010. Queers Dig Time Lords

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QDTLcover

 
 
I’ve only done this twice before but I so love doing it, and also, I’m going to whine about my health (again) in the next post, so here’s some happy for you before I get on that train of (literal) depression.

This is the cover of an anthology on (you guessed it) Doctor Who from a queer perspective, and I have an essay in it! It comes out in early June from Mad Norwegian press and let me tell you, excitement is high hear in Chez Crazy Cat Lady, especially since I’m less an essay girl and more a make-shit-up girl.

Here’s the table of contents, which I bring you with much excitement, as stated above:
 
 
 

Table of Contents
Introduction, by John and Carole E. Barrowman
Editors’ Foreword, by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas
The Monster Queer is Camp, by Paul Magrs
Time, Space, Love, by Emily Asher-Perrin
Seven Ways of Looking at Captain Jack, by Mary Anne Mohanraj and Jed Hartman
Born Again Whovian, by David Llewellyn
Queer Doctor vs. Straight Trek?, by Paul Cockburn
Sub Texts: The Doctor and the Master’s Firsts and Lasts, by Amal El-Mohtar
Nice TARDIS, by Jason Tucker
The Incredibly True Adventures of an Intellectual Fan Dyke, by Sarah J. Groenewegen
Bi, Bye, by Tanya Huff
In Praise of Mature Women, or Why Donna Noble and River Song Totally Need to Call Me, by Jennifer Pelland
We’re Here, We’re Queer, Rate Us on iTunes, by Erik Stadnik
Secrets and Lies, by Scot Clarke
Long Time Companions, by Melissa Scott
Jack Harkness’s Lessons on Memory and Hope for Cranky, Old Queers, by Racheline Maltese
My Straight Best Friend, by Nigel Fairs
A Kiss from Romana: Lesbian Subtext in The Stones of Blood, by Julia Rios
Bothersome Otherness, by Martin Warren
PVC Made Me a Gay, by Gary Russell
Torchwood, Camp, and Queer Subjectivity, by Brit Mandelo
The Doctor: A Strange Love, Or: How I Learned to Stop Hating and Love the Who, by Hal Duncan
A Man is the Sum of His Memories, by Neil Chester
Spoilers: A Letter to Myself, Age 16, by Kaia Landelius
The Heterosexual Agenda, by John Richards
Hey, Mickey, You’re So Fine, by Naamen Gobert Tihaun
Mutants, Monsters, Mutts, and Mentiads, by Cody Quijano-Schell
Same Old Me, Different Face: Transition, Regeneration, and Change, by Susan Jane Bigelow
The Girl Who Waited (for the Guidance Counselor to Get to His Point), by Rachel Swirsky

009.

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onlyever only-ever-always

I’ve read another book, Only Ever Always by Penni Russon. I bought it knowing absolutely zero about it, simply because I follow Penni on Twitter and she’s lovely. I’m glad I did, because it’s a great one. It’s pretty short, with a fairytale type feel to it and a pretty simple (but effective!) premise (is it called premise when it’s not a game? I have no idea). It’s about two girls, Claire and Clara, living very different lives in two different worlds, both in the same physical space. Claire’s world is whole, Clara’s is broken. Of course it’s the latter I’m drawn to – I always go for the broken girls. The fact that her voice is so particular doesn’t hurt. I could read it all day, swear to God.

A (non-spoilery) example below:

I aint clever-clever like Dolores or Duguld and Brown, or seeing like Dolores’s old mum. But there’s one thing I do know, tucked into myself: hope unstitches you. Hope leaves you open and wounded. Without hope there’s no fear, just living. Haven’t I learned this very lesson all my life, by not messing with the way things are, by staying close to Andrew and living the same life every day? Aint I an expert at burying hope – grey and greasy and pulsing – under dirt, under stones? Aint I always buried it, every time Groom came calling, wanting us to make a life, we two? Aint I an age-old expert at stopping the flow of feeling, staunching the blood-river of hope and love that threatens to sweep a soul away?

Five stars on GoodReads, yay!

008. Apple cinnamon muffins.

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I baked something, it wasn’t a disaster, and it’s a momentous occasion, so here’s the recipe, converted to deciliters, with the flours I used so I remember it later on…

Screen shot 2013-03-21 at 17.01.46 Screen shot 2013-03-21 at 17.02.13

Original recipe.

Ingredients:
3.5 dl (1.5 cup) flour; 2.5 dl Jyttemjöl blå, 0.5 dl oat flour, 0.5 dl potato starch
1.75 dl (3/4 cup) sugar
0.5 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 egg
0.75 dl (1/3 cup) vegetable oil
sneaky amount of milk
1 apple, cut into eighth pieces, sliced thinly

Directions:
Preheat oven to 200°C. Line muffin tray with awesome liners with CUPCAKES on.

Combine flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and cinnamon.

Put the oil in a 2.5 dl measuring cup, add the egg and enough milk to fill it up. It will look like this, which I thought was so cool that I had to take a picture.

Add it to the flour mix, stir to combine. Add the apple, and probably some more milk because Jyttemjöl has xanthan gum in it, which means it thickens a little too quickly if you use too much (also the reason you should use it together with other types of flours). Pour into tins. I got eight muffins, and considering I filled the liners until 2 cm or so below the edge they rose like crazy.

I’m going to bake with real eggs, not egg replacer from now on because omg this was a fun expriment.

007.

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My goal when I rebooted this blog was to not start every post with “yeah my health sucks”, but dear reader? It really does. I’ve spent most of it on the couch or in bed. Blah blah blah boring things blah blah blah.

I’ve been writing “drabbles” (flash fiction it might be called in non-fannish terms? tiny bits of prose, 500 words or so), and as I wrote it has turned into a storyline I’m filling in bit by bit, and not in order at all. I love it, other people seem to like it and it’s making me want to do proper writing again. So I opened up Scrivener and rewrote a chapter. Started a second. Then there was hockey on the TV and I stopped.

Goals for next week (I wrote this week and twenty minutes later realised it’s Friday, good job):
- Rewrite half a chapter a day,
- Clean my fucking bedroom,
- Go outside at least twice,
- Answer the phone when people call,
- Start reading Lirael.
- cook at least twice.

It’s sixteen years since the first episode of Buffy was aired. This means it’s also sixteen year olds since I was in high school. What the everlovingfuck, how did this happen?

I think I’ll go contemplate the idea that I’m almost in my mid-thirties. If twenty-year-old me had known she would still be struggling with depression thirteen years old later I might not be. So I should be happy. But oh dear God, I feel old.

My obsession with Les Misérables continues. I’m actually going to attempt to read the book. Researched what translation I want and everything. Wish me luck.

006.

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It’s ironic, how as soon as I decided to at least try to turn my life around at least a little, I fell into the biggest slump ever. This week I had one day when I burst into tears at least a dozen times, and a whole other day when I went to sit in the dark with music to block out all sound, because there were too many people in the room.

So either I’m having a dip (fucking bipolar, I hate you) or I’m getting worse. Again I don’t know which and it would be less worrying if I knew when I’d get to see a psychiatrist.

Let me fill you in on this one:

I live in a small town in Sweden where no psychiatrists apparently want to live ever, nor do they want to work at the (state run, I guess? Idk the proper term) mental health clinic because nobody wants to work there so working there sucks. I’m told by my sister who has four months left before she’ll be a licensed nurse (right now she’s in Tanzania on a work study thing, how cool is that?), that makes complete sense. The health care is seriously lacking in this country, and so many doctors and nurses simply can’t do it, it’s too stressful to cope.

But back to the story: at the only mental health clinic in town they have no psychiatrists, so they keep having to rent doctors from other clinics in other towns. Which is expensive and leads to them having even less time and money to put down on treating their actual patients, who get a new doctor every single time, because none of them stay more than a month or two. I think I’ve seen six or eight in the last couple of years, only one more than once.

I was promised by one of the temporary psychiatrists I saw in January that I would get contacted before my sick leave paperwork idk what you call it in English ran out. I never was, so I called them and was told that I’m on a waiting list. They can’t even tell me if it will take a month or more to get my appointment.

So hahahaha I need to contact the aköfhdaöfdhafdahfdafd everything in the whole world to tell them this clinic sucks but that their paperwork will be in SOME TIME THIS YEAR HOPEFULLY BEFORE SUMMER and hope they are okay with that explanation or I’ll lose my precious precious income.

Being mentally ill really sucks. You have to be healthy to be able to do all the phone calls and arguing and stuff for your appointments. Which… you wouldn’t need if you were healthy.

So yeah, that’s a whole new kind of stress, and I really don’t need it right now. I try to hang in there and do my best to get better, but it’s hard when it’s like this. My mum says she’ll pay for a private therapist (we have those), but I’ve seen so many and they all say the same things, and I can basically script their answers out before they even say them. But maybe I will. I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.

But this? This is really fucking frustrating

005.

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The Name of the Star[6]
For something more fun:

I read this book. It’s about a southerner (American, that is) in London, about school uniforms and prefects and ghosts and Jack the Ripper. It’s less fluffy than Maureen Johnson’s other books, which I like. It has an awesome main character, which I love. It has fun minor characters, like Alistair of the library, like Callum with the Chelsea tattoo and Stephen who is all proper and English.

I wish there had been more of Jazza and Jerome, Rory’s friends, but other than that I’m happy with this one. Only two books behind in my GoodReads challenge now. Hooray!

004.

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I’m going to write about something I have avoided to blog about for over six months. If you don’t want to read I understand, because God knows I scroll as soon as someone mentions the word weightloss. This isn’t about ‘life style changes’ (I hate that fucking expression) and counting calories, though. It’s about being so depressed that “if I eat that food today I’ll have nothing cooked tomorrow and cooking is too hard” makes perfect sense.

I’m ashamed of it. I try to blame it on new meds. I try to say I eat pretty well. Here’s a secret: I don’t. Some weeks I live entirely on sandwiches or chips or apples. Other weeks I cook maybe once, and eat that stuff for that whole week. Sometimes I go over to my parents house on weekends, just so that someone will cook for me and I won’t have to use all my spoons to make a simple meal. They always send me home with leftovers. Sometimes they last for days.

This is not me losing weight on purpose. This is me living extremely unhealthily. This is me losing 32 kilos (and counting) by eating chips instead of vegetables, and toast instead of fruit. This is me feeling that I’m doing good if I cook more than once in a week.

People have started asking me if I eat, what I weigh, if I’ve lost weight. Not in a good way. In that way they had, back in high school, when I had an eating disorder and a mystery illness and was too weak to sit up by the dinner table and had to suck on sugar cubes just keep from collapsing in class.

I used to weigh 100 kilos and run and eat perfectly healthily. I used to rant and rage about idiot people in my blog on fat acceptance and health at every size. My last run was in May 2012. My last post in that blog was in August 2012.

Technically speaking, I’m of a ‘normal’ weight now. On the upper half of normal even, if we speak BMI. BMI is utter bullshit, though, BMI is the least thing you should look at for health. It doesn’t count muscles vs fat ratio, it doesn’t care if parts of that fat is because you have an awesome rack (I don’t, by the way), it doesn’t do any of those things. It was construed in an attempt to figure out the ‘average man’, ranging from the average length of his arm to the age he would get married. BMI is arbitrary. But should someone ask, this is what being of ‘normal weight’, of the elusive 22 on that stupid scale, feels like. I’d rather be able to have dinner without having to lie down afterwards because eating sitting up takes all my strength, but hey.

I’m trying to decide if writing this is oversharing. If I’m right back where I started, if what I’m writing now is no different than the way too personal stuff that’s in all those posts I just set to private in an attempt to start over. Maybe I am. But this, my friends, is where I’ve been the last six months. Knowing that it’s unhealthy, that it isn’t good for me, that I’m letting down my HAES-friends, and everyone who reads that other blog of mine. Turning this over and over in my head, staring at the screen, trying not to write about it because I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. To think I’m losing weight on purpose.

The worst part is probably that a small part of me, the one with the eating disorder, the one that thinks it’s an accomplishment to look like this, likes being below 70. I do my best to silence her, because it’s nothing but proof that eating disorders are forever, that the thoughts are forever burned into your brain, but sometimes it’s hard. Not always, but a lot of the time.

Fuck her, though. Fuck her, fuck the depression, fuck the anxiety and the doctor who says my bloodwork is fine and I’m healthy and shouldn’t feel this way. This is where I try. Try and fail, probably, but trying all the same. Today I fought the “but I’ll have to cook tomorrow if I eat it now” voice. I had both lunch and dinner. I did the dishes. I read a book. I went for a ridiculously short walk. Last week the streak of making things right lasted two days. Let’s make it three this week, shall we?

And please, please, please don’t see this as me advocating, condoning or otherwise saying yay to unhealthy weightloss or any weightloss whatsoever. I don’t. Dieting is evil. Most (healthy) ways to lose weight aren’t successful. Those that are, will probably not stick around. I still believe all those things. And maybe one day I’ll eat like I used to, and go for runs, and blog about how fucked up these skinny ideals are. Maybe I’ll be fat again, then. (Fat is a neutral word, people. I put no emphasis, positive or negative, on it.) Who the hell knows.

I’m going to hit ‘publish’ now. I hope I won’t regret it later.

003.

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fleury

I have become with a new sport. Years and years ago I tripped and fell into Arsenal insanity thanks to an internet friend. This year, thanks to a whole other friend? Oh yeah. Hockey. Pittsburgh Penguins. Just like that. I almost didn’t fall in love because of the stupid lock-out of which I still don’t understand all (or most) of the details, but a short season is better than no season (insert the THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN IN PREMIER LEAGUE face here), so I’ll deal. Even if I worry about injuries when they play games every other day or sometimes even several days in a row.

Growing up hockey and football were the most popular sports, and you kind of just had to hope that Sportnytt, the sports show that summed up the day/weekend’s sporty events, would squeeze handball in on a corner instead of showing excerpts from yet another hockey game you didn’t care about (they usually didn’t). So, naturally, I decided to dislike it. It’s all about punching each other anyway, right?

This is, I have found out, not true. People do punch each other and I did hear Engelland (who is, from what I’ve been told, employed as much to be tough and scary and hit people as he is for his defensive prowess) say about an awful black eye “eh, I can still see out of it, it’s cool”, but truth is that I’ve almost come to like the fights. Not so much because they make sense or because punching someone in the face is what I want to see when I watch a game (I really, really don’t), but I do like how these boys back each other up. When one person gets injured/goes down/takes a bad hit, his teammates? They’re so there. 100%. It’s almost sweet. You know, if sweet was a 6’2 scary hockey player with murder in his eyes.

I’m still a bb!fan and have only just learned to follow the puck (it’s hard, okay?) as it’s played, soooo I have tons to learn but a few things I really enjoy after having followed this crazy game for a bit over a month:

- when they shoot the puck into the boards and sort of just know what angle it will bounce back from, and time it so the right person is there to scoop it up,
- the way they fist bump everyone on the bench after they score a goal,
- how beautiful sneaky passing is in this game (sorry football, you’ve got nothing),
- how really good skating looks like dancing,
- what I said above, how they all got each other’s backs at any given time,
- how at the end of a game they all have to go a knock helmets with the goalie, sort of like my cat does with me when she’s feeling a cuddle coming on,

and a whole lot of other things that would probably make a ‘real’ fan roll their eyes so hard and probably pat me on the head and tell me it’s just because I’m a girl that I don’t really get it. Don’t worry, boys, I’ll get there. Trust me. I would present my football knowledge as proof but fuck that, I don’t need to prove anything to anyone.

And speaking of goalies! My favourite player so far is the guy above. His name is Marc-André Fleury and he’s the most adorable French-Canadian kid ever. He seems unable to not smile or laugh while talking, he accidentally swears in interviews all the time, he has an awesome accent and embraces the fact that everyone calls him Flower. Because why wouldn’t you, when someone has a last name like that? (There’s also a guy called Cookie, just like me!)

You also have to appreciate the guts it takes to throw yourself flat on the ice as half a dozen players are coming towards you at an insane speed, and yes, the goalies are, as described in the comic below “breakdancing ninjas wearing giant robot costumes”. I love a good goal and beautiful passing makes me sigh happily, but it’s the ninjas I love the most.

The comic? Comes from this page, and I do hope it’s okay to post it like this because it’s perfect. (Also read this one, about a gay couple who are a hockey player and an opera singer, it’s awesomecakes.)

hockeycomic01 hockeycomic02

hockeycomic03 hockeycomic04

002.

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Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares is the first book I’ve managed to read in about three months. It was a surprise Christmas present from Tansy and I’m happy she gave it to me because if she hadn’t I probably wouldn’t have bought it. Or read a book yet, for that matter.

It’s a super cute story about a red notebook left in a bookshop where two kids, Dash and Lily ask each other questions, dare each other to do things, and hide the book with clues about where it is. They don’t even meet until the halfway mark or so but I don’t even care.

It’s a bit like eating peanut butter or Nutella or something, not too sweet but pretty damn sweet, not to filling, except when it is, and just… perfect contemporary YA at its best. It got FOUR STARS by me on Good Reads.

Next I’m reading Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson. I bought it when I was in Stockholm last month, meeting up with Rebekah. It was -18°C and we took forever in there, just so we would have time to thaw before going outside again. I really love making memories like that, stuff you remember when you read the book later on. It’s why I always go to science fiction bookshops when I’m travelling. That’s how I remember.

001.

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Hi. This is me starting over. I just privated 364 posts (yes, really) for no particular reason except wanting a fresh start, of sorts. Everything on the internet is forever, but I’m going to pretend that’s not true. The last six months have really, really sucked and I checked out from all things blogs and Twitter, and now? Now I’m throwing myself in there again.

I don’t think it will last. But it’s worth a try.

So hi, dearest diary. I’m back. I have a rant about socialised health care coming up, but it’s no way to greet a blog after such a long absence. We’ll take that another day.