So today, I'm at work. Not a lot of motivation: my job seems really really meaningless lately and i can't summon enthusiasm. I don't care enough about money to love my job for it. Just like I don't care enough about the concept of being Skinny to actually bother Dieting for it, so I don't really like the concept of Money enough to make myself motivated to earn it.
Anyway.
Having a tough time here.

Was looking through a folder of info. There was a file on a topic I hadn't thought about in a while, and it looked like it had stuff I didn't know, so I opened it to read it.
The opening paragraph was kinda witty, and I was like, "Who wrote this? I like their style." The info was clearly and engagingly presented, and I read the piece with some enjoyment before I scrolled down to the bottom, looking for the signature lines at the end (it was a letter).

I wrote it.
It must have been some months ago. I have no memory of it.

I feel kinda dirty. I was totally checking myself out and had no idea.

Also I've been here too long, if this sort of thing can happen.

Hey-- it never occurred to me to ask anyone on here before this moment, but if you're interested in buying a pin-up calendar featuring the members of my roller derby league (I play a featured role in the August photo), they're $11, the extra $1 being a donation to Crisis Services.
Just thought I'd offer, seeing as they're timely at the moment.
If you want one... You can buy one at the bout on January 5th, in which I will be skating!!

JANUARY 5th 7 PM RAINBOW RINK N.T. TICKETS FOR SALE ONLINE AT QCRG.NET PLEASE PRETTY PLEASE COME I WILL CRY IF YOU DON'T.


Unless my knee doesn't improve. :( My left knee has been bothering me since mid-December, when I fell and bruised it. It hurts, sometimes quite badly, and sometimes not really; for a while I couldn't bend it, but I had convinced myself it was better until I fell again and it hurt a lot...
So I'm spending this week popping ibuprofin and icing it every hour and keeping it elevated and all that.
It doesn't seem to affect my skating.
No, I haven't seen a doctor. I'm an idiot. But I don't want them to say "It's a torn meniscus" and tell me to stay off it, when I know fine well to stay off it, and am doing all I can. I'm pretty sure it's not structurally injured, anyway. It supports me just fine, I just have to think real hard about kneeling on it. (And, usually, decide against kneeling on it.)

I have to decide by tomorrow whether it's fine or I have to tough up and tell my coach to put in one of the subs. I am so excited to have made the primary line-up, I really am, but it wouldn't be fair of me to insist on skating if my knee isn't OK-- there are six girls who have to sit out this first bout because of number constraints, and I don't want us to wind up skating short because I reinjure myself. (Once the squad of 14 is finalized there are no more substitutions.)

Sigh. Hard decision. My knee is mostly fine. But what if I land wrong?

OTHER NOT-SKATING NEWS.
I want a kick-ass garden this year.
Does anyone want to split a seed/plant order at any point?
Am in preliminary planning stages. A friend with a giant suburban yard is thinking of going in on this with me, and another friend who is a crazy subsistence gardener who this year has no yard is also thinking of helping out, so we may have a little weird mini-collective going on. I have high hopes for this year.

And I need to be doing something outside of work that isn't roller derby, so, I think gardening is it. I had a pathetic garden this year and am dying to not repeat that awful experience. (I just didn't have time.)

Just posting a reminder--


Not dead. Just snowed under. Literally and figuratively.


I had something else to post here. Crap, what was it?
Ah yes.

Photos taken at a roller derby practice last week. See if you can find me!

I'm totally still researching porn, lest you think all my earlier posts were in vain.
But I just wanted to share this snippet I found. I think the website is www.sexysamantha38G.com or somesuch-- she's a woman in her late 30s-early40s who's been doing Big Boobs Porn for a while, and I just love her style. She's blond, brash, brazen, busty, and all-natural, lets herself be whatever weight she is, and apparently is just sincerely horny as all get-out. She blogs and writes on message boards and what have you.
But this isn't really about that. I just think this picture, from an affiliate blog trying to drive traffic to her site, is absolutely hysterical.

Not X-rated, so I'm just posting it:

Hmph. I'm not trying to start drama with (e:imk2), but her post about how great little boobies are is leaving me scratching my head. if little boobies are feminine, then what the hell are big boobies? Masculine?

I think boobies of all shapes and sizes are awesome. Some may be more awesome than others but I decline to categorize the awesome; it is something that must be judged on a case-by-case basis. Preferably after extensive viewing, measuring, fondling, squeezing, and related testing. That's really the only way to judge.

A related rant: all these bras whose catalogue copy says absolutely retarded things, such as, "and frilly little bows give it that feminine touch." I ASK YOU, what is UNfeminine about a motherfucking BRA??? They are not always pretty, not always cute or girly or delicate, but I ASK you, how are they NOT feminine? I have NEVER NEVER NEVER seen, nor can I even begin to conceptualize, a MASCULINE bra.

A site which I love in all other ways epitomizes this-- on a quick perusal I can't find any examples, but if you read it you'll surely find at least one catalog blurb or customer comment that makes this idiotic semantic irrelevancy.
But I'm linking to it mostly because I love the site, and for those of you who feel a bit put-down about being busty, I give to you, Bravissimo.

Because as those of us over a DD know, there's actually a tremendous amount of shame attached to large breasts, which I think I've ranted about before. On Halloween one of my roller derby cohorts' first comment, upon seeing my costume, was, "Oh my God, you need a reduction."

In her defense, she's a very petite woman who had a reduction herself when she was a 30JJ, and is now a 32DD. And when I expressed shock at her statement, she retracted and said well, I carried it well.
But she's not the first to say that.

I really don't think I need surgery to be less awesome than I am. I think I'll just diet and exercise, like I already am, and see what happens. And if they don't get any smaller, I'll make porn so I can afford new bras.
(Guess who grew out of her GG bras over Thanksgiving? Yeah not so much dieting and exercising happened this past weekend.)

If I wait until I have time to be poetic about this, I won't ever write it.

The time change sucks. I'm bummed that it's dark when I leave work.

But it does mean that as I drive down the 190 I get to see the city silhouetted against the last light in the sky, with all the lights on in the buildings like little jewels.

I almost got off at the wrong exit twice, because I was so busy admiring the view.

Watch the Channel 2 morning show on Wednesday between 6 and 7 am. The Queen City Roller Girls had two reporters come skate with us at practice Thursday night, and we even had them do a scrimmage with us. One of them got to jam against Pissi Longstocking, which was a particularly, well, exciting experience.
Set your alarms and mark your calendars. :)

I still don't know if I explained the phenomenon well in the comment threads I was in-- I hope (e:paul) didn't think I was implying he was crazy.
So here's an anecdotal case study from my job, about Multiple Chemical Sensitivities.


The other day I got a call from a customer who was very hard to talk to. I kind of get a lot of these. Since our product is widely held within the MCS community to be helpful to people, we get a lot of calls from people who have the condition. Most of them already know quite a lot about the product. (Others have very... interesting ideas about the product that I don't know where they got.)
Most of them also, as I have mentioned before, are crazy. It's gotten to the point that we can tell within the first moment of a call whether it's an MCS sufferer or not.
Their voices are usually high and breathy, whether they're male or female; their tone is quavering, unsteady, and demanding. Their sentences are often illogical. They usually start out the call with a tremulous demand to speak to someone technical. They make outrageous statements, often indicating that there has been some kind of victimization of them by either us or some other entity.
Usually, the call takes the form of a long, drawn-out story full of irrelevant details, in which they tell us the story of their chemical injury, something about their environment that eventually may reveal itself as a pertinent detail, something of how they have suffered, and then how our machine has let them down, one way or another.
Sometimes things take a turn, and instead of complaining how we've let them down, they praise us. That's always nice.
Often they must stop speaking to cough, sometimes for extended periods. They sometimes lose the thread of where they were going with this. Sometimes they weep.
Most of the time the long story is an obvious passive-aggressive ploy: they want us to say, "That's terrible! Have some free shit/ We'll give you all your money back despite our clearly-worded policy to the contrary that we know you know about." When we fail to respond in this expected manner, they repeat the story. It is often difficult to get them to come right out and say what they want from us. Alternatively, they will begin the story with their demand: "I want you to give me back all the money for the machine I bought three years ago not even directly from you," and then tell the story.
(They are not always women. I would say 9 out of 10 of them are women. The male MCS callers do not differ significantly in manner or content.)

So I got one of these calls on Tuesday. She was a real corker, totally incoherent, borderline delirious. She'd bought furniture, it had made her sick, so sick, it had taken her two days to figure out it was the chairs, these wing-back chairs, they were offgassing, it was in her den, oh my, oh my. So sick. Violently ill. Etc. Even after sending back the chairs, she still couldn't go into that room. It had been two weeks, she'd opened the window and put on a fan to ventilate the room, she'd put her air cleaner (one of ours) in there, but she still couldn't go in there.
It took me like half an hour to get enough sense out of her to realize she was asking whether it would be safe for her to use the machine of ours she'd put into that room in another room, or if she should replace the filter. The filter she was using was not our one that removes chemicals particularly, so I asked her, with a sinking feeling, whether she'd ever tried our chemical one.
She answered as I'd expected: "Yes, but it gave me a headache." Sometimes really really sensitive people can smell the carbon and "react" to it and get headaches etc. Which would be why she had the other filter, then.

I told her that she was reacting to such extremely low concentrations of the chemical that I really couldn't speak as to whether the machine would retain any-normally I'd say no, because it would be such a tiny amount nobody would notice it, but this lady... I told her she would probably be all right not to replace the filter, but that she shouldn't do any experiments or anything.

She called back three hours later. I didn't recognize her. She sounded calm, crisp, and professional. "When I called you before I was delirious," she said. "I don't remember precisely what we discussed. I had wanted to ask whether I should try that chemical-removing filter, because while I react badly to it, it's less bad than the formaldehyde from those chairs."
It was like a different person, but she had the same name and the facts of her case, once coherently presented, were roughly the same as the earlier whackjob. The voice was similar enough, I suppose, but no longer trembling or hesitant.
"My friends think I am crazy," she said grimly. "I know, and I cannot entirely blame them, but you can hear the difference. I know you don't know how I normally am, but this is me normal, and earlier, that was me after I opened the door to that room and let it air into the rest of the house. But I had had the window open and a fan going for three days, I thought there would be no possible way there could still be formaldehyde in that room. They were wing-back chairs with wooden legs-only the wooden legs touched the floor, which doesn't have a carpet. How could anything still be lingering in there? I couldn't smell anything." She laughed bitterly. "My friends ask when I'll get better. They ask what the doctor says. They ask if there's a pill I can take. They think I'm making this up. I assure you, if I were going to make something up, it would be less stupid than this."

I finally found it! I found the article I was referring to earlier.
I wasn't saying that antique porn was more intellectual, I was saying that the current revival in antique pornographic art forms (i.e. burlesque) was spearheaded by intellectuals.

And this article explains it better than I ever could.



"Burlesque revival: more nerdy than sexy?" reads the headline.

""The base level of IQ is decently high," said James Habacker, 42, owner of "The Slipper Room," a burlesque-themed New York club that hosts Weldon's salon. "Even in the last year the supertalented old school have really stepped it up.""

I had a lovely commute this morning. I know that's a weird thing to say. But I got in my car, which didn't have snow or frost on it, and drove down nice little back streets in North Buffalo, some with beautifully-tended gardens and some with rusty K-mart shopping carts poking out of the long grass, and got onto the 198 and drove past the park and the art gallery and the big beautiful church towers on Grant St., and went around the curve onto the 190 and there was the vista of the river on one side, the drawbridge and the Peace Bridge up behind it a black latticework of iron arches decorated here and there with idling trucks, and came around the bend to see downtown spread out to my left, skyscrapers with antique buildings nestled among the concrete, and then I was into the First Ward with the hulking old warehouses and brick factory buildings, until I reached my exit and drove over the railway overpass and a tangle of ductwork, a neatly-groomed lawn and pretty garden on one side and a chain-link fence with weeds growing through it on the other, and up to the huge brick behemoth of the factory where I work, sturdy and weatherbeaten.
I had good music on the iPod, and it just felt like it was the opening credits of a movie. The sky was dark and dramatic, light from the sunrise coming through banks of dark clouds in black and gray lined here and there with a strong pale silver light. I saw both a pickup truck with a plow on it and a bicyclist riding to work, at the same time; the leaves are changing but the grass is bright green and flowers are still blooming. It was a very Buffalo scene.