Health Notes

I had two hot flashes the last two days. This may be due to the rising heat of summer or it could just be my body messing with me. Whatever the case,  they were bad. I experienced a lot of nausea with both of them and had trouble shaking that. Tomorrow it may be warm enough for us to put on the AC. If we do so and I still have another hot flash, then it's just some chemical whatnot that my herbs can't handle. If not, well, then it's probably just due to the awful heat.

Aside from those unpleasant hours, I've been emotionally okay. My body is recovering from the fall, if slowly. That is helped by me trying to get as much sleep as possible. Maybe in a day or two, I'll be back to just my normal level of pain. Hah!

Heart Ur Curvzzz

As a person with an overabundance of fat, I was happy to see the body positivity movement start. Don't get me wrong, on some levels, I still am. The idea that people can find love and joy in however their body looks is a good thing. It is. But as many fat advocates have pointed out, it isn't enough.

For one thing, the positivity movement tends to focus on and have visibility on women who aren't really all that heavy. They are usually what Roxane Gay referred to as "Lane Bryant fat" because while they may be heavy, they can walk into any Lane Bryant store and basically wear anything in there. This isn't something a lot of fat people can do.

This is actually difficult to write because I don't want to dismiss what people at that size (or any size) go through in terms of how they view themselves. I get that a person with 20 lbs of extra weight can feel horrible about themselves. The movement for them (and all of us) to embrace our bodies no matter what is a good thing.

At the same time, the focus on self-love does nothing to address the vast number of problems faced by fat people. It doesn't address how we have trouble finding clothes, finding cars to handle us, finding chairs to hold us, or being able to go into a medical facility and receive proper care because some or all of the equipment may not work on us. Body positivity does not address the fact that while the population of the world is getting fatter, no one seems to be building things to handle us.

So yes, by all means, love your body. But fight for a more accommodating world as well. We need that.

Out

For the first time since the last fall, I went outside. Even though my shoulders would give protest every time I turned, I was able to drive. Going in and out of the house was challenging, but I lived.

And now I'm in a lot of pain. Hahahahaha. Oh well. I still went out.

Day of Fathers 2019

It's Father's Day. I talked to my dad to ask him how he was without HIS dad being around this Father's Day. He seemed okay, though there are lingering headaches where my grandfather's assets are concerned. That really needed to have been handled better than it was.

Other than that, my dad was fine. I'm glad. I'm glad we're getting along better than we used to. I'm not even sure what caused that riff. The smaller the family gets, I suppose the closer you get to the ones who are left.

Getting There

OF COURSE, I would have to fall right before the weather decided to do an uptick. Now I'm hot and annoyed and in pain. I don't think sleeping is going to be very fun tonight.

Hopefully the pain will be less horrid tomorrow. The bathroom is so hot that I'm having a difficult time functioning in there. It's a room I have no choice but to deal with. Between the pain and the heat, it's rather miserable.

Okay. Enough complaining.

Tumbling Down

I fell in the driveway today. Nothing seems to be broken though I know my knees are going to be killing me in a couple of hours due to the way I had to get up. My butt will probably hurt too. I fell on my butt.

My roommate came to my rescue and took my glasses/other stuff from me. He also moved the car so I had ample room to hoist my body to a standing position.

That took a while. For one thing, I needed to recover from the shock and impact of the fall. For another, falls always leave me in a panic. I had to calm down from that before I could think clearly about how to fix the situation.

In any event, I'm back in the house and at my computer. Thankfully, this didn't end in a bad way.

Radioactive Stag

Apparently, there is an increasing number of people who have their bachelor/bachelorette parties in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. You read that correctly. Cheap flights, the opening up of the area to tourism, and just general morbid curiosity have created a strange new ritual for stag parties. And mind you, when you go here, you can't drink. There are no strippers or prostitutes. There is a hotel, but beyond that, the whole thing is just a matter of wandering through an abandoned, possibly dangerous city that could maybe make you radioactive.

Then again, I guess that's the point.

Stag parties have always been about getting all the single-life hellion out of your system so you can settle down.  Of course, as we've become a more open society where sex and pleasure are concerned, perhaps we don't need to 'get it out of our system' as much as we used to. For many people these days, the point of getting married is as a nice safe exit out of the party life. When you start that in your teens and don't marry until your 30s, the whole party thing has started to get dull.

Instead, it seems some people want to spend their last days as a single person exploring something else. This isn't just a collection of abandoned buildings. This is a relic of Soviet-era life. It's a relic of the nuclear arms race. What do people talk about as they walk through abandoned buildings? What do they discuss when there is no background noise or energy from other people? What do you do with all of that spookiness, all of that sadness?

A lot of people probably find this morbid or disrespectful. I can understand this. At the same time, I do really get why people would go there, especially when their lives are about to change.