in local news...

Until recently the Telfer Subway's walls were a mix of sub-Banksy stencilling, tag scribbles, and abstract debate on understanding and action. Not so bad, for visuals you catch in fractional glimpses while your attention is 90% focused on not stepping in the copious piles of dogshit. One bit was actually quite nice, a white-haired busker stencilled where the usual guitar-and-whistle busker stands:



Last week, the Rhinoceros company water-blasted the walls down to bare brick, and rather than having someone semi-official in to mural up the graffiti-begging walls, they've left it a blemishless cream.



This will last how many hours before it's nothing but random scribbles, not an interesting visual in sight?

glands and repeats

There’s a family history of autoimmune disorders…at least on one side. The other tends to drink themselves into sudden heart-related events, lucky bastards. My grandfather’s got myasthenia gravis, my mother has MS, and my misguided white cells attack my thyroid.

I’m just so goth, cutting isn’t attention-getting enough; I have to slowly destroy a gland that regulates all bodily functions. Look upon me, lip-pierced neck-tattoo guy, and weep at your own insufficiency.

Hashimoto’s thyroiditis is not life-threatening, even without medication…at least not right away. When you’re 800 pounds at 32 and die of pustulated bedsores…hey, nobody lives forever, and we have to accept that our metabolisms slow as we age, right? It’s instead deeply annoying because the syndrome manifests as visible moral failings. Put on more and more weight? You’re gluttonous. Barely drag yourself out of bed? You’re lazy. Trouble remembering where you parked the car, what the last chapter covered, your own age? You’re purposely stupid.

And that’s just from doctors who, if you manage to impress upon them the seriousness of your issues, might order a single blood test, which actually tests the pituitary gland’s function…and, inevitably, will tell you you’re ‘within normal range.’ More likely, the white coat will admonish you for lying about how much you eat, sleep, and exercise and insist you live better to feel better.

Which is why I buy my thyroid hormone replacement pills from Canada. I’m done wasting time with medical doctors who barely know where a thyroid is (left clavicle, right?) and wasting money on nutritionists who’ve done less research than me and keep pushing for expensive Chronic Fatigue Syndrome tests, with its even more expensive ‘treatments.’ I’ll never again be dependent on them for, quite literally, my lifeforce. Instead, I take my little pills on the schedule that seems to work best, swallow a handful of vitamins every morning, hit the gym as often as the body can manage, and make my baby steps toward health.

The latest MS research continues to support the theory that genetic predisposition is only part of what leaves someone with a dead stupid immune system – some sort of tipping point is required, like a viral infection. So, I could point toward that bad summer of 1997, when I came down with some virus the family GPs lackadaisically diagnosed as ‘not mono,’ after which I was allergic to everything. Air was deadly, or at least the pollen, dust, mold, dander, or wayward latex powder wafting on it left me choking and vulnerable to every bug in the dorm.

And, apparently, my thyroid was suddenly on the most wanted list as well. There’s a pattern of pre-diagnosis weight shifts with hashi’s…during the period your immune system is in its aaaaaaagh a thyroid, attack!!! mode, the dying cells dump their load of stimulating hormone into the bloodstream, and you lose weight. As a bonus, you have trouble sleeping, feel anxious, and can slip into panic attacks. Then there’s spells where your immune system is mellower, and your poor damaged thyroid returns to functioning, albeit not as well…and lucky you, all the weight you lost and more piles on, while your hair thins and your limbs are made of lead. But, chins up, soon enough it’s all thyroid, grrrrr! again and you lose the weight! Aaaand then put it back on. Then lose it again! And put it back on.

Over time you lose less and gain more, until you’re anxiously grinding through the overactive periods still suffering the exhaustion and gain of the underactive ones, and THAT’s when you finally accept something is wrong and go see Your Friendly Family Doctor, who runs one test, then kicks you in the shin for being a fatty-fatty-two-by-four looking for a magic thin pill.

Anyway, that sums up 1997 – 2004, until I was finally diagnosed. Mystery virus, you did stick with me.

And I don’t know why it bugs me, having a start date for this thing. Maybe because the years prior to 1997 were so unlucky and sometimes tragic, and I’d been crawling out of that. Learning who I was when I wasn’t just focused on surviving, that I loved kickboxing and making prints out of toxic chemistry and hiking and sometimes even pretty lace dresses…and then I was back in survival mode, too tired for kickboxing and hiking and too weak in the lungs for darkroom smells and too fat to wear my pretty clothes, too uncomfortable in my skin to buy new ones that also wouldn’t fit a few months.

There’s another school of thought, that allergies and more serious autoimmune conditions are partly caused by neurotic anxiety, dem ole bad vibrations. In which case…ha ha!...I was also screwed. In one sense, I can see this, the nearly constant adrenaline grind interrupting metabolic and immune function eventually leading to a sort of snapback, as a woman who gives birth can have temporary autoimmune problems when her immune system overcompensates for nine months of suppression. But how has this been measured, or even noted anecdotally? An overactive thyroid causes anxiety and an underactive thyroid causes depression, and both color memories in an anxious/depressive light. It’d be easy to take the effect for the cause, given a firm grounding in pseudoscience.

Still…I can feel the difference when I’m stressed. It takes longer to recover from exercise, and a cold bug can knock me back for weeks. I’ve been trying to cut back on pointless anxiety, with some success (and pointlessly worrying about that, since the desire to write and take pictures is a pointless anxiety that work alleviates). At least it’s something I can put a little hope in, instead of only cursing whatever classmate or fellow coffee drinker passed on my little virus friend.

disconnected

Deadly exciting stuff today – walked across town to go a Tesco, instead of the usual Sommerfield or Lidl. In the rain. It’s already late-autumn feeling here…remembering wine festivals and rinkydink carnivals and October weekend trips to Ocean City just before all the shops closed for the season. The weather suits the mottled basalt buildings.


We got coffee in the supermarket Costa, where we went back in May when we first visited and stayed down the road, killing mild hangovers with caffeine and setting up appointments to see flats.

I love the thousand-yard stare on the woman in the background. It's this century's absinth drinkers...the lower-middle-class lattee sippers.

catching up

Slowly getting the hang of this daily photoblog craic. It’s actually helped to begin work, since it not only has me waking across town twice a day (trying to find shortcuts, which always leaves me near the castle – it’s got the same magnetic force as the gherkin), but takes me to an extremely photogenic area. It’s turning into a habit to grab a photo of anything marginally interesting, which is what I hoped it would poke me into doing. Thinking about doing the same here as well, just to be pressured to write something every day, where it won’t be blithering on friendslists. I complain about having an audience, online…I must be lying.

I really just want the potential for conversation. Whether it materialises or not doesn’t matter, so much. Maybe it’s getting older…keep a journal when you’re 16 and it’s cute, but do the same ten or fifteen years later, and you are actually compiling a hardback book of creepiness for the police to eventually find and analyse, ending your cat-and-mouse serial atrocities on amateur microbrewers. Writing where nobody reads, but some desperate freelancer with a deadline in five hours might stumble across in a really extended procrastination binge, implies some small amount of accountability. Without the angst of actual associates potentially expecting accountability.

Hmmm. My logic chain has some linkage problems.

best of a bad city

Been a busy few weeks. The upshot is, we’ve now got a flat in Edinburgh and are moving up at the end of this month. Yay?

It’s more difficult that I expected, leaving London. I’m tired and claustrophobic in this city, more than ready to go somewhere it isn’t a major undertaking to pick up a pint of milk, but all the same…we’ve been here three years. It’s familiar. Like a long depression, after which smiling is scary.

Still, there’s bright spots I’ll miss.

The University
I’m back to working with the big arts university through the end of the semester (and serendipitously, my move date), where I’ve floated through a few contracts. There’s a few aspects that drop me into a vat of spicy boiling rage once or twice a week (primarily, the huge mess the last person left me to mop up, and my supervisors’ determined innocence of this fact), but the benefits far outweigh the hassle.

My coworkers are nice. This is simple, but huge. Most of them pitch in when there’s a big task or a crisis. And nearly all of them have some artistic hobbies, so their conversations are interesting and no one stares at you for scribbling in a sketchbook or reading over your lunch break. Also – lunch break! You’re expected to take one, instead of getting the skunk eye for eating away from your desk.

Also, there’s free publications of varied quality lying about. Most are displaying student work, but others include random how-to’s…what open-source software can be used and what still required professional stuff, the important laws regarding squatting and the local squat-arts scene, etc. I like leaving these on the bus when I’m done and watching people’s fascination when they pick them up, expecting a Metro or London Lite. The best was when I dropped the Student Union magazine, ‘Less Common, More Sense,’ with its bizarre cover of a sausage in a banana peel, on the seat in front of me, and a young guy picked it up, flipped through with a growing grin, and pulled out a Polish-English Dictionary to begin working through the first article.

It’s also, several times a week, a satisfying job. Most of my job involves scheduling and maintaining records of the advisors and counsellors, which as I’m partially an anal retentive picky pain, works for me. I spend a lot of the day on the phone with students, which is entertaining in itself, and sometimes they’re really in a bad way. It can be exhausting, on days you’ve heard too many sad stories and haven’t been able to help, but then in another day or two, you’ve gotten them a time to meet with a counsellor and they are happier. I haven’t done the hard work, but I have gotten A and B together, so I feel like I’ve had a positive effect on my corner of the world.

random thoughts upon exiting

Bouquets of flowers just make me sad. That, and the allergies they provoke. I can't keep them going--a day later, they're a sad wilted bunch melting into mold and smelling funny.

Potted plants are better. It takes longer to kill them, and I feel like they had a better shot at life as I throw them in the bin with the cut flowers and the tub of hummus I never get around to finishing.

modestly proposing...

I’m not saying that it’s a rational impulse, the wish to murder someone who pronounces ‘here’ as ‘hnun-yheah.’ Even if they start and end every sentence with ‘hnun-yheah.’

But common sense dictates, to keep the population at a sustainable number, a reasonable licensed hunting season. Say, September through April—enough to stock the deep freezer with hnun-yheah steaks and hnun-yheah bratwurst through barbequing season.

Most of my father’s duck callers would need only minor modifications: hnun-yheah! hnun-yheah!