On Kids and Fandoms

So, Brynna is officially a geek-girl. Not that she would admit it. She's not quite there yet, but I have won. I declare victory over the powers of snobbishness and stupidity.

This weekend, we went to see Divergent. (It was wonderful and I loved it. Pretty true to the book, although the second half goes a little off the rails.) If you haven't read Divergent, I cannot recommend it enough. I also cannot recommend enough that you just stop after you read it. Insurgent is fine, but Allegiant is such a disappointment.

The best part of the movie was the previews, during which Brynna turned to me once and said, "That's The Giver. I've read that," and another time and said, "Is that a book? Am I allowed to read it?" The fact that she was more excited to read the previews than watch them says something deep and true about her.

She's reading a lot of dystopian stuff right now, which I consider SciFi. That's a victory in and of itself. And she loves fantasy. Possibly more than I do. She has no patience for romance and is pulling further and further away from fluffy pink book covers.

I think she's writing Fan Fic, too. She talks about it, but she hasn't let me read any. She's never read Fan Fic, as far as I know, but she wanted to write something about Percy Jackson and so I told her that you could do that sort of thing, you just couldn't sell it and it was called Fan Fic. That was that.

All of these are sufficiently geeky things. But it's not what she loves, but how she loves it that makes her a nerdlet. And watching her take up fandoms is a truly exciting thing for me. She loves Percy Jackson and Hunger Games and Divergent and so many other wonderful things. She wants to wear their t-shirts and jewelry, write their fan fic, live in their worlds. She jumps in head first and tries to find her own place there.

She assumes that everyone knows what she's talking about as she compares meals to local district cuisine and assigns people to factions or to god parents or to Hogwarts houses.

Watching her is like magic.

And this weekend, she was talking about Divergent and books she wanted to read and I realized that things have changed. Times, they have changed. When I was a kid, I loved things the way Brynna loves things. I loved GI Joe and A Wrinkle in Time and Narnia. I loved Eerie, Indiana and Twin Peaks*.

But I didn't feel free to do what Brynna does. I didn't feel free to wander around quoting and emulating and building my identity in terms of the things that spoke to me. I didn't get that until at least high school, and probably college. College was really when I realized that you could take a room full of people with one thing in common (The X-Files) and build a community. So, that, even though I've read A Wrinkle in Time about 20 times since I was eight years old, I still consider that group of kids packed into my dorm room to watch The X-Files to be my first fandom.

I am so amazed and proud that Brynna gets to live this life now. That she can love what she loves how she loves it and no one will stand in her way.

It's a brave, new world out there. And she doesn't even know she's a pioneer.

*Which I absolutely, positively was not supposed to be watching. Sorry, mom.

Driving Me to Distraction

So, pain.

Yeah.

Here's how it started: about two or three days a month, I had pain. Lots of pain. Then, those same days, instead of having lots of pain, I had soul-ripping apart pain. But nothing in between.

Then, about two months ago, I started having pain in between, but like little pain. Not so bad. Then, those days grew to be all the days and they are punctuated by the Pain Days, which are I don't know how often, but more often than two or three days out of month.

And today, my friends and colleagues is a Pain Day.

Yesterday, I was fine all day. More or less fine. I had an ache and a twinge, but manageable. Then I went home and almost as I was walking in the door, I felt my body being torn apart. Cleaved. Lacerated. Ripped asunder.

I made it through. Like parents do. I fed the kids, tucked everyone in bed and then curled up in my big red chair and pretended like nothing existed outside of the chair. The chair is the key to this working. I can't do it in bed. Or on the couch. The chair is my place when I feel bad.

I pulled a blanket over my lap and took two Benadryl, because I was out of Tylenol PM and someone once told me that it's just Tylenol and Benadryl. Eventually, I got tired enough to go to bed. But between, I couldn't do anything.

I couldn't sort laundry or read. I watched some TV, but I don't remember any of it. I'm not even 100% sure of what I watched.

And I thought I would sleep it off. But here I am. Pain Day 2.0.

And I can't concentrate on anything. Not on my work or even on writing this. You should see the spellcheck. I'll fix that before I hit publish, but I probably won't do anything else, because proofing takes concentration.

And I have miles to go before I sleep tonight. Grocery, kids, yadda-yadda.

And it's just made me think: I have had this pain for a year. It's been one year since I first started having pain days, the not so very bad ones. In less than a year, it's gone from zero to sixty on the 1-10 pain scale, and I cannot manage this mess. I mean, if I could, I'd rip my uterus out right this very second and stitch myself back together with stash yarn. And it's been a year. I know that some people have chronic pain from various things and it lasts years and years and you know...

I just want to give those people a puppy and a medal. Because how in the every-loving pants do you manage to get through one day and into the next? Let alone have a career and raise kids and write books and have people over and volunteer. How? Because right now, right this second, all I want to do is throw my head back and scream until my lungs hurt as bad as my abdomen. I want my screams to rip my throat raw and crack open the corners of my mouth.

Because then I could be distracted away from this pain, instead of by it. Because then, I could point to something and say "This is what is wrong. I am not making this up. It really hurts just as bad as it looks."

And tomorrow, I will be back to the nagging sensation of discomfort. I hope. And all this will seem so silly and I'll be glad I went to the grocery and didn't wait until the weekend. Tomorrow, I'll hold my head up and I'll laugh and everything will be fine. Just as fine as it can be.

I hope.

Because, I've seen the pain grow and I guess that one of my biggest fears is that it's just going to keep growing and someday and then tomorrow will just be another today.

*Less than 30 days until the surgery that makes this go away forever. Less than 30 days. Even if they are all like today, I can survive 30 of them, right?

Five Things on Friday: Life Hack Edition

So, over the past couple of weeks, I have discovered several important lessons. I thought I would share some of them with you, to save you the trouble that I've been through.

Because I'm kind like that.

Five Quick Life Hacks

1. Never name a blog post "Master Debater" because you think it's funny. No one else will think it's that funny, but every spam bot in the realm will pick up on it and it will be a practically full time job to click over and make sure that none of them got through the filters.

2. Do not teach yourself to knit hours after having an IV in your hand. Although you may be successful, all that motion in your hand that you are not used to will make your IV site swell up like a knot and get really sore. You'll get to the point where you can barely move your hand and it will take literally weeks for the tenderness to go away. In that time, you will forget how to knit and have to start all over.

3. Going to the grocery physical labor. You may not think so, but there is a lot of bending over and picking things up and pushing heavy things around. Remember this in the days after surgery.

4. Do not forget to let the dog out before you go to work. Just don't. Trust me on this one.

5. Do not help your child make school projects out of air-dry clay. The night before they are due, the clay will crack, the whole project will fall apart in spectacular fashion and you'll end up sending your child to bed and doing it for them because all their hard work was wasted. They will, however, get 100% on the project.

Have you learned any valuable life lessons recently?

Let me Catch You Up

They are black and pink. In other words, they match my hair.

Dja miss me?

I've been, um... away. Let's go with that. So, here's what you missed:

• I had surgery. I got stabbed in the stomach a couple of times with a laser beam, which is cool in a living in the future kind of way, but totally uncool in the way that it broke my 35 year no stitches streak. This was about the pain thing I talked about a while ago and what they found was bad news, but not very bad news.
• The good news is everything is perfectly benign and I could live the rest of my life in excruciating pain and be totally okay, because it's not serious. 
• The bad news is that if I don't want to live the rest of my life in excruciating pain, I'm going to have to go ahead and have a couple of organs yanked out of my body. This will be done with a combination of laser beams and robots. I am totally living in the future. Once upon a time surgery performed with lasers and robots was strictly Science Fiction. Now it just looks like really scary Science Fiction.
• I bit the bullet and got glasses. Real ones, not readers. The readers made me dizzy. These make it hard to drive after dark. Considering that thanks to daylight savings* I am doing most of my driving in the dark, this has proven to be challenging. Someone with glasses tell me that that lens flare thing that headlights do will get better.
• I gave up Coke for Lent for three days. Then, my pastor mentioned giving up self-criticism and I decided that I needed a life without self-criticism more than I needed a life without Coke. I'm pretty much failing at this too, but I'm trying really hard.
• Brynna got glasses too. Whereas I am "slightly" far-sighted, Brynna is "really, very" near-sighted and also has astigmatism. None of this is surprising because that's exactly what's wrong with her dad's vision and he got glasses in the second grade, so she's actually held out longer than I suspected. 
• I taught myself how to knit. Me and YouTube make a pretty deadly pair. I'm not good at it or anything, but I am capable. This weekend, I'm going to start my first ever knitting pattern, so watch out for that. 
• Between recovery, busy life, depression and pain, my house looks like no one lives there but the dog. The dog has excellent taste in furnishings, but is a lousy housekeeper. I was standing in my kitchen last night at 10:00, when I finally got home,** and I realized that I will be cleaning for the next two weeks straight. It's terrifying.

*You can thank me whenever for not writing my annual bitching-about-daylight-savings-post.

**Shh. Don't tell my kids' teachers. Really, we are almost always home before bedtime. Last night was a weird, weird fluke.