The Duck's Nest: online home of mizducky

NaBloPoMo dropout ... ah, well

Barely halfway through the month, and already I am FAIL at the daily blogging thing. Ah well. I am more laughing at myself than anything else: oh dear, I couldn't come up with one meaningful thing to say per day, how shallow ... More like I blurted out a couple of big heavy things up front, and that seems to have relieved the posting angst, and now I'm enjoying a well-earned respite into non-profundity or even silence.

And that's okay. I've got a lot of things going on in my life where there's nothing flashy going on, just putting one's nose to the grindstone and doing the work every day. Lack of crises is good. It may not make for exciting blogging, but it's good.

Who knows, I may walk into a faceful of angst tomorrow, but for now I'm feeling mellow about things, so I'm just going to enjoy that without analyzing it to death.

 

So what is this Second Life thing?

And why have I been spending such a major amount of time hanging in that so-called virtual world? Well, I do belong to an active and meaningful online community there, which is the major reason. But one of the many other significant reasons is that people use can and do use Second Life to create stuff like this video. And a lot more.

 

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing

I'm not even going to bother with making excuses for posting a video this time. Sharing cool videos is fun. And this is an extremely cool video, for a song that takes a crucial Ella sample and spins it into a whole new shape.

 

Return to Wuthering Heights

I don't know about this blogging-every-day thing at this point. It appears I don't have the inspiration to come up with some profound and original idea every single day--let alone the energy to write about it at length. So once again I'm falling back on showing you a video that I find really cool. But what a quirky wonderful video it is, and it's only fitting since the song, and its performer, are renowned for wonderful quirkiness too. I give you the then 18-year-old Kate Bush, looking all pre-Raphaelite and more than a little posessed, out in a field in a red dress dancing her evocation of the ghost of Catherine.

 

Interlude: funky pop-culture historical humor of yesteryear

I was researching tunes for a project I was doing in Second Life (more about that later) when I happened upon the following video. Words can't do it justice, so I'll just let you all watch it and make of it what you will.

 

Being the interpersonal canary in the coalmine again

Arrg. I am feeling this song just a wee bit too much tonight, in regard to my role in interpersonal relations. Let's just leave it at that, shall we?

 

The ever-returning chronic pain

I've been living with chronic pain (due to osteoarthris and gout) for some 15 years now, and in that time I've learned all sorts of interesting things about it. One of the chief things being that there's only so much one can do to stave off chronic pain. You can be an absolute whiz with self-care, meds, supplements, home remedies, exercise, nutrition, alternative therapies, etc. etc. etc. ... and have some really fine days of minimal pain. But sometimes despite all your best efforts, you'll get a flareup anyway.

For instance, I'm one of those people whose joints will start aching in advance of the barometer dropping--and since I'm not planning to move to a weather-free bubble any time soon, I see no way of avoiding that. I'm also an expert at winding up in some awkward position in my sleep that torques out my knee. It doesn't matter how careful I am with placing pillows all around the cranky joint; I have been an active sleeper my entire life and there's no talking my subconscious out of it.

The corollary to the lesson of flareups happening even despite one's best efforts is that, beyond a certain point, there's little to be gained in microscopically examining what might have caused any particular flareup. Certainly if there's something hugely obvious that's in your power to change, then that's worth examining. But go too far down along the road of "why did this flareup happen?" and you get into "what did I do wrong this time?" ... and self-blame does no good in living with a long-term condition.

For example: I have at this point proved to myself over and over that my gout meds do a much more efficient job at keeping my uric acid levels at bay if I drink copious amounts of fluids--like at least that proverbial 8 glasses a day, and one or two over that even better. (Yes, I know some medical pundit comes along every now and then and declares the 8 glasses a day a myth. That may or may not be the case for the general population, but for anyone on allopurinol it is most definitely NOT a myth, and that's not just from some health pundits but from the NIH database on pharmaceuticals.) So--yes, those 8 glasses of fluids, preferably water, daily. I know this. Can I manage it every day? Sometimes ... it just doesn't quite happen. It's a lot of freakin' liquids to get down one's hatch, and I find I have to start working on it first thing in the morning and keep a count, or by bedtime I still have a glass or two to go amid prospects of staggering to the bathroom multiple times in the night.

Now I could beat myself up over being less than perfect with something I know will make me feel better if I just do it--but why do that to myself, when the borderline-gout-attack joint crankies will already be beating up on me? Plus--no. Just no. Done with beating up on myself for lack of perfection, or anything. It's just a nasty thing to do to oneself, and doesn't solve a thing.

Likewise, there's a thousand other things one could conceivably do to affect one's pain condition for better or worse, that often just wind up getting randomized the way life can do. Like the flareup I woke up to this morning: not only had I been a tad skimpy with my water intake the past couple of days, but yesterday I chose to go out wearing flipflops instead of more supportive shoes, just because I wanted to wear my flipflops, dammit. And I wound up driving around a whole lot looking for stuff, and apparently my car seat has decided it doesn't like my back anymore. Fine--I wore much more supportive shoes today, and tried to sit in the evil car seat for less time, and I still freakin' hurt. Like I said, no point in self-flagellation. Besides, the barometer did drop today, so for all I know my bod was hurting because of that.

The point is, I did go out again today anyway--and that brings me to my third big learning: there is no perfect way to decide whether you're overdoing it or underdoing it. The advice on whether to keep moving despite the pain or stop moving because the pain is a sign you are overdoing it I find contradictory and confusing. Again, obviously, if I suddenly feel like my leg is being clawed by rabid honey badgers and realize that the person swearing at the top of her lungs is me, well, yes, I can bloody well tell that's "danger Will Robinson" stop-everything pain. And I'm damn glad I've only experienced that a blessedly few times. But most of my pain is much less identifiable than that, various health pundits' assurances to the contrary. Frankly, it all hurts, and all hurting sucks.Even the pain one is meant to push through because it will feel better once you move, that pain sucks a whole lot more than the pundits give it credit for.

I got proof of this right after my hysterectomy. When I woke up in the hospital, the docs told me the best thing I could do for my recovery was to try and get up and walk around the ward, despite the pain. And so I did it, white-knuckling through it on a walker--and the nurses on my ward were amazed. Apparently almost nobody actually took them up on the walking-around-after abdominal-surgery thing, despite the doctors' encouragement, because the pain was too great for most patients. It was in that moment that I realized that all my years of pushing through daily arthritis pain had so trained up my ability to tough it through pain, that toughing out the post-abdominal surgery pain was not that much of a stretch for me. And in that next moment, I realized "ahah! So this daily pain I'm supposed to shrug off is really right up there with healing from having your innards surgically rearranged."

So--to push through, or not to push through: only the person with the pain can decide for sure. I seriously considered staying at home today. And I would have given myself permission to do so, and not felt like a wimp for doing so. What decided me on going out anyway was sheer determination to get one more day out in the fresh air on my remaining day off, before I start my work week and hole up with the computer. And yes, there was a desire to push myself at least a little more too--I have long-term health goals that require I be at least a little pushy. But it was my choice. And whichever way I decided would have been okay, because ultimately there is no perfect way to do this freakin' chronic pain thing, there's just doing whatever seems to be the thing you need to do in that moment, and not exacerbating the pain by getting painful with yourself.

Return to Aqui Es Texcoco

I was reminiscing the other day about my previous activity as an amateur-to-semi-pro food blogger (the semi-pro part referring to the fact that I actually landed a paid restaurant-reviewing gig at one point that lasted nine months) ... anyway, yes, reminiscing, when I suddenly recalled this one joint down in Chula Vista that I had previously raved about here. Aqui Es Texcoco does a regional style of lamb barbacoa that is not your usual Americanized taco-shop fare. And I am a fool for roast lamb, which I don't have very often as it's kind of unwieldly in quantity and price for a single homesteader on a budget. So I decided to make a return visit today.

Of course one can just jump on the I-5 and be down to the South Bay in a flash--and to be blunt, a lot of people prefer to do that rather than drive through a lot of barrio-esque neighborhoods. But for me, that's one of my favorite things; to check out various neighborhoods and absorb the vibe--and also scope interesting new restaurant finds. So I basically got on 43rd St./Fairmount Ave. heading south and kept going till it gave out, and then worked my way over to the next arterial, and so on and so on ... spotted an interesting joint, too, that I need to go back and check out further some time. But in the meantime I had a mission.

I had also planned to take a turn through Imperial Beach, arguably the most low-key and modestly-budgeted of San Diego's beach communities ... but alas, road construction had closed off a whole stretch of the beach-front street, so my plans for a stroll along the sands did not materialize today. Perhaps tomorrow, at a different beach ...

But by now I had worked up quite an appetite, so I cut back inland, found Broadway, and found Aqui Es Texcoco. It was in the same strip-mall, but it looked like it had taken over the space of a second storefront and expanded in size. Had a fabulous meal of their basic lamb plate plus a serving of their nopalitos salad, and it was gooooood.

Took a similarly leisurely route back, made it home... and then napped for over an hour--post-feed sleepiness! Oddly enough, the whole meal still fit perfectly well within my food plan. I guess it was that nice satisfying lamb ... oh, and the lamb broth. Heavenly liquid essence of lamb. That'll put a sleepy on ya.

Anyway, I chose to write this food expedition up on Nosh, and you can find the details here, here, and here. And I'm feeling a sense of accomplishment. As well as a sense of being well-fed.

Return to childhood: Astro Boy

 

Goodness knows why it suddenly struck me to go searching YouTube for this, but there it was: the original 1960s English-language opening to Astro Boy, a cartoon I adored as a child. Little did I know it--because all overt clues to its origin had been removed--but I was watching one of the earliest imports of Japanese animation into the US market. But even though the dialog and themesong lyrics had been dubbed into English, and all Japanese credits and title cards replaced, I could still tell, even as a child, that this cartoon was different from the usual Hanna Barberra and Loonie Toons fare on my TV. The aesthetics were different--hell, there were whole references to cultural traditions that did not seem to have anything to do with it being a series of science fiction stories. And thus I cut my teeth on anime before the age of 10, and it was good!

Return to restaurant/cooking geekery

Needless to say, another erstwhile beloved activity of mine that kind of fell by the wayside during my Slough of Despond was my avocation as a food-geek (a self-coined term I still prefer to "foodie"). When my eating was way the hell out of control, the last thing I wanted was witnesses. Plus I was broke anyway, so even the inexpensive hole-in-the-wall ethnic eateries I loved were out of my budget.

But now that things are looking a lot more optimistic, there are definite positive reasons for me to re-embrace my inner food-geek. For one thing, as I discovered in my previous weight-management days, one of the best ways to make staying on a food plan attractive is to make the food itself enjoyable. That requires putting some effort, skill, and even love into hunting down healthy ingredients and preparing them pleasantly, or finding pleasant places to enjoy healthy food made by others. For another thing, most pre-packaged pre-prepared foods are just not good for me. Even the supposededly healthy stuff just has way more sodium than my bod can handle--my feet and ankles start making like dirigibles and it takes days for them to recover.

A new additional impetus is that my recently-gained employment is all telecommuting work-from-home. In some ways, this is wonderful--no expenditures for gas or for clothes I'd have no use for outside an office; no shlepping lunches or buying swill in some company cafeteria. But the downside is that, if I'm not careful, I don't get out of the house for days on end, and don't get near enough exercise. So I've taken to turning my days off--which fall in the middle of the week--into day-long excursions, in which I entice myself into walking by puttering around interesting neighborhoods and stores, and hunting down interesting places to have nice modestly-priced lunches.

You'll notice the new widget I've stuck in the upper right-hand corner of the blog front page. Nosh is yet another amateur-restaurant-review website, but it's new and fun and has some really neat features--not only the widget, but an app so that I can play Harriet-the-Spy restaurant reviewer with my Droid. Of course it's kind of silly. But that's what makes it fun. And when you've just rescued yourself from a major Slough of Despond, silly fun is theraputic. And well deserved.