5 things make a post

[capri0mni]

1. Still Dithering in my head about creating an alternative writing challenge to NaNoWriMo. I mentioned on Tumblr that I'm thinking of starting a Dreamwidth community for it, and this week, that post is one of the ones that has gotten the most attention. So I hope that will bring fresh people here.
   
   
2. One of the new media I've been following, sideways-like, is the anime/manga One Piece, which I stumbled into though an English-Translation cover of one of the series's main diagetic songs. I still haven't watched a whole episode, or read any of the manga, proper. But I'm loving watching reviews and character critiques on YouTube. It's like auditing an English (and Japanese) literature class from half-way through the semester.
   
   
3. I recently checked the status of my poetry chapbook, The Monsters' Rhapsody: Disability, Culture, & Identity (2016), over on Lulu.com, and discovered that the default list price was too low to cover printing and shipping costs for international markets, so for the Canadian Dollar, Australian Dollar, British Pound, and Euro, I've set the price at 0.03 above the minimum; for the U.S., version, I've set it at 0.55 above the minimum. Watch this space for when it's available. (if I succeed in writing what's in my head during my NaNoWriMo alternative, which is prose fiction, instead of poetry, I may publish it through Lulu again).
   
   
4. I've been thinking about disability and parasocial relationships. (1) How Normate people in "mainstream society" have an automatic parasocial relationship with disabled people (visibly disabled people at least) because of how we are used as tropes in popular culture (especially around Halloween and Christmas), so when they see a disabled person in real life, they assume a familiarity that doesn't exist. (2) The relationship with a hired personal care aide is very intimate and very real, and actually social on one hand, but on the other, the person who is your aide can be fired by the parent agency -- or quit -- without any say from you. So is the relationship really what it seems to be?
   
   
5. October 1 was the 28th anniversary of me living in this house, and I still feel out of sync with the changing seasons in Virginia, vs. the seasons in northern New Jersey & southern New York. Maybe it's like a duckling imprinting on the first creature it sees upon hatching? That it's my first experiences of the seasons, as an infant, and young child that remains throughout my life? One thing I have noticed is that I'm craving sweet desserts more after dinner, than I did in the summer. Maybe that's a response to shorter days, and less light?

Comments

[spiralsheep]

4. When I was in hospital all the nurses had clearly been instructed to call patients the gender neutral "my lovely", which was as uplifting / convenient as intended but also very odd for someone used to being automatically judged negatively on my perceived "loveliness".

5. To be fair, the seasons have also changed in the last 28 years. And, yes, when I'm tired is the only time I crave sugar (whether the tiredness is from lack of calorific energy or another cause - hmm, I wonder if maybe our bodies are less inclined to use calories for energy and more inclined to store fat when day length wanes?).

[capri0mni]

4. When I was in rehab, 10-going-on-11 years ago, recovering from widespread skin infection in both legs, I started out with knee-jerk snarkiness, to get ahead of any preconceived notions that I was intellectually disabled, thanks to my C.P.. It was exhausting. And it also made me hyper-aware of the power dynamic between nurse and patient.

5. True. What I'm wondering is how much of it is also a result of cultural upbringing (Fall/Winter holidays are often centered around sweet baked goods and candies of all sorts), and how much of it is an evolutionary response to less daylight and the lower angle of the sun in the sky, and, as you suggest, preparation for a semi-hibernating state. After all, human-caused climate change is throwing a lot of things out of whack. But the angular tilt of the Earth's axis is not one of them (as far as I know).