Lydy's Anarchist Revival Meeting

So, I believe I have now called every representative I own, from city councilperson to my senators. I got a fuck-ton of points for it in Habitica, so yay Habitica. Mostly, I was calling to say that you must stand with the immigrants, and not with Trump.

For my senators, I told them I had a bright line: Jeff Sessions. If they vote for Sessions, I will never vote for them again, I would rather vote for the Natural Law party than someone who supported that racist bigot. Actually, for Franken, I had to send email, because his phones were completely tied up. Most other reps, I had to leave messages for, because they are not answering their phones. I hope it's because they're overwhelmed, and not because they're hiding.

Seriously, fuck this noise. Trump is a scary, weak motherfucker. Bannon is a terrifying wife-beater bigot. The administration is a comedy of incompetence. None of which means that they can't win.

Children, I am frightened. It's early days. Remember we are in this for the long haul.

Let's start with a basic that is often forgotten: peaceful protests are a tactic, not a virtue. They have been, in several very notable cases, an effective method to change deep injustice. Non-violence is a tactic used by numerous but out-gunned people against an opponent who can feel shame. Non-violence has a lot of really good follow-ons. It tends not to escalate out of control, it tends to have very little in the way of collateral damage (unless, of course, you are counting the protesters, which you probably should), and it's easy to explain. It's damn hard to do. It is a tactic which supports its goal.

It is a terrible mistake to judge a movement only by its tactics. I have had more than one argument with someone who insisted I had to support the abortion clinic sit-ins because I honor the lunch counter sit-ins from the Sixties, for instance. That I should honor the Promise Keepers because they had a large, peaceful march and I approved of large, peaceful marches to protest George W. That because I believe in freedom of speech, I should approve of hatred being spewed onto the airwaves by Rush Limbaugh. And this is what I have to say about that: fuck that noise. If the ends do not justify the means, then surely the means do not justify the ends. Also, seriously, there's no particularly useful bright line between means and ends, so stop being a sophomoric idiot and think.

It is also impossible to ignore the fact that policing priorities in this country are property, particularly corporate property, first and foremost. Compare the response time and manpower assigned to a silent alarm from an empty jewelry store compared to a call from someone with an on-going home invasion. Please notice that the cops thought defense for murdering Michael Brown in Ferguson was that he might have shoplifted some tobacco products. It is instructive that they thought that this was a reasonable defense. Even if you try to look away, you can't fail to know that the police in this country care a whole hell of a lot more for property than they do for people.

Why, then, is it a surprise that people pushed beyond all reason, strike at the only thing that the police and society apparently care about? (Also, the sound of smashing glass is pretty rad.) If you have reached the point where peaceful protests have not worked, and I think it is possible to argue that we have, then breaking a few windows and trashing a few cars does not seem unreasonable. At least it will be heard. Over the last fifty years, the "establishment" (I don't have a better term right to hand) has developed some very effective ways of dealing with non-violent protests. I don't think that the use of peaceful protest has entirely run its course, but I think that we may need other things as well.

Here is where I say I really, really don't know. I don't know what happens next. I don't know what we need to do. I am scared by violence. I hate entropy, and I despise breaking things. I think that the breaking of things can escalate to the breaking of people. But I also think that we are too quick to equate property damage with actual violence against people, and we need to cut that shit out. That's how we get shoplifting being a capital offense. Breaking stuff is scary and dangerous. It is not the same thing as hitting people. Please notice how often the cops use property damage as an excuse to hurt people. Not just arrest them, but pepper spray them, shoot rubber bullets at them, beat them with sticks, and taser them. These are not morally equivalent actions, and we must begin to understand that.

The massive, peaceful, creative protests yesterday are inspiring, and definitely suggest that peaceful protests have not run their course. They still have power. They still matter. But, dear ones, we're in for the long haul, here. And it is possible that not every protester will choose that path. What I'd like to ask is that you consider the possibility that they are right to choose other methods.

I also want to talk about people's reaction to the Clocking of Richard Spencer. A lot of my friends love watching it, but feel a little guilty about it. Here are some things to consider before you get your guilt on. First, no one has ever said, "Gosh, I wish we'd given the Nazis the benefit of the doubt. They might have turned things around." Universally, what people say is, "We should have fought back sooner and harder." So there's that.

I think it is also important to notice the way in which the media has failed us. Look the media always makes choices about what positions are too far out there to report on. I mean, they don't do the "both sides" nonsense with the flat-earthers every time they talk about space exploration. More noticeably, when was the last time that they quoted a Trotskyist when covering a labor dispute? You may not know it, but the United States is blessed with a great many smart, educated, articulate Trotskyists. The reason you don't know this is because the mainstream media thinks they are too far out to talk to or about. So we know they do this. We can see it. So why did Richard Fucking Spencer and his trough of evil, vile shit become something that they report upon. Not just once, but multiple times. And in ways that make it seem like it is a set of beliefs that we should consider, the same way we might consider whether or not Obamacare makes long-term financial sense for the United States.

At the point that Spencer was clocked, he was being asked about his Pepe lapel pin by a reporter. That is to say, he was being given yet another platform from which to promulgate his sly, slick, racist evil shit. And the fact that he got clocked means that instead of talking about that vileness, we're talking about whether or not somebody should have hit him. Which is a much better conversation. It's a damn shame that the Fourth Estate can't be trusted with a damn microphone. Thank god for the Nazi punchers.

I called my two senators, Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, and my representative, Keith Ellison this morning. (And got points for it in Habitica.) Here is my script:

My name is Lydia Nickerson, and I voted for you. I wanted to let you know that I support your efforts to have the Russian hacking investigated. I also want to tell you that I have grave concerns about the incoming Trump administration. I believe that his business entanglements constitute, not merely conflicts of interest, but also very probably violate the constitution.

I want to strongly encourage you to fight for the preservation of the ACA, Medicare, and Medicaid. I also want you to continue to fight for LGBT rights. I believe you stand against hate, and I stand with you.

It wasn't fun, but it is done. Amy Klobuchar had the nicest and most encouraging staffer, Keith Ellison the least happy-sounding. All three staffers were polite, of course, but only Amy's sounded enthusiastic. So, there you go. Did a thing.

Need to call state people, probably tomorrow.

For no good reason, a random assortment of things that work:

1) My bed. I love my bed. It is a heated, king-sized waterbed, which means that it is exactly the firmness I want, and it is cuddly warm to slip into in the winter. After years of unsatisfactory linens, I found some reasonably priced micro-fiber sheets on Amazon which misleadingly call themselves 1400 Thread Count Cotton like. It's easy to miss the fact that they are not, in fact, a high-thread count cotton. They are, however, delightfully soft, breathe well, and fit my bed perfectly. While I miss my down comforter, the down-alternative comforter has been satisfactory, and I bought a feather pillow from Ikea at the same time. I haven't had a feather pillow since I was two, and my mother took them away on the order of the allergist, since I was allergic to all living things, which included feathers. (They also removed the drapes in the room, the fleece throw rug, and all knick knacks.) But the packaging assured me that the pillow was hypoallergenic, and machine washable and dryable. And it is delightful. So perfectly squishy. I love my bed.

2) CPAP. As far as I can tell, I have several different sleep disorders. The only one that's been diagnosed is obstructive sleep apnea. I've been using CPAP for almost 20 years, and my what a difference it makes. It doesn't fix the other problems, obviously, like delayed circadian rhythm disorder (which is actually an asset for a night job) or other weirdnesses in my sleep, but it does mean that when I go to sleep, I actually get rested. I love my CPAP.

3) Red Juice Cleaning Solution. A really, really long time ago, I used to work in a massage parlor, and one of the women I worked with was thinking about quitting The Life and starting her own business. She was enamored of Speed Cleaning, and wanted to start a business cleaning other people's houses. Which, in its own way, is an interesting indictment of prostitution, if you think about it. Speed Cleaning has pretty good books on how to make housework simple and fast, and a host of products. I pretty much ignore their advice, but I do like the cleaning solution called Red Juice. It's your basic spray-on-wipe-off cleaner, but much better. It has various claims to environmental friendliness which I can't evaluate, and claims to be perfectly safe in kitchens. It comes as a concentrate, which you dilute 10-to-1, and put in your own spray bottle. And that, that is certainly a lot more environmentally friendly than buying a new spray bottle every time. The stuff works really well, cuts through most dirt easily and quickly, and is not perfumed. I love it a lot.

4) Feliway diffusers: Lady Jane Grey and Nuit will probably never like each other, and they continue to squabble, but it's been a while since Lady peed on my bed, and I think that is largely due to the two Feliway diffusers that I'm using. Mind you, that's $20 a month to keep the peace in my feline family, but so worthy it.

5) Scrub skirts: I basically don't like pants. I dislike trying to find pants that fit me in the waist, hip, crotch, and leg. Mostly, I can find something that fits one or two of those parameters, but not all four. I love skirts, and I like the swish of fabric around my calves or ankles. The problem with skirts, though, is that they tend to not have pockets. I was wearing jeans skirts, which had jeans pockets, and were nice, but then I found out that there are scrub skirts. They are made from the same material as my scrubs, which means they launder well and don't wrinkle, and they have enormous pockets. I love them to death. My only complaint is that they cling to my legs when I try to wear leggings under them in the winter. I may have to switch back to my jeans skirts for the cold months.

And as we used to say, "Five things make a post."

(Content note: Needles. Lots and lots of needles. The sharp kind, not the knitting kind.)

Yesterday, I stopped off at the clinic to get my flu shot. No biggie. I've been doing needles since I was two, and while I have never learned to like them, I'm not afraid of them. My girlfriend was out of town, still, so I headed for her house to feed the cat.

Look, I had a plan, ok? It was my last day of work this week, so I was going to go to Beth's house, feed the cat, drive to the grocery store, buy orange juice and a rotisserie chicken, come home, make pasta, eat pasta with parmesan and chicken, make mimosas, and start on a batch of broth for my cat Naomi. I would just like to point out that this was a perfectly good plan. David was planning on getting up a little early, and sharing the mimosas with me. The champagne was chilling in the fridge, everything was perfect.

About fifteen minutes after my flu shot, while I was driving, about six blocks from Beth's house, I had a sudden pain between my shoulder blades. It then migrated to my chest, an horizontal pain just under my breasts, slowly getting worse on the right side. I remember saying, out loud, "This is bad, this is very bad." It wasn't enormously painful, probably about a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10, but it came with a sense of impending doom. Also, I felt a trifle dizzy and short of breath. It hurt to inhale. The fact that I was driving at the time made everything that much more frightening.

Things I know about how heart attacks present in women: back pain rather than chest pain is not unusual. While denial is a very common symptom in men, some reasonable percentage of women have a sense of impending doom, instead. The classic "radiating down the left arm, elephant on chest" set of symptoms is less common in women, and women tend to have just plain idiosyncratic pain responses when it comes to heart attacks. Heart attacks are about as common in women as men, but not diagnosed as often.

So, I get to Beth's, park in the drive way, go in, feed the cat, take out my phone, and call the nurse line. The nice lady asks me a series of questions. The pain is nearly gone, now. She says that since I am alone, I should call 911, and have them take me to the emergency room. I should not drive. She was very emphatic about that. I also should not eat or drink anything. I ask her what emergency room I should go to. She says, rather earnestly, "The closest one." Ok, then.

Do I call 911? Oh, you sweet summer child, of course not. What I do do, though, is call David. He's a little bleary when he answers the phone. I say, "I need you to put on your clothes, come to Beth's house, and drive me to the emergency room." "Ok," he says, and hangs up the phone. At this point, I am feeling fine, but terrified. In retrospect, I'm not sure why I felt it necessary to tell David to get dressed.

The closest ER is Fairview Southdale. There was a brief period of entertainment when the GPS signal was lost and the Google would not tell us how to get there. We muddled through. I was in a room at approximately 9:30, just about an hour after first symptoms. They wheeled me into a room, and did an ECG. The technology was really cool. The electrodes have little tabs which the leads clip to. It took the tech less than five minutes to put the electrodes on, attach the leads, and do a full 12-lead ECG. Once she had a nice picture of my heart, she took off the leads and electrodes, and wheeled me into a private room. By this point, David was back from parking the car, and sat in the room with me for the rest of the time.

A very nice nurse named Michele came in, and the fun began.

They wanted to draw blood, and they wanted to place an IV. Like you do. As I've said, I don't particularly like needles, but I've endured an enormous number of them, so you know, here we go. Except, we don't go. Two or three tries in my right elbow. A couple in my left elbow. Several tries on both hands. It was...it really was. I gave up early on, and started saying fuck a lot. A whole lot. I apologized to the nurse, who apologized to me. I went back to saying fuck a lot, and she said that her 19 year old daughter would like me, that her daughter apparently can't complete a sentence without using the word fuck at least once.

At some point, she came in with this really cool machine that shone a different type of light on my arm, infrared, maybe? Maybe David knows. Any gate, it makes the veins show up vividly. The IV was only necessary if they needed to give me contrast to do a CT of my chest. Even with the fancy machine, she couldn't get the IV placed. Eventually, we agreed that she'd just draw bloods, and if the clotting factor test came in high enough that they needed to place the IV, they'd do that then. Meanwhile, we'd just do the clever little butterfly needle. That, too, did not go well. I think it took three sticks before she managed to fill all her lovely little vials.

So, the two primary things that they were worried about were a heart attack and a blood clot in the lungs. Both are potentially fatal, of course. There are blood tests for both of these. At some point, the doctor came in, and was cheerful and informative. Very nice man. I believe his name was Treirweiler, but I have probably spelled that wrong. They also hooked me up to a nice little monitoring set up, that checked my blood pressure periodically and kept track of my heart and oxygen levels. Oxygen levels generally quite good (100% when hyperventilating), I got to watch my heart throw a perfect little PVC (not a good thing, but I did already know that my heart did that), and my blood pressure was unusually high, 158 over 95, I think, or something like that. Since it's usually 120/70, that's unusual. But there you go.

There then ensued much boredom. I played a little Pokemon Go, sent texts to various people, whined about not having my cat, and allowed as how I hated life a lot. Then a cheerful young man with a large piece of equipment came in, and I said, "Oh, fuck. You're here to place an IV, aren't you?"

He allowed as how he was. My nurse came in to explain that the bloods indicated that I had not, in fact, had a heart attack, but that the clotting factor thing came in at .6, when normal was .5 or lower, so they were going to have to do a chest CT. She then warned the new tech that I cussed like a sailor, and he said that I had already established that.

I do not know what machine it was that he had. It was different than the one the nurse used, and I was past asking questions. I was very tired, I had not eaten since one that morning, I was a couple hours past my bed time, and I was scared. He had this round-headed thing that the rested against my elbow, and gently pressed and massaged my elbow. I'm not sure, some sort of ultra-sound or something? No idea. Any gate, he took a good shot at the left elbow, and failed. I made a new land record for the word fuck, and burst into tears. David said later that when he finally gave up on the left elbow, the needle had a thirty degree bend in it when he took it out. He then went to the right elbow. That took a lot of time, although I think it was really just one extended try. At some point, I said that this was the last time, I was not doing this again. At some other point, I started talking in a very childish voice about Pokemon Go, and getting shots as a small child, and then stopped and said, "I am two. Or maybe four. That's not good." In general, if my system breaks to the point that my individual personae start popping up, I'm under a lot of stress and there's hell to pay, later. Very destabilizing.

He did get the IV in. At which point there was a lot more waiting. It was in my right arm, which meant that I couldn't really use my phone any more, since every time I moved my right arm, it hurt. I was resting the arm on the bed rail, and would move it from time to time to get more comfortable. Each time I did so, I would forget about the IV, and bend it slightly, and it would hurt. I would complain, and David would make fun of me for forgetting. Which would make me laugh. David was absolutely wonderful throughout. Calm, easy, distracting, kind, and infinitely patient.

Eventually, there was the CT, which was much less uncomfortable than I had feared. The contrast does feel intensely odd, but it doesn't hurt. So nice to have something that doesn't hurt. I was relieved that the IV was still working.

The results from the CT came back pretty quickly. I have gall stones.

The doctor said that the symptoms were not caused by the gallstones. However, some time in the future when I have a piece of pizza or a slice of meatloaf, or some other fatty food, and then suddenly have an "oh my god I'm going to die" pain in my right side, I should remember this conversation with this incredibly smart, handsome, bald doctor. I laughed, and he went away for a little bit.

They had left the door to the area where the med people were open, and a little while later, I heard my doctor say, "Yeah, we should probably get more blood. I don't think she'll like that." I didn't know if he was talking about me, but it seemed a good guess. So when he came in with a tech, I knew what was up. He sat at the foot of the bed, and cheerfully explained about how the enzyme test they had done to establish that I didn't have a heart attack had been done within the window where it was possible that the enzyme hadn't yet shown up, because I'd come in so quickly, so they were going to need to run it again. While he was talking and being entertaining, the tech took some blood from the already placed IV. I pointed out that I had noticed he was just distracting me while the tech was stealing my blood, he agreed, and everybody went away again. In actual fact, I didn't care about them taking more blood. It's the getting the needle in that was the problem. Once it was there, the very slight about of pain that drawing blood causes was no big deal.

More waiting, and then the doctor came in and said that the second enzyme test also came back negative. There is, as far as he can tell, nothing wrong with me. A little while later, another tech came in and took the fucking needle out of my fucking arm. I got dressed, and we left. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon. Parking cost $7. I have no idea what the medical bill will be like.

We went to Punch Pizza, and I had pizza and a beer. I got home, and eventually got to bed. My left arm still hurt from my flu shot (remember the flu shot?) so I had to sleep on my right side. I slept from about 5:30 p.m. until about 8:30 a.m. this morning. Lady Jane Grey came and curled up against my tummy and snuggled for a long time.

And, you know, I'm just fine. Just fucking fine. Except that I'm a still a bit emotionally unstable. That was a whole fuck ton of stress. I guess I'm glad I went in?

Gall stones, huh? Ok, then. Gall stones. Sigh.

My place, starting at 6:00 p.m. I hope to celebrate our new Taco Truck Overlords. If the Angry Cheeto wins, there will be beer and margaritas to soothe the pain.

There will be tacos, chips, salsa, guacamole, beer, margaritas, soda, television, and wi-fi.

If you supported Trump, you will be roundly mocked. If you voted for a third party, I am willing to argue with you about how bad a choice that was, but if you'd prefer I didn't, just tell me to fuck off.

I expect that this will run late, even if they call the election early. If you want to show up after midnight, you should probably call first, just in case I made it an early night, after all.

At a pinch, I can probably bed four or five people if you end up not being able to make it home under your own power.

There are cats in this house. The nominal cat-free zone has been cat free for six months or so, but I never got around to spraying the furniture with the allergen remover stuff, and cat fur and dander does waft in under the doors, so plan accordingly. Smoking outside only (sorry, smokers.) Not even remotely child-proof, but kids are welcome if they can be persuaded to not hurt themselves or their surroundings.

So, I'm back from my second Pokewalk of the day. According Pokemon GO, I clocked about eight kilometers, total. This is approximately ten thousand steps, that magical number of steps that people were so enamored with a bunch of years ago. When I was working for the university, they gave everyone a very cheap and crappy pedometer, and gave us brochures on how easy it would be to incorporate those ten thousand steps into our daily routine. Park a couple of blocks further away from work, take a short walk on your lunch hour... and so on. The promises of health benefits mentioned cardiovascular improvements, but most of all, they stressed weight loss. So much with the weight loss.

I have Thoughts about this. First of all, I'm whacked. Tired and foot-sore. The idea that this is something I could easily incorporate into my daily life is fucking nuts. And the idea that this is something that everyone has the time and physical capacity for is deeply insane on so many levels. The brochures they handed out claimed that people take about 5,000 steps naturally during their day. However, I doubt this claim. My best estimate is that I get maybe two to three thousand steps in in the normal course of a work day. That leaves between five and six thousand steps. If a kilometer is about thirteen hundred steps, we're talking four to five kilometers. Average walking speed, according to the Google, is five kilometers an hour. That means finding an hour of extra time in a day, every day, to walk. I don't know about you, but that's kind of a lot of time during my work week. I can usually manage two kilometers a day, about a kilometer before and after work, but more than that is hugely difficult to manage just on time.

The claims that this will improve your health are... well, I dunno. I've been walking every day, sometimes as much as ten kilometers in a day, but usually at least two, for two months. I have seen exactly no change in my weight. My tight navy scrub pants do fit a little less snugly, which suggests that I may have traded a little bit of fat for a little bit of muscle, but not by very much. I may well be doing my heart and lungs all sorts of good, but I've also given myself several fairly small asthma attacks, and heart stuff you mostly don't notice until you have catastrophic symptoms or death.

Which leads me to BMI as a measure of health. Medicine, as a discipline, has this problem: it really has no good measure of health. Medicine is much better at measuring disease. If you have, say, Stage II Breast Cancer, that actually means an actual thing. It tells you useful things about your probable life expectancy, and provides a useful gauge for how aggressively you should be treating your disease. And while it is perfectly possible to make mistakes, if they kill off the cancer, they generally know that they have done so. If you've got pneumonia, they can usually figure out if it's viral or bacterial, and design a treatment program for it.

Health is largely measured by absence of symptoms or disease. And that's because health is holistic, and man are bodies complicated. At this point, the medical profession is pretty sure that health is enhanced by avoiding carcinogens, being physically active, and eating nutritious food most of the time. Exactly what is a carcinogen, how active, and what exactly is nutritious is under debate. And that is partly because all of those things interact complexly within the human animal, and with the unique biological machine that is each person. None of this is measurable. However, activity and food consumption correlate with weight, and weight, weight is measurable. It's nicely objective. This height, this weight, this BMI, man is that something that fits nicely on a chart. And, it's bullshit. It doesn't measure health. It doesn't even correlate as well as they say it does. I think that doctors rely on it so heavily because that's the only thing they have. They can't actually measure health, at all. But they can put you on a scale. And so they do.

In sum, I did my 10,000 steps today, and I am happy about the Pokemon. So there.

Days since I adopted Lady Jane Grey: 367 (more or less, I forget if there was a leap year. Maybe 368. Any gate, Sept. 7th of last year. I didn't know I was adopting her at the time.)

Days since Lady Jane Grey has bit anyone: not sure, but many, many months.

Days since Lady Jane has pissed on my boyfriend's head: 8

Days since Lady has pissed on my bed: 3

So, um, a work in progress.

I had to buy a new comforter. I loved my old comforter, a very well-constructed, 100% down-filled, Calvin Klein comforter with a really high fill factor. Which needs to be dry-cleaned. At $40 a pop, I just can't do it anymore. So, I bought a down-alternative comforter which can be washed and dried at home. It's not as fluffy, it's not as much like cuddling into a cloud as the other, and it isn't as cool in the summer as my other, but it's launderable. Haven't decided what to do with the nice comforter. It's badly stained (coffee, fountain pen ink, sweat), and in a plastic bag after the last incident. I should probably just throw it out. But, you know, if you put a duvet cover on it, you don't seen the stains, and it's ever so nice... yeah. Well. Should just toss it.

I don't really know how to resolve what ever issue there is. LJG spends most of her time hiding in the kitchen under the dishwasher door. She really likes being petted, but doesn't come out from her cave very often unless there's a person, right there. I'm annoyed with Nuit about this, but don't have a good answer. I wish I could afford a good cat psychologist.

Still, LJG is a lovely, funny, friendly, fluffy cat. And when she's not pissing on my bed, she's a marvel. I love her a lot. I just wish we could resolve her issues with Nuit so that they were both happier.

It is not a game without flaws. So many flaws! The fact that it crashes frequently is amazingly annoying, and it is not improved by the fact that I have to reboot my phone in order to get a good, clean start. My phone has been badly behaved, lately, so it doesn't always reboot cleanly. This may or may not be the fault of Pokemon GO. There are all sorts of issues with the game mechanics, I suppose. I am not a gamer, and cannot evaluate this.

The thing about it, though, is that for eleven days in a row, it has gotten me to take at least one ten-minute walk. I am walking a kilometer or two more per day than I ever did, before. Now, a kilometer is about 1300 steps, so vastly short of that 10,000 steps that everybody was all het up about some years ago. But that's still 1500 to 2000 more steps than I would have taken without it. This can't be a bad thing. (Ok, the tripping over curbs, that is a bad thing. But I'm getting better at avoiding that.)

I've seen several think pieces on Pokemon GO which hold forth in alarm about various aspects of the game. It's possible they get more sensible several paragraphs in, but I tend to bounce out after the first paragraph or two sound the alarm about how there are fewer Pokestops in poor neighborhoods because poor neighborhoods have less public art and fewer institutions. I think that there is an interesting article to be written, here, but the ones I've bounced out of all seem to think that the problem is Pokemon GO, rather than the fact that too many of our people live in poor neighborhoods with few amenities. Pokemon GO could provide an interesting lens into what is where and why, but it is not the problem, guys. You know what other neighborhoods are vastly impoverished when it comes to Pokestops? Rich, white suburbs. There was a fascinating article I saw a link to a while back (on Making Light, maybe) about mapping the elevators in New York City. And a map showing the presence of elevators does, indeed, provide an fascinating look into population density and wealth distribution in the city. But no one was suggesting that the presence or absence of elevators was, in fact, the problem.

The other thing I've seen in my Twitter stream is a friend concerned about the ableist aspects of Pokemon GO. I'm not really sure how to think about this. My friend is a very smart person, who has done a lot of really useful and creative thought about inclusivity and ableist assumptions. But for me, Pokemon GO is largely a very inaccurate pedometer with a stellar reward system. For me, it's not really a competitive game. I've fought a couple of gym battles, and man, that's boring. I like collecting the pretty little monsters, and I like evolving them. I like walking to the Pokestops and spinning the disks to get prizes. I like being encouraged to go to places I don't normally go to get rarer Pokemons. I like the fact that I'm becoming more sedentary and less sessile. For me, an older, very out of shape person, it doesn't feel coercive or alienating. I'm very aware that a lot of players are way ahead of me, because they have more time and more energy and can walk a fuck-ton farther than I can, but I don't find that upsetting. However, I may be missing something important. I do very much think that inclusivity is how we build humane, resilient systems. But I'm not sure how to design a walking app that doesn't, in the end, privilege people able to walk.

I have four delightful, frustrating cats: Naomi is Arwen's littermate, and likes to bully David. Ninja is a fine black cat, the most cheerful cat I have ever known. Nuit is Ninja's littermate, and very sweet, except for her hobby of bullying Lady Jane Grey, and I really wish she'd stop that. Lady Jane Grey has been auditioning for the role of "best cat, grey," but keeps on getting intimidated by Nuit. This is a problem I need to solve.

Arwen died around noon on Saturday at the vet's, at my instigation. At the moment, I feel just fine, not upset at all. On the other hand, I have carefully replaced her footstool at the foot of my bed, after I used it for something, and have not yet thrown out her thyroid medication in the fridge. I'm still pretending.

The title also fits my dead cats, come to think of it. Arwen is the fourth cat I've had to let go. Ember, Lilith, Cholmondley, and now Arwen. I miss them all very much.