Open Thread for Personal Stuff, Part Deux

Update on my friend… Hi all. I lurk lots but haven’t been posting much. My friend is “ok”. The surgery was really intense and it seemed like he was doing much better before (like a few days after surgery) than he is now. He’s at home but he can barely talk a sentence and can’t walk 5 steps without taking a break. It’s really scary because right after the operation we were chatting and laughing and joking about the weather. And now, the nurse who comes to his house to check on him daily basically said no visitors starting yesterday. It’s super scary. He doesnt want to tell me what she said, but he sounded pretty freaked out. I fly north again tomorrow for two weeks at work and I’m pretty much going crazy… 🙁 I don’t really have anyone to talk to. Sorry to feelings dump here. I don’t have many friends and my coworkers and acquaintances mostly treat my recent quietness, absent mindedness and general sadness as an inconvenience that they are forced to deal with. It’s a very lonely place right now.

In other news, I’ll reply to the stuff about outdoor dogs. It’s really common here (it that flat wheaty Canadian province) for farms to have “outdoor only” dogs. But farms typically also have other structures like barns and sheds with other animals so I guess it’s not as much outdoor dogs as just not in the human house dogs. And in winter it gets down to the -40’s here.

@eline & bad_dog, Jedi hugs, if you want them!

@bad_dog, Did the friend have bypass surgery? Obviously I don’t know what is going on with your friend, but I do know that when my mother got out of the hospital after hers the recovery took a long time. I’m thinking the best for your friend.

I’ve just had a meeting with a personal trainer I know who’s gonna make me and Husband an exercise- and muscle-building program we can pursue at home. I used to go to the gym on my own, and Husband used to not exercise at all, but that’s gonna change now!

I know I’ve mentioned this person before on Manboobz. Zie’s an old body-builder, and zie specializes in coaching trans people. Zie’s said that particularly trans men tend to over-estimate the impact of testosteron treatment… Firstly, if you’ve lived your entire life with very little testosteron, it might not be the case that adding testo as a grown-up gives you a completely masculine look. You might need to do some body-building too in order to really get the body you want. Plus, even without testo, body-building can do quite a lot. Zie’s FAAB herself, nowadays on testo, but long before zie ever began any hormone treatment lots of people would read zir as a man, simply because of zir body-builder muscles.

I really wanna grow bigger muscles myself… My natural body shape is really thin and feminine, but I don’t like that. It’s not that I think that body shape is ugly, it just doesn’t feel like me. I’ve grown somewhat more muscular and androgynous from going regularly to the gym for several years, but with some personal coaching I hope I’ll be able to grow bigger still. I wanna have big arms and big shoulders and take up some SPACE goddammit!

Hugs welcomed, thank you guys (regardless of gender). My sympathies to those struggling with cancer, as well. A few weeks ago I did tell my doctor (while she was sitting at the foot my bed, like a good doctor would with a patient stuck on her ward for months in one go and while I had the most godawful headaches from a spinal catheter leaking spinal fluids combined with meningitis and no painkiller takes away that pain due to how it is caused) I wish I had cancer instead of a chronic disease that makes my life as miserable as cancer but lets me live to a ripe old age with medical assistance, which naturally also cause additional misery, because at least with cancer the misery ends and the palliative care is so much better for cancer patients (in my doctor’s words, “because it doesn’t matter how much the painkillers mess up their bodies in the long term”). I don’t think that way under normal circumstances, of course. But perhaps this confession of momentary envy will lighten the day of a fellow patient (cancer or otherwise) with a morbid sense if humour like mine. Illnesses are not fun but can be a source of jokes. It’s how I make through the day at least!

Dvårg: That’s super cool! I find home exercise really makes me more likely to actually do it. Gyms are my rare treat during work travel.

eline: Hugs. i wish I had something better to say.

If any of you are going to the Texas Statehouse Tuesday for the vote, I’m out of town at a computer science thing, but I’ve ordered components and am wiring up a solar charge station/wifi gateway and will be sending it with a friend. David has my contact info, and I can get you in touch with whoever has the base station if you need a charge/want some company. Whatever protests happen, we can expect media blackouts, wi-fi cutoffs and electrical outlet shut downs. It’s important to be prepared.

It’s official, the Studio Killers album has eaten my brain.

To anybody going to the Texas Statehouse to protest the bill, best of luck! All I can do is send jedi hugs of good karma, but I’ve been told my good karma hugs are very potent. Hope it helps!

I had somewhat of an unnerving experience on the train last weekend, followed up by a really frustrating conversation about it with my friend.

A few rows back from me was a man and a woman, presumably a couple, and they were clearly in the middle of an argument. It was quiet, but you could tell from the tone and the occasional “fuck” that it was not a happy conversation.

Suddenly, the man stood up, and yelled “I’m fucking done with your shit, you fucking bitch” and similar things, and shoved his way past her to the aisle and stomped away. She almost fell out of her seat. She was saying things like “please babe, calm down”. At the next stop, she got up and followed after him.

I said to my friend, after she left, that I wished she hadn’t followed, that she deserved better. He responded, “Yeah, I don’t see the attraction. He looked, like, 20 years older than her.”

I was like “ummmm… I thought the more obvious problem was that he was being an asshole.”

And then my friend launched into this whole thing about how sometimes getting up and leaving an argument is the better choice, and that he probably made the right decision and is therefore probably not an asshole.

Guys, that dude did not “get up and leave the argument”. He made a huge scene on crowded public transportation and could only have been more violent in his exit if he had turned around and punched her first.

I explained this to my friend and he went on about how we should give people the benefit of the doubt and not pre-judge.

Why do I know so many people like this? Argh! It’s like every friend I make (and I’m trying really hard to meet new people since my relationship ended — and that guy I was with was so good about these things, he really understood where I was coming from argh I miss him) is the sort of “rational” “liberal” who seems to think that calling something racist is worse than racism, calling something sexist is worse than sexism, and thinking someone is an asshole for making a huge scary scene of intimidating his girlfriend is worse than, well, making a huge scary scene of intimidating one’s girlfriend. Because everything can be logic’ed away, there’s always some way of creating doubt, of making excuses.

“Oh no, the writers of the Game of Thrones show aren’t being sexist, there were REASONS for all these ladies to be naked all the time, and there are REASONS why there’s so much rape, and there are REASONS why the stories of all the major female characters have been neutered, and BLAH BLAH BLAH how dare you call it sexist, they didn’t MEAN to be sexist, I’m sure they aren’t cackling in their beards about how their going to ruin feminism with this TV show…”

With friends like these, I don’t think I want to have friends anymore.

Why are friends so hard?

@Deniseeliza: That sucks!

IDK why so many people go on about how interesting it is to have friends or a spouse who thinks completely different from you and contradicts you, like some fucking Dharma and Greg. I think the world is filled with people who think differently from me and will contradict me… I don’t need to search for that.

Hugs, donuts, gluten-free pastries, and babies here!

Help yourselves!

deniseeliza, that sucks, majorly. When you wrote “Because everything can be logic’ed away, there’s always some way of creating doubt, of making excuses” it struck me how gaslighting is a much broader thing than one person specifically targeting another in a relationship (or to coerce them for whatever reason).

I hope this isn’t completely inappropriate but LBT has advertised their fund raising projects here so I hope I’m ok.

Since losing my phone and needing to buy a new one I am selling Gallifreyan cards with whatever message you want on them, translated into Gallifreyan and hand inked in black or brown.

I have some pictures of the work I do here http://faeboy.deviantart.com/ and I’ll upload more later today
. Cards like the one there, or as proper folded gift cards and envelopes are 2 for $10 nzd, a four line poem is $12 and a poster is $30 ic you want the Robert Frost poem I’ve already translated, or $50 if you want me to do something completely new.