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assorted updates
Aug. 10th, 2023 02:49 pmHealth: I'll put this under a cut.
My sciatica flare-up continues to flare, alas. I was doing okay, actually having pretty long periods of being pain free (with the help of OTC painkillers, gabapentin, and muscle relaxants). And then on Friday at work I bent down, and something went TWANG in my back, and it was not good. I went home early and haven't been back to work since.
That weekend I started taking the leftover prednisone from my last round of this shit. I'd been hoping to avoid it because of its blood sugar effects, but that clearly wasn't going to be possible.
On Monday I got an appointment for a same-day video call visit with my doctor, but several levels of technical failure meant I had to go in instead. So I dragged my sorry ass in--for a while, driving in and having to lean over in my seat at an angle to keep the back pain under control, I wasn't sure I'd manage to get there. But I did, and got more drugs and a referral for physical therapy and a work note, and the pain eased off and was pretty bearable even when I was sitting.
So, on the way home I thought "Why don't I stop at the grocery store and pick up a few things?" I was coping okayish--in considerable but not intolerable pain--most of the way through the brief shop, and then suddenly the pain ramped way up. I gritted my teeth through checkout and carrying my bag to the car and driving home and carrying my bag up two flights of stairs to my apartment, then more or less collapsed in a heap. The rest of that day and the next were pretty bad.
It's still better than last time--I can stand, but only for a minute or two before the pain gets bad. I don't know when I'll be back to work, though. Doc prescribed me a higher dose of prednisone and I'm on day 3 of 5 for that, and I do feel a little better but not nearly as much as I was hoping for.
Doctor also gave me some exercises that I'm forcing myself to do, and a referral to physical therapy (but the PT doesn't start until the second week of September). I guess the goal of the PT isn't so much immediate rehabilitation as preventing this from happening again.
Bodies, why are they so terrible?
Reading:
I finished Peter Swanson's The Kind Worth Saving, which turned out to be less of a mystery novel and more of a novel about crime, with literary aspirations. It was fine but not as profound as it wanted to be, and I don't have any real interest in reading the previous book in the series.
I've also read most of Paul Magrs's short stories collected in Silver Jubilee. They're really a kind of fictionalized (sometimes quite heavily, with time travel etc.) memoir, and most didn't absolutely delight me. But they were interesting enough to finish. My favorite was probably "Companion Piece," in which an occasional writer of tie-ins for the cult classic TV show Iris Wildthyme* does an event at a bookstore with one of the performers from the series. It's richly textured, the fannish in-jokes aren't too jokey, and it reckons with life not turning out quite as you'd hoped in a way I found really appealing. (*Iris Wildthyme is a character of Magrs' own creation who appears in several of his Doctor Who novels. She travels the universe in a double-decker London bus.)
Currently I'm reading Blaze Me a Sun, by Christoffer Carlsson, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles. It's one of those melancholy Scandinavian (Swedish, in this case) crime novels, but it seems to be going in interesting directions--the protagonist is a writer, and there's a strong meta level about the construction of narrative meaning. The translation's excellent as far as I can tell--it doesn't have that clunky feel that a lot of translations do.
Watching: Good Omens S2, which was hit and miss for me.
I'm glad Gaiman finally decided to go ahead and make the Crowley/Aziraphale relationship explicitly romantic, and that aspect of things was very well done. Unlike a lot of people, I'm not upset that S2 ends with them broken up--even if S3 never gets made, it's clear that they love each other and will probably find their way back to each other. I also appreciate the show's careful, joyful, understated inclusivity, with lots of queer people, gender-nonconforming people, angels who use wheelchairs, etc.
As a story, though, it was a hot mess. Poorly structured and poorly paced, which surprises me, because co-writer and co-executive producer John Finnemore knows how to write a supremely well-structured story in which every twist is surprising but perfectly built up to. But GO2 was just kind of a ramble, and while I often like that sort of thing, what didn't work for me here was that the show didn't embrace its rambling. It was trying to pretend to be a tight, coherent story, while actually being a lot of filler and throwaway scenes pasted together. All the flashbacks (Job, the resurrectionists, etc.) were longer than they needed to be and didn't cohere thematically. As for the zombie Nazis, the less said, the better. I was particularly annoyed by that episode because the cathedral sequence in GO1 was so beautiful and so emotionally climactic, and the weird silly gross-out zombie stuff came close to retrospectively ruining that for me.
And then there's the Gabriel/Beelzebub romance, which was a bad idea in principle and completely unearned in practice. A bad idea because, it seems to me, you don't want your B couple to have THE SAME ARC as your A couple. What's the point of showing us Aziraphale and Crowley growing closer over thousands of years, gradually changing and growing to the point where they can love each other, if we're then going to be presented with a far more rules-bound angel and demon doing the same thing in the blink of an eye? It diminishes the narrative, emotional, and even ethical weight of Aziraphale and Crowley's story, which is a damn shame. (Also, I will never stop resenting GO2 for getting that fucking song stuck in my head for days at a time.)
The ultimate unearned twist, of course, was Aziraphale's return to heaven. I didn't find it very believable at a point when we've seen him learn to defy heaven over and over again, to value the earth and humanity and above all Crowley in ways that heaven forbids. It might have worked better for me if we'd seen the temptation itself (the Metatron's conversation with Aziraphale), and of course had some buildup, but as it was, we just got a pretty damn sudden, massive about-face. I'm not saying it was entirely out of nowhere--there were little suggestions that Aziraphale was still struggling--but the story gave them nowhere near enough development. (Cf. the equivalent moment in Our Flag Means Death, which was much better built-up to and did make emotional sense for the character.)
I did like it overall, but it felt a bit like they went and filmed the first draft of the screenplay instead of the final one.
Nothing gory or TMI, but probably not very interesting.
My sciatica flare-up continues to flare, alas. I was doing okay, actually having pretty long periods of being pain free (with the help of OTC painkillers, gabapentin, and muscle relaxants). And then on Friday at work I bent down, and something went TWANG in my back, and it was not good. I went home early and haven't been back to work since.
That weekend I started taking the leftover prednisone from my last round of this shit. I'd been hoping to avoid it because of its blood sugar effects, but that clearly wasn't going to be possible.
On Monday I got an appointment for a same-day video call visit with my doctor, but several levels of technical failure meant I had to go in instead. So I dragged my sorry ass in--for a while, driving in and having to lean over in my seat at an angle to keep the back pain under control, I wasn't sure I'd manage to get there. But I did, and got more drugs and a referral for physical therapy and a work note, and the pain eased off and was pretty bearable even when I was sitting.
So, on the way home I thought "Why don't I stop at the grocery store and pick up a few things?" I was coping okayish--in considerable but not intolerable pain--most of the way through the brief shop, and then suddenly the pain ramped way up. I gritted my teeth through checkout and carrying my bag to the car and driving home and carrying my bag up two flights of stairs to my apartment, then more or less collapsed in a heap. The rest of that day and the next were pretty bad.
It's still better than last time--I can stand, but only for a minute or two before the pain gets bad. I don't know when I'll be back to work, though. Doc prescribed me a higher dose of prednisone and I'm on day 3 of 5 for that, and I do feel a little better but not nearly as much as I was hoping for.
Doctor also gave me some exercises that I'm forcing myself to do, and a referral to physical therapy (but the PT doesn't start until the second week of September). I guess the goal of the PT isn't so much immediate rehabilitation as preventing this from happening again.
Bodies, why are they so terrible?
Reading:
I finished Peter Swanson's The Kind Worth Saving, which turned out to be less of a mystery novel and more of a novel about crime, with literary aspirations. It was fine but not as profound as it wanted to be, and I don't have any real interest in reading the previous book in the series.
I've also read most of Paul Magrs's short stories collected in Silver Jubilee. They're really a kind of fictionalized (sometimes quite heavily, with time travel etc.) memoir, and most didn't absolutely delight me. But they were interesting enough to finish. My favorite was probably "Companion Piece," in which an occasional writer of tie-ins for the cult classic TV show Iris Wildthyme* does an event at a bookstore with one of the performers from the series. It's richly textured, the fannish in-jokes aren't too jokey, and it reckons with life not turning out quite as you'd hoped in a way I found really appealing. (*Iris Wildthyme is a character of Magrs' own creation who appears in several of his Doctor Who novels. She travels the universe in a double-decker London bus.)
Currently I'm reading Blaze Me a Sun, by Christoffer Carlsson, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles. It's one of those melancholy Scandinavian (Swedish, in this case) crime novels, but it seems to be going in interesting directions--the protagonist is a writer, and there's a strong meta level about the construction of narrative meaning. The translation's excellent as far as I can tell--it doesn't have that clunky feel that a lot of translations do.
Watching: Good Omens S2, which was hit and miss for me.
Spoilery stuff under the cut.
I'm glad Gaiman finally decided to go ahead and make the Crowley/Aziraphale relationship explicitly romantic, and that aspect of things was very well done. Unlike a lot of people, I'm not upset that S2 ends with them broken up--even if S3 never gets made, it's clear that they love each other and will probably find their way back to each other. I also appreciate the show's careful, joyful, understated inclusivity, with lots of queer people, gender-nonconforming people, angels who use wheelchairs, etc.
As a story, though, it was a hot mess. Poorly structured and poorly paced, which surprises me, because co-writer and co-executive producer John Finnemore knows how to write a supremely well-structured story in which every twist is surprising but perfectly built up to. But GO2 was just kind of a ramble, and while I often like that sort of thing, what didn't work for me here was that the show didn't embrace its rambling. It was trying to pretend to be a tight, coherent story, while actually being a lot of filler and throwaway scenes pasted together. All the flashbacks (Job, the resurrectionists, etc.) were longer than they needed to be and didn't cohere thematically. As for the zombie Nazis, the less said, the better. I was particularly annoyed by that episode because the cathedral sequence in GO1 was so beautiful and so emotionally climactic, and the weird silly gross-out zombie stuff came close to retrospectively ruining that for me.
And then there's the Gabriel/Beelzebub romance, which was a bad idea in principle and completely unearned in practice. A bad idea because, it seems to me, you don't want your B couple to have THE SAME ARC as your A couple. What's the point of showing us Aziraphale and Crowley growing closer over thousands of years, gradually changing and growing to the point where they can love each other, if we're then going to be presented with a far more rules-bound angel and demon doing the same thing in the blink of an eye? It diminishes the narrative, emotional, and even ethical weight of Aziraphale and Crowley's story, which is a damn shame. (Also, I will never stop resenting GO2 for getting that fucking song stuck in my head for days at a time.)
The ultimate unearned twist, of course, was Aziraphale's return to heaven. I didn't find it very believable at a point when we've seen him learn to defy heaven over and over again, to value the earth and humanity and above all Crowley in ways that heaven forbids. It might have worked better for me if we'd seen the temptation itself (the Metatron's conversation with Aziraphale), and of course had some buildup, but as it was, we just got a pretty damn sudden, massive about-face. I'm not saying it was entirely out of nowhere--there were little suggestions that Aziraphale was still struggling--but the story gave them nowhere near enough development. (Cf. the equivalent moment in Our Flag Means Death, which was much better built-up to and did make emotional sense for the character.)
I did like it overall, but it felt a bit like they went and filmed the first draft of the screenplay instead of the final one.
