Lactose Intolerance In America’s Dairyland

(Just a quick CW for mentions of lactose intolerance, dairy, and being sick when those two things come together. No gross details.)

As a US citizen who has always had decent health insurance but not enough spare money to pursue all of my minor ailments to full comprehension, I’ve gotten pretty good at finding ways to deal with minor day-to-day health issues. Now, this practice is no replacement for actual medical aid, nor are my actions entirely without negative consequence (the thing about trial and error is that you get a lot of errors before you find out what works, generally speaking), but as a person living in an imperfect system who is methodical in almost everything they do, I’ve managed to mostly resolve a few minor problems that come up for me. I keep a close watch on them, of course, making sure I’m not ramping up my mitigations without realizing it to account for worsening symptoms because I know there’s a chance that they’ll graduate from minor problems to major problems, but so far this strategy has paid off pretty well for me, all things considered.

Continue reading

Progress Takes Effort, Which Kinda Sucks

The longer that 2022 goes on, the more I see how my mood on any given day is effected by more factors than I could ever account for. I’ve been working to get into better habits this year and while I’ve made some progress, I don’t feel like my average mood has gotten any better. I feel more productive for sure, but I also feel more tired. No matter what I do, I seem to always wind up trading one thing for something else and making almost no net change to how I’m feeling. For instance, I recently changed my wake-up playlist to music that engenders positive feelings in me, but now I’m having a more difficult time feeling awake and alert because the old songs did an incredibly job of rousing me as the playlist played through. I’m getting out of bed later than usual, but I do feel a bit better in the mornings.

Continue reading

Vacation Conjecture

Today is my first day back to my normal life following my vacation. I can only guess at how I feel right now, since I’m writing this two weeks prior in order to allow myself a break from daily blog updates during said vacation. The actual week I’m on vacation is going to be only flash fiction so I can avoid feeling guilty for not posting anything. I’ve spent a week in a distant cabin a few hours north of where I normally live, enjoying a getaway with two of my younger siblings and two of my friends (all of us made up my old Monday night D&D group back before I realized I needed to dial things back a little bit in 2021). Some of these people met each other in person for the first time while sharing a cabin with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and probably just a little bit too little space for all five of us to be comfortable together. As someone who has lived alone for two years, I imagine it took a bit of getting used to for me and that I found great solace in the ability to just go for a walk or sit outside in the shade.

Continue reading

The Power of Influence and the Folly of Originality

As a person interested in creating my own stories, worlds, and whatnot, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to create something “original.” In terms of criticism, I think the word has been so bandied about and overused that it has lost most of its meaning, leavied as it has been against everything from creative works acknowledging their influences to entirely unrelated and unconnected works that coincidentally had similar themes. In this vast, wide world of ours, it is not unthinkable that two incredibly different people might have similar ideas. Not everything alike is a copy or partial copy, and there’s nothing wrong with copying something if you’re planning to build off it.

Continue reading

Managing Vacation Anxiety

As I begin the careful calculus of packing and planning for my vacation, I’ve started weighing the various options I have for types of entertainment to bring with me to this isolated cabin. I have so many options that are portable enough to consider bringing with that I’m concerned I might be packing more tabletop and video games than everything else put together. It has been a long time since I’ve done anything to relax that didn’t center being at my apartment for an extended period of time, so I’ll admit I’m overly anxious about how to adequately prepare for my vacation. To be entirely fair to myself, something bad has happened every single time I’ve taken more than one or two days off of work for the past two years, so these anxieties aren’t entirely unfounded. Since one of the main strategies for processing anxieties involves acknowledging the parts that are actually reasonable or at least reasonable-adjacent and then taking steps to mitigate them, I’m giving myself space to over-plan and over-pack.

Continue reading

Creating Your Own Hope Via Collective Action

I spent the entire fourth of July watching a charity stream hosted by my favorite podcast, Friends at the Table, as they raised money for the National Network of Abortion Funds. Over the course of two days of streaming, 10 hours on July 3rd and almost 12 hours on July 4th, they raised over $160,000. It was amazing to watch on both days as the numbers slowly (and sometimes incredibly quickly) ticked ever upward as the dual promise of supporting a worthy cause and unlocking the various goals pushed people to donate. The world would be a better place if charity drives like this one weren’t necessary, but we don’t live in that world. We live in one slowly falling apart due to corruption, extreme wealth disparity, rampant capitalism, the powerful’s open hatred of anyone who isn’t a cisgendered white man, and reactionary politics. It’s difficult to feel hope these days, especially given that I live in the most gerrymandered state in the US, so I’m not sure I can say I live in anything even close to a democracy without lying to myself. But as I watched some wonderful entertainers play games, goof around, and do a solid twelve hours of streaming (with a few reasonable breaks, of course) while the people watching (myself included) smashed through every fundraising goal these entertainers put in front of us, I can’t deny the spark of hope that ignited within me.

Continue reading

I Struggle With Writing Short Fiction

I have a vacation coming up in a week and a half. I’ll have access to the internet and my laptop with me (I plan to work on some editing projects since I can’t just NOT do anything), but I still plan to double my usual blog buffer so I can just ignore my blog every day that I’m away. My current intention is to do five Flash Fiction posts in the place of my usual content, as a nice compromise between writing five normal posts and letting my blog sit empty for a full week, but I’m running into the same problem that I always do when I’m trying to produce new flash fiction. I just don’t know what stories to tell in so short a format!

Continue reading

The Slow, Onerous Grind of Change

(Another brief reminder that I write these a week ahead of time and while I hope nothing drastic has happened since I wrote this, it might not be an immediate reflection of the day it gets posted).

The past few days have been exhausting. Reeling from all of the expected but still devasting decisions by those sitting atop the judicial branch of the US government, I still had to go grocery shopping, clean my apartment, make myself meals, do laundry, and navigating a draining social situation that was one of my biggest anxieties which I’d been coping with by telling myself it would never happen. Because it’s not like my life grinds to a halt the instant something terrible happens in the world. I still need to pay bills, feed myself, maintain some kind of social connections, and take care of myself even when I’m trying to figure out how I can respond to the horrible things happening in the world around me.

Continue reading

Time To Settle In For The Long Haul

Today’s been a real shit show [I originally wrote this on the day the US Supreme Court dismantled Roe v Wade, but it’s felt true pretty much every day since then]. In the past few weeks of judicial bullshit, the Supreme Court Injustices have wrecked more shit on rights for citizens of the US than any other time in my life as a socially-conscious adult Human. If I hadn’t spent time a few weeks ago looking up ways to write about being incandescently furious, wounded, and positively apoplectic, I would be at a loss for words! Instead, I’ve got all these wonderful ways to talk about the grave injustices, loss of rights, and anti-democratic hanky-panky being pulled by the pro-fascism side of my country’s government. Still, even armed as I am with words aplenty, I can’t help but feel none of them are adequate to the task of describing how I feel in this moment.

Continue reading