(no subject)

[the_rck]

I signed up for the Circling the Wagons friending meme on LJ, and that asks for an about me post. I know I’ve got two such posts as stickies on DW (First post, second, less informative post). The interests list on my DW profile is more complete than that on LJ because LJ caps interests at 150. Even so, there are a bunch of things I’m interested in that I simply haven’t thought to list or that, when I searched them, didn’t bring up anyone else who’d listed them. Since I was trying to keep my list within sensible bounds, I didn’t list anything unless there were at least a handful of other people who had already listed it.

At any rate, this may cover some of the same ground as those two posts, but it may also say things I didn’t think of when I wrote those. I don’t know.

I’m the_rck on DW and AO3. I’m therck on LJ and FFnet. I crosspost all entries between DW and LJ unless I’m doing a poll. I’m only paid on DW, so polls happen there.

I have a Tumblr, but I haven’t logged in in at least two years, and I don’t think I ever reblogged more than a dozen things. I’m very not visual, so Tumblr annoys me because so very much of it is pictures that I don’t really care about. I think I’m the_rck on Tumblr, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I don’t really think I’m likely to go back, so, while you can follow me there, it’s not likely to do anything useful.

I’m on GoodReads under my wallet name, and I’m happy to share that by PM. I don’t maintain a heavy separation between this pseudonym and my offline name. Mainly, I don’t want my in-laws to find my fic (mostly, they’d pray for me a lot and give me even more come to Jesus books. I’m content with my relationship with God, thank you). At any rate, I don’t post many reviews on GoodReads, but I end up rating a lot of things I read decades ago, so that occasionally gets a little spammy. Well, not so often now, I guess. I haven’t really figured out the social side of GoodReads yet.

I’m still on AIM as estetnaoko (a name that I established in 2003 for an online rp that I ended up dropping out of. I don’t change names very often because it’s a PITA). I chat on Google, too, but I do it under my wallet name (again, PM me) because my pseudonymous Gmail tends to spontaneously block people and not allow me to unblock them. As far as I can tell, it’s Google trying to make me sign up for Google+ on that account and give them a real name to attach to the account. (Or am I being cynical?)

I will turn 49 in May. I’m female, cis, het, white, and disabled. I’ve been married for 22.5 years (anniversary in June). I have one child, a daughter who will turn 13 in May. I live in the US, in Ann Arbor, Michigan (if you don’t know US states, Michigan is the one that looks like a mitten. Ann Arbor is in the southeastern bit).

I had a small cancerous lump removed from my left breast last August, and I went through radiation therapy in October and November. I now have lymphedema in that breast, and they’re telling me I’ll have to deal with that for, probably, at least another year to year and a half. Last July, my younger sister had a double mastectomy. We’re looking into environmental and genetic factors (there’s zero family history, going back to at least our great-grandparents’ generation).

I’m trying to get back into writing and into thinking about things other than what I have to do to keep going. It’s more challenging than I expected because I tire out pretty fast

My disability is based on a laundry list of problems, but the primary factor is anxiety, both agoraphobia and generalized anxiety. There are a lot of things I can’t do easily or at all, and my anxiety tends to come out more as physical pain than in other ways. I haven’t been able to work in fifteen or sixteen years. I can’t walk very far all at once, maybe quarter of a mile at a time, four to five blocks. I can do a bit more if I plan for it, but it’s generally not worth the price I pay for it. I also have fibromyalgia, GERD, migraines (and other headaches), asthma, and allergies.

I have a lot of trouble saying that I love a particular book/show/musician/whatever. Somewhere, early on, I got the idea that I shouldn’t be enthusiastic about anything because other people would be bored and/or would judge me harshly. (I think this comes largely from my parents, but it might also be that I was a reader in a small community where most kids didn’t read.) I’m still fighting with that, and at this point, I kind of suspect I’m not going to overcome it entirely.

I mostly write fic for Weiss Kreuz (an oldish anime/manga series about some young, attractive guys who are florists by day and assassins by night. It’s, um, not all that good, but for some reason, I keep having fic ideas) and C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. At least, those are the only fandoms in which I’ve ever finished a story that wasn’t for an exchange or challenge.

There are a lot of canons that I quite like that I will probably never write fic for because they’re larger than I can keep in my head all at once and aren’t easy to spot check. I also don’t tend to fall for a canon and then start writing it. I consume the canon, get an idea (or not), write it (or not), and don’t have any other ideas unless someone prompts me.

I like writing things that I’d never have thought to try without prompting, but I’m slow enough that most prompts I get go unfilled. I’m also prone to the sort of fic ideas that are obviously going to take hundreds of thousands of words to complete. My stories split between things that I wouldn’t be ashamed to show to my grandmother and things that are pretty dark and need warnings of all sorts. I don’t post fic here, and when I link, I include whatever warnings occur to me.

I have a low tolerance for gore and violence in TV and movies, so there are a bunch of things that sound fascinating that I’ll never, ever dare try. (Battlestar Galactica, the one or two episodes I watched, did very bad things to me.) I also can’t handle a lot of sitcoms because they rely on laughing at people and on people being terrible to each other. For about the last ten years, I’ve been having trouble reading the sort of books I used to devour. I simply get too anxious to finish. Right now, I’m skewing toward low violence graphic novels, middle grade fantasy and SF, and non-fiction. I keep trying romances and cozy mysteries in hopes that the formula will help, but I mostly stumble over things that annoy me when I try.

I probably don’t need to say this, but— When I say that I don’t enjoy something or that it’s not for me, that is not me saying that it’s terrible or that other people shouldn’t love it (and, even if I do say that it’s terrible, I’m not saying people shouldn’t love it. Given Weiss Kreuz, that would be thoroughly hypocritical).

I actively seek out spoilers, particularly about things I don’t expect that I’ll watch or read. If I am going to read/watch, spoilers can help decrease my anxiety enough to make doing so possible. I try to be very careful about not passing spoilers on unless asked, but there are things that I assume everyone knows.

I try to post something every day. That’s more for me than because I think I’m so utterly fascinating. I’ve found that I like being able to go back and see what was going on at a particular point in time. I post on DW and use the crossposter to get to LJ. That gives a little message that says to comment only on DW. I don’t actually care where people comment or if they do. I just haven’t figured out how to edit the silly thing to say as much.

I try to answer most comments when I’m feeling well, but I won’t necessarily answer the brief, supportive type stuff. I’m grateful to get it, but it’s generally when I’m feeling rotten and having a hard time otherwise, so I give my energy to other things. If you leave a 'I hope you feel better!' or something similar, I will definitely be glad to get it. I just may not respond right away or at all.

I don’t use my writing filter any more. Trying to separate out the writing stuff got to be more than I wanted to deal with. I don’t lock much of anything else. I do have a separate journal on DW that I use to back up story fragments so that I don’t lose them in case of a local disaster (we don’t have offsite backups for our laptops. I think this is unwise, but the budget won’t currently stretch). Some of those fragments are more than twenty years old. Many of them are terrible. Most of them will never be finished unless I find someone who’s really enthusiastic about them and willing to prod me to go on. If you have a great fascination with other people’s writing debris, I’m willing to let people look. 95% of what’s there is access locked, so you’d have to tell me you wanted to see, and I can’t imagine why you would.

I read LJ and DW pretty much constantly, refreshing the screens several times a day. Reading other people’s entries is most of my social contact, but I don’t comment in proportion to my reading. I have to feel like I have something to say that’s worth hearing, and anxiety sometimes means that I self-censor. I will definitely be reading, however, as long as our internet is solid.

Feel free to ask me questions. I may not always answer, but I probably will.

My tagging is sporadic. I’m trying to be thorough about it now, but I didn’t start until a few years ago, and I’ve never gone back to tag old entries. My guess is that most of my tags aren’t likely to be of much interest to other people and that the ones that might be are probably pretty obvious.

I’ve been on LJ since 2002 (DW since 2009) and never transferred my old entries to DW. There are some swathes of time when I didn’t post much because dealing with what my daughter needed took everything I had. I was really fascinated, looking back, to see the sudden huge gaps when she started pre-school and I had to take her out, by bus, two or three times a week and stay out (I did mention the agoraphobia, right?) while she was there for 2.5 hours at a go. It was a co-op, so I had to help out once every two to three weeks, too. I really wish I’d had Ativan then.

Comments

[lunabee34]

This was really interesting. I'm glad to know more about you.

[eurydice72.livejournal.com]

Ann Arbor! I have so much love for that city. I grew up in Mt. Pleasant, but went to EMU, and as soon as I could, I moved out of Ypsi to get over to A2. I don't miss Michigan as a whole much, but I do miss Ann Arbor terribly.

It's good to meet you!

[the_rck]

Good to meet you, too!

I've lived most of my life in Ann Arbor. I was elsewhere in Michigan for middle school and high school, but I came back for college and stayed. I worked for U of M for about eleven years. At this point, we stay because the schools are good and because there's a decent (for Michigan) bus system. I can't drive, so a lot of places we might go, I'd be trapped at home.

I think we're here to stay.

[jerusha]

And I thought I was the only one who sought out spoilers to combat anxiety...

[the_rck]

Definitely not the only one.

[ramenkuri.livejournal.com]

I do it too! Particularly for anything remotely violent

[the_rck]

Cordelia used to be confused when she watched me read because I often work from both ends toward the middle of a book. I think she understands it better now because she says she often looks at the end of a book before she starts it.

I'm sure that my approach to reading books is why mysteries so seldom appeal to me.

[desdemonaspace]

Wow. I had small tumor removed from MY left breast last March, almost a year ago, and radiation too. No chemo, no lymphedema, thank God.

Cancer is something, isn't it? My entire outlook on life has changed. Can't be arsed to do anything that stresses me, cut out toxic relatives liek whoa.

I like your username. My brain translates it into The Real Cool Kid.

[the_rck]

The lymphedema is, fortunately, 95% in my breast itself, so it's not affecting my ability to move. It just hurts and needs to be massaged out several times a day. It's very strange being in PT for a body part I can't move.

I'm very glad that I'm not getting bad side effects from the tamoxifen the way some people seem to. Mainly, I just need to have our ceiling fan running if it gets anywhere over 68F in our bedroom at night. I'm kind of not looking forward to how summer will be when we keep things 78-80F at night.

I think... For me, cancer was just one more bit of nastiness that my body was pulling on me. My sister has taken it very hard because she's always been physically healthy. Now she's having physical problems that she can't just will herself to get past.

A lot of people thought that I seemed very calm, but my anxiety spiked pretty badly. It's just that all of it came out as headaches and joint aches and poor sleep as opposed to panic.

I'm very lucky. It's ten minutes drive to where I get treatment, $9 (plus tip) each way for a cab. Most of the time, I had local friends who were able to drive me back and forth to radiation, but having the option of a cab was really reassuring. The bus would have been free, but it would have required a good bit of walking, and I really wasn't up to it.

As to the user name, some friends came up with it in college, in the 1980s, in response to a role playing character I ran. At first, they tried to say it was 'The Really Cool Kid,' but they eventually admitted that it was 'The Red Cross Knight' from The Faerie Queen. I haven't read that, but my impression is that he's an over the top sort who never thinks that he might lose (the character I was playing didn't so much think that she wouldn't lose as that, if she did lose, she'd be dead, so she might as well talk like she was going to win).

I hate coming up with handles, so I've stuck with this one for a very long time.

[desdemonaspace]

I'm not taking tamoxifen; I'm taking exemestane, which brought back hot flashes and makes me feel all the time as though I'm starting a head cold. Also urinary frequency like mad, and I leaned that way to begin with. I'd like to tell the oncologist I want off it, but the thought of a recurrence makes my blood run cold.

Before this friending meme took off, I friended someone I'm pretty sure is dead. I was searching "breast cancer" in LJ, and came up with "I_wont_give_up," I think her name is. Her last post made me thing she's no longer with us, and I have to remember what she went through, when I want to tell my doc I want off exemestane.

If we lived closer, I'd give you rides to the doc.

[the_rck]

I don't know exemestane. I'm not yet menopausal, so my oncologist said it's tamoxifen or nothing. If I reach menopause during the next five years, he'll switch me to something else, but he didn't talk to me about what those options would be because I'm young enough that I probably won't get there in the next five years.

I'm very fortunate-- Even without the tamoxifen, the oncologist thinks a chance of the same cancer coming back is less than 10%. He just thinks that, as long as I can tolerate it, decreasing that chance is worthwhile. Me, well... My sister had at least three completely separate cancers in her left breast when they removed it. Not just physically separate but actually distinctly different types. That leaves me more worried about a completely new tumor than about a recurrence of the old one.

The thing is that the types of problems my sister and I got don't usually turn up in women in their 40s. They're more usual for women in their 70s. I worry for my daughter and for our half-sister who's 25 now. There's absolutely no prior family history, going back to at least our great-grandparents' generation

[desdemonaspace]

That is troubling. My primary care doc told me, "You could not have breast cancer at a better time in history," and I believe her. When I blew her off, telling her I had no family history, she told me that 80% of women with breast cancer don't have family history. Although in my family, there's cancer. Just not breast cancer.

[the_rck]

It's definitely a good time. The treatment protocols have changed in the last couple of years. My sister did a ton of research because it helped her anxiety (as far as I can tell, she was pretty good at picking reputable sources and at triple checking what she found). Also, we have a sister-in-law who's a vascular surgeon at a large hospital, and she checked both of our treatment plans with coworkers who know the field.

I count myself as very fortunate to be in Ann Arbor because there's a dedicated cancer center at the University of Michigan Hospital. People travel for hours to get there for appointments. I only had to go ten minutes.

[desdemonaspace]

The Humphrey Cancer Center is where I go. I'd drive four miles from work, get irradiated, and make it back to work over my lunch hour.

I don't know about you, but I HATED radiation. Don't know why, but it completely squicked me. Plus, the hole it burned in my armpit lasted for WEEKS.

Sorry. I just had to say that!

[the_rck]

I finished radiation the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and I missed family Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings due to not being able to tolerate shirts for the length of time that would have been required. My burns had 90% healed by Christmas, but my husband bought a new laundry detergent two weeks before, and my breast reacted to it badly. I didn't figure out the problem fast enough.

My main worry with radiation was that they initially told me that my heart was close enough to my chest wall that I'd have to breathe a particular way to keep it safe. When, after ten minutes, I couldn't master that, they just kind of chucked it and didn't bother with it but also never explained what-- if anything-- they were doing instead.

I'm capable of holding my breath for a minute pretty easily, but I couldn't master what they wanted me to do which involved keeping the beginnings of inhalation and the endings of exhalation at specific points on a grid. When I started inhaling on cue and stopped when I was told to, the exhalation always went way past where it was supposed to (and I'm not clear as to whether these were time parameters or volume parameters. I had the impression they were volume, but it wouldn't make sense that I'd consistently exhale more than I inhaled, so time probably makes more sense). I think that the idea was to get me to hold my breath at a point when my lungs were full. They never actually explained the measured exhalation to me.

I ended up doing my best to hold my breath during the seconds of treatment. In some of the rooms, I could see the warning lights on the walls that announced when things were about to begin and when they were in progress. In at least one other room, the about to begin light made a noticeable noise.

[desdemonaspace]

That's just not right - they should have angled it so you wouldn't have to hold your breath! My radiation oncologist told me that the area being irradiated and they angle at which they were going to come in, meant that they'd miss my heart and most of my ribs. Just a little of the ribs, he said.

Man, cancer sucks.

Sending you good thoughts and healing vibes.

[teragramm.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing so much of yourself with us.

[the_rck]

Once I start babbling, I'm afraid it's hard to stop.

[1-rhiannon-1.livejournal.com]

Hi there! It's nice to meet you :D

[the_rck]

Nice to meet you, too!

[snogged.livejournal.com]

I love Goodreads. It's one of my favorite sites.

I have a soft spot for Ann Arbor, MI because that's where Team Starkid got started and I pretty much love that geeky theater group. I've seen them perform three times when they were in Chicago.

My friend Rachel and I were huge into Weiss Kreuz in high school. She still has an icon of the boys in their flower shop.

Nice to meet you!

[the_rck]

For some reason, Weiss Kreuz is the fandom I can't let go of. I still have new story ideas for it even now that nobody much is writing or reading it. At this point, I suspect I always will. Every now and then, indelicateink will kick off a challenge for Weiss and Saiyuki fics and art.

I hadn't previously heard of Team Starkid; they look interesting! I used to enjoy going to plays, but I haven't tried it in a very long time. I'm not sure how I'd deal with the crowds now, but my daughter's old enough that she might actually be interested.

I like GoodReads because it will suggest things to me that I wouldn't have heard of otherwise. I don't finish most of the things the site recommends to me, but I like trying new things.

[snogged.livejournal.com]

You can watch a lot of their shows on Youtube. They do a lot of parody work. A Very Potter Musical is one of my favorites.

[the_rck]

I'll take a look! Thanks! (It will probably wait until I'm alone in the house on Monday, though.)

[kseenaa.livejournal.com]

Glad to follow you! :-) Sounds like you have a fairly busy life after all. :-) And I do have more people on my f-list that suffers from agarophobia. Quite common, apparently.

[the_rck]

I think that people with agoraphobia and/or other restrictions on leaving home are more likely to put a lot of time and energy into online communities and interactions. Before the internet, someone like me would have had TV and books (if I could get out to get them) and not much else.

[kseenaa.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, that is very true. :-)

[thenewbuzwuzz.livejournal.com]

Hullo. :)
Ooh, "Chronicles of Narnia" fic might be interesting. I used to really like the books a while ago (though I didn't read all of them), but I've only ever read one fic in that fandom.
I appreciate how carefully you're setting up expectations. It's 100% okay with me if you don't comment/reply to everything.
So many people here are trying to start or restart writing more, it's inspiring.
And that anime sounds kind of fabulous. :D I don't really watch anime and I'm not about to start, but what a premise.

[the_rck]

There's a fair sized section of Narnia fic on AO3. I particularly recommend (if you're willing to read longfic), rthstewart's Stone Gryphon series. The third part is still a WIP, but the first two parts each stand pretty well on their own. I particularly love the second part which has a lot about Susan in the US during Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Looking at my AO3 bookmarks...

edonohana wrote a crossover of Narnia and Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations that is excellent: No Reservations: Narnia. I think it was a Yuletide story.

Catch by Transposable_Element is a shortish study of Marshwiggle courtship customs.

There's also a summer fic exchange, the Narnia Fic Exchange (narniaexchange with an AO3 collection for the last year or two), that routinely produces good stories.

FFnet has a lot of Narnia stories, too, but the fans there skew kind of heavily Evangelical Christian and come down hard on anything they don't think is Christian enough. I've crossposted my Narnia fics there, but I thought twice about it. Mine are pretty thoroughly innocuous, though.

I got into Weiss Kreuz through the fanfic. I'd seen three or four episodes on a VHS fansub sampler, and I had been stuck at home for weeks with nothing to do, so I tried some of the fic. There's more canon now, and the fic is harder to find because a lot of it was on individual author websites, so I'm not so sure that doing that would work now. The fanfic spends a lot of time on the villain group of attractive male psychics to the point of being out of proportion to how much screen time they get, and the female characters (there are a handful) don't tend to get much fic.

[thenewbuzwuzz.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recs!

[debris4spike]

I realised reading the latest posts that somehow I had missed reading this intro!

Hi!

I live in England, but know where Ann Arbor is!! I was a Maid of Honour in 1989, in Northville. The dresses came from Ann Arbor.

My sis-in-law had a mastectomy a couple of years ago, but fortunately didn't need any further treatment. My mum had been diagnosed with breast cancer, but due to her age/health, she was having pills ... however they were working.

I read some of the Narnia stories as a kid, but haven't refreshed my memory.

Like you I'm not a great TV fan ... my real hate are Soap Operas, as I find myself getting very stresses. I tend to watch DIY programmes ... or films from DVDs

[the_rck]

I've been watching TV off and on for about thirty five years now, so there have been some shows that really appealed to me. Some of them might not appeal to me so much now-- My ability to handle violence has gone down, and so has my ability to empathize with teenage characters (I think that being a mother changed my perspective considerably).

In terms of currently airing TV, the shows I actually look forward to are The Librarians and Antiques Roadshow.

If I recall correctly, my grandparents lived in Northville in the late 1970s. I was about eight when they moved there, so I might be misremembering.

I had a fairly long gap between my childhood reading of Narnia and coming back to it as a fic fandom. There are some very good writers in the fandom, and I've managed to avoid the less pleasant corners of it.