Freckles & Doubt

Genetics are weird. My niece doesn't have her mother's hands, she has mine. Slightly scaled-down version of the same basic shape, long fingers, long palm. Also, the weird double-jointed ring fingers which bend slightly backwards when straightened. And the baby fingers which curve inward slightly too much, and used to drive my piano teachers crazy, because it's quite tricky to do scales evenly when your baby fingers hit the key slightly sideways and are perpetually ducking for cover. Also, we both have the hideous witchy ability to bend over just the top joint of our fingers (I can't do it on the right forefinger any more since the nice doctor had to move the tendon out of the way to remove the weird cartilaginous lump). She and I can witchy-finger my sister in concert, thereby grossing her out considerably. But it's very strange, to see inheritance do a sideways curtsey like that. We are all lurking in our siblings, clearly, just waiting for expression.

I am very aware of hands just now because mine are not only shredded with eczema from all this damned hand sanitizer, but also somewhat liberally nipped by evil kitty teeth. Jyn has, yet again, had to have a giant abcess under her chin surgically lanced by the Splendid Vet, as a result of, presumably, being bitten by the sneaky invisible ninja tom who occasionally beats them up, silently and without visible presence, in the back courtyard. (How?! I am here all the time at the moment, and I've never seen hair nor hide of him). I feel much less guilty about this one, because I took her to the vet solely because she was all pale and quiet, I couldn't find a lump anywhere, and nor could the vet, despite knowing it was present from her very high temperature. He did a thorough examination, causing her to emit her astonishingly baritone growl when he fiddled with her hips, but I think that's her endemic weird joint issues which make her so loathe to jump. The actual abcess popped up two days later in her neck, and when he lanced it, he said it was incredibly deep and must have been agonising. Bloody tomcat. Anyway, I have been religiously shoving antibiotics down Jyn's throat twice daily for the last week, and she is significantly recovered to the point where she fights tooth and nail and tries to bite me, with occasional success.

She and Pandora are wreaking their revenge by refusing to eat the fancy arthritis-soothing prescription food Pandy needs for her old bones, they seem to hate the taste, and are consenting to imbibe just enough for continued life if I mix it with the hairball control they were on previously. I have had to order fancy alternatives via the Splendid Vet, so hopefully that will reach their high culinary standards. Sigh.

(This photo proof that they do get along, really. Also featuring my new bedroom carpet, do you know how difficult it is to find a persian-style design in dark green? And my Burne Jones wood nymph).

Occasionally I wonder if I actually, you know, have a brain, because possibly going in for an MRI (very minor, there's a weird bumpy thing on my finger that the specialist couldn't figure out) was not an intelligent thing to do only a week after discovering, courtesy of sports traffic, the exact parameters of my problem with being hemmed in. I'd thought it was crowds. Enclosed spaces have never really been an issue; I rather like caves. But when they put me on my face on the table with my hand strapped into a complicated box thing, and roll me into the MRI tube with strict instructions not to move, it turns out I have a small, perfectly formed panic attack. Weirdest feeling, lying there hyperventilating with my heart rate climbing and sweat breaking out all over my body, and my whole being consumed with the desperate, flailing urge to MOVE! at any cost, preferably to thrash and plunge and make a break for it. Flight or fight. It's very odd, knowing it's completely irrational and being completely unable to switch it off.

Fortunately, I am addicted beyond redemption to random link-following on Teh Internets, and a couple of weeks back it was something-or-other that mentioned, in passing, that flight-or-fight responses can be short-circuited if you focus on a breathing pattern where you breathe in for a shorter count than you breathe out. Which I read at the time with a certain degree of scepticism, thought "Huh. Probably woo." and promptly forgot about, until it was recalled by the desperate realisation that a quick sedation was in the offing unless I did something. And, huh. Turns out it's perfectly accurate. Breathe in for count of two, hold for count of one, breathe out for four. It was enough to manage the panic and gradually, over about fifteen minutes, bring it down to something perilously close to trance state, which was fortunate, because they kept me in that bloody thing for over an hour. Apparently fingers are merry hell to scan, small and fiddly and difficult to hold still; they ended up having to pump me full of dye to see what was going on. When I finally emerged I was slowed down and pleasantly calm to slightly stoner levels - in sharp contradistinction to all my muscles, which were in spasm from being motionless for so long.

MRIs sound incredibly Millenium-Falcon for the high-tech things they are - there's a great deal of banging and thumping and ticking and weird "whum-m-m" noises, and that bit where it mutters "muh-muh-muh-muh-muh" to itself very rapidly. They stick you in earplugs before shoving you into the innards, which is somewhat merciful, it's very loud. It's also very varied; an image seems to be built up as a composite, which entails scanning at varying degrees of current through the electromagnet, and it responds with a fair repertoire of noises. Possibly the most frustrating part was not being able to identify what exactly the machine was doing with each different noise it made. Generally I enjoy high-tech medical equipment, and will demand explanations of what's happening with a shameless mongoose interest, but you can't ask questions if you have to lie motionless and focus on your breathing so as not to freak out completely. "For Science!", I kept telling myself, but I'd prefer to know what Science.

It also makes very cool pictures with way better resolution than an x-ray, and reveals that I have a weird body which won't do things in any standard way. I have a lump, slowly growing larger, just above the middle knuckle joint on my middle right-hand finger. It's been there for years; it's briefly agonizing if I bump it, even lightly, and has started to ache randomly even when I don't. The MRI doctor was Baffled, Watson, Baffled! - he said it might be a "very complicated ganglion", which is a nerve cluster lumpy thing. Or a cyst, because it takes dye, which suggests there's fluid there, although it's also too hard for a cyst. The orthopaedic surgeon is concerned because it's grown large enough to start pressing into the bone, which will eventually weaken the bone and invite random breakages and things. He's hauling said Mysterious Lump out on Tuesday just to be safe, probably with an element of frustrated curiosity with which I completely empathise. Apparently I am scheduled for One Minor Op Per Year until further notice, and this is mine for 2016. At least it's interesting.

This is an utterly simple, somewhat perverse, ridiculously absorbing mini-game. I think its appeal is a sort of transference: as a cat owner, there's something weirdly seductive in projecting yourself into the persona of the #(*&$*)! feline who wakes you up in the morning by meeping, kneading and knocking things onto the floor. It'll take you five minutes to play and will content some weird, vindictive corner of your soul. Unless that's just me.

In other news, last night we watched Interstellar. While I darkly suspect that I shouldn't be thinking about it too hard, because its manifest plot holes would infallibly present themselves (inevitably, with black holes and time at the heart of it), I very much enjoyed it, and in particular its vision of the creeping, dust-laden, inexorable death of the Earth. But it pushed my annoyed buttons a little in its uncritical adherence to the tired old sf trope of "we stuffed up the Earth, let's leave and find another planet."

Because, see, here's the thing. It's not even about my inner Victorian governess who believes that destructive children should bloody well deal with the consequences of their actions, although she definitely believes that. It's actually a logical problem. We live in a biosphere into which we have evolved over ridiculous amounts of time, and to whose atmosphere and organisms and substances and what have you we are absolutely adapted. Even so, people die every day from anaphlyactic shock as a result of an allergy, a systemic and cataclysmic disagreement with our very own environmental niche, suggesting that we are, evolution notwithstanding, somewhat fragile. However badly we crowd and poison and superheat our Earth, how logical is it that we'll find a completely unrelated planet somewhere the hell out there where the environmental challenges of an alien biosphere are somehow more welcoming than the screwed-up versions of the one we've evolved in? In terms purely of economies of effort and resource, surely it's going to be cheaper and easier and less potentially fatal to simply sort out our own planet? Honestly, I don't get it. I have the same problem with giant artificial environments in space. Earth may be a mess, but there's more to work with than the interplanetary or interstellar void offers, and it's less likely to kill you on the turn if you accidentally break a window.

My subject line, incidentally, is Death Cab for Cutie, since Narrow Stairs is playing in the car at the moment - from "Grapevine Fires", which seems thematically appropriate to all this destruction.

Here is another entry in the Department Of The Approximately One Million Things That Make Me Cry. "Space Oddity" is a fairly emotional piece of music anyway, considered quite apart from its position in my pervy-David-Bowie-fancying lexicon: it's a particularly vivid and evocative rendition of isolation and loss layered on top of stirring human endeavour. Space is simply emotional, and humans in space hit a deeply-embedded science fictional nerve in my psyche. (Which suggests why it's taking me so long to get around to watching Moon, and also why I really ought to). I've also been following Chris Hadfield on Twitter and Tumblr, as he patiently and systematically humanises the space station project - not so much putting a human face on it, as skilfully using the immediacy and speed of social media to insert us into the experience. It's been wonderful, both exciting and moving - he's an amazing man. He also posts the odd photo of Cape Town from orbit, which makes me ridiculously happy.

He's coming back down to Earth now, and as a farewell has released a version of "Space Oddity" sung, rather well, by himself, in the space station. This is a perfect thing. It's been bouncing around my Tumblr and Twitter feeds all morning, accompanied by righteous squee. It also hits so many of my buttons simultaneously that I've just sat at my desk for ten minutes and cried like a baby.



I've had a rather madly social weekend - book club on Friday, Neil's birthday on Saturday, and a Sunday night dinner I cooked last night with Jo&Stv and Sven&Tanya featuring wine, hilarity and roast chicken with all the trimmings, not to mention a new recipe for chocolate mousse which ... seems to work. All three of these gatherings were not particularly notable in that they featured me, at some stage, babbling enthusiastically about fan fiction, as a result of which Jo was moved to suggest that I actually post some links to these stories for the general enlightenment or bewilderment of my readers. Which is a damned good idea.

As an opening shot, and in keeping with the Space Feels, have a series of really rather interesting AU fics re-imagining the Avengers in a space opera setting. I'm impressed at the creativity of this writer: the way they've managed to take the characters and relationships of the Marvel films and explore them via a rather different idiom but with a sensitive eye to emotional and political resonance. Also, bonus AI politics and Tony Stark as technomancer with nanotech, communicating with JARVIS via a neural implant. JARVIS is simply cool. icarus_chained, Space Electric.

Added bonus: I've managed to shamelessly use both "evocative" and "resonant" in the same post. I blame the Space Feels.

Not entirely the highlight of yesterday's day off work doing errands: the doctor at the radiologists telling me, "In the nicest possible way, you have terrible breasts". In his defence, in context it was funny rather than insulting, and he's perfectly right: I have terrible breasts, in the sense that they are infested with cysts and fibroadenomas to an extent which requires a rigorous annual mammogram and attendant ultrasound. (Score! this year they didn't have to biopsy, as apparently nothing much has changed from the last time). Mapping the gazillions of little dark spots makes the sweet radiologist lady mutter to herself and become ferociously intent, and also leads to her telling me, in tones of cheerful surprise, "well, at least there are some areas of this breast which are perfectly normal!" Actually, all the little lumps are apparently entirely benign and may, given that they're sometimes referred to as "breast mice", actually be considered cute.

I should hasten to add that in purely aesthetic terms I am perfectly satisfied with my breasts, thank you, doctor's comments and lack of actual cleavage notwithstanding, and this whole mammogram process is reassuring rather than traumatic, however hard they squidge me (I'm a bit bruised today). My Lawful Good apparently gains contentment and calm from feeling that I am monitoring the Terrible Breasts for potential Evil with the full weight of Science. Science is cool. I love watching those grainy ultrasound images and marvelling at the radiologist lady's skill.

Yesterday was apparently thematically dedicated to Detect Potential Evil in more ways than one, as I had to haul Golux off to the vet for a slightly paranoid check-up of the current scratch on her nose (probably courtesy of Hobbit), which is not healing and which may thus be the first step on the thin edge of the skin-cancer wedge. The vet had to scrutinise with a particularly intense scrute to spot the pre-cancerous crater, but he concurs that it's better safe than sorry, and Golux goes in for the first in three weekly histofreezes tomorrow. Poor kitty. I'd feel more sympathetic if I didn't know perfectly well that the trauma is infinitely less than that of a nosectomy down the line, and she's going to take her suffering out of my hide in meeping and guilt.

All in all, a slightly satisfying day in which we achieved a score of Vigilance 2, Cancer 0. I also booked a driver's licence exam. In a couple of month's time, which is the earliest I can get at the moment, but by gum I booked it. Take that, neurotic procrastination. (Therapist to me, suggestively: "What makes a driving test so painful that you have to avoid it?" Me: "Nothing. Well, I suppose it's undermining my grown-up competence on a fairly fundamental level. Oh, and I can't replace my Zimbabwean one because Zimbabwe is a disaster, which is all about loss. Wait, I'm in tears. Definitely Zimbabwe.") I make yesterday's overall score at Chaos 0, Lawful Good 3, so go me.