So I was pondering on how unfair it is that it hurts to be a woman. My cramps are better, though, so the outlook is a bit rosier at the moment, and now I'm wondering really how important it is.

Today, somewhat relatedly, I was having a discussion. It started with a discussion on aging, a story of someone who was 90 and healthy as a horse and then dropped dead from a stroke. "Wow," a coworker said, "90," as though that was an unheard-of age.
"My grandmother is 90," I said. "And not as healthy as a horse, but not imminently dying." She is slowly dying, I suppose; her osteoporosis-caused fractures (her spine is telescoping, and her sternum has fractured too) and arthritis have her in so much pain that she has to be heavily medicated, which is making her so confused she had to be put into a nursing home, and it's obvious she can't survive forever like this. A couple of years back the pain was getting to her and she said, "You know, I'm not tired of living, and mentally feel like I could just keep on keeping on, but my body's kind of falling apart and I'm a bit tired of that."
So she probably hasn't real super long for this world and I really ought to write her another letter-- I'm the world's worst correspondent, and I've tried calling her but she doesn't understand the free-long-distance aspect of cellphones and always chats you right off the phone in under three minutes-- but anyway. My point. 90 is old but it's actually pretty common in my family.
This grandmother, who we are discussing here, is a genealogist. She did a ton of research several decades back, knowing that her father came from a notable early New England family, and traced all kinds of family lineages.
The women of my family married at an average age of twenty-five. A few earlier, a lot later, many right around that age. Going back three hundred years. We have marriage data from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth centuries. Ann Denison was born in 1616, didn't marry until 1646 (do the math! Really!) had six kids (all of whom survived infancy), was giving birth well into her forties, and died in 1712. (She outlived her husband, who was a couple of years younger than her and only made it into his eighties.)
And nobody died young. The menfolk, some of 'em got killed and some of them had health issues. But the women? If they didn't die in childbed, they routinely lived into their late 80s and early 90s.

All of which is a long roundabout way of saying that I am trying super-hard to get plenty of calcium in my diet, and I'm not just doing roller derby for lolz, I'm also trying to get a lot of weight-bearing exercise to maintain bone density. Because man, if I am going to be in this body for sixty or seventy more years, it had better be sturdy. I'll take all the time I can get because I'm so far behind I'll never catch up, but I don't want to be rolling around totally bummed out and unable to get shit done because my damn body's falling apart.

Statistics from both sides of the family hint that as a female, I'll reach 90 easy, but the males in my family? Tend to crap out in their seventies. (Well, Great-Grandpa made it to 102, but Gramps on both sides both conked out before 60, so-- averages are not favorable!)

sushi-- "fuji tower" roll at fuji grill on maple

perfect cure for a shitty week

We have some sort of Animal. If it is quiet in the living room, occasionally you can hear a persistent irregular scratching noise. It's familiar to me; I grew up in an old farmhouse in the country. We had mice in the walls in the winter; in the summer they'd move back outside and do their thing. The myriad cats we had occasionally caught one or two, but mostly left them be. Mice don't hibernate; they're like squirrels and other small rodents, and hoard food that they live off during cold months, so they are active throughout the year, and even build tunnels in snow.
(Ominously, rats are also active all winter, and I saw one a couple of weeks ago, a few blocks away, as I drove home from practice one night: I glimpsed it very clearly as it skittered across the road, not hopping or jumping like a rabbit or squirrel, it was clearly a rat, probably seven inches long, with a long naked tail behind it and a running gait, not a lope. But I think a rat in our house would be much louder than this.)

So there's an Animal. I have heard it on and off for a while, but tonight Z finally heard it. His attention span is longer than mine, as are his problem-solving skills, so it is marginally more likely that he will do something about this than me. (Worth mentioning, he was also not raised as a hillbilly, so his not-minding-this-sort-of-thing instincts are likewise less-developed.)
For tonight, though, our solution has been to throw the cat up the stairs and hope that the mysterious scratching noises are why she has been so fascinated with the attic of late.

Saturday was roller derby bout, which = 6+ hours of being at a skating rink I already spend too much time at, doing various tiring things. (I wasn't skating, so at least there wasn't any real injury potential.) Sunday I had a scrimmage / practice, and then spent a bit over an hour with my team afterward; I was gone from 9:30am until 2pm, and skated for a bit under half that. Monday I worked 9-5, and then went to roller derby practice that night to try out for the travel team squad. That practice went from 8pm until a bit after 11, and was pretty hardcore. I had trouble unwinding afterward, as I sometimes do when I skate, so I didn't get to sleep until after 2am. Then I worked Tuesday 9-5, had to run a few errands, spent the whole day nursing a pinched nerve in my neck/shoulder/back, nearly killed the new girl with my teeth, collapsed into bed for a half-hour nap, then hauled myself out the door and went to practice again.
At practice I had to cope with not only the pinched nerve but also sore muscles from the previous accumulated two days' worth of lactic acid buildup, mostly in my lower back and arms (wtf? why arms?), but a little bit in my thighs as well. (My thighs are pretty fucking diesel if I do say so for myself; I rarely have sore thighs anymore, but it does happen sometimes.) So I couldn't turn my head well at all. Then blisters began forming in my insoles, I don't know why. (I was wearing socks I've skated in many times before, so that shouldn't have happened.) And then I started feeling all kinds of pain in my abs, and my thighs started getting really weak and sore...

By the end of practice I was crying, as I was so tired and so sore and so exhausted that I couldn't understand the directions we were being given in the drills. I don't think many people noticed. It was embarrassing. We skated right up until 10:30, and then I collapsed onto the floor in the middle of the rink in the fetal position hugging my helmet and waiting for the pain to stop.
Finally I realized that my thighs were weak and my abs killing me because .... oh yeah, those are cramps. Oh right, I'm female and it's been 28 days since I last did this.
DUH.
I figure this has been happening monthly for well in excess of 50% of my life by now, and I still don't have the hang of it.
It explained a lot. I'd been feeling like a wuss, but at that realization I dragged myself off the floor, took my skates off, went home, and crawled into a nice long hot bath and took a handful of ibuprofen.

I am full of simmering resentment at the fact that it is intrinsically painful to be female. I mean really!! Isn't sexism bad enough, isn't the systematic oppression of womankind for generations bad enough? No! We must be also stricken with exceedingly painful muscle spasms monthly, for days on end, for the sheer audacity of having been born with vaginas. Bah and fie.

So anyway. Tonight I am hell-bent on getting to bed before 9pm. I need it badly, as I am horridly sleep-deprived. But I had to mobl post with a picture of the sushi we were eating at the Fuji Grill on our way home from work, because, it was awesome. Awesome and just what I needed.

I have a dilemma and I need to consult the creative brains of (e:strip)pers.
I am bouting on March 7th. The team we are bouting against is possibly the funnest team in the league. (With the possible exception of my own-- we definitely have drafted a whole lotta fun in the last couple years.) Tonight they skated against another team, and for their warmup, they all wore fake adhesive moustaches.
They also have a thing where they almost always skate with underwear as outerwear. One of them skated tonight in hot pants that were metallic American Flag lam�. Which is awesome since her hind end is like a size 20, and fabulous. It's just this thing. They all wear panties with hilarious slogans.

I desperately must have the most festive underpants ever for the March 7th bout. But I am stumped. What on earth can I wear??? What on earth can top metallic American flag lam�?

So far my only idea is to embroider a moustache on the front of a pair of underpants, because I think that would be hilarious. I don't necessarily understand the moustache meme, but I love moustache rides as much as any red-blooded American woman (oh I do love them), so, it seems appropriate.
But what should I write on the back of them, in that case??

I bought a pair of red lacy ruffle panties to wear under my uniform (it is royal blue, with red and yellow in the logo), but Z pointed out, accurately, that it looked odd-- the uniform this year is a field hockey uniform, very sporty, very clean lines. Ruffle undies just look... sort of... out of place.
So what should I wear??

I don't know. I can buy something if it comes promptly, but I might have better luck making something. (Yes, I have sewed underpants before. They're not too terribly challenging, though my shape means I often have to add a drawstring because elastic is not enough to withstand the smooth curves of my chubbeh belleh in athletic motion.)

I don't know. Help me. Advise me, o (e:peeps).


oh p.s. I was totally gonna buy (e:zobar) the Google Phone for Valentine's Day even though we don't really celebrate V-Day that much but he totally beat me to it and bought it for himself. It's OK, I wouldn't have known what to do about our cellphone plans. The solution seems to be giving his old iPhone to his mom and putting her on my family plan. Well, why not, right?