This is My Father

He's coming out of surgery yesterday, and my mom meets him as they're rolling him to his room
He says, "Piece of cake!"
Mom says, "Oh, good, it was a piece of cake?"
He says, "No, I want a piece of cake!"

Like The Back of My Hand, part 2

I've always had an active fantasy life. (Not like that... well, yes, like that, too. But anyway.) In my head I've always been an athlete, a tall, competent, coordinated athlete who can dodge a bullet or take down a mugger with one punch or perform heroic leaps to catch falling babies. In reality, I'm a stocky, uncoordinated, awkward desk jockey with years of experience playing sports badly and staying out of trouble. But there was always the thought that if I won the lottery, took myself off to some mysterious island, and trained diligently for a couple of years, I could become the ass-kicking Amazon of my fantasies.

The hardest part of dealing with my joint issues is coming to terms with the fact that that is no longer true.

It's not a loss of something tangible. I'm not even all that upset about some of the nastier possible consequences of this incurable, degenerative condition. It's more like the "loss of hope" described here - I have a surprising amount of emotional energy invested in my athletic potential. Untangling that is taking a lot of time, and I find myself resisting it very strongly - it's much easier to just forge ahead and take my pills and go to my PT appointments and not think about it too hard. I don't know if that's healthy or not. It seems like something is sort of broken with my self-image, and I should probably figure out what's wrong so I can fix it, but I'm having trouble sitting still long enough.

Speaking of which, I'm going to continue musing in later posts.

Like the Back of My Hand

I have had mysterious joint pain since I was about fifteen. At first I just assumed that years of spraining my fingers playing goalie had made them sensitive to weather changes. My pediatrician, after the blood tests came back negative for anything interesting, said "yeah, lots of girls get growing pains, take some Advil and don't worry about it." So I didn't. The pain got worse, and the joints in my feet started to ache, too, but it still wasn't critical.

Moving to Texas definitely seemed to help - warmer weather and less rain made the bad patches less frequent and severe. So for several years I didn't think much about it at all. I asked one doctor about it when I had a chance, but all he wanted to know was what painkiller I was looking for. I wasn't, and shrugged and let it drop. Maybe I shouldn't have, but it still wasn't bad enough for me to worry about.

A year or so after that, I had one brief really bad spell - the pain had spread to all my joints, and was severe enough that I took a few days off work to stay in bed. Finally my roommate bullied me into going to a chiropractor, and that seemed to help, but I didn't much like the doctor and I definitely couldn't afford to go as often as he wanted me to. Fortunately, the pain dropped off pretty quickly after that and I was back to normal. From there on my bad spells were no worse than before, although they would now involve all of my joints.

This winter, everything changed. I went from a little achy to unable to function in about a day. I spent the holidays in a hot bath, and had to take a month off of karate because I just couldn't make it through. It was finally bad enough that I couldn't ignore it. I started googling, and found pictures like this. I got my insurance in order and found an internist.

After all of the bloodwork, tests, x-rays, and everything, the verdict is... I am blindingly healthy. Except, of course, for my swollen and painful joints. The rheumatologist is going with a verdict of rheumatoid arthritis, which seems likely enough. I'm currently on three different medications, seeing a physical therapist, and, for the moment, cutting wheat out of my diet to see if it has any effect at all. The pain and swelling still vary pretty widely week to week, but I'm doing much better than I was in January.

So that's the backstory. Looks like this one will be a multi-post effort - stay tuned.

Quick Survey on Twitter

If you use Twitter, check this out, will you? One question only!

50 Books Challenge

I don't actually have a comment at the moment about what's become known on Livejoural as Racefail '09 (although I may eventually) but one thing that came out of it was the challenge to read 50 books by people of color this year. That sounds like a good one to me, and I plan to participate. More comments once I have something of substance to report.

March Challenge

It's just so terribly convenient that everything is happening for me at the start of a month. I'm participating in a fitness challenge, among other things, and last summer I found it very helpful to babble in my blog about my diet and exercise challenges, so I may do more of that this month. My high school reunion is not going away just because I've had job and health issues - I really need to get back on track to achieve my goals. My plan has changed a little (see the challenge post for those details) but I have a hard date for the reunion - November 27th. It's still very much an achievable goal :)

Creators and the Internet

George R.R. Martin posted a wee rant about some of his fans' behavior here, and John Scalzi expanded on the topic here. I was going to comment directly in Scalzi's blog, but it ran long.

It seems like there are two issues here - there's being discontented with the pace of production of a product you're interested in, and then there's how customers express that discontent.

The first is entirely the consumer's right. I'd be terribly curious to see the actual sales impact of longer delays vs shorter delays on publishing books in a genre series - I doubt that info is public anywhere, but I have to wonder if there's a sweet spot of building audience anticipation vs. losing the audience's interest. I suspect there is, and I suspect that publishers know about it. If the wait's too long, people probably will get frustrated and get distracted and wander off.

Now, if you're frustrated about something, isn't it your inviolate right to go bitch about it on the internet? Isn't that what the internet is for? And people often don't moderate their tone or take others' feelings into account on the internet. (This should not be news to anyone.) And I have met few if any authors, artists, game designers - anyone who produces a creative product for public consumption - who handled public, vitriolic criticism well at all. So this kerfuffle is absolutely unsurprising to me.

It seems like writing, because it's entirely a one-man job, is a little more intensely affected by this phenomenon, because there's no one else for the audience to blame. There's no production team running behind, no art contracts that fell through, no unexpected hardware failures or bugs in the code. The process takes place entirely in the black box of an author's head. This probably makes criticism a lot more personal, and it makes long delays (and make no mistake, Mr. Martin's latest book is long delayed indeed) even more frustrating, because the consumer literally can't understand what's holding up the process, and so they seize on anything handy - Livejournal posting, convention appearances, whatever.

In this particular case, though, the problem is one that's all too common, and all too avoidable - failure to correctly set expectations. I love transparency on the part of my favorite authors, and I read several of their blogs regularly. But this book was previously, publicly estimated to be released in 2006, 2007, and 2008. It has not yet been published - it is not, by the author's own admission, even completed. Now, this isn't a moral failing - no one deliberately lied. But there's a damn good reason the MMO industry customarily overuses the word "soon" when talking about... anything, really. Things change, deadlines get missed, plans get updated, and explaining all that to a bunch of furious customers is not anyone's idea of a good time.

I'm not blaming anyone here, and I will wait patiently until all of my favorite authors produce more masterpieces out of their black boxes. But guys, please don't tease me? I'd rather get a lovely surprise than another disappointment as an estimated date slips by.