Anxiety

Jun. 11th, 2025 10:12 pm
kimberly_a: Hawaii (Hawaii)
[personal profile] kimberly_a
It seems like my anxiety is not being fully controlled by the non-medication methods I've been using (meditation, breathing exercises, various relaxation techniques), so I'm going to try taking a small amount of Valium tomorrow. I really don't want to start taking it again, because it sedates me so much, but I go through bouts of overwhelming anxiety every single day (not all day long, but for significant portions of every single day), so it seems wise to start at least a small dose again. I'm hoping half a pill will be enough to calm me down without putting me to sleep. I really want to be alert and energetic for the water exercise classes!

Wednesday reading

Jun. 11th, 2025 11:47 pm
redbird: full bookshelves and table in a library (books)
[personal profile] redbird

Last week:

*Cattitude read Blue Moose, by Daniel Pinkwater, aloud to us, because it's one of his favorites and Adrian had never read it. I've reread the book several times, and was happy to hear it out loud.

*I read Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil, by Oliver Darkshire. Decidedly weird, funny fantasy. A lot of the humor is in the footnotes, which seem to be at least a quarter of the text. Also, the title does in fact describe the book. Isabella lives in a poor, out-of-the-way village, whose wizard keeps the local goblin market in check, until one day he doesn't. The goblins sell one thing, unnaturally tempting and dangerous fruit.

*Did not finish: Girls Against God, by Jenny Hval. I don't remember where I saw this recommended, and just couldn't get into it.

Currently reading:

*Installment Immortality, by Seanan McGuire, the latest book in her InCryptid series. I started it late last night, and only read a few pages before turning the light out.

*Twelve Trees, by Daniel Lewis, nonfiction about trees and climate change. I picked this up at the libraru, as a "book with a green caover" for the summer reading challenge.

The Lost and the Lurking

Jun. 11th, 2025 11:49 pm
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
[personal profile] marycatelli posting in [community profile] books
The Lost and the Lurking by Manly Wade Wellman

A Silver John novel.

Read more... )

Wow!

Jun. 11th, 2025 07:05 pm
freyjaw: (spiral galaxy)
[personal profile] freyjaw
I'm at 287.8 lb (130.54 kg)! The loss is now 52.2 lb (23.68 kg). It's not slowing down any time soon. Thank you, Dr. Shoaib! The Ozempic and Jardiance are working well. My A1c should be under 6.4 as well.

Bathing and everything else is easier. Even getting in the car isn't fraught like it was. I used to have panic attacks, but no longer.

More of my clothes fit now. I hope I can fit in my tie-dye tank dress after years of it sitting forlorn in the closet.

I'll bet I can wear some of my rings again. Nice!
kimberly_a: Hawaii (Hawaii)
[personal profile] kimberly_a
I don't really have a lot to write about today. Two more members of BTS were discharged from the military today, and it happened while I was in a Korean class meeting online, so suddenly people were in the text chat exclaiming "IT'S HAPPENED!" and "THEY'RE FREE!" in the middle of our class. lol. Only one member of the band is still waiting for discharge, which should happen within the next 2 weeks. And then there will be much rejoicing!

One of the band members, Kim Namjoon (김남준), has been very frank about how miserable he was while in the military. The others have been quieter about their experience.

I'm going to start saving my money toward concert tickets. I'm sure they'll all need some time to relax, recover, and readjust to civilian life, but I also know they all really enjoy performing and will want to tour as soon as they can. I've talked with my friend Ginny who lives on Oahu, and we're hoping to finally go to a concert together. She invited me to come with her to Las Vegas when they were performing there a couple years ago, but I didn't have enough money for the flights. This time I'm determined to have enough money for concert tickets and flights!

I've been continuing to feel stressed/anxious, but I'm trying really hard to manage it without Valium. I just hate feeling so sedated! It would be much easier if I was able to go for walks on my own without waiting for a ride! I find solitary walks very calming. But my knee isn't up to that quite yet. Yesterday my knee started hurting just from our shopping excursion in town. It's so frustrating!

But I'm hopeful that the water exercise class will help. I've dropped one of my weekly Korean classes and moved one of my weekly study groups to a different day, so that I'll have time to go to the Y without stressing myself out more.

Shannon and I are planning a trip to Honolulu to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary in August, and I'm hoping to be able to walk around more while we're there! Waikiki is pretty flat, but there are some hills in the surrounding areas. I'm hoping we'll get to go to some museums, some nice restaurants, maybe even swim in the ocean a bit together, since I believe the water is pretty safe in some places there. We might see a movie, too. A few days in the big city will be fun!

Recent reading

Jun. 11th, 2025 01:53 am
egret: egret in Harlem Meer (Default)
[personal profile] egret
A Spoonful of Murder by J. M. Hall - A delightful cozy mystery about a group of retired school teachers in England who meet for coffee once a week and solve murders. In this one they are told that their also retired former principal died from an unfortunate dementia-related medication mistake, but they have their doubts! This is the first one in the series and I look forward to more. 

The Quest for Annie Moore by Megan Smolenyak - Smolenyak is a celebrity in genealogy-world. Her latest is a deep dive into the story of the first immigrant to land at Ellis Island. Smolenyak looked into the records supporting the life story of Annie Moore and discovered gaps and misidentifications. This book is the story of her years of extensive research to correctly identify this impoverished Irish immigrant and trace her life. (Spoiler: Moore spent the rest of her life on the Lower East Side in NYC.) I read it for the Virtual Genealogy Society online book club and I really enjoyed it. I think anyone interested in immigrant genealogy would enjoy it. But it really is about the adventure and thrill of tracking down elusive records, especially since much of the research was done before so much was digitized. So maybe not for the general reader. But the book club discussion was very lively and threatened to run over the time! 

Dead Man's Grave by Neil Lancaster - First volume in a police procedural series set in Scotland. It started out really great with a blood-feud-based murder but sort of trailed off into gangster-related corruption in the police force. I don't know that I will continue with the series because I found the Scots accent very hard to follow in the audiobook. This is a personal failing -- I always find Scots accents hard to follow. I suppose I could read with my eyes but I don't care that much about police and their supposed nobility. 

Lies Bleeding by Ben Aaronovitch - This is the 6th Rivers of London book. I do really love these but might take a little break because spoiler )

Currently reading: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I want to like it but it's uphill. Maybe it will pick up. I wish I had not started reading her autiobiography and learned what a rightwing eugenicist she was because now I am biased against her. (Reading it as part of my Feminist Science Fiction open source anthology project.)

The Hanging Stones

Jun. 10th, 2025 08:53 pm
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
[personal profile] marycatelli posting in [community profile] books
The Hanging Stones by Manly Wade Wellman

A Silver John story, Works as a stand-alone.

Read more... )

I just want to sleeppppppp

Jun. 9th, 2025 08:39 pm
kimberly_a: Hawaii (Hawaii)
[personal profile] kimberly_a
I'm exhausted tonight and just want to go to bed early, but I prefer to wait up for Shannon. I might not be able to make it tonight, though. I might just have to admit defeat and go to bed early. It's only 9 and I feel like I'm about to fall face-first into the nearest soft surface. I'm not entirely sure why I'm so tired, but I do remember that I didn't sleep very well last night, so maybe that's why.

I finished re-reading Howl's Moving Castle this morning, so I've been continuing reading All the Beauty in the World (non-fiction) and am planning to start a magical realism novel called Folklorn tonight. I might be too tired to start a new book, though. The ending of Howl's Moving Castle was more rushed than I remembered, but the book was still very good. Much better than the movie, even though I loved the movie, too. I haven't watched any Hayao Miyazaki films in a long time ... maybe I should. I always love them. I'll bet many of them are available on various streaming services now. I remember when it was almost impossible to get your hands on most of his movies! Ah, how the media times have changed! The same used to be true of Jackie Chan's movies ... I wonder if those are all available now, too. Maybe with better subtitles than they used to have.

Two more BTS members were discharged from the military today, so that makes four of them who are finished with their mandatory military service. Only three left, and I believe two more are being discharged tomorrow. The last one has to serve a bit longer because he is doing some kind of civilian work, due to a bum shoulder that rendered him unfit for normal military duty. But by the end of this month, all seven will be free again! It's very exciting for BTS fans (armys). Two of the members, in particular—the most sensitive souls, perhaps—seem to have found military life very difficult. One was discharged today, and he literally skipped with joy. The other is being discharged tomorrow. It's unlikely that there will be new music right away, but a tour in 2026 seems very likely. It's going to be a bloodbath trying to get tickets, but I'll do my best!

I haven't been studying Korean much lately, and I've now dropped out of one of my clubs/classes because it would make things to stressful on Fridays if I'm going to go to the YMCA for the water exercise class. Getting my knee healthy is the most important thing to me, so some of my Korean studies will have to be set aside.

Hua Hsu on fandom and copyright

Jun. 10th, 2025 01:19 am
egret: egret in Harlem Meer (Default)
[personal profile] egret
In a recent New Yorker (paywalled link to article), Hua Hsu wrote a favorable review of the fanworky film Pavements, which is about the band Pavement. He liked it. But he also considered the big picture:

Just as a generation of young people now picture Timothee Chalamet's wispy mustache when they think of Dylan, it's likely that many fans understand N.W.A., Queen, Bob Marley, and Elvis Presley almost solely through their recent, varnished bio-pics. There are Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson movies due for release this year, as well as four separate Beatles ones slated for 2028. Perhaps pop-music history will soon exist only in the form of authorized, brand-managed hagiographies. Netflix recently announced that a nine-hour documentary about the complicated genius of Prince, directed by the Oscar-winner Ezra Edelman, would not be released, because of concerns raised by the artist's estate. Even in the lower-stakes world of publishing, a celebrity can mobilize her fan base against anything deemed unofficial. Adoring books about hip-hop musicians such as Mac Miller and De La Soul have been criticized by the artists or their estates -- basically for being journalistic endeavors. 

When careers are seen as intellectual property -- and when, with the decline of album sales, one's back catalogue becomes an even more valuable resource -- legacies will be guarded with a lawyerly vigilance. Messiness gets edited out in the name of a few key narrative turning points. The possibility that an artist today would ever offer the kind of access that Metallica gave for "Some Kind of Monster," a 2004 documentary that famously featured the band in therapy, seems as likely as the prospect of American politicians welcoming the scrutiny of reporters. 

In the absence of friction, contemporary bio-pics are just a series of boring victory laps. Intention and accidents, theft and boorish behavior: it all gets folded into the myth-serving lore. And it makes fools of us fans. The magic of pop music isn't just the star on the stage; it's how the crowd sways, and what fans do afterward with the feelings inspired by the show. All this made "Pavements" feel more exceptional. It seemed to exist adjacent to the band. A true fanatic's take, it aspires to be as heady and as weird as the band itself. Perry's aggressively clever story about Pavement is different from what mine would be, yet I recognized a fellow-traveler. In making something so intensely loving, he points out the banality of modern-day fandom, in which we're all expected to be brand ambassadors, reciting someone else's gospel. 

 
I think he's right about the branding and the IP monetization. I believe musicians should be paid for their work, and paid well. But I also remember making mixtapes, impossible now because of DRM, so we are reduced to sharing playlists and hoping the recipients have a compatible streaming service. Sometimes I feel sad about my long gone vinyl collection which included a significant number of one-off bootleg pressings of various artists. As our individual access to creative technology increases (entire films made on smartphones now), our fannish field of operation becomes more heavily policed and gatekept. Official merch is never as interesting as the fan productions. I wonder how many of our fandomI forget  debates are influenced by an internalized version of this policing and gatekeeping? Not to mention the external problem of legal liability.

I forget where I read an article about the cancelled Prince documentary but it sounded like it would have been amazing. I don't really have the heart to look for it.


source: Hsu, Hua. "You're Killing Me: Pavement Inspires a Strange, Ironic, Loving Bio-pic." New Yorker, 26 May 2025, 66-67.

A lovely weekend

Jun. 8th, 2025 09:17 pm
kimberly_a: Hawaii (Hawaii)
[personal profile] kimberly_a
We went over to Gary and Mary's house today like we do every Sunday, but this week Mary was gone on church business. It was too bad we didn't get to see her, but we hung out with Gary, chatted, played a game of Harmonies, and then went down to Poipu, where Shannon and Gary swam while I took a walk.

It was nice to get to walk somewhere else, since I almost always just walk on the golf course. I've walked a particular path at Poipu a number of times before, but not in the past year or so while I've been so sick. I was surprised (and pleased) to find that the familiar walk was easier now than it was when I did it a year+ ago. So I assume I've been subtly building muscle just with my walking around the house like a normal person (unlike when my foot was bad and I used the knee scooter even inside the house).

While on my walk in Poipu, I saw a man I recognized from the golf course. I've never said hello to him before on the golf course, because he always seemed to be scowling and didn't make eye contact. He also often walks his dog on the grass instead of on the path (which he was also doing today), and so saying hello would require more than just a casual nod. But today I waved to him and called hello and said, "I've seen you lots of times on the golf course in Kalaheo!" and we had a nice chat about his dog. The guy was actually really really friendly! He smiled a lot and seemed very interested in chatting more, but I needed to get back to the beach to meet Shannon and Gary. When I was leaving and we were saying goodbye, the man said, "It was nice talking to you. Thanks for saying hello!" and I was so happy. Maybe he only looks like he's scowling all the time! Maybe all this time he's been open to chatting but I was just misreading his body language. So next time I see him on the golf course I'll introduce myself, because I forgot to exchange names when I was in a rush to get back to the beach.

And then this evening we had a tasty dinner including delicious cauliflower Shannon made. I've been craving fruit and vegetables lately, so maybe I'm lacking some kind of nutrients or something. We're going shopping tomorrow, so I'll make sure to get some fresh produce.

What a nice weekend!

boring knee update

Jun. 8th, 2025 07:23 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
My right knee is healing, and stretching worked significantly better than yesterday. I even did a few carefully selected PT exercises this afternoon.

I can do more things standing up, and walking around the apartment is easier. However, I seem to have been leaning too much on the other leg, because my left knee started to hurt earlier. Not badly, but enough that I am putting the cane aside for the moment.

update Monday, 6/9: my knees feel mostly OK today. I am still being careful about walking a lot or standing too long. I just got the mail, figuring the two steps down to the mailboxes would be a useful check of how I'm doing. It was doable, but did hurt a little; I'm glad I decided not to go out. (The sidewalk is down another half dozen stairs, which are a bit more difficult than the ones inside, but the main thing is that this way I only had to climb back up two stairs.)

I heard from the GI doctor's office this morning, and have an appointment Friday at 10:30, which will be telemedicine. I hope my knees will be feeling a lot better by then, but if she had wanted to see me in person, I would have called a lyft and taken the quad cane with me just in case.

Salonon: the penultimate program

Jun. 8th, 2025 08:04 am
calimac: (Haydn)
[personal profile] calimac
The San Francisco Symphony program this week was a miscellaneous assortment of four pieces, each about 20 minutes long. Perhaps that's why, even though it was music director Esa-Pekka Salonen's next-to-last program, the hall was not as packed on Saturday as it was last week. (I don't usually go to SFS on Saturday. I did this week because I was doing something else on Friday. More on that later.) The audience cheered EPS just as lustily, though, despite his attempts to modestly back off at the end.

We had:
  1. Richard Strauss's two shortest - and, not coincidentally, best - tone poems, Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel. These were played with quicksilver energy and bumptious color, so much so that, had I not known better and were told that Don Juan actually portrayed the merry prankster Till, I might have believed it. (The reverse would be less plausible.)
  2. Sibelius's shortest and most cryptic symphony, the Seventh. This was played in the same manner: it was so brilliantly colorful and convincing moment-by-moment that it didn't matter where the piece was going, and indeed I wasn't sure if it was going anywhere. Each section seemed to come from a different work; there was even a moment straight out of Valse Triste.
  3. A premiere, Rewilding by local composer Gabriella Smith. This celebrates the titular ecosystem restoration projects by means of musical onomatopoeia. It both begins and ends with the percussion evoking the squeaking of Smith's bicycle as she rides to and from her project sites (which is what she spends her non-musical time doing). In between are attempts at animal sounds: lots of insect swarms from the strings and bird calls of various kinds from the woodwinds, while the brass play what come across more as Ingram Marshall-style foghorns.


EPS had a definite vision for this concert, and this is an orchestra that can do anything that a good conductor asks of it.

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