Wind magic

This is a very poetic post. I want to make this clear in case my more rational readers suspect that I have completely taken leave of my senses. The purpose here is not to describe the world as it is; it is to describe how I see the world, and how changing the way I see the world can make a significant difference in my life.

Life makes a lot of demands on all of us. When life got very demanding for me, my response was usually to gather up all the energy I could manage and charge right through it. Looking back, I don't think that technique ever worked as well as I had hoped, and it's resulted in a few breakdowns along the way, but I could kind of get by doing it. I'd always seen myself as a bit of a wimp, but I kind of got by.

That is no longer true. My illness has diminished my energy reserves considerably. I'm not completely incapacitated, but there is no "charging through" anymore. I have often lamented that I can no longer live with the intensity I used to.

I began to form an image of myself as a being desperate for energy. I pictured myself clawing at the walls of my life, hoping the friction would create the tiniest spark I could use. I pictured myself nursing tiny flames of life-force that could be blown away at any moment, leaving me barely able to get out of bed for days at a time.

Recently I viewed a broadcast of an opera with a friend of mine. There I realized that for me, fire is a poor metaphor for my power, and I suspect it always has been; perhaps that is why I have never seen myself as powerful. I drew inspiration from the singers, whose power came from moving air through their bodies, and I have adjusted my outlook accordingly. When life is demanding, I imagine myself becoming lighter, until lifting a hand to a task seems less daunting. When I start to get tired, I focus on keeping myself coasting until I can rest. And when I rest, I truly rest; I try very hard to let my preoccupations float away for a moment.

I don't think turning away from fiery thinking and towards airy thinking has actually given me more energy, but I think it has helped me better utilize what I have. I am a being of wind!

Why do I blog?

This winter I set the goal of doing something creative every day. Because of energy constraints and my desire to do things for my family like help out with the housework and take care of my kids, I've had to modify that goal. But I'm still trying to do something creative a few times a week, because it helps me to keep fighting through my health problems. Setting constructive goals for myself makes my life seem a little less pathetic.

That's all well and good, but it doesn't explain why I don't just create for myself and keep it to myself. Why do I put my creations up on the internet for all to see? I don't think it's egotism or exhibitionism. Those are excellent reasons to start a blog; I just don't think they're my reasons. I think I post my creations on this page because I honestly feel like this page is the only thing I have left to offer the world. There's a kind of desperation at work here; I hope you don't mind.

Thanks for listening.

Call for feedback

All right, readers (all five of you), I have some heavy stuff to throw out here in the near future. It might be a bit of a downer, and I'm sorry about that. But look on the bright side - it's me writing, and I can never be too depressing for too long. It just doesn't seem to be in my nature. So take heart; either we'll get through this together, or you'll go find something else to read. Either way, the world will go on (I hope - I'm suddenly really grateful the fate of the world doesn't hang on my blogging!)

There's a lot I need to say, so there will be a lot of writing involved. What I want to know from you is, should I put it all out there in one fell blog post, or should I try to put my thoughts into little bundles and post them a bit at a time? I can see advantages and disadvantages to each approach. The "one fell post" approach would allow me write about some things I really don't want to write about and move on as quickly as possible, but it would also be a lot to read all at once. The "small bundle" approach might be easier for a reader to process, but it also might be harder for a reader to see the ultimate point - where I'm going with all of this. I might lose them in the process.

What do you think?

I'm a lucky woman!

I have to keep telling myself this, because after a two year leave of absence, I have been talking to my professors about withdrawing from the biochemistry graduate program. This has made today very difficult for me, so let's focus on something positive, shall we?

I have a sexy husband who not only goes to work every day while my invalid ass convalesces, but he also does great cooking shirtless!

Ok, now that I've shared this, I suppose it's only fair I share bikini-clad soup-making pictures of me.

Electronic music and constructing womanhood (and a little physics)

Anyone who gets to know me a little bit will discover that I'm a huge fan of VNV Nation. I drew heavily from my experiences with their music in writing about my fictional band Rupture Effect, when I wrote that their words have a way of describing everything about the world that thrills and disgusts me, as well as everything I hope for it. Their words can grind my heart into the dirt with their bitterness, then lift it - dust still falling from it like rain - with a call to stand up, endure, and help create a world worth living in. When I want to dramatically enhance my life experience - whether it's creating, celebrating, wallowing, contemplating, working, playing, whatever - I often turn to VNV Nation. What they have achieved is the reason anyone should strive to create art - they make life better. To make a long story short, I'm a huge fangirl.

(Quick side note: I posted a link to "The Concert" mostly to let people know or remind them that I'm very slowly writing a work of fiction. If you choose to read it, keep in mind that it's still pretty rough. I think it needs a serious overhaul.)

Anyone who gets to know me a little bit more will know that I also love singing. I enjoy listening to a good song as much as the next person, but I really enjoy it when I can sing along with a favorite. And lucky me, VNV Nation has some great songs for singing along! The down side is that VNV Nation singer Ronan Harris and I have different sets of pipes; namely, thanks to all the testosterone, his are pitched a little lower than mine. I have a deep enough voice that I can sing with him most of the time, but occasionally he hits a low note and loses me.

Physics to the rescue (which is only right, since physics got me into this predicament in the first place)! As it happens, if one wave has a frequency that is a power of two times that of another wave, those two waves have a special relationship. They still have different properties granted by their respective frequencies, but certain parts of their oscillations line up. What this means for sound waves is that if you play two such waves together it doesn't sound like crap, but neither does it have the complexity of two waves that create a pleasing interference pattern. In fact, the two waves sound very similar - so similar that musicians give them the same note name and call the frequency interval between them an octave. So yes, I could have just told you that I resolved this issue of vocal range by taking parts of VNV Nation's music "up an octave," but where would be the fun in that?

This solution was disappointing and unsatisfying. The power that infuses VNV Nation's music was gone. I sounded wimpy, and in a small way I cursed myself for being a woman.

At this point I want to state very clearly that I don't believe the female voice is incapable of being powerful. The opera world is full of powerful female voices! I'm not even saying that in a more modern context the female voice is incapable of being powerful. I'm not nearly as big a fan of Within Temptation as my husband is, but I still have to admire their power. What I'm saying is that most female singers express a different kind of power from what is expressed in the VNV Nation songs, and that's what I completely failed to capture.

As I tend to do when I run into an obstacle, I analyzed and intellectualized. While Ronan Harris's singing voice is very masculine, his poetic voice is not. At no point in listening to VNV Nation music do I feel excluded from the experience by being a woman. I never think to myself, "That was obviously written by a man," or, "You must need to be a man to 'get' this part." The words call out to my humanity, not my gender.

This realization gave me hope. If the power of VNV Nation resonates with me, it is in a sense my power as well. There should be a way I can claim it as such. That is now one of the challenges I have set for myself whenever I sing along to a VNV Nation song. The goal is not to sound exactly like Ronan Harris (because physics says no), but to capture that power with my voice - a woman's voice. And in the process, I am incorporating that power into my version of womanhood, just as it is part of Ronan Harris's version of manhood.

Six ways chronic fatigue syndrome seriously messes with my head

Physically, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a debilitating illness. Strength and stamina both suffer, and simple activities become exhausting. However, it is important to remember that a chronic illness also has profound effects on a person's mental and emotional well-being, and that is what I'm going to share with you today.

I'm going to use a very personal tone here because, while I'm sure many people with CFS can identify with what I'm going through, I don't want to assume that my experience is everyone's experience. I can only share what has happened to me and hope it's a step toward greater understanding.

1. CFS gives me "brain fog."

To begin with, some common symptoms of CFS are mental symptoms. When I start to get tired (and I get tired very easily), my concentration is one of the first things to suffer. I hunt for a word mid-sentence. I read the same passage over and over for five minutes, and it doesn't make any more sense the fiftieth time than it did the first time (being sick wouldn't be nearly as bad if I could have some marathon reading sessions!) I stare off into space for a few seconds and try to remember what I was doing. I get overwhelmed easily and sometimes have to excuse myself from very stimulating situations. Sometimes little things like a trip to the grocery store or dinner with my family qualify as "stimulating situations." Basically, my mind just doesn't handle all the crap life throws at it as well as it used to, and on top of that there are further complications (see everything else below).

2. CFS makes me second-guess all my decisions.

Managing CFS is a delicate balancing act. If I exert myself too much, I could exhaust myself and end up flat on my back for the next few days. On the other hand, if I don't keep trying to be as active as I can be I'll keep losing strength, and eventually I could be flat on my back for the rest of my life. That makes any decision to do anything (or not to do anything) a difficult one, and I always end up wondering if I'm doing the right thing. If I have a busy day, I wonder if I'm setting myself up for a crash. If I decide to take it easy, I wonder if I'm babying myself too much. I can't even trust my instincts, because my instincts are telling me to stay in bed all the time. I can't win.

3. CFS exacerbates my neuroses.

To help me take care of everything in my life that needs taking care of, I like to have little algorithms in place. When those algorithms start to break down, I get tense and edgy. Because I can work through it and continue to function, I don't think I have a diagnosable mental illness; however, I realize there are some things about how I deal with life that are not exactly "normal."

CFS exacerbates this in two ways. On one side, I have more to manage: diet, exercise, day-to-day activities, rest, etc. And because I don't completely trust my own ability to make decisions regarding my expenditure of energy (see #2), I find myself turning to these algorithms more and more. On the other side, the amount of energy I have on a given day is highly variable. Because I can't accurately predict what I'm going to be capable of, my algorithms also break down much more often. It becomes something of a vicious circle.

4. CFS makes me feel like I can't commit to anything.

Another consequence of not having a reliable energy reserve is that if I make plans for the future, I'm never sure if they're actually going to happen. It was a bold move on my part to announce on my various social medias that I was going to be posting this today; I could very easily have made a liar out of myself. Even when my husband casually asks if I can do him a favor, I'm very reluctant to positively answer yes. It's not that I don't want to help; I just don't know if I'm going to be able to help.

This is the big reason I don't have a job right now, and I don't consider myself capable of having one. I'm sure there are some jobs out there for which I am capable of completing each task I would be required to complete. The difficulty is that I probably wouldn't be able to complete them when the employer needs them, and that's a real problem.

In our society, it seems like a lot of our identities are wrapped up in commitments - jobs, relationships, social events, trading favors. Not being able to do those things as reliably as other people makes me wonder: as far as the rest of the world is concerned, who am I? Is my identity recognized as strongly as it used to be, or have I "faded" in other people's eyes?

5. CFS makes me want to throttle some basically well-meaning people.

I'm lucky enough to have a lot of understanding, supportive friends and family members who would never say something like this. However, I run into a lot of strangers and casual acquaintances who hear I have CFS and immediately compare it to some time when they were really tired. NO! My illness is nothing like that one time you had a busy day, and you felt "exhausted" afterwards! I know, because I used to have those days when I was healthy, and my current experience is unlike anything that has ever happened to me before.

I suppress my urge to throttle these people because I think their comments come from a well-meaning place. I think they're just trying to find a way to identify with me, or maybe they're trying to be understanding. Since those are noble impulses, I will give you guys a little hint: one of the most compassionate, supportive things my husband has ever done for me was to admit that he will never fully understand what I'm going through. Meditate upon this!

6. CFS makes me reluctant to discuss the emotional and mental toll it takes on me.

I wrote this post because I thought it was important. It's easy to read a list of symptoms for an illness, but it's harder to understand what they do to a person's mind. It was important to write, but it's also been very difficult. This illness has changed the way I look at the world, how I make decisions, and how I relate to people; that's not easy to admit. I also worry about contributing to the perception that this illness is "all in my head." I am definitely suffering from a medical condition, and it's very tempting to just keep the focus on that and away from how demoralizing it can all be. I feel very vulnerable right now, like I've opened myself up to the assumption that if I can just fix my attitude, everything else will be fine (a laughable assumption, because anyone who knows me will realize that attitude maintenance is something I'm working on all the time). So please, the next time you interact with someone with a chronic illness, prove these anxieties to be baseless.

I will try to make my next post less of a downer!

Double-vision

I think I have finally overcome one of the major hurdles to my writing: dealing with two conflicting ways that I look at the world. On the one hand, my world is this profound, poetic, deeply beautiful (or grotesque, depending on the situation) place, and I'll begin writing from that point of view. On the other hand, I have a strong sense of the absurd and ridiculous in the world. That part of me looks at what the poetic part of me has written and laughs, and laughs, and laughs.

I thought for a while that this perspective would doom me as a writer because I wouldn't be able to commit to a style. My sense of the absurd makes fun of me every time I try to plunge wholeheartedly into a romantic tone, but my sense of the poetic doesn't have the heart to put everything under the figurative scalpel. It's like looking at the world through red and blue 3D glasses. Simultaneously, nothing and everything is sacred.

I've recently come to realize that this could be an asset rather than a handicap. I can write something that has heart and soul, but is also grounded. I'm excited to see what happens.

Vampires and werewolves

As I thought about this story idea that's been incubating, it occurred to me that my protagonist might be turning into a vampire. Ok, fine, I've been rolling with the weird things that pop out of my brain for over thirty years now. I can work with this. Then I realized that werewolves might be showing up as well, and I was a little disappointed. C'mon, brain, you're more original than that!

That got me thinking, though: what is it about vampires and werewolves that so many creators put them together in stories? I think it's because they contrast each other so nicely. Vampires are monstrous because they aren't alive enough - cold, only able to experience the life force by stealing it from others. Werewolves are monstrous because in a way they're too alive - hot-blooded, primal, and visceral.

Cliche or no, I might just take this and play with it ...

Music that makes me feel creative

I slacked off yesterday and didn't do anything particularly creative; I played way too many computer games instead. However, while I was overindulging in computer games I did listen to a lot of music that often makes me feel very creative. Since that's the closest thing I did to achieving my daily goal, I think I'll share what music has that effect on me. There is just something about these particular songs that make me feel a little restless, like something extraordinary is lurking behind all the ordinary things in my life. It's an excellent feeling

I'm not (too) self-absorbed

When I first started this goal of doing something creative every day and posting the results, I was concerned that it was just a self-absorbed, self-indulgent thing to do. That's something you'll find out if you get to know me at all - I often analyze my own motives for doing things, and I analyze their impact on other people. Consequently, a lot of my sentences start with "I am/was concerned that ..."

This time, I was concerned that I was being self-absorbed and self-indulgent. It's still possible that I am (I don't think anyone is completely immune), but I've noticed something interesting as I remain committed to this goal. It makes me more interested in the projects other people are working on. If someone puts their new song up on the internet, I'm more likely to check it out now. I've been spending more time looking at the creative things my friends are doing. I've been reading more. Instead of becoming consumed by the next thing I'm going to put on display, I have instead begun looking beyond myself more. That was a pleasant surprise.

My science fiction double standard

I've thought about this problem I've been having with my insecurities getting in the way of my writing science fiction, and I've realized that it's even more comical that I originally thought. At first I was just amused because insecurity is amusing; it's so unnecessary and counterproductive, but we all have it to some extent. The only way not to be crippled by it is to recognize it and laugh at it. Then I started thinking about Dune by Frank Herbert. When I was reading Dune I just accepted the fact that some quirk of Paul Atreides's genetic makeup combined with the drug spice gave him prescient abilities, and I moved on to enjoy the hell out of that book. On the other hand, if I were going to write that novel I would be trying to figure out what how Paul's body would take in the information of the universe needed to be prescient, what collection of biomolecules would process that information, and what role the spice would play in that process. And even if I figured out all those things, I would be bracing myself for some hole to present itself.

That's my initial approach, even though I don't expect that kind of detail from most of the things I read. Yay double standards!

Science and science fiction (and insecurity)

My original plan for today was to play around with some ideas I have for a novel, but I got stuck. I would like for it to have some science fiction/fantasy elements in it, but I suddenly realized that I know a lot of people who are very knowledgeable about science who might very well be reading this. I started worrying about them making fun of me, and I locked up (which makes no sense, because they're all really nice people - that's why I communicate with them).

Now that I think about it, my insecurity is also the reason I hesitated to apply for grad school. I worried that I wouldn't have what it took. This is actually why I made it my goal to post something every day. There's no way I can possibly perfect something in a day, forcing me to get over my insecurity and just throw a little of myself out there. I haven't quite worked myself up to throwing my crazy imaginings out there, so today I'm throwing my insecurity out there instead. Enjoy!