The Importance of Names

My name is Jessica.

Shakespeare invented it for a Jewish girl in A Merchant of Venice. When I was fifteen I received the Oxford Complete Works from my 20 year old boyfriend for Christmas. I relished the texture of every syllable. Because I am a touch/feelings=color, and pain=color synesthete, texture is very important to me. If I could perceive colors with words, the play would be gold. Here's why:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

I read it cover to cover, but there are only two plays I've paid much attention to since: A Merchant of Venice (of course) and The Taming of the Shrew. The one which made my name is important to me because names are so important, too. My interest in the other is purely didactic. Shrew is a name I take for myself. But I tame myself, now. I do not need to be tamed. Maybe I, for a woman, for a man, for a human being or cat or carbon based life form, have an unusual ability to compartmentalize my feelings. This has broken the hearts of nice boys who liked me, because though I am kind, I have no intention of emotionally investing in anyone nice. If you lined all of my love interests up in a row, I would pick the mentally diseased drug addict over the super nice doctoral candidate every time. If you knew my narrative you, like I, would see the evidence of this story arc. It re-makes itself over and over again. I don't have feelings for nice guys. Nice guys are my brothers, and to kiss them is incestuous. There are a great number of good reasons for this behavior, which is why I intend to separate my love interests from my life interests for as long as I can bear...for the sake of my daughters, who have not yet been victims in their childhoods. Who must never be victims if I am to reverse the cycle in of my history in their lives. They will never see Mama reject the right choice. Because they must grow to make right choices. So Mama. Shrew. Bitch. INFP. Woman Who Does Not Care to Let You Know She's Probably Got A One Up in the IQ Department. These are names I accept for myself. But I am still kind. I am still sweet-natured, too. I'm a nice single mom. But I do not intend to get lonely about it.

But back to names.

High school is a confusing place for a girl from a trailer park who felt victimized by "ability grouping." There were not people from my class in said ability group, or if there were, there were very few. I was the president of a few clubs there, and an over-achiever in areas which interested me. I do not, however, test well. I only made a 30 on the ACT. I say "only" because, while a 30 is a perfectly acceptable score, the scores I made on the Language Mechanics and Reading Comprehension sections were almost perfect. There was more than a ten point spread between those scores and the score on the Science section. I do not have a difficult time understanding science, if it is interesting. The problem is, I find science just about as interesting as doorknobs.

When I made this score, my high school principal suddenly became incredibly interested in what I was doing with my life. I was just a weird poet-actress-Christian girl who he probably thought was on drugs. But after that score, he started calling me Jess. Not Jes, as my friends would have known because my friends knew my disdain for superfluous letters, but Jess. Jess Generic. Jess. Generic Jess. He did not ask for my permission to do this. He simply started calling me Jess. It drove me crazy. Not literal crazy, but a little crazy. Jessica is a very common name, Jess is a very common diminutive. But I didn't want to be considered common, because I knew I was not. I was only as common as I let myself be, and those antisocial personality traits made me disdain him even more for not accepting me until I had over-achieved.

My maiden name starts with a B. I share this name with my mother and two of my siblings. The culture of the town in which I grew up meant that most people knew my mother was "crazy." And crazy is such a dirty, dirty word. She is not crazy. She suffers from a chemical imbalance in her brain which causes her to make poor decisions. For most people, this can be remedied with a simple combination of medications. For my mother, who is what they call "treatment resistant," these medications do not always work. She has also had electro-convulsive therapy and currently has a Vagus Nerve Stimulator, which is a fancy pacemaker for her brain.

Anyway, when my mother divorce this B fellow, she fell apart. He married his high school sweetheart. They publicly humiliated her at football games. My mother became a whispered wisp of womanhood. A rumor. A pariah. I am not my mother, and I will not be those things. After I got married to Mr. W., I kept my weird last name. According to the federal government, my last name is still B. When I registered for a tax ID number for my record store, they made me hyphenate because my W name had become something like an alias. So I have been a hyphen for years. Now that I am getting divorced, I'm making it official. My degree will say B-W.

I used to write under B-W. My friend Russell gave me a nickname. Be-dub. I will continue to use B-W until I die, because it is a name I have chosen for myself. My ex-stepdaddy might have been a sack of shit, but my siblings are not. My ex-husband might have done many, many things wrong, but his stepdaddy did not, and neither have my daughters. So names, names are a complex system of symbology. Names are semiotics for beginners. I am Jessica B-W to those who don't know me well enough to call me Jes. Be-Dub. Or Jes Be-dub. But if you are reading this from a facebook link, you have seen more sources of shame than I wish you had, and for that reason, you may call me whatever you like.

Except crazy, behind my back.

Or bastard, to my face.

Though jokes are funny when they're funny. To my face, please. That's all I ask.

Because those are not names I have selected, and names can hurt the feelings of any carbon-based life form--no matter how profoundly compartmentalized her feelings may be.

What the Hell Happened.

December 11, 2002: I unwittingly marry a young philosopher/musician who just happens to have the same chronic degenerative mental illness as my mother. I will not name it, but if you know, you know. I don't want to stigmatize him since my daughters have the genetic potential for that same disease. With treatment, they are fine. Like a diabetic on insulin.

2003: No one loves me like him.

2004: Child One is born.

2005: Child Two is born.

2006: Marriage Counseling.

2007: I train myself to stop having panic attacks without the aid of mental health professionals or meds.

2008-2009: I don't even want to talk about it. He gets a degree in the end. I get a job at a bank where I am undervalued and miserable.

October 23, 2008: Unnameable Event.

October 24, 2008: Youngest Child's birthday party.

2010: I go back to school.

Present Day

January & February 2011: SICK! So, so sick. Losing weight and blood and no one knows what's happening to me.

March 14, 2011: I am diagnosed with severe Ulcerative (pan-)Colitis. A diagnosis of arthritis (large joints and ankylosing spondilitis) follows shortly after.

March 15, 2011: I turn 27.

March-April 2011: Antibiotics + Steroids.

May 2011: I take a job working retail because my medical issue has caused my beautiful savings account to be depleted. I am still not in remission and the combined stress of financial worry plus working a retail job with nasty arthritis causes the flare to worsen, causing more extreme rapid weight loss.

June 2011: The rapid weight loss causes "gallbladder sludge" to back into my pancreas, causing pancreatitis.

July 2011: I am still recovering from pancreatitis. My husband betrays my trust in an extreme manner because he also has a chronic degenerative disease (in his brain), but I am forced to stay with him anyway because I am too weak to make my own sandwiches and I have been sick so long I'm terrified of death. His goddamned mother who has approximately the sense of a ham bone tries to have him kick me out of my own house AFTER she has been made aware of the history of abuse which took place before he was medicated...all over a panic attack brought on by pleurisy.

I am put on an SSRI to help me cope with the chronic pain since NSAIDs might cause my colon to ulcerate, and because my whole life is falling apart.

August 2011: I am strong enough to walk around, and I return to school. My husband's job is too stressful for him and he has a "flare" of his own.

September-October 2011: My third remission hangs in the balance because of my fear of losing the life I had finally planned for myself (daughters, home, supermom+eventual PhD) due to his instability.

November 2011:

We file for bankruptcy because of the pancreatitis.

Chronic joint pain is terrible, the SSRI is upped to 60 mg. I can walk around again. I become euphoric about still being alive.

Husband quits his teaching job.

I realize he will never be stable and decide to leave him as soon as I am financially able.

I do not yet realize that the reason for his instability is that I've treated him like a child for the duration of his adult life. But that's true too.

My UC begins to flare. AGAIN. I drop weight very rapidly.

I enter a "Manic Episode" because of the SSRI and electrolyte imbalance.

I begin to think the stress of his disease will kill me if I don't leave him right away.

He tries to intimidate me (as per usual when I try to leave).

11-16: I file a protection order against him so he will not convince me to come back to him.

After having to own the shame of my marriage, I decide to own the shame of my childhood abuses. This is because I have entered a "Manic Episode."

I decide I'm not afraid of being crazy anymore.

I stop eating.

I stop sleeping.

The flare is really, very bad.

I forget to take my SSRI. Abruptly.

I become psychotic. (But I prefer to think of it as a nervous breakdown.)

I humiliate myself on facebook and at school.

11-23: I am arrested. I am kept under psych evaluation for six days in a box with no light switch, no mattress, no food I can eat, and no contact with anyone. I do not even know my own name when I get out.

My children are taken by DHS because I am incapacitated and the protection order tells the truth about my marriage...but also because senseless hambones and their children couldn't keep their damn mouths shut and leave the children where they were.

November30-December 18: I am involuntarily committed.

My husband files for sole custody and for me to have SUPERVISED visitation with my own daughters, and gets an ex parte order to that effect.

I am diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and "both dependent and antisocial characteristics." It turns out I'm not a narcissist after all. I did meet a real one though.

Recovering from psychosis is like if you shattered your brain and must make a mosaic from the tiles. My personality took a long time to come all the way back. BUT IT'S BACK NOW! YAY! I can be MEAN! AND SWEET! And funny, too....at the same time if I want. My life after psychosis will be better if I can know my narrative and hold my head up under the oppressive weight of the shame I now feel.

December 20: I regain physical custody of the children.

I am neither manic nor psychotic now, and I do not intend to defame anyone. Mental illness is like a heart condition, and my daughters, should they suffer it, will know their mother is not ashamed of her brain....because it's a twisted gnarly tree...but it can make some pretty flowers, can't it?

The parties involved know their culpability, who deserves which names they have been called, and that by discussing (and not discussing) the medical conditions of involved parties, I have not breached the trust two parents must have if they are to raise well-adjusted children. The divorce will be virtually uncontested, I get the house and primary custody of the girls. I will probably also get to stay in school, even. BUT OH! how I wish my stupid joint pain would lay off so I could go out into the world and bring home my own bacon.

Having said all that, it was probably out of line to call her a ham bone. BUT! No one will ever call me white trash again. And, because I have lived a life confronting the reality of mental illness in my own mother, I will be careful to keep my own diagnosis to myself and not try to apply labels to people I don't understand properly. I will never ever ever threaten suicide on facebook where my granddaughters can read it...but I will sit quietly to wait for the next byronic hero to wander by so I can break his poor heart while pursuing my terminal degree with help from those who love me and hate from those who don't.

Seeeee....still an atheist, too. It's hard to tell my personality from my diseases, huh? Try combining that shit with serious introspection and you've got some gnarly poetliness on your hands, whether or not there is actual poetry about it. ;-)

Why oh why then must I pull all this out into the open in this irrational manner, when I should simply stay home and get depressed about how wounded I feel that all these things have happened in the same year?

...because I'm Jessica frakking Weisenberg. I have two exquisite daughters. I live without shame. I will not be a rumor or a whispered wisp of womanhood. I have not yet failed when I could work hard to succeed. That's why.

OH! and also....I can delete this entire blog whenever I want. I can edit, rearrange, and sing old songs with new, exquisite verses. I am unemployed and not currently applying to grad schools. So, for the very first time in my entire life, I am a free woman. I no longer carry the weight of the world on my shoulders...because no one's fucking dying for a long, long time...and my various diseases all respond to the weight I put on myself.

I'm currently in remission number four.

On Being Fat

Here's the end of my Fat Studies paper on The Silence of the Lambs:

"To be a “big, fat person,” then, is to be simultaneously impotent and un-feminine, it is to only be worthy of male attention when on display as a mutilated victim. To be fat is to be alone in the pit with no hope and no power. To be fat is to have a mother who will not describe your body. To be fat is to be coveted for your skin and not your whole self. To be fat is to be an inappropriate embodiment of womanhood, to be rescued from your squalid pit by a sexually attractive functioning subject of the patriarchal structure. To be fat is to be the fatted lamb, bleating in a pit, “Fuck you! You bitch!” while the more appropriate woman stumbles around in the dark."

This is not what it was to me to be fat. Being fat was the avoidance of the male gaze. It was wearing whatever clothes I wanted without worrying about the wrong message. It was to be considered jolly, sweet, non-threatening, friendly, maternal, soft, loving, wise--and to be taken for my merits instead of my assets. It was to be valued for my cleverness and not my measurements. I do not care if I am beautiful. I recognize that I have been called that word many times. But I will never identify as beautiful, and though I recognize beauty in the bone structures and color schemes of the women in my life, I do not value it. It is either the possession of something not worked for or it is the preference of straightening irons and surgery over books and comfort. And very often, it is the performance of self-loathing.

I didn't realize that self-loathing part until after the Disease deflated my body a bit. I loved my rotund mounds of flesh. I hated the sagging skin left behind by rapid weight loss. I bought LOTS of lotion. And belts for my funny, high, wasp-waist. This is because I needed self-soothing to deal with the dreadful new body. Since things have evened out a bit, I love my body again. It is soft, after all. It has mass and takes up space. It is the home of my brain.

I still identify as a fat girl. Yesterday, though, I took a picture of myself that made me realize once I'm down one more dress size, that fat-girl identity will be wrenched away from me. I do not know how well I will do without it. AND, now that I can shop in the Misses department in earnest, I find that the male gaze is turning my direction again. It burns my flesh. I cannot be sweet to strangers in the supermarket anymore, because there is a gap in the perception of that sweetness. I think I am only kind. Men (and sometimes, their wives) think I am only becoming. I really ought to make myself a t-shirt that reads "You and I will get along a lot better if you'll just think of me as one of the guys."I would wear it with tights, a pencil skirt, and a sweater. And then I could help single redneck stranger-men pick out hairbows for their daughters without being asked for my phone number.

Pathos, Pain, and Percentages (Or, My Masochistic Machismo)

I don't know how the cat knows. Maybe I start to smell weird. Maybe he's as good at reading my face as my grandmama is. Whatever cat hoodoo he's using to divine my pain level, it's incredibly accurate. He adds his weight to the heating pad. He licks my worst ankle. I am grateful for his attention.

To make a long story very short, I've condensed this summer's events into a numbered list:

1. I gave myself pancreatitis this summer because I stopped eating.

2. I stopped eating because of a particularly nasty flare of my Ulcerative Colitis.

3. The UC flare was caused by an urinary tract infection.

4. The doctor who found the UTI neglected to run a full blood panel and sent me home with pancreatitis to writhe on my couch with the most painful condition a human can stand for a full week before my mother forced me to go to a different ER.

Now that we're caught up, I need to tell you what the other not-incompetent ER doc told me, "I know you're in a lot of pain, but some people with Ulcerative Colitis present this way while flaring." If I had been able to draw a deep enough breath, I would have laughed in his face.

Just to make sure we're all on the same page, I will tell you what Ulcerative Colitis is. I will not discuss the more unpleasant symptoms. If you want to be thoroughly grossed out, google it. Ulcerative Colitis is an autoimmune disease which effects the colon, joints, eyes, and less frequently, the liver and skin.

What that means: my immune system is homicidal. It interprets the good bacteria and food inside my large intestine as an invasion force. So, like any strong, healthy immune system, it bombards the living shit out of the invader until the invader backs the fuck off. The problem is, I need food and bacteria to live. In its war on those things, it creates millions of open sores along the full length of my intestine. In addition to this joyous circumstance, my super-strong-yet-entirely-insane immune system also attacks my joints and causes my eyes to swell. Some days I can barely wear shoes and can't manage my contacts at all.

Now that we all understand the science, let me tell you what it feels like:

Take an empty sausage casing. Stick a million razor blades through it. Twist.

Ask your best friend to jump up and down on your ankles.

Poke yourself in the eye.

Better yet:Acquire road rash. Scrub road rash with steel wool. Then give yourself epic food poisoning.

Now you understand what it's like every time I eat during a flare.

And that's all pain I can put into words. The pain of pancreatitis isn't like that. It is unspeakable. It is death in your belly. It is boiling alive in acid. It eats you up.

The problem with my face is that it's too expressive. My instructors always know when I am thinking something. If I know I am going to make a face, I can control it. I walk around most of the time pretending it doesn't hurt, that I'm just an average 27 year old woman. I actively think, "When you hurt, you show the tension in your eyes first. Smiling creates similar lines. Smile and people won't notice." This works out most of the time. It takes a discerning eye to see the pain on my face. My grandmama can always see it. My friend Kara, with her artist's eye, can see it sometimes too.

I go through a lot of trouble to carry on as if things are normal. Because I don't want to talk about what it's really like. Because I want to win. Because I want to understand myself as someone who is strong no matter what. Because I despise weakness--most of all, in myself.

Tuesday my doctor asked me what percentage of the time I spend in some kind of pain when I'm flaring. It never occurred to me to consider it in those terms. But there was a time before the pain, when I never hurt at all. Now the pain is a person who lives inside my body. I am not without her, and she is never far from me.When I asked my doctor what I could do to help my left ankle, which is by far the worst of my joints, she told me that my colon and my joints are "wound up tight like a ball of snakes." My tattoo nearly tingled, because those snakes are just going to keep eating each other up until I die. And I deceived myself if I ever thought any different. I just need to smile through it, give myself a chance to value my own strength, keep my life stress free, and eat plenty of calories--even when every bite becomes a sacrificial gesture on behalf of my daughters. Because food is not my enemy. Anorexia is. And right now, she's eating me alive.

I can't let her win. I can't retreat to my heating pad and sleep through the flare. I must stay up to stay alive.

Why I NEED a New Tattoo, in 4,000 Words or Less

If you're just joining us on DiseaseTalk with Denise Disease, we here at Set Your Jaw recommend that you reference these three posts:

"Well, fuck."

*various words on why I hate my body*

"My Tattoos, Myself"

In fact, it would serve you well to read all posts from March 2011. There's some interesting back story there, anyway.

Jessica Weisenberg is a sensible girl. It's true. My Aunt Ruth told me so, and she never lies. Jessica does not spend money on herself frivolously. She turns in her homework on time and she braids her daughters' hair before bed so it won't tangle by morning. She is the picture of femininity because self sacrifice is the apex of the feminine existence.

Okay, maybe none of that is true. Certainly, that last bit is not. 

Lately I find myself to be quite a bit less pragmatic than usual. Instead of buying myself clothes that fit, for example, I bought an iPad and a new tattoo. Why? Well for one thing, I'm still losing weight. Secondly, iPads and tattoos are forever and frankly, I don't care enough about bodies to keep clothes that long. Thirdly, we're all going to die, people. Your family, friends and children, they will die. This is true. I've been a little closer to it than I hope most of you have, and let me tell you: there's nothing there but nothingness, so you best enter into nothing with the best, least regretful self you can manage.

The tattoo I am getting is AURYN from The Neverending Story. I'm going to go against my nature and tell you why in as explicit terms as I can bear:

1. AURYN, the thing itself

As a child I knew I was, for lack of a better term, Other. I was a bastard, a girl, very smart, very poor, imaginative, outspoken, and I had many, many reasons to be precocious in ways I wish no child ever had to be precocious. I watched The Neverending Story approximately 15,000 times. Because the fantasy appealed to me as means of escape.

Later, when I began to realize I would be a poet, my greatest fear became The Nothing. I have many references to Nothing in my notebook. Sartre is responsible for some of them. Sebastian is responsible for the rest.

I began to rekindle my admiration for AURYN wholeheartedly when I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, because of the concept of eating ones' inverse, which I equated with microscopic cells eating my full vibrant life--but also because is an infinity symbol, ouroboros and pisces all rolled into one. 

2. The Earthling Symbol for Everything

Many years ago, I was introduced to a girl who said, "You must be the infinite Miss Jessica." At least, that's what I thought she said. It is entirely possible that she said "infamous." Infamous would be more likely. Nonetheless, I heard Infinite. 

At the time, I was 18, at a creative low point but rapidly racking up experience points. I realized, whether or not it was true, that I considered myself infinite. I was sure the universe provided infinite substantive amusement. I was sure I would never run out of thoughts. I was sure I would never run out of words. Then I wasn't 18 anymore. And I was scared I'd lose my infinite qualities. I began to think of every day of my assimilation into adulthood and the middle class as a sanitation process, whereby the bacteria which provided my access to the Force was bleached from my being.

I am not worried about that now. My deep brain is full enough of gender/class/race that I know I'll always have one thing or another to consider and many things to make from each consideration. So maybe I am infinite after all.

2. The Ouroboros

If you didn't already know, the ouroboros is an ancient alchemy symbol which represents infinite creation and destruction, much in the same way my cells will infinitely keep destroying each other and recreating themselves. Really, there are too many things to say about this guy. So, I'll let Carl Jung do it:

The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

The Ouroboros has been said to have a meaning of infinity or wholeness. In the age-old image of the Ouroboros lies the thought of devouring oneself and turning oneself into a circulatory process, for it was clear to the more astute alchemists that the prima materia of the art was man himself.

The Ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow. This ‘feed-back’ process is at the same time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. He symbolizes the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and he therefore constitutes the secret of the prima materia which unquestionably stems from man’s unconscious.

4. Pisces

Yes, my birthday does fall on the ides of March. Yes, that does technically make me a pisces. No, I don't believe in astrology. Because I believe astrology, like all other beliefs outside of my own belief system, is bullshit. Please, let's not pretend any other kind of believer (or cynic) thinks differently about their beliefs vs. other beliefs. If it weren't bullshit to them, they'd believe that thing and not the other thing.

I do, however, believe in personalities. As for myself, I am an INFP. What astrological sign corresponds to the INFP? Why, Pisces, of course.

In addition to the COINCIDENCE that my personality lines up with my sun sign, (and I cannot stress the word COINCIDENCE enough,) I identify strongly with the duality of pisces.  You see, the fish are supposed to be swimming in a circle of fantasy/reality, which is what I am doing all the time: Bookkeeper Jessica -->Arty Jessica --> Mama Jessica --> Poet Jessica --> Filial Piety Jessica --> Least Possible Scenario Jessica --> Pragmatic Jessica --> English Major Jessica--> White Trash Jessica --> Masquerading as Middle Class Jessica--> PTA Jessica--> Chanteuse Jessica...ad. infinitum. Frankly, it's exhausting. But I've come to the point now where I realize that most of us can only ever hope to be self aware versions of the stereotypes we always were but thought we weren't. 

So yes, a tattoo. To symbolize my defeat over the HellSummer. To tell myself I've accepted my disease and it's time to move on from letting it ruin my life. To remind myself that I am strong. To symbolize that however much time I spend eating myself, I am recreating myself in equal proportion. 

In ten or fifteen years, after I get cancer, lose my colon, and I become okay with all of that, I will get another tattoo. It will be this:

Because then I will have become a master of death.

The Apotheosis of Eve & Her Sister

They confer in secret sister syllables,

But Lilith will say it aloud, if I ask.

She will say that God never made green,

That green is a wavelength. Green is a frequency.

Eve will laugh.

But I do not ask.

When we get home, Eve will take my face

In her hands and tell me I'm her favorite mama.

I will stare into her eyes and see her there,

As she was and is and is to come.

I become Theotokos.

They become mothers of all that I have thought,

The jewel-toned bearers of what I dreamt,

As we, the three, hovered over the waters.

Yes. It was like this when the world was made.

"There's no glitter in the gutter. There's no Twilight Galaxy."

I typed a whole post. It was really good. But the internest hates me. So I'm replacing it with a crappy post. Sorry guys.

First, let's get caught up...

June:
Pancreatitis. (It's the most painful thing ever. No...really, ask your doctor.)
Mother Bitch of All Urinary Tract Infections. (Took six bags of IV antibiotics and three oral doses of anti-Bs to kill the Bitch.)
Seriously devastating Ulcerative Colitis flare.
An additional twenty pounds of weight loss, bringing my total weight loss since the end of January to almost 60 pounds.
A month in bed.
Serious muscle atrophy.
Crippling depression.
Problems in my personal life that I don't want to talk about. Ever.

July:
Got out of bed.
Got myself an antidepressant.
Got myself some awesome insomnia as a side effect.
Got sore walking around my house.
Getting stronger everyday.
I hate my new New Edgar Suit even worse than my old New Edgar Suit. I have batwings, which is not as cool as it sounds. Put me in a knee length belted black dress and I feel pretty good about my body. The rest of the time, I am miserably self conscious.
My pancreas still feels like it went a couple of rounds with George Foreman, Sr. AND his grill. This is what happens when an organ tries to dissolve itself in acid.
My Ulcerative Colitis is in remission, for the first time ever.
Because of the remission, despite the residual pancreatic pain and lack of physical strength, my body feels better than it has in half a year.

Some stuff about feelings:

It's easy to forget, when someone strong becomes weak, that eventually they will gain their strength back. This is why you must always double tap zombies. After they aren't stunned anymore, they'll be stronger than you again and then they'll eat your effing brains. That's what zombies do with their strength. They eat brains. I don't eat brains. I'm only allowed 25 grams of fat a day (which, if you didn't know, is about 1/4 of a cheeseburger) and I'm afraid most of the people in the world have big lumps of fat for brains. I'd be back in the hospital if I ate brains. Here's what I do with my strength: I hold up the sky.

I know this about myself, because as I was writhing in pain, too weak to even stand on my own, watching my body and resolve melt away, my entire life came crumbling down on top of my sick bed. I was too weak to stop it or move out of the way when it happened. I just laid still and let it crush me. There wasn't anything else I could do. I have never been so helpless as I was in the month of June. So those who loved me helped me until they couldn't anymore. Those who were selfish helped themselves and could not see how hard I was trying. Because, you see, it's easy to forget, when someone strong becomes weak, that eventually they will gain their strength back. I did not forget. I remembered, even at my weakest points, that strength is not ever-lasting, but it is regenerative. I am strong again. And again, I am holding up the sky. This is my job, you see. I am the Atlas of my own world. I have been since I was old enough to Know.

What I learned through this horrific, ridiculous summer is that there is no place in physical illness or ensuing depression for forgetting that the only place of refuge you can always depend on is the fortress you build for yourself. When the sky falls on your head, you can either be a Titan or Chicken Little. I know, it sounds like some goddamn Chicken Soup for the Soul bullshit, but it's true. There is no hero but you. There are no search and rescue teams to dig you out of the rubble. No one will save you but yourself. If you're really lucky, like I am, you'll find there are people in your life who can soothe you when you stagger under the weight of things. Maybe they'll bring you flowers or apple slices when you are sick. But you must always remember: They cannot bear your load for you. If you have a sky to hold up--and not everyone does, because not everyone is strong enough--then you have to use your own strength. Keep that in mind, people. Someday, it might save your life.

On Whether or Not It's Lady Like

Gender Theory: I love it.

No, really. I LOVE IT.

Why do I love it so much, you ask?

Here are some reasons:
"You're beautiful. Really beautiful...but women are supposed to have long hair." --7 foot tall high school senior, Mr. Football Player Guy. (He said this to me when I was a freshman, brushing my hair out of my eyes while he did so. True story. I blushed first, then choked on the other half of the statement.)

"Boys will never like you unless you learn to keep quiet." --Friend's mother.

"I don't even know why you'd want to get married. How are you ever going to submit to your husband?" --Same friend's mother.

"You'll never get married unless you get submissive." --Other friend's mother.

"It's just hard to decide between the girl I can have a conversation with and the girl I'm attracted to." --Dude friend I had begun to crush on, until that moment.

"Why can't I find a smart, hot girl in this school?" --Dude friend in whom I had no interest beyond Conciliare.

"J is a boy. She likes boy stuff, so she's a boy." --My four year old daughter, speaking of my six year old daughter.

"Isn't it hard for you to run this record store by yourself? You know, because women aren't as bright." --Customer. (My response: Get the fuck out of my store.)

"Where's your daddy? No daddy? Well, where's your husband? I want to do some business." --Various Customers X 3. (My response: I'm the boss, here. You're welcome to do business somewhere else, if you want.)

For contrast:
"I think your whole empowerment thing is super hot." (My husband of eight years. I'll leave my response to your imagination.)

I have other reasons too, of course. Including, but not limited to: my daughters, the unfortunate popularity of the Twilight series, plastic surgery statistics, the APA report on the sexualization of young girls, my mother, my sisters, romantic comedies, dude friends, girl friends, the irrational bias against homosexuality, rednecks, Fox News, misandry, the objectification of sitcom men, the infantilization of EITHER sex, the designation of men as pigs or fools, AND the idea that masculinity is threatened if a man isn't a "man's MAN."

What, you ask, is an example of a man who isn't a man's MAN? He is arty, educated, loves musicals and romcoms, reads books, has complicated opinions on politics, hates sports, doesn't have a damn clue how to fix anything, wouldn't be caught dead in Hooters, likes babies, loves gossip, doesn't care who makes more money and thinks empowerment is hot. Who is this mythical non-man's MAN man? By this definition, my husband. Now, my husband also provides for his family and would never ever dye his hair or paint his nails. HOWEVER, if he did, he wouldn't not be a man. Fingernail polish is not penis remover. I REPEAT: FINGERNAIL POLISH IS NOT PENIS REMOVER. So, what's the reason for this mostly meandering rant?

TOEMAGEDDON 2011. John Stewart, in collaboration with a fb friend, is the reason. Apparently, a J. Crew ad which featured a mom laughing with her son after having painted his toenails neon pink, has drawn some fairly insane criticism from the mainstream media. One Fox News contributor called this "an assault on masculinity." Painting a 5 year old's toenails is an assault on masculinity. That's what he said. Here are some equivalent statements: Letting your daughter play tee ball is an assault on femininity. Dressing your infant in yellow is an assault on heterosexuality. Giving your son a teddy bear is an assault on masculinity. I could go on and on. There is no civil rights issue that doesn't fit into this model. Specifically, there is nothing folks haven't been historically prohibited from doing that couldn't worded in this way. It's the model of ignorance everywhere: Electing a black president is an assault on the white population. The existence of Islam is an assault on Christianity. Immigration is an assault on the current population. Gay marriage is an assault on heterosexual marriage. These ridiculous accusations are statements I heard less that two weeks ago while sitting in a cafe in my hometown. My grandmother loudly asked me if we should leave since "they let all kinds of horseshit in." I said no, since she had already ordered. But I wondered aloud: "How does it hurt my marriage for someone else to marry? How am I affected if migrant workers pick fruit in California? How is my race diminished by the prominence of one member of another race?" The old men at the offending table stared at us, ate quietly, then left.

I am not even-minded enough to think we aren't in a culture war. I think maybe all open societies are in perpetual states of culture war. That's what keeps us in balance. That's what keeps outrage over fingernail polish from turning this country into Iran. They don't like polish there, either. Sometimes they put people in jail over it.

I know I have to fight every day to make sure my daughters are able to call bullshit when they're spoonfed the same hegemonic ideals I swallowed about what it means to be a woman.

I didn't know to call bullshit until I was 23. This caused a lot of misery, because if there is any place where I don't excel, it's traditional femininity. Maybe that makes me a gender bender. I think it makes me well-rounded. I'll keep to my action movies and maybe sometimes I'll watch a romcom because my husband likes them. We will remain perfectly balanced: the man's woman and the woman's man. And we'll be happy. Maybe the little boy in the J. Crew ad is happy. It's possible that he's a little culture warrior, too. But then again, he's 5--he's probably enthralled with the wonder all around him, and happily ignorant of the truth that there are those in the wide world who think his toenails have something to do with sex.

An Open Letter to the Wife of My Mother's Ex-Husband.

Dear Madam,


It would be easy for me to call you trash. It would be easy for me sit on my leather couch, in my nice home, with my educated, productive husband and my gorgeous, excessively intelligent daughters and tell myself that I don't associate with trash. It would be easy to tell myself that I am a well-adjusted, well-respected, generally successful person, or even to chant to myself that I am a liberal feminist with an I.Q. of 155 who could wear your sons' testicles as garter belts if they tried to engage me in scholarly debate, if they did anything but mispell, misuse and name call. It would be easy sit in silence and console myself with the knowledge that there is not a single way in which I am not superior to you...but I've never been much for easy, anyway.


The truth is, I've always thought of you as a woman of average intelligence. My estimation in that regard has fallen somewhat now that I know you think you need an apostrophe to make a word plural. Still, it would seem that you are at least intelligent enough to know the story of your own life, and thusly, that you should know the sources of your shame. I will not add additional shame by recounting who you are and what you've done. I simply mean, here, to respond to some of the things you said, in public, on DW's facebook status, about me.


First of all, with regard to the assertion that I need to remember where I came from, I would like to reassure you that there is never a day when I forget. My husband says that I should not write this, now, and especially that I should not send it to you. He says that I am out of my hometown culture in my real life, and that I need to get out of it in my head. He is right. But I do not toil under the weight of guilt for abject hatred. I do hate that town, and several of its inhabitants--because I still care about it, because I still think it has potential, and because really, deep down, I believe people need to be delivered from its dominant doctrines. And, most of all, because I care about some of the people I was a girl with and I don't want to see them waste their lives in factories. As to the metaphysical implications which rest with that missive: I will never forget that I am the bastard child of a crazy woman. I will never forget that I am very odd, that I was trailer trash, that I use my intelligence to overcompensate, that I think more highly of myself than I ought. I assure you, ma'am, there are other things I will also never forget.


Secondly, it is true that I have never lived anywhere but Arkansas. I abandoned my opportunities. My siblings were still at home, you see. I felt my honor was more important than my ego. I felt loyalty to those to whom I found myself committed.


I have no doubt, however, that no matter where else you have lived, your mind stayed right at home, in Alma, in the smallness of the small town's delusion of grandeur. There are, after all, Almas all over the country. I am, in that respect, more well traveled than you--no matter where I have lived. You said that people from all over think I am a redneck. I don't care if they do. Redneck isn't about physical location, it's about the culture of ignorance. I am close-minded, yes, but no one could accurately describe me as ignorant.


With regard to your "medical license" as evidence of your intellectual prowess, I was very glad when my sister told me that, in your 40s, you had finally found a vocation. Kudos on making yourself better than you were before. I mean that in all sincerity.


I am sorry that you took offense to the term "Common Man." I thought I was very kind in my little concession speech. There is nothing wrong with being common. Most people are common. You should consider yourself lucky to be counted among them, and that here, on this blog, no one knows who you are and will be substituting some other common woman's face with yours. Maybe you will be lucky and they will use the face of someone who has moral fiber.


With reference to the last name: if I were you, I would fall before my feet and worship me, because someday, someone might mistake your youngest son for one of my relatives. I was the first good thing that ever happened to that name. I became so fond of the idea that my teachers praised me for surpassing my "dad," that I kept it. My legal name is hyphenated. I considered it "hailing the subject," a term which means to appropriate a negative word and reverse its meaning, applying it to oneself in a positive way. It, like you, reminds me of where I came from. I love to be reminded of how much I have overcome. There is no better food for my ego than thinking of you, of your husband, of your culture.


For the record, I did not call your son a redneck. I said his attitude caused him to be "stuck in redneck hell," which was not a slam. It was the truth. I do appreciate that you people all stand up for yourselves, even when it is not necessary. I was making philosophical conversation with an old friend from high school, before you all got country about it.


My husband says you are irrational, and a lost cause--that I am stooping to your level by writing this at all. I do not agree. I think you deserve to be confronted. I think you deserve to know that you are, in fact, important enough to be a blip on my radar--because you are the stepmother of my siblings, even if you never call them on their birthdays. So, no, I will not sit in silence and think that you are trash. I will not objectify you. I will say to you, straight up, that you are worth standing up to. Even if I have to stoop to do it. I will even say: Sometimes, you are right. But mostly, you are sad. And that you may have bullied my mother, but you will not bully me--on Facebook or anywhere else. I'm Jessica fucking B-W, with a good reputation, accomplishments, success, IQ, a savings account, and a nice, middle class life. Who the fuck are you?


Sincerely,


Jessica F. B-W.

New News is Bad News

Choosing the right specialist is a little like choosing the right grad school. That is to say: it is vitally important to your success, and choosing the wrong one can negatively impact the course of your life. No pressure. Luckily, I already knew which specialist I wanted because he came with a modifier. When my other two doctors, some family members and a few friends talked to me about which GI guy to see, they said, "Well, there's Dr. D, he's the best." I started to think of him as Dr-D-He's-The-Best. I was told it would be six months before I got in to see him. My appointment was two weeks from the date of referral. I considered myself fortunate.

When I arrived, I was the youngest person there--by about 40 years. The age disparity highlights my sense that none of this is fair, my sense that I'm too young to spend THE REST OF MY LIFE sick. I begin to feel not-so-lucky. I sat silently and read my Denis Johnson stories, looked at my shoes, wrote some lines in my head about them both, and the old people, and the spots on the carpet...

My surgeon, who I am so very fond of, said to me, "GI docs are not as personable as you and I."

He was not wrong. But maybe not very many people are as personable as the two of us. We did, after all, discuss what I would call my disease inspired punk rock band: "Toxic Megacolon." Every time he mentioned a new horrible possible outcome, he added "And that should be the title of the first single," or, "You should make that the album title." During my last appointment with him, he told me I would probably be disembowled and that I might just lose my liver and my vision as well. I walked out of his office feeling awesome. He's the bedside manner master. Like I told my close friend Jack, I say we throw that man a parade.

Now, let me say: I like Dr. D. He's one of those superduper smart people I can admire--BUT I walked out of Dr. D's office feeling like shit. Mostly because of some miscommunication. You see, I was high on drugs the day of my diagnosis. I don't remember a damn thing about what the surgeon said. I only remember cursing, weeping inconsolably and telling the surgeon "MY BODY REALLY DOES HATE ME!" in between sobs. My husband, mother and grandmother all three had conflicting stories about what the diagnosis actually was. I understood it to be severe distal ulcerative colitis. I was wrong. After talking to me about symptoms, pushing on my belly, reading the surgeon's report, examining the biopsy report (which, btw, "could not rule out infectious agents" i.e.: was inconclusive) and looking at pictures of my horrendous little wound-friends, Dr. D said "Well, I am certainly convinced. Your pictures are like a textbook." He then proceeded to tell me that my entire colon is involved. All the way up to the cecum. I still have Ulcerative Colitis, but now it's severe pancolitis. Which is the very worst damned one to have. Lucky me.

He also said, "You don't need to start worrying about cancer for eight years." I thought: I'm 27. I'm 27. I'm 27. In eight years I'll be 35. I don't need to start worrying about colon cancer for 8 years?! Thanks for being so flippant about it, D. Then I remembered the waiting room, considered that maybe he thought he was talking to a 90 year old, and forgave him.

In other news: Apparently the specifically-for-my-disease drug is not currently at a therapeutic dose. All of the improvement I have seen is the result of that Devil, Prednisone. He upped the dose on my 5-ASA (Asacol)--which moved the price from $250/month to $362/month. I will only just be on the therapeutic dose at that level, and may have to bump up again.

So, yeah, when I left his office I felt like shit. He did make one ass joke: "This disease is the proverbial pain in the ass. But it's manageable." I am currently a big fan of ass jokes. But I need more than one a visit to balance out that much unpleasantness.

FURTHERMORE, surgeons AND specialists sure know how to push on organs. I feel like I've been stabbed again. I managed to keep my energy up and did the troop leader thing tonight, in a new dress I bought to console myself about the fact that I still hate my new Edgar Suit. I'm trying to buy myself one clothing item a week, until my birthday money runs out. It'll be at least two years before my skin is ready for a new tattoo anyway. Have I mentioned how very lucky I am?

Actually, it's a good thing I don't actually believe in Luck or Anything Else, or I'd have some real anger issues. I'm so glad my life sucked enough to purge me of belief before now. I don't think I could handle adding Existential Crisis to my list of Things To Overcome.

I may post the poem I wrote today. It's not ever going to be good enough to save for anything.

What She Ties in Apron Strings

I'm very close to my grandparents. In fact, I think they're the best people ever. They're loving, supportive, intelligent, unassuming, unpretentious, generous, thoughtful, thoroughly wonderful people. They're the kind of people who pay for stranger's groceries because they remember what it was like to be young and always worried. And the best part is, they don't subscribe to any religious credo that either requires or rewards their behavior. Their goodness is its own reward. Don't get me wrong, we have our occasional interpersonal conflicts...but I am proud of who they are. There isn't anything in the world I wouldn't do for them just because of who they are.


When I started to be sick enough to lose my appetite, my grandmother tried to take me to every restaurant she could think of in search of something I could eat. Mostly, I refused those restaurants or politely pushed my food around with my fork. My grandmother isn't the kind of person who doesn't notice that sort of thing. She's the kind of person who brings me new shoes when she comes over to give my spouse and children candy bars and ice cream. She's the kind of person who goes home the week of my diagnosis and experiments with my two favorite of her recipes until she has successfully lowered the fat content by more than half. [Don't worry, I'm posting the recipes below.]



My favorite part of having meals at my grandparent's house is the prep time: sitting at the kitchen table chopping or peeling, yelling over the food processor about politics we all agree on, watching the children chase each other around the dining room table, being shooed out of the kitchen 1200 times because, though we've all come to help, really we're just there for the company. I can remember the same processes running through my childhood and adolescence: chopping, yelling, chasing, shooing. Even when things were at their worst, there was always the comforting rhythm of my grandparents' kitchen. Of all the beautiful, wonderful things I wanted for my own daughters, this experience is maybe the most important to me.


My attempt to move from Ensure to real food calories was a terrible idea. A really, truly awful idea. Three days ago, before it was known to me the sort of pain this really, truly awful idea would inflict, I made plans with my grandma to go to the grocery store and come back to her house to cook (in surplus) the new recipes she developed. This morning I brought my can-do attitude, my daughters and the stabbing pain in my side to my grandparent's table, to help my grandma make food she didn't want help making. Food for my freezer, food for my disease. I wound up under a quilt in the back bedroom, crying in frustration on the phone to one of my very best friends.


When I came out, I found my mother and 7 yr old daughter sitting at the kitchen table, "helping," my grandad yelled about politics while my five year old pushed a Barbie car around the dining room and my grandma shooed me out of her way. What I saw today, tied in my grandma's apron strings, was more than love shown through decades of service, more than good meals and good arguments --it was our Tradition. It was our holy Rite. It was our whole history of working hard and loving each other, of fighting and making up and proving over and over again how strong we really are. I never needed to GIVE it to my daughters. It belonged to them before they were born.


I didn't cry in frustration anymore. I took my place at the kitchen table and gloried the comfort of those familiar rhythms: chopping, yelling, chasing, shooing. My grandmother's apron strings swayed to the music.




THE RECIPES:

GG's LOWFAT CHICKEN SALAD

Ingredients:

2 cans Swanson 98% Fat Free Chicken

1/4 Cup Craisins

1/4 of 1 finely minced Onion

2 Stalks Celery

5 Boiled Egg Whites (sliced)

3 Tablespoons Reduced Fat Mayo with Olive Oil


Directions:

1. Mix ingredients together. Seriously, that's it. This recipe makes 19 tablespoon-sized servings.

WAY DELISH LEAN[-EST] BEEF TIPS AND MUSHROOMS
Ingredients:

1 lb ("Diet Lean") 97% lean Stew Meat (you're going to cut off any fat you see, so cut out the hassle by looking it over)

1 onion

1/2 package of sliced mushrooms (we used Baby Bella)

1/3 cup Flour

Garlic Salt

Cumin

Season All

Water

Some Extra Virgin Olive Oil

***IMPORTANT NOTE ON OLIVE OIL***

[Cool research, read it. SAVE YOURSELVES!]

Other stuff you need:

A gallon sized storage bag

Lots of time

A big, nice skillet with a lid

Directions:

1. Turn your burner to low, coat the bottom of your pan with a thin layer of Extra Virgin Olive Oil. (We're talking a VERY THIN layer.)

2. Combine flour, garlic salt, Season All & cumin in your storage bag. (Measurements on dry ingredients are not precise, my grandmother decides how much by saying "Shake-Shake-Shake-Shake" while she fills the bag.)

3. Take stew meat out of package and wash it, then cut away any fatty parts you see. A little marbling is okay, but even the super lean has more fat than you (I) want.

4. Place meat in dry ingredient bag, shake until meat is dusted, but not coated too thickly. Throw the dry ingredients away. You don't need them any more.

5. Your oil should be hot by now. Place the meat in the pan, turn up the burner. Brown the meat.

6. Add in 1 chopped onion before meat is cooked through.

7. Add in sliced mushrooms. Pour water over the top. Cover. Turn burner to low.
8. Allow to cook down over and over, replacing lost moisture with water. (We're talking 3 hours on low on the stovetop.)

9. The sauce consistency should be gravy-ish. This is accomplished by the repeated cooking down of the ingredients, YOU ARE UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ALLOWED TO ADD ADDITIONAL FLOUR. It ruins it. My grandmama was emphatic on this point.

10. Serve over plain white rice.


Today my grandma doubled the recipe, four people had a nice sized portion, 2 people had tiny portions and I wound up with this in my freezer:

[Each container is 3 tbsp. of white rice + 3 tbsp of beef tips and mushrooms, which is 2 servings for SickJes.]

"The only thing I'm afraid of is cheese."

How to Start a Blog Post Using the Phrase Replacement Game:

Every woman's most difficult and complicated relationship is with food....

Eating is one part catharsis, one part delight, one part nourishment of fat cells...

When you face something....let's just say, "famine" in your life...

So, I don't know if you guys have noticed or not, but I love Mexican food...

I'm beginning to feel hungry...

The day before yesterday, I consumed 1,000 calories without supplementing my diet with Ensure. It was really hard. Why? Have you ever had food poisoning from fettuccine alfredo? Now, since that incident, have you eaten that particular fettuccine alfredo again? That's because your body doesn't want food that tries to kill it.

One of the theories as to why my disease exists is that my immune system thinks food and the friendly bacteria I need to digest food are trying to kill me. My immune system goes all Hannibal of Carthage and hurls millions of white blood cells at the problem, who, being the dedicated-but-brainless brutes they are, then proceed to fling themselves Kamikaze style at the lining of my colon, causing it to become inflamed and develop millions of bleeding ulcers. I am lucky enough to have also developed arthritis, which is also an inappropriate response of my brainless, brutish, WBCs. I opened this elaborate mixed metaphor with the phrase "one of the theories," because, like most intelligent people, one of my methods of coping is intellectualization and I have delved into credible scholarly research on what's happened to my body which stands unmatched even by all the research I've done on Gender Theory. (Which, if I do say so myself, is pretty extensive for an undergrad.) Anyway, there is no consensus about what causes Ulcerative Colitis, and while all agree that it is a malfunction of the immune response, not all scholars even classify it as an "Autoimmune Disease." My doctors say it is an autoimmune disease, so I say what they say. Three weeks of reading does not make one a doctor.

I said all of that to say this:

Everything I eat causes some degree of pain. Sometimes, things I think I can eat still cause me to vomit. I don't understand this phenomenon, but I intend to ask my gastroenterologist about it as soon as I have one. It doesn't seem fair that food cause me distress even from the outset. The deepest part of this problem is that it doesn't matter how much I tell myself I have to eat to get well, I still have the guttural response of "get that poison away from me," every time I see food. It wasn't until a few days ago, when I saw my GP that I could put my finger on exactly what that feeling is called.

Doc: How is your appetite?

Me: Awful, but getting a little better. It's weird, I just have this feeling when I think about eating like.......it's hard to explain, but....it's like....I don't want to....?

Doc: Alright, well, I need some blood from you. If you'll follow me to the lab, Nick can stay here...unless you're afraid of needles?

Me: The only thing I'm afraid of is cheese.

............................................................

Then:

^Just like this, I realized what to call my aversion to food: FEAR. Not just any kind of fear, either: ABSOLUTE TERROR. The kind of absolute terror that kicks you in the pit of your stomach, grabs you by the throat, dangles you over the abyss of your own mortality and laughs at you as you struggle to free yourself from his black-gloved hand.

In that instant of "BOOOOOM! [JESSICA THIS IS YOUR LIFE!]" I also realized that because this fear is so primal, there would be no intellectualizing it away. As of right then, my strongest defense: sheer force of will, pure unadulterated unwillingness to admit defeat, Hubris on the scale of Michelangelo as he defaced his Pieta--was doing little to remedy the food problem. I would need to default to my other favorite coping mechanism: humor. But how? How do you make paralyzing fear funny? I had to think about it.

I decided to go with Hobbits.

I made myself a menu of things I can eat:
Breakfast: Banana
Second Breakfast: 1 Tablespoon of Peanut Butter
Elevenses: Dry Low-Fiber Cereal
Luncheon: Two Eggs
Tea: PB&J Fold Over on White Bread
Dinner: Baked Chicken Tenderloin, White Rice & (baconless) Green Beans
Supper: Yogurt, or Ensure if I still need calories.

It's so much easier to eat when I get to say "Elevenses" once a day.

Ode to the Informal & Rocks of Remembrance

I am beginning to feel better. My joints are almost normal sized, my abdominal pain is now only intermittent. Fatigue, dizziness and general malaise are still kicking my ass. I'm still suffering with my Prednisone speedbrain. I had to see my doctor today because of a sudden mysterious fever. But, really, it's amazing how much better I feel than last week. I even ventured far afield today, to the grocery store, with my husband. It was slow going and I felt like I had run a marathon afterward, but I also experienced a tremendous feeling of accomplishment. I mean, I got dressed. I went somewhere. I bought my own peanut butter this time.

There were other events:

My Husband: I don't think I know what "country" means.

Me: Yew mean ya ain't never known nobody who's just country?

My Husband: I don't get how screaming at people in the grocery store is "country." I'm sure some of the good people of New York City also scream in grocery stores.

Me: Oh, honey....screaming in the grocery store is country no matter where you're from. Okay, okay, I forget you folks from Southside aren't really ej-aw-cated on some things...let me translate. Country: [adj.] expressive of crude or unrefined manners, descriptive of inability to assimilate into public society due to lack of concern toward holding oneself accountable to social standards of public behavior, specifically with reference to making a public spectacle of oneself due to an unfamiliarity with the protocols of urbanity. See also: "country cousin" or "country bumpkin."

My Husband: I don't get why "country" is the word for that.

Me: You see this? This is my English major trump card for that definition I just made up. I hereby declare myself correct.
============================================
This conversation, one I shared with my husband as we left the grocery store, where we went for peanut butter and bananas and left with peanut butter, bananas and front row viewing of a countrified screaming match, led me to some reflection on dichotomy. Now, I appreciate words. If I could fill up a bathtub with words like "re-appropriation" or "hegemonic" or "ignominious" or even "antidisestablishmentarianism," I would take baths three times a day. I'll take my sentences any way I can get them: short and sweet or long and formal. But most days, I'll dine on Vonnegut and consider Melville my dessert.

Having said that, Imma be real honest and tell y'all somethin': there are few things more precious to me than informality. Sentence fragments are my favorite fragments. Colloquialisms might as well be the language of angels. I love the ability blogging affords me to just write like we're talking in my living room. I used to feel the need to be "ON" all the time. Like, people were going to think less of me if I used a comma splice. Then one day I realized I knew more of the trailer park than cotillion. I would be a snarky, pretentious, overwhelmingly disingenuous douchebag if I only ever spoke or wrote in complete sentences. It would be paramount to the abandonment my native tongue. I don't care if some high school English teacher taught me that my accent, in context, is a social liability. Lightning Hopkins and Sookie Stackhouse are more credible sources. So, I'm not going to edit this blog for lousy almost sentences. I love lousy almost sentences.

I should be writing papers instead of blog posts. Unfortunately, the speedbrain makes that scenario nearly impossible. So instead, I've got notes from which to build sentences. Speedbrain notes are Brilliant. Capital B. Speedbrain sentences are...more trouble than they're worth. [Once again, I'd like to thank Prednisone and my immune system for continuing to complicate the previously uncomplicated, mundane processes of my daily life.]

In other news, as soon as my weight has plateaued, I'm getting a new tattoo with my birthday money. I already have one tattoo. On my right wrist DON'T PANIC is printed in large, friendly letters. There are two other patches of skin marked by that sentiment, in that font. One on a foot and one on a forearm of my two oldest dearest friends. Every time I see it I hear us echoing that sentiment to each other; the sentiment which stretches across a decade of alterations to our lives, the thing we've said to each other millions of times, no matter what words we were using, the sentiment Douglas Adams gave us as a guide and Arthur C. Clarke declared the best advice given: DON'T PANIC. I could not say all the Things it means...

My new tattoo is going to look something like this: This is AURYN. It's a symbol from The Neverending Story, which, is, in and of itself, pretty boss. I watched that movie probably once a day for ten years when I was a child. But, that's not why I chose it. It means Things to me. Today, while I was reflecting on the Things that it means, I realized that tattoos are like poems: if they can be explained or, if the explanation can really adequately describe the meaning--if they have to be validated by others, then they never meant any Thing to start with.

"A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity." --Rainer Maria Rilke

Life in my New Edgar Suit (this one goes out to the ladies)

So, I don't know if you guys have noticed or not, but I'm fat. Don't you sputter at me, Missy. And, keep your embarassed guffawing inside your mouth, please. My BMI is in the obese range. That means I'm fat.

Now....can I let you in on a deep, dark secret? I don't hate my body. It's covered in soft skin. It bears battle scars I got from building and feeding my daughters. It houses a huge mind, and stockpiles of resolve and gumption. Besides, I'd vastly prefer Botticelli's Venus to Kate Moss as the standard of feminine beauty. To each her own, I say. Now, I'm no Venus, but--I'd prefer the soft curve of goddesshood to hard pitch of cocaine if I got to pick. I say we women should come to the table and vote on our own role models. Oh, you think Kate Moss would still win? Yeah, you're probably right.

There was a time when I was even fatter than usual (thanks, desk job). When I reached the fatter-than-usual stage, I had no energy and generally felt like a huge, heaping pile of simple carbohydrates all the time. But, even then I could heave myself up two flights of stairs without getting winded. It took me 3 months to gain my "bank weight" and under 6 months to lose it. I went back to being normal-fat, and I was really, most days, okay with that. Though I did find that something had shifted in my perception of my own fatness when I had to listen to beautiful, brilliant women repeat every single day that they were disgusting. I began to think, "Well, my conventionally attractive sister, if you're disgusting, what am I?" For awhile, this inherited sense of self loathing gave me increased anxiety about meeting new people. I wound up with a gym membership, a subscription to a tanning salon and a calorie tracker on my phone. But, guess what happened when I got back to normal-fat? I got over all that awfulness really quickly. Hey! I'm Jessica frakking Weisenberg. I get over stuff.

[Later, I began to wonder if the root of gym memberships, crash dieting and tanning beds is really about matching the outer self to the outer selves of others, or if it's just some women's way of coping with the manner in which she is undervalued in her professional and personal life...anyway, gender studies aside...]

Why oh why would an obese twentysomething be unhappy with over 20 pounds of rapid weight loss? You think I'm going to tell you why, right? Well, of course I am...

First of all, out of the initial 18 pounds I lost, at least 8 of those were from my chest. Talk about your self-esteem crusher. I mean, I know they weren't perfect, but they've been right up under my chin since I was 13... and, not to be gross to you non-nature goddess types, but these are the organs which provided sustenance to my daughters for their first years of life. They're a part of who I am, part of the roadmap of my life. I never realized how attached I'd gotten. Granted, they're just significantly smaller than usual, it's not like they're really lost...that I can't even fathom.....I've once again got renewed awe for women who lose their breasts to cancer. Those women, if you know any, are the bravest, most amazing women in the world and deserve to be told so RIGHT NOW, so stop reading this and go forth into the world to hug your local breast cancer survivor. I'm going to hug my own stepmom double hard next time I see her. I only hope I don't bawl like a newborn calf when I do it.

Another obvious reflection of my troublesome rapid weight loss is that it looks like my disease took huge bites out of my body fat. What once was pale, smooth-ish flesh is now lumpy, bumpy skin. Even before the weight loss, my abdomen held the worst stretch marks I've ever seen on anyone. That's what happens when you give birth to two 9+ pound babies in under 2 years. Even if you use body butter every single day, sometimes you get stretch marks. I count them as badges of honor. Yes, they're gross, but they're mine. I worked hard for them. I have always reflected on them as markers of who I am: a mother. Well, now I've got another set of stretch marks. The kind you get from shrinking all over your body. And those white stripes of motherhood that I wore with honor? They look 10million times worse. I have found the remarkable difference between losing weight the right way and losing weight the wrong way: when weight is lost through diet and exercise, one tends to look stronger, more robust. When weight is lost too rapidly, things begin to rather quickly look very sad.

In the classic movie, Men In Black, (and yes, I mean classic, I'll arm wrestle whichever dude wants to argue as soon as I have muscle again) a space invader crash lands on a farm and proceeds to peel the farmer. He wears the skin of a misogynistic redneck asshole to hide his insectform for the remainder of the movie. The downtrodden, vapid wife of the farmer (think American Gothic, or The Miller's Wife) calls it his "Edgar suit." Well, that's how I feel about my body right now. I feel like my disease is wearing my skin. I still look and sound like myself for the most part, but really, the dominant presence inside the stretched decay of my flesh is a roach that ate me. Granted, that roach is my own immune system.

With each day, my complexion improves, and with it, the feeling of zombie-ness decreases proportionately. So thanks, Modern Medicine, for at least giving me my face back. It might not be a stunningly beautiful face, but it's an unusual face, maybe even a pleasant face, and I'd like to keep it while it's still mine.

Having said alllll that, I should add:
Because I feel so bad, I've been wearing jeans and t-shirts every day. It's harder to tell, in jeans and t-shirts, how much things have changed--even if the jeans are a smaller size. Yesterday, I put on my favorite dress, which I can almost still wear because it's a wrap. (I had to have my seamstress grandma pin up a few areas.) Looking at myself in the mirror, in that dress, I had a moment of "WOWZA!"
And that, even if I know underneath the dress is pock-marked skin with intermittent pockets of missing flesh, even if I still don't feel quite like it's my own body I'm in, felt just a little bit awesome.

On Whether or Not Prednisone is the Devil

At about 2 AM on Thursday morning, as I lay underneath my trusty old heating pad, with my new elephant sized ankles propped up on the end of my couch, moving my legs slightly to avoid the discomfort of either moving or sitting still, with my mind running 12 million miles an hour and sweat covering my skin, it occured to me that the many and varied tribes of internet sickpeople might have something useful to say about coping with the side effects of Prednisone. "Google?" I said, in my head, and with my hands to my laptop, "Prednisone is..." Google suggested, "Prednisone is making me crazy?" And I replied, out loud, "YES!" The cat startled from his place near me. I felt more crazy.



About fifteen minutes later, I googled "Prednisone is the devil" and received over 4 million results. I agreed, at the time. Prednisone may, in fact, be the devil. Why, you ask? Well, faithful reader, I will tell you why:



PREDNISONE IS THE DEVIL BECAUSE:

1. "HOLY SPEEDBRAIN, BATMAN!"

Now, admittedly, I've got some fairly rapid brainwaves. I am even prone to occasional bouts of "randamity." I can make hasty, enormous cognitive leaps--part of that is because I'm really smart (what? I am...) and part of that is because I think really fast. [Let's not confuse the two.] I am likely, on a fairly normal day, to jump from subject to subject with the precision and speed of a lemur. If we were playing a word association game and you offered "banana pudding," I would be able to connect that, in 11 steps or less and in under .05 seconds to the masculine/feminine binary in Middlemarch. [This is why I'm not very good at telling stories.] Now, my normally rapid processes are NOTHING compared to what someone with Bipolar Disorder or Adult ADD faces. Ohhh no. Far be it from me to try and empathize with diseases I don't have :). I'm just a little random at times, and more than a little Type A. On Prednisone, however, these brain mechanics of mine are amplifed to the GAZILLIONTH degree. Example: I had an assignment to write a little three or four page paper on a Keats' poem, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." The paper required no outside sources, was to be a short length, on an easily decipherable sonnet. Piece of cake, right? It's just New Criticism. I can write that paper in an hour and in my sleep. Problems began to occur when I couldn't focus and had to just step away from the paper 20 times in 2 days. My beautiful, logical thoughts were in disarray. My sentences were circular. My hands were shaking. The paper took me a little over five hours to complete. It was only 5 pages long. That's right, after I had already had fully realized ideas, I spent an hour per page trying to make them coherent. I also wound up quoting: Percy Shelley, George Eliot, & Rainer Maria Rilke; and referencing paintings by Vermeer and Jan Matejko. Don't get me wrong, it's a damn good paper. Maybe the best of this semester. I just wasn't able to....simplify, the way I usually can. It all came out a tangled frantic mess of every brilliant idea I had. It was, in some very real ways, a disaster.



2. "LEAVE MAMA ALONE, GIRLS!!"

Irritability, another speedbrain problem, gets its own bullet point for being especially...irritating. I feel like I'm always on the verge of a full blown panic attack. Luckily, I still don't have enough energy to be really, truly mean. I did scream at my five year old for hopping around this morning. My five year old always hops around. It's a special facet of her sunshine-laden personality--which is the reason I felt so absolutely horrified when she put her face in her hands and cried like I'd killed a bunny in front of her. I apologized. Just like I apologized when I screamed at my 7 year old for needing help with her shoes. She's not a crier. She did look like she wanted to punch me in the face. I deserved it. I can't count how many times I've apologized for yelling at my wonderful, helpful husband today. Even though I know this keeps happening and I'm trying to be careful with my family's feelings, I just can't keep a handle on it. And ohhh lordy, is there anything I hate worse than loss of control? No, no there's not.



4. "INSOMNIA!"

I watched Food Network until 3 this morning. I stared at my bedroom ceiling until 4 AM. I got up from the bed at 8 AM. Rinse. Wash. Repeat. X 3 Days.



5. "MY HEART! MY HEART!"

Heart palpitations: they're awful.



6. "MENOPAUSE?"

WHY IS IT SO HOT IN HERE? Oh yeah, it's also on that sheet from the pharmacy.



7. "I HAVE ENERGY! OH WAIT...NO I STILL FEEL AWFUL."

The absolute worst part of the Prednisone experience, from my point of view, is the false sense of energy it gives me. If I am sitting down and all my aching joints are at rest, I begin to feel like I could run a marathon. Of course, my joints hurt all the time and I'm still neither eating nor properly absorbing nutrients. And now, I'm not sleeping either. The result of this special combination of circumstances is that, in a resting position, I feel like there's something I should be doing. And when I try to do something? BLAMMO! I get knocked right back on my ass by pain and fatigue. A fifteen minute trip to Walmart is almost too much to bear, even if I do the 6 to 8 hour fast it requires just to make it out of the house. I find this phenomenon particularly hard to articulate because it seems to contradict itself. It's just a tiny bit like this: have you ever stayed awake for 24 hours and then drunk three pots of coffee to make it through the day? Jitters, with a side of fatigue and nausea, right? Yeah, that's a little bit like what I mean.



SYMPTOMS OTHER PEOPLE EXPERIENCE:

8. HUNGER!

I am not afflicted with this side effect, because, remember that "every bite I take is a sacrificial gesture made on behalf of my daughters" thing, from a few posts ago? Yeah. That.



Some people, though, gain like 50 to 70 pounds on this drug. Combined with the speedbrain symptoms...well, geez I feel really sorry for those folks.



9. MOONFACE!

Sometimes Prednisone makes people's faces swell to moon sized proportions. They call it moonface. No, I'm not kidding.



10. INFECTIONS!

It says on the side of the bottle to avoid people who are sick. I live with a first year teacher and two elementary school students. Let's keep our fingers crossed that I can avoid this one.



WHY PREDNISONE MAY NOT BE THE DEVIL IN A LITTLE OVER 2,OOO WORDS:

Both of these pictures were taken at similar times, in similar light. No editing was done to either picture. I'm wearing only a tiny bit of mascara in both pictures. How does a woman who is sleeping LESS and eating just the same amount go from looking grayish, monotoned and sunken eyed to looking like a paler version her usual self in just 6 days? It's a Prednisone miracle! Actually, it's because the inflammation in the lining of my intestine is slowly beginning to abate. Unfortunately, I have suffered a natural decrease in hormones these past few days which have made my joint pain and GI symptoms worse (something else to look forward to), but by golley I look human again! I look forward to the time when I feel as better as I look. My GP says that will be in 3 weeks for the joints, and some time later for the other stuff.

SO, is Prednisone the devil or not?

I've decided Prednisone, like my own immune system, is both the devil and not the devil.

By the way,

Coming Soon to a Writer's Notebook Near You:

Poetical Ponderings on the Metaphysical Implications of Living in a Body That is Trying to Kill You, featuring ruminations on: self-loathing, destructive power, & hubris at the cellular level.