“I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.”
- Maya Angelou
27
Jan
2006
What, was she getting hit on by too many women? I’d consider that a compliment!
I sometimes distrust it when women make the decision to “give up” on being “boyish,” or wearing comfortable clothes. I agree that feminism is all about choice, and if she wants to wear make-up and run around in tight clothes, that’s cool. I just question the reason why she’s decided to run this flip so suddenly.
(thanks, b)
27
Jan
2006
I see there’s a reason I had a nightmare about my credit card balance last night.
Sweet Jesus.
27
Jan
2006
27
Jan
2006
I went to the doctor again yesterday, this time to PP. For the last six months, I’ve been suffering from what I thought were recurring yeast infections. If you’ve had these or had a partner who’s had these, you know that they make walking uncomfortable, kill most of your sex drive, and make sex uncomfortable anyway.
Two weeks before, I visited another doctor after suffering from a persistent hacking cough. I’d been choking on my own phlegm for nearly two weeks. The coughing fits were so bad that during one of the worst bouts I pulled a muscle on my right side. I had to alter my morning weights routine so I put less strain on it. Getting out of bed in the morning was painful.
The doctor sounded me out and said she had no idea what was wrong with me. She gave me some antibiotics and cough syrup and sent me home.
A few months before that, I got taken out by a major case of the flu that kept me in bed for two weeks. I lived on chicken broth and juice. That’s when all the weight started coming off. I’ve dropped two sizes in 6 months.
When the clinician at PP weighed me in, she looked over my chart and said, “You’ve lost a lot of weight!”
“Yea,” I said, “I have. What am I at?”
“188,” she said.
I was 180 at Clarion. I’ve never in my life wanted to be below 175. I didn’t ask my starting weight, but I’d guess I was 215-220 6 months ago.
The clinician asked me the long list of questions you get about yeast infections: are you using scented soap? Bubble bath? Do you wear a thong? You wear cotton underwear? Cut down on sugar? Alcohol? Change out your clothes after the gym?
I’ve been trying to handle this discomfort for six months. If I hadn’t done some google homework on the issue and tried everything else, I wouldn’t be here.
I told her I’d been taking massive amounts of acidophilus, using creams, and doing or avoiding all of the above things she indicated. Mostly, I felt like I was in a constant state of remission – I noticed some discomfort, but it didn’t really spike except once or twice a month. It was like living in a constant state of tension, with occasional outbursts.
She looked genuinely perplexed.
She checked out my IUD and said there may be a couple of things going on:
1) my IUD may be irritating my uterus, which is why I feel better during my period, because everything’s getting flushed out.
2) I overdid it with the acidophilus (and, I think, if she knew how much I took – every day – she’d likely have gone pale), and too much of a good thing can cause a lesser irritation, which is what I’d been experiencing.
So I got another dose of antibiotics to flush the extra acidophilus from my system and clear up any kind of irritated infection that the IUD may have caused.
Seventy-five dollars poorer, I headed out of PP and went home . The whole right side of my face was throbbing, and I kept a tissue handy for my dripping nose. That morning, I’d discovered I had another of my twice-yearly sinus infections. I needed to take some Sudafed.
I’ve been sick for the last six months. I asked my clinician when I’d first come in about a yeast infection. She said it was in July. Getting on and off the pill will do that. I had one getting on the pill, one getting off. Made sense.
But it started recurring again six weeks later – and kept recurring. Not long after that, I got the flu. Not long after that, the bronchitis-like infection in my lungs. Now the sinus infection. My sicknesses are accumulating more quickly now. And I’m dropping a staggering amount of weight.
None of the doctors I’ve gone to can pinpoint what exactly is wrong with me. They’ve got theories, but nothing concrete. They threw some drugs at me and told me to drink more juice.
At home, my room looks like a war zone. Everything’s been torn off the walls. The angry ripping left behind brown patches where the paint’s been stripped. I have a box of crap sitting by my bed, ready to be moved out.
Six months ago, K moved in with Jenn and me.
For six months, we’ve been trying to make our living situation work.
We’ve all been trying very hard.
Things were not good when we moved in. Things went from bad to worse. There were screaming fights. We had a long list of “house rules” that needed to be followed. No labels on things. Close the shower curtain and medicine cabinet. Keep your stuff out of public areas. Jenn and I did all the dishes. Wipe down the counters every morning. Keep to a strict cleaning schedule. Make sure you wipe down the door handle in the bathroom.
I began to believe that I had to rigidly stick by all of these rules to the letter. If I didn’t, I thought, then K would be upset., and if K was upset, Jenn and K would fight.
All I wanted was to live in a happy house where everyone loved each other.
Now I know what it is to be a child of parents who are constantly fighting.
You keep thinking that if you just do this one thing, everything will be all right. If you pick up the slack – if you do more dishes, give up the TV more often, try harder to have a “relationship” with K, spend more time in your room, maybe, if you were just around the house less often, then everything would be all right.
But, of course, it’s not.
I started to dread coming home at night. I didn’t know what state the house would be in. Would it be a happy night? Or would there be closed doors and angry words?
We all wanted things to get better. Yet no matter how many talks we all had, no matter how many times we said, “This isn’t right, we need to fix it” – it never got better. It never got fixed.
It got worse.
“It’s so strange,” my clinician at PP said, “I had this eight-month time period where I was getting yeast infections all the time. I did everything I could think of, and they kept coming back. Then one day they just stopped.”
After months of talking about breaking off the relationship, about different living arrangements, after a week of K sleeping at other people’s houses, of everyone being “unsure,” after six months of sickness and tension on my part, after surviving more and more on credit cards, after my second computer in two years died, my printer went down, after having my fantasy novel rejected again, after getting stalled on my latest novel because of my dead computer and tangled plotline, after increasing stress at work, after another discussion about all of the things my partner and I were unhappy with in our own relationship, I lost it last week. I completely broke down into a screaming, sobbing mess and told Jenn I was moving out March first.
I tore everything off my walls and started packing. I returned all of the library books Jenn had loaned me. I started moving out.
When I say I’m going to do something, I do it.
I hated my house. I hated how we lived. I hated coming home at night. This was hurting me.
My body had been saying no to this situation for some time. I tried to move out as early as October, but it wasn’t financially feasible. This time around, I was getting a big check for my writing contract work at the end of February, and it would give me my freedom. I’d get a shitty, cockroach infested studio apartment until I moved to NY. I’d done it before.
For months my body was telling me to get the hell out. I didn’t listen. I didn’t listen because every time I ran into something I thought was a problem, I’d try to rationalize it. I told myself things would get better. I told myself that stress wasn’t something that affected you physically. Stress was something you just ignored or “got over.” It was a weak, emotional thing. There had to be some other explanation for all of my sicknesses.
But as the third wheel in a house where two people live who are in a relationship, I had no control over that relationship. Nothing I could say or do would change any of it.
Jenn and K spoke, and K said she would move out. She’s gone to spend time at friends’ places until March 1st. She’ll come in to get her stuff piecemeal, and head out.
On the one hand, I was upset about this. I was sad. I wanted it all to work. And if somebody was going to move out, I wanted it to be me. I didn’t want K feeling like she’d been shit on. I was willing to take the hit. But Jenn and K came to their own decision about that issue, and K decided to go.
I am sad. I’m not as bad off as Jenn, of course. There’s a long grieving process.
I tried hard. I tried to wish everything better.
But it wasn’t my place.
In the end, all I could do was leave. Fight or flight. I needed to protect myself, because my whole life was falling apart.
I don’t know how this is all going to turn out. I don’t even know if me and my own partner will make it through this.
I reached the end of my rope with everyone in my life. I was so angry at one point that I never wanted to speak to Jenn again. We’ve known each other for nearly six years. We’re Clarion buddies. For me to get to that point says a lot about how emotionally exhausted I am.
I don’t know that anything can help me at this point.
“Drink this,” the clinician told me.
I stared dubiously into a cup of fizzing water.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“The antibiotic.”
I’d never taken a drink-based antibiotic before.
It tasted all right going down, but the aftertaste was bitter.
“That will flush everything out,” she said.
I hope she’s right.
27
Jan
2006
Chapter 19
Nyx blew out of Punjai and hit the radio a couple of times with her palm, but all she got was misty blue static.
It was going to be a long ride.
She spent the night in the bakkie after making good time, about halfway to Mushtallah. She kept as far off the road as she dared and was up before dawn and back on the road, out past Mushtallah and the central cities. She landed another night on the road, then climbed over the low mountains that divided the coast from the interior.
As she came up over the other side, the terrain began to change. Sandy scrub gave way to rocky soil. The desert bled away and turned into long-needled pine trees, then tall oak hybrids with leaves the size of Nyx’s head, low ferns with thorns, tangles of wild roses, snake maples, amber ticklers, patches of low-spring wildflowers.
Nyx found it all pretty claustrophobic. The trees were so big they blocked the big sky, the sun. She couldn’t see beyond the turns of the road. That made her nervous. She started checking her mirrors more often.
She came out of the mountains and onto the rolling veldt of red-tipped wheat, the broad pastureland that kept the big, hairy, shoulder-high omnivores they called pigs. Farmsteads dotted the landscape. Swarms of locusts, red flies, and ladybirds mobbed the fields, tailored to devour the less friendly bugs and fungi that ruined the staples.
Nyx found a motel that night at a crossroads. She parked her bakkie out front alongside flatbeds and rickshaws and a cart hitched to the front end of a converted bakkie.
She splurged on good food and a bath. The only upside to coming out to the coast was all the water. Sweet, sweet, water. All the water you could soak in.
Nyx lingered in the bath, rubbing at old wounds that had started biting and aching again. It got colder on the coast, and the cold would only make the aching worse.
She missed the desert.
When she crawled into bed, her sheets weren’t full of sand. The floor was made of wood, and swept clean.
She couldn’t sleep.
Nyx grabbed her pillow and moved to the floor, spent long hours staring at the roaches scuttling along the ceiling. A couple took flight, landed on her head, her arms. She flicked them away.
There was a call box downstairs, but she had no one to call. If she called Kine, it was likely her sister would tell her not to come. If she called the Keg, she could make small talk with Taite or Anneke about defense, but she’d be repeating herself, and they’d see through it.
Nyx got up and went to the bar.
The motel had an “honor” bar, the kind with liquor bottles affixed to the wall upside down and a little book to record how many shots you’d pulled so they could bill you for it later.
Nyx took out her dagger and pried a bottle of whiskey from the wall and went out and sat on the front porch. The sky was big, and the stars were the clearest she’d seen since she was a kid. She drank, leaned back in the chair, and tried reading the constellations. Tej had been good at that.
A noise from the parking lot drew her attention. She went still. The night was clear, but the big bloody moons were at the far end of their orbit, meaning they looked about as big as her thumbnail in the night sky. A year from now, they would look about three times the size of the sun.
But that didn’t help her out much now.
The figure was dawdling next to Nyx’s bakkie. She’d parked close to the motel so she could keep an eye on it. The figure crouched for a long while, then rose and moved off. As Nyx watched, the figure shrank, dwindled. She heard a sneeze, and then a white bird was flapping off toward the road.
Nyx swore. She took a last pull from the bottle, returned it to the bar, and held out the rest of the night in her room with the door bolted. She slept in front of it.
The next morning, an inspection of the bakkie turned up an ignition burst and a cut brake line. It looked like Rasheeda had tried to cut open the main hose connecting the pedal mechanisms to the engine as well, but only nicked it. Some dead beetles and organic fluid had pooled beneath the bakkie.
Nyx disarmed the ignition burst. She opened up the trunk and took out one of the toolkits. She patched the leak, replaced the brake hose, and got back onto the road.
This time, she kept an eye on the road behind her the whole way.
She stopped at a dusty station just past a couple of farmsteads at the foot of the coastal hills and filled up on bug juice.
The woman who popped open her tank was a soft, fleshy, coastal type with big dark eyes and a plump mouth.
“You come in from the desert?” she asked.
Nyx wondered where else there was to come in from. As the woman pumped the feed into the tank, Nyx gazed out at the road. She saw a bakkie crawling along around a bend in the road, coming in from the direction of the motel. Following her?
She turned her face away, but noted the movement of the car in the station windows. The car slowed as it passed the station, then sped up again. Nyx saw three figures. She slumped in her seat, wondered if they’d open fire.
But the bakkie sped on. She looked after it.
“Friends of yours?” the attendant asked. She capped the tank.
“I hope not,” Nyx said. She leaned over, opened her pack and rolled a couple of bursts onto the passenger seat. Just in case.
She paid the woman and got back onto the road.
Three kilometers on, she saw the bakkie parked at the side of the road.
Waiting.
Fuck.
She switched pedals, kicked the bakkie a little faster. The other bakkie turned out onto the road after her.
Nyx didn’t know the country well, and unlike the cities, the place was all wide-open, no cover. About all the cover she had were the hills, and some woods, if she could find them. She switched pedals again, reached for the clutch. She hadn’t had to use the clutch in a long time. She wondered if it still worked.
The dark bakkie kept just within her rearview mirror view. They knew they’d been seen. Either they didn’t know where she was going and wanted to pin her there, or they were waiting for a good turn in the road to take her out.
She sped up. They sped up.
She watched the image of the dark car grow bigger in the mirror.
She fucked with the clutch. It made a nasty grinding sound.
“Come on, you fucker,” she said.
It flipped.
She switched pedals. The bakkie shuddered. The speedometer climbed. She saw a turnoff on her left that went up into the hills. Nyx did a neat break, twisted the wheel, and hit the speed as she came out of the turn.
The bakkie screamed under her. She caught the smell of burning bugs, death on the road. She glanced back and saw smoke and dead beetles roiling out from the exhaust. The way was narrow and twisted, and as she climbed, the grasslands turned to a forest of oak hybrids. She took the turns too fast.
Nyx kept checking the mirror. She spent a moment too long looking and nearly lost herself on a narrow turn. She’d seen the other bakkie.
They were still behind her.
She kept a sharp eye out for turns off the main road. She didn’t want gravel tracks or logging roads. The bakkie would get stuck, and she’d be for shit.
The black bakkie was right behind her. She could just see their faces now. The big woman in the driver’s seat was definitely Dahab. Not a doubt in her mind. Dahab had a new team with her, not bel dames, from the look of them.
Nyx twisted around another curve. Raine had taught her to drive when she was nineteen. It wasn’t a skill magicians taught to boxers. Raine had gone to boxing gyms for years to recruit young blood from the front. She’d started out like all of his crew – as a driver.
Nyx heard a shot, and ducked. Checked the mirror again. The woman riding shotgun with Dahab was doing what people riding shotgun did.
Nyx dared not take her hands off the wheel. Even if she could clip off a couple shots with her pistol, the odds of her hitting anything in that bakkie were slim.
She hit a crossroads. Right was back up into the hills. Left was down into the coastal valley. Down meant she would have to put a lot of faith in her repair of the breakline.
Fuck it.
She veered left and barreled down the hill. She disengaged the clutch.
Heard another shot.
Something exploded against her back window.
That wasn’t good. Organics. A fever burst? Or something worse?
She grabbed at one of the bursts on the seat next to her and lobbed it out the window. Heard a satisfying pop as it exploded on the road.
The bakkie squeezed around another narrow turn. The cover of the woods was thinning out. She saw a house set back away from the road. If she couldn’t lose them, she had to fight them.
Fight Dahab.
Nyx ignored the house and kept on down the road.
She came down a long stretch and turned. The road abruptly changed from pavement to gravel. Logging road.
The bakkie skidded on the sudden raw stretch. Nyx hit the far left and far right pedals, and all four wheels twisted sharply, got her some traction.
She looked back. Missed a turn. She spun the wheel and tried to recover, but she was trying to recover on a graveled road.
The car slid clean off the road.
For a long, hopeful moment, she thought she’d be all right. But as she braked and twisted the wheel, she saw she wasn’t going to avoid the big tree in front of her.
The bakkie smashed into the hybrid oak with a loud crunch. Bugs exploded from the hood. A rain of leaves dropped onto the windshield. Nyx’s torso thumped into the steering wheel, knocked the breath from her.
The sound of hissing beetles filled her ears.
Adrenaline flooded her body. She pushed at the door, couldn’t find the handle for some reason. She leaned over and reach for one of the bursts on the floor.
The barrel of a very big gun pointed in at her through the passenger side window.
“Don’t fucking move,” Dahab said.
27
Jan
2006
1) It opens with something like: “The Heroes took wing from a dark, raw field the color of blood.” And you know exactly what you’re in for. This isn’t going to be a “happy” story.
2) Somebody loses something – an eye, a finger, a limb, a head, a womb – at some point
3) Big women with commitment issues go around killing things and trying not to care about people.
4)Skinny men – usually described as looking like or acting like dancers (hey, I used to have a thing for a dancer) – act as the loyal sidekick to above strong woman.
5)There are a lot of bugs
6) Wars are going on and shit is blowing up
7) Somebody’s carrying around a big gun that shoots acid.
The traditional “one man, one woman,” happy hetero pairing is very sweet – and you’re not reading about it.
9) Getting pregnant isn’t a good idea. And if the women are going around having sex (and oh yes, they are), you’ll get an explanation as to why she ain’t pregnant.
10) The civil war’s just the subplot
27
Jan
2006
Five weird habits:
1) I talk to myself. I picked up this habit while living by myself in Alaska, and South Africa. It’s a pretty constant streaming narrative of what’s going on in my head (“I need to do this, then this. Fuck. I forgot that thing. That’s lame.”). So when I’m alone in the house I turn on movies and music. I used to constantly run a DVD in my computer in South Africa when I was home so I didn’t feel so lonely. I’ve been doing it this last week, as well, as K is out of the house and Jenn doesn’t come home until after I’m in bed.
2) When I don’t write for about three or four days, I get emotionally weird. This is because I channel my emotions into my writing. It enables me to keep up a calm façade out in the real world. When the writing doesn’t happen, the emotion tends to build up, and explosions over small issues happen more regularly.
More writing: less craziness!
3) I’m claustrophobic. I can put up with small spaces if I have to, but if it’s for prolonged periods or I’m not 100% mentally or physically well to begin with, I’ll start to lose it and wack out.
This is probably why I need to have moving air in my room when I go to sleep. Preferably, I’ve got a fan going all the time, but if one’s not available, I need to have an open window. I won’t die without it, but it’s something I do automatically if I’m in a hotel by myself – I try to open the windows. This also means I have more trouble going to bed when I’m too warm than when I’m too cold. Lord knows how I managed to live in Durban.
4) I often put on perfume before bed. I have no idea why I do this, since 98% of the time, I go to bed alone anyway.
5) I drink whiskey straight. A lot of it. That may not sound weird to some people, but I’ve gotten startled looks when I tell people to serve me my hard liquor straight. Whiskey is my preferred “I want to get drunk now” beverage. In fact, that sounds like something I’ll indulge in tonight.
23
Jan
2006
I’ll be taking a blogging break for some time. There’s a lot of personal stuff exploding right now that needs to be taken care of, and it might be a month or so before it’s worked out.
Everything in my life feels broken.
I’ll be back in a while.
20
Jan
2006
I only put in one earring this morning.
I had a dream last night that I had an affair with Bill Clinton.
I also had a dream that I was playing a high-stakes game of Cossaks a la Ender’s Game.
In other news, I’ve signed up me and B for Wiscon, and I’m going out to get some coffee. Looks like I need it.
20
Jan
2006
Is Battlestar Galactica “not really” being science fiction something like saying, “I believe in equal rights for women, but I’m not a feminist”?
heh.
In any case, an interview with Sackhoff about the “flak” she’s gotten for playing Starbuck.
And what’s with actresses playing “strong” female characters wanting to get in the whole “I wanted her to strong, yet vulnerable” line. I’ve never heard a male actor say he wanted his character’s “vulnerable” side to come out in a performance.
And why does an interviewer who interviews an actress playing a strong female character feel it’s important to mention that the actress actually has a “delicate physique” and “favors fashion more in the style of Audrey Hepburn than her alter-ego’s flight suits.”
For fuck’s sake. It’s one step forward, two steps back.
I do like that people are fighting over whether or not she’s “hot.” The fact that there’s a debate says a lot about what kind of sex symbols we’re “allowed” to pine after in this culture.
Her response to the original actor’s bashing of her character is probably the best bit, though:
“That’s what I said in rebuttal to that (the bashing by Dirk Benedict of a woman playing “his” character). But I never really tried to match it. But once that started happening, I was like, look, at the end of the day, I’ve now played this character longer. And at the end of the day, it’s a TV show. We’re not curing cancer, people. I wish we were, but we’re not. It’s entertainment. So … tit for tat. Shut up.”
