scotm | Reading

My dreams (well that one I woke up from this morning, anyway) have already incorporated my post-top-surgery shaped body. So that feels nice (not that I put a lot of stock in my dreams; my brain spits up a lot of weird images and situations but still), this felt good to realize when I woke up).

This afternoon, I threw out the rest of my binders (something I couldn't bring myself to do before we left because top surgery still didn't feel real yet). "The rest of" because the two I took to Germany got used the first few days I was there and got left in the garbage bin there too! A lot of times, old binders can be given away at this point...but not mine. They were almost all secondhand when I got them and have been worn to destruction; I was thinking all year that I should replace them. But I didn't in the hope that they'd soon be surplus to requirements.

Also my internet friend elilla, who we met up with in Düsseldorf, said this afternoon the kind of thing that made me want to be friends with her in the first place:

these figurines are just a total source of fascination to me. like, 40000 years. I have some education as a classist and spent a fair amount of time learning about Nara and Heian Japan (a lot) and other ancient civilisations (a little), and a big part of the appeal is how different the ways of thinking were, and this is like, a blip in time compared to the Paleolithic. I spent a very large amount of time learning what we can reconstruct from Old Japanese or Old Tupi or Spoken Latin and even something as trivial as Old English (a mere 500 years ago) is already unrecognisable, the languages of the Paleolithic would have absolutely nothing in common with their descendents at this point. they might as well be aliens. except they were not, they were humans, and there's certain cultural universals that we can probably expect of Old Europe, too, except we do not and cannot know which of our cultural universals are actually universal across such a long period of time.

but most of all the values we can recover from the glimpses of culture that survive in archaeologic materials; the deliberate house burnings, for example, the distributed societies with so little war or wealth inequality, the distributed gardening-farming of the egalitarian urbes, the zoomorphic symbology, and all those goddess figurines. I mean we can't even know if they're goddess figurines, for all we know they could be porn, or portraits, or puppets for theatre or anything. (though "goddess" is still a fair bet, given common trends in cultures we do know more about.) but the impressive thing of these cultural traits is how they span dozens and dozens of thousands of years all over Eurasia, and like, how was this so stable before the Indo-Europeans took over and ruined everything for the entire world. the IE expansion was like an apocalypse, in relative time spans. (the first of many; the first colonisation.)

Then she said

wait is that why my breasts are aching :o I have activated the blessing of the ancient goddess by reflexively worshipping her?? I mean it's the eve of samhain so the veil is thin et cetera. ancient and bountiful goddess of the ancestors of the forgotten names, please give me a couple cm from this, I'm this close to reaching E cups 🙏

And I was thinking E, you say?? So...

Wait: for my reply to make sense, I have to explain one of the many things that I didn't have time to document while we were away. She was able to visit during my convalescence as she had to travel to the area on Sunday anyway (she's Brazilian so she got to vote in that election, but had to go to Köln to do so). And when she got to our place D had to go down all the stairs to let her in; I was sitting on the sofa when they came back up and she did that kinda lean-over-a-sitting-person hug, but then she asked if I could stand up for a proper hug, which I thought was really sweet so I did, and then she explained it was because she wanted (as she later put it when posting a selfie of us) "to be the very first pair of boobs to squish against that newly built manly chest." This made me giggle and is also one of the reasons I'm glad we're friends.

So. to her fervent wish to get the E cups she's apparently approaching (she's only a handful of years on HRT and she's doing various other things that are supposed to make boobs bigger too), I replied: "I had E cups until nine days ago, so maybe rubbing your chest against mine just afterwards helps transfer them to you."

She said "ooh yeah there was that! we should create a superstition about that. trans women should squeeze their boobs against the chests of trans men after top surgery (either), it's good luck. like catching the bride's bouquet"

Catching the bride's bouquet! I love this so much.

So there you go: let's make it a superstition, tell all your friends.

spiralsheep

- Friday Five, et vous?

01. Name all the orange items in the room you are in.

Cuddly hippo finger-puppet, maps, train ticket, Lego unpicker (or whatever the proper name is), various bits of brick-built Penguin and Parasaurolophus, the paperback of Mission to Kala by Mongo Beti, and a cushion with a goldfish as part of the print (it's a bizarre goldfish / bird / map / flower print but I love it).

02. What's your favorite fall treat? A soft landing.

03. What's your favorite Halloween candy? John.

04. What's your favorite scary/horror movie? Lol, Tremors, obv.

05. What are you doing on October 31? Politics, alas.

- Quote from the travel book I'm reading, "ugh": Entombed nearby are the remains of Elihu Yale - misspelled Eliugh - of university fame. American-born, he could trace his ancestry to Plas Grono, a country house near Wrexham. His name is celebrated in the local Wetherspoons. The ersatz pub chain follows the same formula wherever it lands: buy a building that would impress Pevsner; rename it after a local legend; serve cheap ale at all hours and offer catering along pub-grub lines. No music. No familiar bar staff. No meetings with strangers. Yale was a governor-president of the British East India Company in Madras (modern day Chennai), where he amassed a vast private fortune through dubiously acquired diamonds, while trading in slaves. Celebrate that, Wetherspoons!

- Relatedly, in a way.... How cruel is it to name your child Chris Moss? Answers on a postcard, please, preferably a nice christmassy card.

cosmolinguist

We're back home!

The flight was about 40 minutes late and the train we tried to get home from the airport suddenly wasn't stopping at the stop we needed so we had to wait another half an hour for the next one. So we didn't get home umtil like 9:30, but that was just right to have a snack and a chat with V and then go to bed.

I'd put clean sheets on my bed before we left and I'm so happy to be between tbem tonight.

cosmolinguist

I subscribe to Defector mostly to read about baseball (both as an abstract concept and MLB in particular, good writing on bad current events and even how humanities is good despite the STEM-supremacy of the moment.

So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I found a link about something very near the part of Germany I was about to visit for Oktoberchest. And it was...a weird form of public transport? That sounded extremely relevant to my beloved, who loves nothing more than infrastructure.

So today, with nothing better to do on our last full day here, we went to Wuppertal to meet the Schwebebahn!

We saw it from the normal train that we took to Wuppertal, and D once again made the Good Dog Noise like he did about the Minneapolis skyway or the Falkirk Wheel.

We've definitely found a worthy third for a trinity of charismatic megainfrastructure (fitting perhaps that one of the books he's brought on holiday with him is Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works, which I read to see if I should buy it for him, and from which I learned the phrase "charismatic megainfrastructure").

"Schwebebahn" means suspended railway, or literally "floating train," which is an apt way to describe a dangling monorail. It was built along and above the river Wupper in 1901, connecting several towns that would later merge to form the city called Wuppertal ("Wupper valley").

Just as we got to one end of the Schwebebahn, having started in the middle and gone the other way first, just as D had assured me he'd schwebed enough and we should go back to Düsseldorf at this handy train station we're now next to... someone who'd been sitting next to us on the train told us about the [Schwebodrom[(https:// schwebebahn.de/en/schwebodrom), using every mote of her English to convince us that we should go there.

Naturally, the Schwebodrom -- a museum but it's like, "Schwebe drome" (leading me to realize that I'd never considered "drome" to be a productive affix; like, what does it mean?) -- is way back the other end of the line, the way we just came.

But of course we went there.

And it was amazing. D was so delighted at everything that by the time we were done he was like a toddler at the end of a birthday party: happy but in a daze and he needed a nap on the train back to Düsseldorf.

There's so much more I want to say, and D told me that he took two million pictures on our Schwebebahn journeys, and I haven't even told you about the stollen yet... but I've only just had a shower and changed my dressings (by myself, yay! because D's IBS is flaring up again, boo!) and I still have to pack and it's already well past my bedtime, especially considering that I had so little sleep last night... so the details will have to wait for now.

spiralsheep

- Super Valid Designs has shared a youtube video on his attempts to build the world's most epic humane mouse trap: 26 mins of home made cable car action. :D

- AI or human error? BBC News on storm damage: "Elsewhere, a car fell onto a tree overnight on Moor Street, Coventry." [/i think not] :D

- Books: 76. Everything Will Swallow You, by Tom Cox, 2025, novel, realism / magical realism / metafiction, 4/5

I love Tom Cox's writing style but it must be said that he's not for those faint-hearted readers who baulk at sentences with multiple subclauses, and endless digressions into the further reaches of his characters' minds (or trigressions or even trigressions cubed). This novel will also cause hives in readers who can't relate to multiple point-of-view characters including several humans, one of whom can levitate, and an embodied supernatural being, and an anthropomorphised crow (although, you will be relieved to hear, no omniscient third persons hovering over the landscape). Cox's fiction is its own genre but for this one let's go with magical realist folk-metafiction, which manages the neat trick of being both innocently earnest and occasionally knowingly humorous. If I was pushed for an accurate description of the contents of this book then I'd probably claim it's the bastard love-child of the cultural circumstances of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity with the discursive rhetorical style of the fifth chapter of Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, but that's unhelpful as I'm sure most of you will have avoided reading Hornby. ;-) I suspect what Cox was aiming for was more an unholy mash-up of the Powys brothers without the atavistic bullshit + Sylvia Townsend Warner in Lolly Willowes mode if she'd been a working class bloke with fewer editorial filters.

Lastly, I note that one of the trivia factoids related in this book is shockingly false (the etymological one about kidney beans)!!1!!

pg3: The impulse that made Eric feel the need to own nineteen Linda Ronstadt albums, including several from after the mid-seventies, when she began to go off the boil, was the same one which, half an hour before, had made him insist on following a footpath purely because it was one of the dwindling number in the Vale that he and Carl had not previously ticked off their list. It certainly could not be described as a _bad_ footpath. Whether it was a _necessary_ footpath, however, was highly debatable. And now here they were, a mile on from its source, ducking away from a potential Border Collie Situation through a hole in the hedge made by insurrectionary deer, onto an unmarked path beneath the steep brim of an Iron Age hill fort, in the direction of who knew what.

( Three more quotes )

cosmolinguist

We've had a gentle day. I slept okay last night -- catching the beginning of Game 3 but then only waking up to hear an announcer say the score was ten to nothing Brewers???, thinking I was dreaming it and waking up properly just in time to listen to the ending. (Later I'd get to read sentences like "When I came out of the shower, the Brewers had scored eight two-out runs, extending their lead to 10-0.")

I still had a biiiig nap this afternoon, and I've been tired all day. This is not surprising, or even unwelcome, exactly.

We didn't have to go out: we made dinner here (in stages: I chopped the onions and mushrooms, D cooked them and added the sauce and boiled the pasta; I washed the dishes).

Before the big nap, I made and then happily drank drank too much coffee, while reading too much poetry and listening to really cool music from the Dwarf Fortress soundtrack as D was playing the game. Such a cozy, companionable morning.

Here's one of my favorite poems I've read so far today, Interstate by Meghan O'Rourke

( here's a little bit of it )

I love what she does with slippery-ness and light, especially "borrowed light," over and over through this poem.

And LimeWire taught me by KB Brookins is so fun for People Of a Certain Age.

And, because this issue is the Radical Poets of the Midwest one -- which feels like a gift to me specifically, that this would be waiting for me when I have time and inclination to get a poetry magazine from the library --

I focused on drawing together work bound by an interest in witness, documentation, and an explicit or implicit call for action, which to my mind is a definition for “political poetry.” Their poems are radical in their calls for social change, structural reform, and care for future generations.

There is also Battle Prayer by Marcie R. Rendon:

     there really was a time
when peacefully we lived
     genocide made
room for more genocide
removed our flesh and blood
until only—
     if you would stop to hear—
the elders on our homeland
and children waiting to be born
sing ancestral victory songs
     I hear their songs
as I sit in this gentle moment
where snow melts
and the hope of su=mmer smells rises from
moistened earth and green buds—
     cold this morning—
holds the promise of singing
     cottonwood leaves
     in the summer wind
I wish I had the money
to be socially conscious
and politically correct

Which lists not only three of my favorite foods ("strawberries blueberries wild rice— / food of Anishinaabe / creation—feeds my spirit") but also cottonwood trees which i miss so much more than I thought I would; I saw a photo of some yesterday, changing into their fall colors, and was heartsore but also my heart soared.

spiralsheep

I regret to inform everyone who thought the NHS websites were going to remain a good source of medical information that this is not true.

There's a newish page about "Respiratory tract infections (RTIs)" link (warning - other pages for "common cold" &c are also being altered) that now disinforms:

"use painkillers to bring down a fever and help ease a sore throat, headaches and muscle pain"

Please understand that the only UK over the counter medicine used to treat high temperatures is paracetamol, which isn't a painkiller (except as a placebo). Actual painkillers, most commonly opiates such as codeine, don't act effectively against RTI fevers.

Hospitals give paracetamol to lower high temperatures.

Unfortunately the NHS now also allows medics to falsely claim paracetamol is a painkiller (because it works on some people as a placebo), and hospitals offer paracetamol as a "painkiller" because they don't want people to become unnecessarily addicted to opiates + laxatives and giving a placebo is easier and less time-consuming than explaining reality.

I'm so old I remember when this type of medical misinformation was illegal (and also malpractice)!

Encouraging people to take paracetamol, which is one of the most toxic substances in an average UK household, as a placebo is extremely irresponsible because:

1. it doesn't work and so reduces people's trust and belief in medicine in general;

2. it's an overt lie and so reduces people's trust and belief in science in general (and leaves them more open to conspiracy theories);

3. the UK's supply of paracetamol currently comes from a few manufacturers in India, so if you hook people on a false idea of paracetamol and then suddenly need larger supplies of it for hospitals (e.g. in the recent pandemic) then you will appear to be depriving people of necessary medication, and this misperceived deprivation has an actual negative effect on people's mental state (and leaves them more open to conspiracy theories).

Anybody who wants to attempt a probably futile complaint should direct it to NHS England (or NHS Scotland as they have now also edited their similar but different website to make it more confusing and less true, albeit in a slightly less brazenly lying way), or the Department of Health and Social Care (or the minister responsible, especially if the aforementioned minister is your actual MP). Good luck!

cosmolinguist

My followup appointment today went fine! Surgeon was happy with how everything looks. He greeted me with "your nipples, they are alive" which I said was good to hear -- it just means the grafts haven't fallen at the first hurdle. I complimented him on his shirt, which was various vivid pastel colors, and made a joke about how I'm just as colorful, with various wounds and bruises on my chest: purple, red, yellowish, even some blue lines remaining from the markings.

Most excitingly of all, I am free of itchy adhesives and the compression belt that was chafing my armpits and making me really miserable. D found a zit or similar skin blemish on a part of my skin that had a big bruise on it and also had really sticky adhesive on it; no wonder that part had been so uncomfortable!

Getting put into my special zip-up binder was such a relief by comparison! I felt amazing. D took a photo that I put on fedi and everyone said I look so happy and I do but it's because nothing was sticking or chafing or hurting, and I'd just been told I could have a shower when I got home.

After a couple errands (post office, grocery store), we had a drink in a rock bar D had spotted in all his trips between the clinic and our Airbnb.

At a nearby table are five old guys sitting around playing some kind of dice game. The rattle of the dice in the cup was shockingly evocative for me, a the way they hammered it down when there was only one or two dice remaining. I have no idea what game they were playing and I couldn't understand a word they said (except, a couple times, "Ein noch mal?" when they were asking each other if they should start a new game), but I knew so much of what was going on. These five older guys were chatting away, with frequent chuckles and various reactions to whatever the dice were doing. The sounds reminded me so precisely of my grandpa and his friends in the coffee shop. And my other grandpa and his family: my mom and brother and me would always be invited to play cards or dice when we visited. We used to play this dice game that didn't even have a name; it had been around as long as I can remember.

Two of the guys were even wearing hats; one had a straw hat and one had a beanie.

This is a kind of old guy I'd love to get to be one day. I transitioned not because being a girl or a young woman was particularly unbearable to me, but because when I imagined my future I could only imagine an old man. I needed to do this to be able to see myself getting old.

It all made me feel so emotional (and I miss my dad, and one of those grandpas) before I even had a sip of beer!

We got home, via Greek takeout from the place near us because poor D was crashing hard by this point. After he'd had a nap and we'd eaten, he helped me take that exciting shower I'd been looking forward to since last Tuesday. He said it'd been a while since he's seen me as happy as I was after that!

cosmolinguist

I'm really grateful to barakta for reminding me yesterday, when my mood dropped drastically, about the 72-hour post-general anaesthetic drop.

As she said, "The GA meds are basically depressants to shut your nervous system and other shit down. Your brain has to rechemicals it all." I think I was vaguely familiar with this concept but if so only just, and this was my first general anaesthetic anyway. I'd been told it's not unusual for people to wake up from them crying for like an hour, and I'm glad I didn't have anything like that but it makes sense.

And I do think there's something to this explanation for why I had a rough time yesterday afternoon/evening in particular; all the problems are still there today (frustration, discomfort, restlessness, being unable to do most things that would make me feel better, from a shower to almost all exercises (I have done some modified stretches, mostly to deal with lower back pain that I don't usually have, and tightness in my hips which I always have, and that has helped me be more comfortable when I can't do the big stretches my spine really wants)...) but I'm doing okay.

I slept significantly less well last night, so while I'm more tired my mental state still isn't as bad as it was yesterday. So it may well be that the meds did have some part to play in how I was feeling then.

spiralsheep

I was trying to track down an origin for the popular claim (Tom Cox, Bill Bryson &c) that many English parish churchyards have circa 10,000 bodies buried in them (with an often stated 40,000+ in Haworth), and the parallel claim that the reason visitors step *down* to floor level in many old English country churches (and the walls often visibly continue below current ground surface) is because so many bodies have been interred in the graveyard outside (with soil intermittently added above for obvious reasons). Note: land surfaces in densely populated towns and cities tend to rise more rapidly than in rural areas (except e.g. Venice...) so there isn't any one explanation for every church.

Some interesting and relevant quotes from popular articles at present easily available online (no academic references, although the quotees are *cough* respected in their fields [/pun]). WARNING for discussion of human remains and if you click through then occasional images of bones (extra warning for clicking through and reading the final link, which also has a separate warning).

( Quotes (warning above) )

Current Mood: seasonally appropriate
Current Location: underground, overground, wombling free

cosmolinguist

I woke up when D came to bed, went for a pee, and then lay there in the dark realizing that it was probably about time for the first game of the World Series to start.

I can't watch playoff games like I do regular-season ones, despite the exorbitant amounts of money the MLB TV subscription still costs. But I could look up what local radio stations carried the broadcasts and pray that one would work for me online. Luckily, it did. I went with the Milwaukee broadcast, because
a) I want the Brewers to win
and
b) the commercials on the radio make me feel at home. Kwik Trip! Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time...

The game got exciting very quickly with the Brewers taking a lead to give their crowd some reason to scream so loud I couldn't hear what the announcers were saying any time one of their bats touched the ball, even if it was on its way to a routine out.

I got tired and tried turning the radio off and going back to sleep, but I just lay there and wondered what was happening. It was no use. I'm too excited about this World Series, with its "small markets" (i.e. not New York or L.A.), and its teams misunderstood as "old-school" or "small-ball" but which aren't full of big-name players who get famous fans in the stands.

I think I dozed off in the middle innings (around 3:30 or 4 am), but I was locked back in by the time Trevor Megill was trying to get those last few outs. I heard that double-play call that would've ended the game and it was all I could do not to scream and flail in bed -- I consider it a sign of my devotion to D that I managed to avoid this; it really did seem like a close call -- and then with the agonizing challenge. When the Rays wrenched that last out back, I thought the funniest possible thing would be for them to piss it away again, and they did, and it was just the most delightful outcome for the first game.

And then I did fall back asleep, and slept until 11 -- a total of nine or ten hours of sleep last night overall! just which this baseball intermission. I felt pretty shitty when I woke up -- like a little hungover -- but this was elating in its own way because it was just a reminder of how much fun I'd had. I'll do it again: what's the point of having this upcoming week off work if I can't get excited about baseball in the middle of the night?

D asked me "So what are the implications of this game?" and I think it took me fifteen or twenty minutes to stop talking. Baseball has the most narrativium this side of the Discworld.

cosmolinguist

I woke up around eight this morning, to wind gusts making unfamiliar noises in these rooms, and noisy construction work going on outside. Still, I rejoiced at all the sleep I'd had, eight hours solid after the Düsseldoof finished -- an hour later than usual!

I got up, had some muesli and some ibuprofen -- my worst pain continues to be the sore throat from the breathing tube during surgery -- and then went back to lie down next to D who was still mostly asleep.

I vaguely noticed him moving around the flat later, but I kept waking up and rolling over and then going back to sleep. Eventually he woke me at 1:30.

I've spent a nice chill afternoon on the sofa -- it has a reclining footrest at one end that lets me make myself very comfy -- watching shit on Netflix and snacking. Am I hungry or am I just bored? I keep wondering.

The weather is obligingly terrible, very windy all day and it rained earlier this evening. This is a great ally to me because it's the onky thing that could leave me not at all tempted to go outside. I'm so glad I got to come home yesterday, when it was nice out and I was itching ot go back out and stretch my legs after most of a day in bed. Today I'm content doing nothing, and glad D didn't have to go out either: we had enough of everything and he made us pesto pasta for dinner.

A little earlier, I had a quick little tingle in my chest. A nerve waking up or whatever. So naturally I made some noise like "bwah!?" because ofc I was taken aback by this, and then I didn't want D t;o worry so I explained. I said it felt like when you get a muscle twitch for a second so he said "...and you just had a nipple muscle twitch." "Nah," I said, pointing, "it wasn't my nipple it was...here..." and, in real time, I was realizing "Wait, I don't.... really... know where my nipples are now?! What a weird sentence that is to get to say! I don't know where my nipples are." (This same sensation has happened a few more times since, so I'm trying not to startle too much at it any more!)

The good wishes of all my friends mean so much to me, but the one that's stuck with me came from a chronically ill friend, who said "May your surgery and recovery be boring." And I'm so glad that she's getting her wish.

cosmolinguist

Some of the staff don't have a lot of English (which is fine!). The recovery room staff were impressed at my very small amount of German. Honestly I've mostly just said "genau" (to show that I understand something I'm being told) and "danke (schön)"! The night nurse, Janine, struggled with English but I found it helped if I aimed for a kind of "denglisch," saying English words that'd be most likely to make sense to her, and constructing sentences in a German way (as best I understand that, which probably isn't very well!).

It's nice being in Germany, where when the reception staff ask for my first name, she then immediately knew to ask "with a c or a k?"It's also nice being in Germany because when people ask where I'm from and I say Minnesota, they usually seem to have heard of it.

When I woke up in recovery I was next to a screen that showed my BP and it was 124/80 [basically perfect] and I was thinking oh yeah does my BMI make me so unhealthy?? yeah?! Take that, UK surgeons, you fatphobic fuckwits!!! Honestly, if they weren't such bigots I could've had this surgery fifteen miles from home instead of having to pay ten grand and go to Germany for two weeks...

The recovery nurse told me they get a lot of people from the UK "because of BMI." I muttered curses against BMI and she agreed. Shame it's so regular as to be familiar to them here, though!

(She did look up how much weight I lost in the surgery, which we feel should be deducted from the BMI if they must use it! She told me what it was but I wasn't awake enough to hear it properly/remember. I'm very touched that she's this on-side, though!)

When D told his Mum that we were going to Düsseldorf, she said "Düsseldorf isn't very touristy is it?" To be fair he hadn't told her yet why we were going to Düsseldorf. But still, it made me laugh, it made it sound like there was a version of a "destination weeding" for this. Destination top surgery. But my hospital room did have some swag that made it really seem like that: a sleep mask that said "TOP SURGERY" and then "Düsseldorf" underneath, with the clinic's logo next to it. All my take-home dressings and meds and things were in what looked exactly like a gift bag or a shopping bag from an upscale store where you buy small expensive things like jewelry or whatever: it also said "Top Surgery - Düsseldorf" and it even had a rainbow version of the clinic's logo.

The surgeon was carrying around one of these bags before my surgery, when he came to draw on me to mark everything up that he needed before the operation. He had like a dry erase marker and a normal metal ruler, but in one of these fancy little shopping bags.

D took a photo of the finished drawing; I was fascinated to see it but since I had to stand up straight and stay still for the measurements and markings, I couldn't see anything. The photo, of green lines all over my torso, my hairnet at a jaunty angle, and hte surgeon in his blue scrubs a blur behind me as he helps me hold up the gown behind my waist, is so funny. I wanted the photo not just so I could see it but so that V could; I wanted to tell them that I felt like a sewing pattern. They concurred that that's basically what it was.

When one of the friends I was updating about the surgery yesterday expressed the hope that my trip home wouldn't be too bad, I told him that as soon as I told V I had a surgery date, they said they already had researched mastectomy cushions and was ready to buy me this one. My friend replied, "You've got a de-boobing doula!" I told Vee this because I knew they'd love it; they did.

spiralsheep

UK lurgy alert: even my stalwart postie was complaining about having the lurgy this morning. /cassandra

Books

71. Home Child, by Liz Berry, 2023, poetry, 5/5

A collection of narrative poetry about a fictionalised Home Child, one of the poor British children sent to Canada (amongst other colonies) between 1860-1960 as indentured servants, often without the permission of their families, from whom they were intentionally severed.
Berry is, as I've mentioned before, an excellent poet. Here, she's chosen to use many short poems, instead of one long narrative, to examine this complex history from multiple perspectives. The result is a multi-faceted gem. Berry's great aunt was one of the children abducted from the Black Country (and Birmingham conurbation) then expatriated to rural Nova Scotia, but everyone should empathise with the children and this situation will speak to anyone with a family or community history of indenture (or other forms of enslavement, mass child abduction, or forced expatriation). It's estimated 1 in 10 contemporary Canadians has a Home Child ancestor.
Warning for the obvious - Berry isn't trying to extract additional horror or shock from an inevitably traumatic narrative.

From Out West
Walk across the hills of Whycocomagh
when the light near blinds you
and you will see them in the furrows,
in the heartsore violets, the shivering pines.

From The Violets
Home's not a place, you must believe this,
but one who names you and means beloved.

73. A Mermaid's Rescue (Mermaid series book 2), by Chris Riddell, 2026, children's illustrated novel, 4/5

With Riddell's fabulous illustrations for his fantastical story of a mermaid who has to save her friends and neighbours from a James-Bond-style villain polluting the ocean (and the discourse). Riddell has previously kept separate his parallel careers as a children's book author and a vicious political satirist but his rage at the state of the world breaks through in this second volume of his Mermaid series. We're presented with a villain named Nylon Dusk and his lap-duck called... you're probably ahead of me here... Donald. One aspect of the book didn't quite work for me, but Riddell clearly understood this and did it anyway, which is his knowing choice as an experienced and beloved creator. I'm not sure this will stand the test of time as well as most of Riddell's work but like the author I too am currently feeling petty enough to want the cheap laugh now more than I want yet another children's classic for the future.

Film

I don't think I can watch Extra Geography, an adaptation of the Rose Tremain short story, but it comes highly recommended and might interest some of you. Mark Kermode has a short video review on youtube with the added bonus of Simon Mayo interjecting "Ugh!" at mentions of boys (they're both parents, obv):
Kermode on Extra Geography.

cosmolinguist

Surgery went well! I'm fine. More details on fedi, lots of pictures and silliness.

D has been a star. I am only as uncomfortable in the post-surgery binder as I was in my normal ones after like a long day traveling to London for work or whatever. Not in any pain at all so far. I get to go back to our Airbnb flat tomorrow morning.

cosmolinguist

Pre-op appointment today went fine. The surgeon I've got continues to be very cheerful and smiley, despite also being very German. I continue to surprise myself by not feeling very anxious about this.

There's nothing like a private clinic to give you a measure of reassurance that you're in good hands, and they're handing me back to D who is lovely, and then we'll go home to V who does so much support, and who now is being supported by angelofthenorth while we're away, and so on and so forth.

I am at the center of this network of care, and I'm well aware of my role in it. Soon that will be to not get impatient to do too much. For now, it's to pack the things I need for an overnight stay and try to get some sleep.

I have done this before, as one of the support people, and I've had this central role when I broke my ankle. This feels straightforward to me.

Having been so stressed about earlier stages of this process that I literally wouldn't have persisted without help from D and others, having always had a lot of medical trauma and triggers, I can't say why I've been so calm ever since I got the surgery date, a couple of months ago. I assumed I was just dissociating, my brain trying to protect me from this, but my counselor said I didn't sound like it when I speculated thusly. I said then is it possible that I've just used up all my intense emotion on this in the first, oh, two years of trying to get this far, and I just don't have any left? It was a joke and not a real question, I know that's not how emotions work, but also I don't have any other theories.

I am not in need of any, though. My lack of perseverative anxiety on this topic might be an anomaly but it's a welcome one!

By the time I was asked if I had questions, I had very few (I thought of a few later, of course, but nothing too consequential). I did end up asking one that D had asked me, which can be boiled down to

how many nipples will I have this time tomorrow?

(I have three! And while it's a normal part of the procedure to reduce the size of the nipples, D asked me a little while ago if this meant I'd still have the situation I have now which is one normal nipple and on the other side two squished together, like the mitosis diagram where the cells are first starting to separate, or just one. "If it's important to your personality," the surgeon laughed, "you can have all three." I was kinda taken aback at this, I've never thought about it! I've never had a different number of nipples; they've always been like this!)

And in other TMI news:

The surgeon suggested I trim my chest hair.

Not shave, he was very clear. Just trim short. Shaving would sting a lot when they have to cover my skin with disinfectant because, he explained, shaving causes lots of micro-abrasions on the skin. But he didn't have to tell me that; I already know from the chili sauce! Anyway, I was very grateful for D's help in the shaving: we got a cheap beard trimmer and he did it this evening. Such a weird thing, to be sitting next to our dining table with my shirt off... He is so conscientious! I liked watching his face while he did it. "I've never shaved boobs before!" he said. It made me really miss Bat, who out of all the people we know is the one who'd probably most delight in hearing about D shaving my boobs. The poem I wrote for him doesn't really have a name but when I read it local pride's trans open mic last year, I called it "the hairy boob poem." I do not like this stubble-y chest hair, though! I had a shower right afterwards, just because that was next on my list, and I hoped it'd calm down the itchiness but no.

I won't get another shower for a week now, and I'm really going to miss them!

cosmolinguist

Today we went to an aquarium that was recommended by the person who recommended me this clinic I'm going to. Another of my online friends was interested in coming along, so it was really fun to meet him and hang out a bit. We laughed a lot about bow difficult it was for the sighted people to find animals in the various displays. It was nice to hang out with someone else who wore a mask and had his own Aranet co2 monitor with him!

We had a late lunch at a café after that and parted ways. D and I needed to do a little bit of shopping -- a couple ingredients for dinner, batteries, and I got a nice waterproof jacket with a hood for not much more than the repair to my hoodie might have cost, and I expect V can do something about the zipper once we're home so this seemed like a better solution.

We came home, I made dinner with the adventures of using a table spoon to stir ingredients in a too-small pan and learn how the touchscreen stove controls worked... I said it reminded me of cooking while camping, in terms of stacking up a series of improvisations and compromises and hoping that the result is edible. D (who was suffering by that point from a chronic illness flareup that left him sore and exhausted) was very happy with the food, which was a relief!

We watched another episode of Spider-Noir and answered questions from the clinic about my meal choices, asked some more about other stuff. My pre-op appointment is tomorrow afternoon and it's our only real plan for the day; the rest of the day we'll play by ear.

After three nights here of never feeling sleepy at all without melatonin, I'm absolutely exhausted tonight.

cosmolinguist

I learned how to use the pourover and made coffee this morning! (I had a rough idea of how they worked but was still experimenting a bit, and this one makes the coffee in a little carafe where what a friend has made me before is just a filter that you put over a single mug.) And I made croissants; I couldn't resist them after I spotted that here you can get the kind in a tube that you pop open. I was so excited to see them in Lidl last night, it was practically a religious experience.

Sonntagsbrötchen, the package called them: little breads for Sundays.

It happened to be Sunday, which is nice, but I'd have made them even if it weren't. We're on vacation!

After my terribly civilized breakfast, we had a very vacation-y day; going to the Rheinturm (Rhine Tower), which reminded me a little of the Space Needle. After tea (for me, who'd had museli and fruit as well as my croissants, before D woke up) and lunch (for him), we found ourselves with some time to kill before the next boat tour that we got a discount on with our Rheinturm tickets, so we went up to the Gehry Bauten (Gehry Buildings), which are a) made by a famous architect that I hadn't heard of even though I've seen one of his buildings a bunch of times, b) has a name that sounds like "Gary" (the way we say it anyway) and c) one of which is actually home to the clinic I'll be in! There's a white one, a brick one, and a shiny steel one, and I'm going to the shiny steel one which is also my favorite of them!

The river tour was fun (if chilly for someone whose nice warm hoodie doesn't zip up! I wore my medium-weight one today and it was mostly okay but let me down here!). It's nice to see how a city that clearly grew up around water makes so much more sense from the water.

We left the boat near the Altstadt (old city) which is also home to one of the things we were enthusiastically told to visit: a brewery that serves altbier (old beer) in small glasses and just tots up the total on your beer mat. The beer was nice but we couldn't quite see our friend's devotion to it, but the "bar snacks" we eventually hung around long enough to order definitely made a difference: I had bread with a cheese like Edam or something, and I added lots of the mustard we were offered along with the salt and pepper. D had raw pork mince and raw onions, and really enjoyed it.

We staggered home for a rest, no need for dinner now as such, and did some laundry. D had a nap and I read a book. It's been a nice chill evening after another busy but great day.

spiralsheep

Random birbs
- Erithacus rubecula melophilus: my winter Robin seems to have declared a temporary truce with the local Dunnock polycule, possibly because Robin is outnumbered 6-1.

- Pelecanus onocrotalus: I met an adult male Pelican in London, and they really are big pink murder-turkeys that can swim, aren't they?

- Psittacula krameri: I fed several wild, but self-habituated, Rose-Ringed Parakeets by standing under their favourite loitering tree while holding out my hand palm-up with a monkey nut lodged between my fingers. The birds flew down one by one to land delicately on my finger tips, retrieve their treat, and fly off again. The first one snuck up on me from above by slowly creeping sideways along the nearest branches and cautiously watching my reactions (I made eye contact, which I would avoid with most species, and spoke to them instead of singing). There are both wild fruits and seeds in the immediate vicinity, which the birds eat, but they seem to enjoy playful interactions and a variety of food-acquisition challenges. They're a highly social species and have adaptive intelligence for problem solving (like many corvidae) so it's in their nature to explore even risky food sources such as humans.

Current reading quotes
- And we were the fourth element, knowing ourselves fleeting, coming here with people we loved, our days spinning away like sycamore keys.

So British it hurts
- I have my first respiratory infection since 2018 (17?), which I undoubtedly caught from any of the several young white people, male and female, sneezing and coughing freely in public spaces without making even the slightest gesture towards protecting others (not even the traditional inadequate hand-to-face). They were all from the same generation that complains unceasingly about their youth putatively being wrecked by covid. I expect they'll be giving pox-parties for their kids any year now. [/extinction submission]
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Current reading quotes
- I too have done my bit, standing around watching them work, making amusing jokes and drinking several cups of tea.

Current Mood: caffeinated

cosmolinguist

I slept appallingly last night -- nothing special except maybe overtiredness after a long day, and my usual chronic insomnia.

But everything else about today has been pretty great.

We strolled around in nice sunny weather and found a nearby cafe for lunch (after a somewhat lackluster breakfast of "things we could find in the corner shop last night": nutella on toast, and potato chips) where we could sit outside. I had a lovely veggie sandwich on a bagel (accustomed to protein for breakfast instead of sugar, I have rarely been so glad to see a hard-boiled egg in my life!) and we even had a G&T with it so diffrentcolours could say it's Gin & Teutonic.

After a little bit of rain and the dismaying realization that, having brought all my zip-up hoodies with me so that they'd still be usable post-surgery, the zipper pull on the one I was wearing has somehow gone missing since the last time I wore it and it was fine. It's my heaviest and most water-resistant of the three hoodies I brought with me, so a real pain as it's much less water-resistant if I have to try to hold it closed by crossing my arms in front of me!

But luckily the rain didn't last for long. And after some more walking around, including a nice park and admiring many Good Dogs, we met up with an internet friend of mine who's one of my favorite people on fedi where we know each other. We had coffee and she played her shinobue, a Japanese flute for me. Then we had dinner at her favorite vegan Japanese place (she's a longtime vegan who used to live in Japan so she knows what she's talking about there!).

And after saying goodbye to her at the Hbf, we came back to our Wohnung via Lidl, where I pushed the shopping cart and threw into it anything that I thought I might like to eat and especially things that are very easy to prepare: a little pizza, falafel, pesto, gnocchi... We can have mueli or yogurt for breakfast tomorrow! And after I refused to have anything to do with the nespresso pod machine which is the only way our Airbnb provided us to make coffee with, D found and talked me into allowing us to get a little pourover thing. He really wanted to be able to make me coffee, bless him.

A very good first day: I know now how the shower works, I've unpacked my stuff, I've met a friend who's even more fun offline than they are online, we have easy food. I even bought myself a new book as a treat: when I realized that my current library books are about things like Nazis and psychological warfare, I got a book about baseball that I read most of as a library e-book and adored but then it disappeared! Can't be borrowed any more! (The rules about e-books in libraries are heinous.) But I could buy it from the Kobo store for £8, so I did that.

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scotm

April 2014

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Page Summary

cosmolinguist - Catching the bride's bouquet
spiralsheep - In which there are three things including five things [/bigger on the inside]
cosmolinguist - Wilkommen zurück
cosmolinguist - Schwebebahn, Schwebodrom
spiralsheep - In which there are mice swallowed by flying cars that hit trees and, well, everything
cosmolinguist - What are we living and fighting for, if not—at least in part—for access to the sweet quotidian?
spiralsheep - In which the NHS website is now publishing medical disinformation
cosmolinguist - My nipples are alive
cosmolinguist - Can't go over it, can't go under it, can't go around it, gotta go through it
spiralsheep - In which there is a happy Hallow-week!
cosmolinguist - Game 1
cosmolinguist - it's 6pm, do you know where your nipples are?
cosmolinguist - The notes I said I'd expound upon
spiralsheep - In which Wednesday's child is full of lurgy
cosmolinguist - Longer letter later
cosmolinguist - Dienstag
cosmolinguist - Montag
cosmolinguist - Sonntag
spiralsheep - In which there are gums, gurns, and feels
cosmolinguist - Samstag

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