lunabee34

1. Yesterday, Emma and I left the house at 8:15 for her 9:15 appointment. We didn't get there until about 12:20 because a tractor trailer caught fire on the interstate, and they closed all lanes of traffic, and we were trapped for a few hours with no way to get off. Fortunately, the neuro allowed us to come on in; some docs would cancel your appointment and charge you for the privilege to boot.

2. I am even madder at that pediatric rheumatologist today. Protip for everyone: I just recently realized that Lapcorp now has a website; you can create a login even if you don't have an old bill or statement laying around (they ask you questions about cars you have owned to prove it's you; it's very Big Brother), and you can add your dependents, and then it populates all the labs you've ever had with Lapcorp. So I've got PDFs of labs going back to like 2011 which is really useful, and I've also got all the kids' labs. So I went and looked at the labs done three years ago on Emma. Contrary to Scully, I am not a medical doctor, so I get that maybe I am missing something, but that doc didn't even do an ANA test, didn't even test her for RA antibodies. She did like a pretty comprehensive metabolic and CBC and the general bloodwork everybody should be getting pretty regularly from their doc and she did do this sedimentation rate thing that is associated with RA, but that's it. WTF? She didn't even do the one thing she was so concerned about right? I mean, I kept at it. Next stop was the pediatric neuro. But I was really discouraged, and after the neuro, I pretty much did give up on pursuing anything else for awhile. I keep turning over in my mind how differently the last three years could have gone if this woman had done her damn job. Why is my neurologist running a more comprehensive autoimmune intake than someone who treats autoimmune disorders? If every single rheumatologist and endocrinologist made every new patient take the same battery of labs that he does, so many people's lives would be different. I just. *primal scream*

3. One of Fiona's teachers is a former student. Fortunately she assures me that she had a good experience in my class. LOL Nothing to make you feel old like watching your students grow up and enter the work force. I haven't had the experience of teaching the children of students yet; I'm sure that's coming though. (Or mom's experience of being nursed by a former student; she said they would get so so nervous when they realized their former professor was their patient, but she got Best Care. LOL My dad also gets Best Care at the Cancer Center and etc because so many nurses in the area are mom's former students.)

4.

The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I love this book so much. The prose is beautiful. I love the shifting perspectives, the way Le Guin interweaves the narratives of the colonizers and the colonized, the way that even the most sympathetic of the yumens cannot be free of the corruption of imperialism (and indeed is unaware of some facets of that corruption).

Such a poignant and heartrending ending. Excellent read.



View all my reviews

5. Maybe I'll finish my classes today, and maybe I won't. Maybe I will save it for a mad scramble next week. I'll go get a coin and John Sheppard it up.

I don't know why, but I haven't read very many books this semester, so it has been wonderful to start reading them again. What I have mostly been doing with my spare time since Christmas is reading FFA (not even commenting really, just reading the finished posts) instead of reading books or fic or writing it myself or posting something here. It's become a habit I want to break, I think. I successfully quit going to fandomsecrets several months ago, and it's been a relief to have that time back. Everyone in the comm was very nice to me; I had great interactions there, but I spent a great deal of time there and didn't get a lot of conversational return out of it. I'm starting to feel the same way about going to FFA. What I really want to be doing is talking to y'all and writing fic; I don't know why I keep wasting my time passively reading something rather than actively creating material myself.

So, to serve those interests, let's talk about books, baby, and also two movies.

I just finished:

( Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword )

( The Telling )

( Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children )

( Jurassic Park )

( Mad Max )

I have been away from LJ/DW for some time now, in a larger sense because of the seemingly ever-increasing demands of my job and my family and my desire to actually finish my dissertation, but in a smaller and more local sense because of traveling over the holidays and school starting once again and a fannish trajectory that has me reading far more often than producing or commenting on source material. Add in an anxiety disorder which has in the last weeks blossomed uncomfortably, and I have not been around very often. I sometimes feel as if I'm standing on the shoreline of fandom, right where water eats sand, sinking further and further into the sandy slurry over the last four years while fandom slowly, slowly recedes outwards. Pretty soon I'll be perched on dry dunes and watching the surf crash in down the way.

All this to say, what I miss most about fandom is talking to you guys. On a regular basis. About things. :) Josh is watching Oz with Dax, and I have a whole evening to spend wading back into the waves. So talk to me. I have talking points.

1. Let's say you fall through a whole in the sky into the Potterverse when Lily is pregnant but before the prophecy is made. Let's say you help defeat Voldemort before Harry can even be involved and while you are angsting over time travel and universe hopping and mostly not-angsting over becoming the filling in a Sirius/Remus sandwich, you are asked to teach a Muggle literature class at Hogwarts to the seventh years. Now remember, the objective of this class isn't merely to showcase excellence in Muggle literature. The texts you choose have to do something more--they must illuminate the Muggle human condition. They must offer some commentary you feel necessary for this class to understand about what it means to be a Muggle or perhaps about the Muggle perception of and fascination with magic. The texts don't have to be readily accessible to the wee wizards; part of what you'll be doing as a teacher is providing context for the Muggle history and situations they don't understand. This is a Muggle world literature class that spans all recorded history. What text(s) do you choose and why?

2. executrix sent me the most marvelous parcel of books this Christmas, truly her most inspired assortment yet (and believe me, this lady is no slouch in the book delivery dept). In this parcel was Very Far Away From Anywhere Else by Ursula K. LeGuin. Clocking in at about 80 pgs, this novella is a lovely slice of adolescence. I think it does a very good job of capturing the peculiarities of being a teenager--the way everything feels so very terribly important, the sense that you are disconnected from and different than those around you, that what you are going through is unique to you and you alone and the select few individuals you find along your journey, the notion of life as some kind of quest for an answer, a thing to be figured out, a puzzle. I love it. It's really more of a postcard of a book than anything, but UKlG's prose is as fine as ever. Also in the box: Aimee and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin, 1943 (which is about the love affair between a German woman and a Jewish woman who has gone underground in Berlin; has anyone read this book? I have interestingly mixed feelings about the author's epilogue) and Love in a Dark Time which tries to force intersections between homosexuality, Irishness, and Catholicism in a discussion of a set of artistic figures with varying degrees of success. The chapter on Wilde is the most successful, the chapter on Almodovar the least. He seems pasteded on, yo.

3. Adam and Joy gave us Never Let Me Go which OMG, y'all. Wow. I mean. I knew that Remains of the Day is supposed to be awesome and a pinnacle but I'd never read or seen the movie, and now I just want to devour everything this guy has ever written. Never Let Me Go is haunting and creepy and ambivalent and so overwhelming sad that it instantly jumps into favored status with Lorraine. I think it's been made into a movie. Anybody seen or watched?

4. Finally, seen any movies? Read any books? Heard any songs? Cooked anything awesome? Been thinking thinky thoughts about a thing? I wanna know.

Many apologies to thelastgoodname. *hangs head* She posted on Tehanu HERE about 1.83 million years ago; incidentally, I still have not read Tehanu. The public library here in Cochran apparently does not believe in sending books in a series in the order in which they were written. *sigh*

So, without having read Tehanu, here are my thoughts on The Other Wind.

( Pretty much unabashed and spoilerific love underneath )

thelastgoodname and I are once again reading kid lit--this time Ursula K. LeGuin's Wizard of Earthsea series.

( SPOILERS FOR A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA )

I've finished the next book, The Tombs of Atuan, and I have much to say about it, so the series does get better, thank goodness.