wanting a neutral term because people in a position to punch down tend to do exactly that when they feel threatened or like someone's telling them they're wrong. Neutral language potentially decreases the violence (physical, emotional, economic, legal, etc.) of the response. That's generally desirable, especially if there's a risk of splashing bystanders, but it also leaves a lot of wiggle-room for 'good intentions' as excusing everything.

The neutral term can serve as a useful shorthand for people who share a vocabulary, but it also obscures a lot of ugly details and assumes that the repercussions and problems are the same for every culture experiencing appropriation and the same for each individual in a particular culture.

As a white woman from the US, I hesitate to label things as cultural appropriation because my entire context is from the appropriative side. This particular book had beautiful illustrations and some turns of phrase that I liked a lot, but I was also uncomfortable with it.

The author anchored the poems, in a preface, to the traditions of a particular Native American community where she'd been a guest many times over a period of decades. She says that she's white and that it's not possibly for white people to fully understand the things that Native Americans just know because of who/what they are. I was okay with the not understanding because people from different cultures never quite understand everything about each other, but the phrasing exoticized the people she claimed as friends.

It was creepy.

The illustrations were done by a well known artist who specialized in stylized portraits of Native Americans, edging into 'the spiritual' and what I'd call fantastical. As far as I can tell from Google, the guy was white (I found no definitive statements about it anywhere, and I really strongly suspect that, if he had been Native American, one of the sites I looked at would have said so. No one says he was white, either, but that's generally the unmarked state, so...).

The illustrations are beautiful, but they made me uncomfortable.

I don't feel right in delivering a judgment about the poems and illustrations being appropriative, but I certainly reacted to the book, emotionally, as if it was.