Didn't Quite Finish "Turn: Washington's Spies"

 before it left Netflix, but the Revolutionary-War drama provided as close to a binge-watch as your Bohemian Crip is most likely to attempt.  Generally, it's about the journey, people, though maybe I wish I'd started on this one a bit faster.

Relevant to our interests here, however is the revelation that some of Benedict Arnold's bitterness was related to a battlefield disability sustained while taking big risks.  He was very intrepid, and in his way, an early self-advocate, saving his own leg from the then-customary field amputation, at the cost of a painful and lengthy recovery. Not sure if this counts as *good* representation as between the treachery and the bitterness, General  Arnold...essentially laid down an historical basis/template for every comic-book villain, ever, but I think it's important to remember that, although what we might face is new, disability has been present throughout time.(and maybe we haven't had the full story about him, it's true.)

Nobody Should Ask Me Process Questions...

 I got a big inspiration yesterday while being sick.(Really tired of putting the "retch" in "Inkstained Wretch") But maybe it helped me simplify my vision.

"Maybe They Just Boned, Adrian."

 

My continued search for meaning through exploring my diagnosis has slowed a bit. Probably a modern-day Thoreau would have some thoughts about quests undertaken via Facebook, but I'll spare you. What did I expect? Cheat codes?(Not exactly, but kind of, I think. Sigh...) Feels weird that I don’t have a faction in a Persistent Internet Argument but I don’t feel such overweening pride in my disabled identity that I wouldn’t switch it, but I don’t have loads of abled dreams, anymore. Only a few times since high school. It’s lonely not to have a side, in addition to not answering any deep-seated questions, even when I wasn't sure what I was really looking for, anyway.  Such a habit to be disappointed I don't have it, though.  When in doubt, play the hits! And, no, no rotation of new, instant internet besties, much less(heh, heh) a...lid...for my...um, pot.)

I suppose it’s not unusual that thinking about my life would make me remember a documentary, but instead of “Crip Camp” or something like that,I’m reminded of a moment in the Adrian Grenier documentary A Shot In The Dark. If you haven’t seen it, the actor/director drives across country, from maybe Brooklyn to New Mexico, to see the father that he never met. His friends are patient with his cosmic side, all of his musings about the confluence of factors that brought his parents together(Maybe more likely as an actor who won the appearance lottery) but it’s a long trip so his female  friend ends up rolling her eyes and saying “Maybe they just boned. Adrian.”

Maybe CP is just an accident,too.. I can't decide if that would make me sad or free me up.

I wish I didn't want to take the next decade or so and put it in a box labelled "Free To A Good Home"  .

Help Out A Friend of a Friend...

 Help Kay Fight Cancer

I get a lot of mutual-aid requests, but I consider my friend to be an unimpeachable source, so it's important to help with this one. Apparently, Kay was a hero to someone when they were desperate.(Isn't that an energy we need to feed now?) Someone like that deserves someone like that.(And a better health system, too, but I don't have that much Crip Magic.) 

Why do People Even WANT Pity?

 a question I know I've returned to frequently, especially as regarding the illness- fabulist topic.  I watched Scamanda this week, which I thought I'd already seen, because I confused her with the faker on-staff with "Grey's Anatomy"(Which I'm not exactly a fan of, but I watched the reruns over lunch one summer and enjoyed them enough to be a bit jealous of both that chance, but even more than the writer's room dream, which hasn't quite faded as much as  my childhood fantasy of coming back as a macaw.) But also, I'd love to have my life experience respected, instead of feeling like I'd better invent a seated version of stuff other girls get.(For me, it's mostly not been like that, but neither does the traffic part when I roll by, either.)

Maybe I'm kind of a bad person, I think, if not the same kind of bad person that gets vaguely aroused during "Killer Couples" because, though I do know that, for every one of these scammy gals, there are probably a thousand families struggling and white-knuckling and  losing out. Volunteer coordinators tearing their hair out(those that aren't waiting for it to grow back for other reasons-- because nobody thinks cancer patients are real anymore.(And I do care about that, I promise you, but part of me watches wondering why I don't "pull" as a charity case beyond an occasional spot in line. Are big *blue* eyes less emotional than brown? I would never, ever, do that, but I do wonder what I would do with a tenth of their chutzpah. Maybe I'd be truly happy right now. I was an audacious child, and spent class time fighting to be right as if I was on some game show "Who Wants To Be In The Middle Class?" perhaps, but I didn't exactly win, and at some point, people kind of took me aside and told me it was unbecoming.  which it probably was, but finding that out did a number on my confidence that I'm still trying to make up for.

What I think is that pity feels more like being spit on than a warm bath to luxuriate in.I wonder, "Am I bad at this?" Even though I'm not dying and my mother would slap the color out of my cheeks if I leaned in for the handouts the way these people seem to do. Sometimes I don't feel as connected and committed *to my real disabled life* as these women are to these scams.  Sometimes I think they won't get true justice until they get injured or truly sick...does that mean I think this is a punishment?  Sometimes.

Sometimes, when I sign my own paperwork for my permanent condition, I have the tiniest urge to look over my shoulder as if this isn't real.  (It may not be fatal, but it's WAY real. )

Crossposted from Dreamwidth...

Urban Dandelion 

I am slightly worried it is too passive, but the more strident attempt was also too unfocused. Also, you know, I feel for Norma Rae, but I can't BE her, right? And, you know, being Gen X means never being far from a voice in my head that says "Fucking poser," and doesn't mean it as a compliment  to my social-media savvy or brand ID.

Can't say I always love my brain, even if it weren't obviously damaged in shipping, but I am kind of loving that I can take a thought and a picture I didn't know I had yesterday and make it into something I'm even halfway proud to share.

And my own Afeni might even like that there's a plant in it. 

Everyone Wrote About "Adult Braces" So...

 

Everyone Else has written about this book, so….

1.      Reading “Adult Braces” the second time through to fully decide if it’s messy like a tomato that I love, or when one’s whole purse falls out in front of everyone.  Still kind of can’t decide, though I wonder if L&A might have gotten similar results from, like, hiring an assistant they pledged that nobody would bone. Since so much of what I’m reading about them and Roya is about coffee, and bill-paying and, well, non-shippy things. Not that I know what triads or throuples really feel like.  Obviously.

2.      Love is lovely, though, and I wish I had more. How could I begrudge someone for trying to keep their thing together instead of sacrificing for someone else’s version of a principle? Yeah, it would be nice to feel like someone really had it figured out, but does that mean that person has to stick with that version of her life forever because it satisfies us? It’s like a larger version of why I got stuck writing snarky crippled college girls after my actual life felt like something else.

 

3.      As a disabled person with one easy-to-diagnose condition and one tough one, I welcome Lindy West to the neurodivergent family.  I also have read that women with ADD tend less toward dramatic, impulsive acts and more toward dreaminess, being forgetful and things like that.  So, you might have gotten some bad advice—my hard-to diagnose thing was dyscalculia, which would only have factored in here if I’d fully kicked it Buzzfeed style and written “10 Things I Think About Lindy West’s Latest” and come up with eight.  Or twelve. (Yes, that’s why I stopped aping listicles.  Besides certain old-hat aspects.) Didn’t get dx till way at the end of college, though I could have written an article called “Why Does Math Class Make Me Want to Die?” way before that.  Again, didn’t come up till more high-level math so maybe that was my “too successful” while people were trying to find paper, or pens, or resolve my non-existent “Yes, You Can Be Cute and Still Factor Equations” issues(seriously, boys in my class thought of me as either One of The Guys or, possibly, drooling tapioca into a cup, neither of which was ever altered by classroom performance, despite my showing up as if I were on a game show fighting for a slot in maybe the middle class, or maybe humanity, a great deal of the time. Who wants to be that person’s friend? I compounded my own struggles without realizing it a bunch of the time.)

4.      Did people, including Lindy West herself, really set her up as the Queen-Sized leader of the feminists? Gen X usually doesn’t get included in the chat here, but I don’t remember that meeting.  (Although maybe there is a feature like that, because editors tend not to respond well to “Leaderless movement from the bottom up,” and just want Faces—with the added bonus of getting to one day debunk what you set up in the first place.) Although, yeah, it would be nice if “happily ever after” were real, but even Jimmy Buffett wrote about “Happily ever after/ every now and then” and maybe that’s what people really get. 

5.      Nobody really wants to read the book about the couple that never messes up the foreplay and where the husband does EXACTLY 50% around the house, but did this book have to be *this* messy? I’m kind of thinking not. Editing is still a thing that writers can do.