something queer going on

I got my MRI results back, and as far as I can tell from googling all the medical terms (and the fact that I haven't gotten a call from my healthcare provider saying to come in immediately) I don't have cancer. I'm relieved, obviously, or at least as relieved as I can be when nobody has actually said, "Hey, you're fine." It's not fine, but it's not life-threatening or urgent.

More on the not-fine-ness under the cut. Includes reproductive anatomy, but nothing TMI, I think. ( Click here for more. )

So, in non-medical good news, the city moved my bus stop back to where it used to be, hooray! I was expecting the construction to go on all summer at least. It saves me close to ten minutes' walking each way, which doesn't sound like much, but which a lot of days was definitely TOO MUCH. (Partly because the route to the original bus stop mostly skirts the riverside park, which is pretty pleasant and only requires crossing a couple of streets. The route to the replacement stop ran along one of the town's main roads, with many street crossings and many drivers who neither look nor slow down before they turn. I almost got hit multiple times in just a couple of months.)

Between these two developments, I no longer feel quite so much like the last straw is incoming.


I've been reading a bit. Seeing the trailer for the Murderbot TV show made me decide to try the books again--previously I read the first two and lost interest. I still think the first book is by far the strongest, while the later ones get repetitive and wish-fulfillment-y. But I enjoyed them well enough and I'm looking forward to watching the show.

Most recently I read Freya Marske's romantasy Sword Crossed, and liked everything about it, in a popcorn sort of way, except the central romance, which irritated me intensely. But the worldbuilding is fun, and I like that it's a fantasy focused on trade and economics rather than swords and dragons.


New series of Taskmaster begins soon! Normally I would hate the idea of an American guest, but Jason Mantzoukas is so weird that I think he'll be great.


And finally: if you had asked me ten years ago who would turn out to be a better LGBTQ ally, J K Rowling or Robert de Niro, I would certainly have guessed wrong.


ETA: And my hearing seems to have recovered from the MRI. It took a couple of days, though.

This Thanksgiving, I have mostly eaten Chinese food (I got takeout last night--2 main courses and some wontons--had some for dinner last night and some today, and there's still another meal's worth left). For breakfast, however, I had a truly heroic quantity of St. Angel triple cream brie, eaten with pecan raisin bread. It was yum.

I also watched the S16 final of Taskmaster.

Some spoilery things, warning for one of them being a bit yucky

I'm intrigued by the definition of "family friendly" that includes "Julian makes Alex kneel to him while he, Julian, eats a doughnut, then spits doughnut in his face." (Which still wasn't as gross as what Susan or Lucy did, just kinkier.)

[pedant]Also, no vanilla ice cream is using castoreum as a vanilla substitute. Castoreum is hard to obtain! And consequently rare and expensive! It's not even used much in perfumery anymore, as far as I know.

And also, Greg, "enormity" does not mean what you think it means.[/pedant]

Hotel Taskmaster was brilliant.

Greg called Alex "cutie." I am easily made happy.

I do have to work tomorrow, but it should be very very quiet and allow me to catch up on stuff.


Anyway, I hope those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving had a lovely day. Also those of you who didn't!

I'm partway through Taskmaster S12 now, and

under a cut, to spare the uninterested and unspoiled insofar as this kind of thing can be spoiled, is a reaction

I know it's a bit. But Alex saying to Greg "I love you. I want you to look at me the way I look at you," and Greg's utter indifference in response was painful to watch.

What makes these moments so compelling is that they're always played sincerely (even the ones that are much more bizarre than a declaration of love); it makes the funny ones really funny and the ones like this . . . ouch, ouch, ouch.

Then of course everything resets soon afterwards (though, unusually, Alex put in a callback to it with his little "I love you" during the final task) and is completely forgotten/"forgotten" by the next episode. This aspect of the show is mercifully like an old-school sitcom; an ongoing arc of that kind of thing might be too much for me. Even though I then invent the arc in my head.

Also, there's an excellent cast this series. Guz Khan is very funny, frequently endearing, and it makes me wish I had never seen his Twitter which, with its homophobia, sexism, and stanning for a repressive regime*, made it impossible for me to like him or wholeheartedly enjoy his work.

(*Qatar during the World Cup. The homophobia was at least as bad as you're imagining, and possible worse.)

1) Health.

My back continues to be more of an issue than I'd like. My healing seems to have plateaued; I'm seldom in a lot of pain, and I can function, but I'm seldom completely pain-free either. Plus I get fun little incidents like the other night, when I felt pretty okay when I went to bed, but woke up at 2 in the morning in more pain than I've had in a while. (Yes, my bed is probably a factor. But I really don't want to spend a couple of thousand dollars on a new one.)

Another delightful plot twist follows,

under the cut because potentially TMI

.

Around the beginning of this month I started having UTI symptoms. Very mild at first, and I thought it might resolve on its own. It did not. This left me trying to get medical care during Labor Day weekend (a big holiday in the US). I went to urgent care on Sunday Sept. 3, after work, but the clinic I went to was too busy and I couldn't get in. (I didn't want to try another clinic because this is the urgent care I usually go to, and I didn't have the energy to try a totally unknown one.) On Monday (Labor Day), I thought about going back, but a bit of googling showed that most of my local pharmacies were closed anyway or on such reduced hours that by the time I finished work and went to the clinic it would be too late to get my prescriptions that day.

This whole process confirmed the wisdom of my pill-hoarding tendencies. I had some phenazopyridine left from my last UTI. It doesn't treat the infection, but it reduces the symptoms while you wait to get antibiotics/wait for them to kick in. It was all that made things tolerable.

Anyway, I finally got to the clinic on Tuesday Sept. 5 and got a 10-day megacourse of antibiotics which I'm still taking through tomorrow. And--this is how it's relevant to my back--the nurse agreed that the prednisone I had to take for my back probably contributed to the UTI: prednisone is an anti-inflammatory because it's an immune suppressant.

And here's a fun fact: after googling, I discovered that in people with a vulva, having low estrogen levels (if, say, you're post-menopausal, or a trans masculine person taking testosterone) makes UTIs vastly more likely. Did anyone ever explain this to me? Fuck no.

Another thing I only learned from google: don't buy lube made with glycerin. It's sugar-like enough to feed bad bacteria a lovely meal.

*sigh* I don't like bringing up genital/sexual stuff with medical people. It's uncomfortable, especially now that I'm out as trans. I wish they would bring it up and give me useful health information--in a nice, matter-of-fact professional way, not in the way like my previous pcp who was a little too curious about my sexuality. My current provider is pretty good, but a bit silent on the subject; I wonder if it's too personal for her because her son is a trans man (she mentioned this to me, with his permission).

Anyway, enough of this. Here's hoping I don't get a third UTI this year; that's the point where it's officially considered chronic.

2. After temporarily losing interest in it, I've been watching a lot more Taskmaster. In fact the word "bingeing" might be appropriate. I'm most of the way through S07 now, and feeling twinges of obsession. I blame, at least in part, Greg Davies' decision in the hiatus before S06 to get glasses and grow a beard, and therefore become hot to me as he has never been before. Alex has always been hot to me; skinnyish, socially awkward, clever boys push my buttons, as does the whole stage-gay "Alex is slavishly, erotically devoted to Greg" thing. And beards.

I'm again noticing how much of the show's general enjoyability depends on the vibe of the contestants. The S06 people were mostly uninteresting, except for Liza who was both competent and likeable, and Tim Vine, whose every moment on camera was like fingernails on a chalkboard. Then S07 brought in absolute loons like Rhod Gilert and James Acaster, and varied interpersonal dynamics played up to the hilt by the whole batch of drama queens, and it's much more fun to watch. (Apart from having to look away to spare my eyes from Phil Wang's skin-tight yellow bodysuit.)

Mostly the show does not ping my embarrassment squick, thank heavens. (Mostly. I could live without any more impromptu songs, though I would hate to have missed the sheer delight of that moment in S06 when Nish Kumar and Mark Watson's song was actually really good.) I do have to remind myself often that Alex Horne created the show and writes at least some of it, so nothing is happening to him that he hasn't okayed. He consented to sit bare-bottomed on that cake/be cuddled by every contestant/have Rhod Gilbert turn him into a water feature.

And then there's the Greg/Alex stuff.

Under a cut, for sort-of spoilers I guess, as well as being long and containing musing on stage gay, power differentials, etc.

I didn't expect them to actually kiss. Even about a second before they did, I thought it would be a fake-out and Greg would pull away or something. But no, they kissed rather sweetly, to the loud approval of the audience and most of the contestants. (I wish the camera would quit cutting away from the most highly charged Greg/Alex moments to show dubious reactions from the cishet male contestants, though.) The explicit eroticism has mostly been toned down since the kiss, which I guess makes sense since there's not much further they can go with that unless the boys are going to make out on stage, which presumably is further than they and the bloke-centric Dave network want to take it. Though in S07 Alex did make that rather startling reference to Greg's "special spot" and the letter G, fuelling all kinds of potential speculation.

. . . I just really enjoy stage gay. Especially when it's played, er, straight, from the whole chest. (For a while I thought Greg was gay, based on a couple of things he said on the show. But Wikipedia tells me he had a long-term relationship with a woman. So I've decided he's bi until proven otherwise. Alex is married to a woman and has kids. I've decided he's bi too.) To repeat, I know it's stage gay, but I enjoy the game/performance of queer desire (when it's an acknowledged game and not e.g. queerbaiting in fictional media) without the disavowing wink and nod. I like that both Greg and Alex just go with it--the erotic implications are played for comedy, but the joke is not "OMG that's gay!" Usually it's more like "OMG that's fucked up, Greg, stop that and be nice to Alex." I enjoy the very rare moments when Greg genuinely is nice--the bits of background business when the focus is on the contestants and Greg and Alex start holding hands.

And of course I enjoy the whole glorious spectrum of ways Greg finds to bully Alex. It's sometimes a bit of a fine line for me, because humiliation is deeply not my kink, but it's so clearly stage-Alex's that I can enjoy his delighted misery. No usual form of BDSM is really my kink, but I love a power differential and I love devotion. So the idea of Alex worshipping Greg Davies--moderately successful comedian and host of a light entertainment show--like a god on earth, making his bed and sleeping at his feet and surrendering to his every sexual demand, unfazed by any amount of ingratitude, exploitation, and downright cruelty from Greg, kind of does it for me. But I must admit that, as usual with me and power differentials, what I would want from a fic is to see the relationship become more equal. (The big exception to this trend for me is Izzy Hands from Our Flag Means Death; Izzy is such a shithead and a fuckup that to the extent I can imagine a happy ending for him, it looks more like a pornographic fever dream version of Greg/Alex than like Ed/Stede. Izzy should never be allowed to make meaningful decisions about his own life or anyone else's, ever again. Alex, by contrast, should be cherished.)

Once I'm caught up--because I'm so thoroughly spoiler-averse that I don't want to know whether they kiss onstage again, or even whether X contestant does a great/hilarious thing in S11--I intend to read all the fanfic. And probably be disappointed by it. Recs are welcome if you have any; just please let me know where they fall season-wise so I can wait if necessary to avoid spoilers.

3. Yuletide

I think I'm going to participate this year, for the first time since about 2013. I've done two fic exchanges this year, so I feel reasonably confident in my ability to write something and not default.

Our Flag Means Death is of course ineligible. But Taskmater is eligible and I can think of stories I might request. For other fandom requests, I'm thinking about Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness (most of the existing fic is Estraven/Genly Ai, for obvious reasons, but the world itself is fascinating and Le Guin leaves a lot of omissions to explore. (E.g. same-sex sex during kemmer, or some people having a preference for whether they go through kemmer as male or female--are there Gethenians with a stealth gender identity?, or for that matter whether Gethenian societies can possibly be as devoid of popular culture as Le Guin makes them out to be. It can't all be work and sex and religion and politics--I want to know what Gethenians do for fun.) Maybe Moby Dick too. And I'm considering some five-minutes fandoms to fill in the gaps. There are a zillion Mountain Goats songs that could make great fic.