Saturday, January 28, 2012

Is this thing actually working?

Maybe I will reactivate it just to share this hilarious email from Livejournal:

Dear yanub.blogspot.com!

LiveJournal is planning to start deleting inactive empty accounts. Pursuant to our housekeeping policy, your LiveJournal account yanub.blogspot.com is scheduled to be deleted in 15 days.

If you wish to reactivate your account to avoid deleting, please visit http://www.livejournal.com and log in within 15 days of this notification.
If you do not remember the password for your account, you can reset it following instructions over here.


So, does Google known the LJ is now in charge of blogspot?

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Farewell, blogger

I have migrated the contents of this blog to a new one hosted by WordPress. I am tired of being constantly locked out of Blogger at home, unable to either comment on friends' blogs or post to my own. Please visit me at iformaybe and reset your links, if by some chance you actually link to me.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Me v. Plants

Plants win.

This past summer, I moved back into Austin to be near work. I was just so tired of losing two hours a day to driving and of all the associated expense.

I have lately been reminded, quite harshly, of why I was willing to commute an hour into and out of town for work rather than live near work. Austin is a sink for pollution and pollen. I have severe allergies. We are not a good combination.

At any rate, this past summer has been mild and moist, a perfect growing environment for nearly any plant. And what plant is most annoying come August? Ragweed. And it is everywhere, and worse than usual, and I feel hellish. I've been on steroids since Friday and can't say that I feel particularly better. I can't get the crap out of my lungs, and the medicines I'm on, while keeping me out of the hospital, add their own layer of lethargy, stupidity, and clumsiness to that so helpfully already provided by asthma. I do OK as long as I am semi-reclining in bed. But bills get paid by me getting out of bed and hauling my ass to work, so into work I must go even though I get exhausted just surfing the net.

And work? The air conditioner is broken. Lovely. Nothing to filter the air or remove a few ounces of water from it. Yesterday, I ended up begging to go home for a bit, just so I could rest enough to close up the office later. Since it was either that or me slowly crawling on hands and knees unable to summon the strength to get up, the boss agreed. Fact, people: Oxygen is vital to good health.

Enough whining. I have to get myself ready to go in again. Maybe the AC will be working.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Shougai Yakusha

A while back, I was reading an English language blog on life in Japan. The post was about a government report that seven of ten Japanese people with disabilities have experienced discrimination. The first comment, from someone with disability: "And the other three were in a vegetative state and couldn't answer." All comments after that agreed that the first comment was correct, that discrimination is extremely wide-spread and the report was likely understating the problem.

So, it was with great interest that I read that Kotaro Yanagi, a member of the ikemen* acting troupe, D-BOYS, had published an autobiography of his life since sustaining a severe brain injury. Great interest, and despair, because my ability to read Japanese is pretty much limited to distinguishing the men's and women's toilets. But now one of his bilingual fans is taking it on herself to translate for all the people who have bought the book but can't read it. Seeing as I was hopelessly pondering how expensive it would be to find someone to do that very thing, I couldn't be more delighted.

She has just started and only has the prologue up, but if you are curious, you also might want to read Hicchan's Translations. And, like she says, buy Yanagi's book even if you can't read it.

At any rate, I am very eager to read how Kotaro has managed to continue as a performer. And also, I am delighted that he's still considered an ikemen actor. I wonder if the same thing would hold for a young American actor who faced similar difficulties.

*good-looking (only applied to men)

Sunday, July 04, 2010

Ashley treatment, writ large

I have been incredibly busy lately, and so quite late in checking blogs, email, festering sores that need attention.... OK, I did manage to work in the attention to festering sores. But I have had a deficit of web time. Yesterday, I was finally able to work through my RSS feed. Huzzah! And good thing I looked instead of just marking all as read, as I was tempted to do after three weeks of neglecting it. For there in Pharyngula, was a post about some perversely diabolical doctors essentially recommending taking poison to prevent the calamity of lesbian daughters. He is shocked and horrified, calling it "a convenient anti-uppitiness pill for women" and supplied a link to Alice Degner's criticism of the experiments at Bioethics Forum. A commenter also gives a link to Degner's commentary on the matter at Psychology Today.

While both of Degner's articles are worth reading in full, I call your attention to this sentence from her Psychology Today piece: A democratic medical establishment does not alter people's bodies to fit regressive social norms; it advocates for patients by demanding the social body get its act together.

This, this, this. This is why the attacks on people with severe disability, the failure to respect basic bodily integrity and human rights, are not an attack on just people with disabilities. It's convenient and self-assuring to assume that what happened to Ashley X, the maiming of her body for her parents' convenience, is something that only happens to a special class of people for whom it somehow a "good." But it shouldn't be so hard for people to understand that there are a whole lot of groups of people who aren't convenient. As David said "Ashley is me. I am Ashley. And you are Ashley, too." (Sorry, I lost the link to David's blog post and now only have this CNN article.) And now a medical "cure" to fix the main problem of being inconvenient!

This is much in keeping with the historic "destroy the Indian in order to save him" tactic of late nineteenth century US humanitarians (and, I understand, the practice of forced deculturization also has been done by Australians against native peoples there). "Of course," they say with a patronizing tone, "nobody actually hates the _________ (disabled, blacks, Indians, women, gays, etc.). This is for their own good. Because we care!" And, yes, I suppose it is a better approach than Phillip Sheridan's "nits make lice" genocidal one. But, my dears, it is the same damnable attitude. If the "other" is acceptable only when made convenient, the "other" isn't acceptable at all. And what of those who can not be made convenient under any circumstance? Then there is Sheridan's approach, which the patronizing will let happen while they wring their hands over how sad it all is.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Post deleted

I just got tired of having to delete spammer comment requests.

Back soon with posts that will hopefully not become time-sinks from dealing with dingleberries trying to sell s e ks. (Weird spelling in the hopes of killing spambot interest.)

Saturday, April 03, 2010

Look, Ma, an update!

It was bound to happen. The past few weeks, I had been thinking how well I feel, how I was able to get all sorts of things accomplished and that my pain levels were completely manageable with hardly any narcotics at all. Oh, sure, there were other things. Asthma attack. Gluten contamination. Some minor narcolepsy-type events. But nothing all that serious. Thus, I planned a busy Easter weekend doing housework and getting paperwork taken care of.

Which means, of course, that first thing this morning, my right foot went out of place and all I can do is wait for it to reduce itself. As long as I stay completely off it, I'm fine. But as soon as I get up, I'm hurting. I can't do housework, can't cook, can't rummage through my files looking for the papers I need, because all that requires that I stand and walk and use my hands. And I can't stand and have free hands since I need them to hold onto the canes to keep the weight off my foot. Not even my fancy-schmancy shoes help.

Here's hoping tomorrow is better, because there is so much I need to do. I want to at least put my new plants in pots.