the_andy

Ugh, my heartburn and anxiety came back this last week. The heartburn is way way way less painful than it was before, but my anxiety doesn't give a fuck about that. All my brain wants to do it convince me I have something wrong with my chest (not all that hard to do, given that some heart arrhythmia runs in my family and my mom is having valve replacement surgery this Thursday). So, like it or not, I end up fixating on the pain in my chest and worrying, which makes my stomach upset, which makes my reflux worse, which makes the chest pain worse. So around and around we go.

I was getting seriously “lets go to the ER” anxious at work today, with weird feelings in my chest and tingling in my hands. But almost as soon as I left the office the tingling went away and my chest dropped to it's “normal” level of ache. My emotions were still a bit out of sorts for the bus ride, but I was mostly back to normal (or what passes for it these days) by the time I got home. Wrdnrd is spoiling me back to health with rice and sake and I'm feeling ok now. Yeah, yeah, alcohol isn't great for my heartburn, but A) I can deal with normal heartburn that's not coupled with horrible anxiety worry and chest tightness, and B) fuck you, I needed a drink.

Notes: isn't it great that my heartburn triggers my anxiety and my anxiety triggers tightening in my chest and tingling in my extremities? We're 95% sure my heart is fine (had an EKG and everything), but it really sucks for self diagnosis that my symptoms mimic heart attack and stroke.

I have another doctor's appointment for Wednesday. Proof that most of it is anxiety is the fact that I reliably start feeling better after making an appointment. Still, I want to cross off the remaining major things it could be and start talking in more concrete terms how to deal with this anxiety. Other than drinking it away I mean, I have expensive tastes in sake.

Got around to watching Redline finally. I think I want to watch the first part on a loop forever.
( Read more... )

I think my gum surgery is healing ok. Hard to tell, everything looks gross, but now it's a different gross? My lower jaw is quite swollen and it makes me look silly.  Every time I attempt to eat something other than soup it's super painful and awkward. Overall though the pain hasn't been too bad, though I'm also never not on something to mitigate it, and often end up with a headache by the end of the day from the dull pain and lack of enough food.

Saw doctors today for some follow up about that tingling I had two weeks ago. After reviewing the symptoms and testing my sensitivity to various kinds of sensations they we're pretty comfortable saying it was anxiety based. If I still have it in a couple weeks I can get a MRI scheduled.

Oh hey dentist, thanks for never calling me back after getting my insurance squared away. It's not like I'm trying to schedule an appointment before the end of the year or anything. Fortunately I lucked out and they were able to find a time other than the afternoon of Friday the 23rd that was their only opening initially. I don't have a lot of Christmas traditions, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to add a liquid diet to them.

Anyway, yeah, I have gum surgery scheduled for next Wednesday. If anyone has recommendations for how I should be knocked out let me know. Everything else I've had done was fine with just a local, but I don't think that's going to be an option in this case. I'm leaning towards the nitrous so I'm not groggy for the next several hours after.

I'm still getting some of the tingling feeling that sent me to the ER. Pretty much it's just limited to part of my right forearm and my right cheekbone (of all places). Also it seems worse at work and fades at home (anxiety or pinched nerve the bus ride aggravates?). But I'm being good and taking myself in next Friday to have that checked out too. It's a bit tough to evaluate accurately though since it's so chilly during my walk to work and then I sit at a window so I end up with a fair amount of tingling from cold that overrides anything else I may be feeling. 

One nice thing about the ER was that now I've had a scan of my head and an EKG it's actually possible to not fret about something wrong with my brain or heart. Take that, hypochondria, I will beat you! 

My heartburn is still around, but the PPI seems to be keeping it to a reasonable level of discomfort, like what I would experience before my bad week. It's a little more constant, but just irritating. That's pretty good considering how much spicy stuff and alcohol I'm still ingesting. I've also become really aggressive with preemptive antacid use.

Ok, I think that about covers everything. Dental anesthesia opinions appreciated. Commiseration about other symptoms is cool, but please don't give me a list of everything they could be, see above, re: hypochondria.

Let's see, what's been going on here in the last mumble mumble since I posted.

• We survived wrdnrd's brother coming out for a visit, even if he did kinda hit on Alex.
• My acid reflux became so horrible after a night of spicy pizza and heavy drinking that I saw a doctor for it. Now on a PPI, which has taken the edge off a bit. Also avoiding pizza. Mom suggested avoiding alcohol, but let's hold off on that for now.
• Found out my dad and sister both have bad reflux too. Thanks for keeping me informed, family, it's not like this would have been useful to tell the Dr or anything.
• The new Legend of Zelda came out. So of course I ran out and bought a Wii the day before it released, made sure it worked with our projector setup, and then bought the game the next day. For the record I am enjoying it.
• Work is stupid busy. If I can keep up with it it'll be good cause my boss is fighting for me to get high marks on my review this year (our collective boss is a stickler for giving above average marks). But damn, I am tempted to bring in my flask some days.
• We don't celebrate Thanksgiving, but since that's wrdnrd's night to work at the cinema we usually make something nice to bring over for the projectionist. They always appreciate it and it was one of our friends this time, so we had a nice little meal in the attached cafe.
• We took in a new cat. She now owns the place and will happily eat anything we happen to have available.
• I am finding myself increasingly unable to get into books that don't grab me immediately. I'm thinking of sticking to classics or comics.

Next time it'll either be cat pictures or manga writeups, promise.

Robert E. Howard (Conan)
C.L. Moore (Jirel)
Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser)
Clark Ashton Smith (pretty much everything)

I'm not sure I have enough to say to make a post if I did these individually. Also, I'm at the Portland Zine Symposium, and thus can't reference my books and have to use my faulty memory. So here we go with the pulp sword and sorcery lighting round! Also, because I'm writing this while staffing a table in the stuff zine room I'm considering this a draft. I reserve the right to come back and clean up things from spelling to paragraph organization.

Howard wrote Conan (and it seems every other manly man pulp character). That's kind of all you need to know. Ok, maybe a little more. Sometimes Conan is a thief, sometimes a pirate, sometimes a king. He's usually killing things, sometimes getting rich, but never keeping the money long. One time he fought a gorilla who thought he was a sorcerer. While the stories are problematic in a lot of ways (coughracistcough) they're still better than most of the derivatives. If you're at all interested in the genre, you should read these (make sure you're getting the original ones and not any stories “completed” by Lin Carter).
Little known fact: for as badass a warrior Conan is, he definitely has a weakness to being hit on the head and knocked out. Like in every single story.

CL Moore is one of the first, if not the first, woman writing for the pulps. I've only read her Jirel of Joiry stories because I like S&S and Lovecraftian pulp, but she also did a bunch of space stoies too. Jirel is interesting in ways I don't know how to describe, so I'm not going to try, but highly recommend them because they're so different. Jirel is a badass warrior and has her own castle, so trouble usualy ends up coming to her. The castle, for some reason, has a stairwell to hell in the basement. “Dudes” keep trying to get with her because she's so badass. One is an extradimensional being and the relationship is ruined because she wants to know what he really looks like. The other is a man who manages to defeat her. And then after she gets revenge she realizes she might have been into him too (problematic maybe?)
Depressing wikipedia fact: Moore was going to be a nominee for the first woman Grand Master of SFWA, but her husband had the nomination withdrawn as she had Alzheimer's and the ceremony would be confusing and upsetting.

During his life Fritz Leiber wrote everything, but he's here for his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. I'm not a fan of the first and last volumes (first and last in terms of story chronology, I think they were both written rather late) as the origin stories just aren’t as much fun as after our “heroes” team up. And the last book just plain isn't very good. But for the most part they're fun and playful in a way that pulp isn't always. There's tinges of Lovecraft, well, or everything really, as Leiber wasn't building a logical world so much as a kitchen sink one where he could write whatever would be fun. This aspect of Leiber's stories is the often forgotten secondary influence on D&D (the first obviously being Tolkien). The boys squabble and break up only to find themselves thrown back together again (once breaking up over the correct way to spell Fafhrd's name). They get drunk and steal a rich man's house (literally: they get a bunch of other drunks to pick it up and move it for them).
Bonus bookshelf feature: Howard Chaykin and Mike Mignola did a comic of some of the early stories that are a lot of fun. Dark Horse reprinted it a couple years ago, and while Mignola's art isn't as tight as it would become it's still worth a look.

Clark Ashton Smith is what happens with you combine Lovecraft's ideas with someone who can actually write (sick burn!). Ok, I'm not a huge fan of his poetry, but most of the fiction is great. There's a lot of it and the amount in print at anytime is spotty, but there's at least a Fantasy Masterworks volume with a bunch of good stuff in it that's fairly representative and not too hard to find. The fiction can be pretty dark at times (most dudes trying to take down evil necromancers don't succeed), but not only is it better written than HPL, there is, I think, more fun being had in many of the stories, even the dark ones. There is definitely a Dunsany influence, which is rarely a bad thing.
Also, I feel a bit sorry for Smith. He had a hard life and isn't as well known as he should be, given his talent and prolificness and usually gets tertiary billing after Howard and Lovecraft.

黒鷺死体宅配便, written by Eiji Otsuka and drawn by Housui Yamazaki.
11 volumes in English, ongoing series.

I'm realizing my bookshelf is going to contain a lot of "not for everyone" stuff. Wait, I’m going to quote from Chris Sims here, because this is more succinct than I was in my attempts:

Despite its creators’ uncomfortable fixation on naked female corpses, Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki’s Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a fun and–at times–genuinely terrifying read.

This is a darkly humorous series about a group of young adults who a) have no job prospects after graduating from a Buddhist college (since they don't have a family temple to take over) and b)have unusual talents, ranging from the supernatural (dowsing for bodies and speaking with the dead) to the more mundane (embalming and hacking). And there's also the guy who claims to channel an alien via a hand puppet, but I hate him, so we'll ignore that.
Anyway, they come up with the dubious business plan of locating undiscovered corpses and getting them where they want to go. But most of the time they end up solving messed up murders, not getting paid anything, and making ends meet by moving furniture.

I usually describe it as being along the lines of NCIS, but with out of work Japanese college kids and more graphically naked corpses. Also, there's that one flashback story about the ghost of Jack the Ripper in Japan.

The aforementioned preponderance of young naked dead women lessens a bit as the series goes on (I was sold on this as a comedic horror comic, not a comedic horror zombie porn comic!), but even without that particular sort of off-puttingness you should be warned that it is pretty graphic: decomposing corpses, serial killers, decomposing corpses that have been animated and are getting revenge on their serial killer, etc.

There are no multi-volume stories, which is a nice change of pace from a lot of manga. Each volume is either a set of shorts or a whole arc. There are some continuing plot elements dropped throughout (if the series continues we'll find out what up with the spirit who helps Karatsu), but mostly after the introductory stuff it's a series you can pick up any volume of.

There's a rumor a live action version is being developed for US TV. I'm torn about this. On the one hand, I think it would work really quite well as a TV show (a thought continually running through my head while marathoning NCIS was "well, if they can show this on network TV than Kurosagi wouldn't even have to be on cable!"). On the other hand, the series feels very Japanese to me. Some of the cultural interaction with police and hospital staff wouldn't work. It’s supposed to be very weird that Makino is an embalmer (since virtually everyone is cremated in Japan). I'm worried if it's set in the US it won't be similar to NCIS, it'll just be NCIS.

So there you go, I hope I made it sound somewhat interesting, even if it’s not your thing. At least, I didn’t come across like some necrofetishist, right?

Right?

3x3 Eyes, by Yuzo Takada
Manga, in Japanese, 40 volumes

It's a pretty basic story, really. A high school student working illegally at a transvestite bar meets a lost Chinese girl who is actually a 300-year old monster. He inadvertently gets killed, she makes him immortal. We learn some back story (increasingly cribbed from the Hinduism section of the encyclopedia), then there's 30-odd volumes of globe trotting, fighting, and pre-pokemon monster summoning.

This is more than just a manga I like. It's one thing that's been woven throughout my burgeoning through my anime fandom.

It's no great work of art, but I like the story well enough. The immortal main character lead to lots of interesting bits where he wins against demons and monsters by doing something clever (and usually painful) related to being immortal, rather than properly beating them or having some heretofore unrealized potential. He gradually obtains skill with fighting and magic, but is almost always outclassed, which was a nice change of pace from the badass samurai stuff I had been reading prior. And I find it interesting to watch the art evolve from the late 80s to the early 2000s, becoming a little more cartoony (especially after Takada gets Studio Palm to help with the backgrounds).

It has it's problems, from some early LOL cross-dressing, a fair amount of cultural appropriating of India, and a preponderance of panty shots in the early volumes (Pai's pants are strangely fragile), but there's a certain 80s manga quaintness about it that keeps it from bothering me as much as I suspect a more modern manga would.

I'm can't quite recall know how I started reading this; either I stumbled onto it in a comic shop when Dark Horse released the second volume in '95 or I heard it talked about on the Anti-Gravity Room (a Canadian comics show that played on Sci-Fi for a while and I had a fondness for) and then tracked it down. I believe volume 2 was released nearly 5 years after Dark Horse released the first volume, and it quickly became apparent that it wasn't going to get a regular release. I contented myself with rereading what I had, tracking down the first Dark Horse release at SDCC, and finding random images on the still shiny new home internet connection (I think this was also after I developed connections at school for hacked and stolen AOL accounts).

Things really picked up when I went to college. I bough up my first Japanese volume (#17) when I found it randomly for sale at a table at the first Baka!-con (later Sakura con). [Remind me to tell stories about those first years when I worked at the con.] Then I picked up a couple more during every trip to Kinokuniya in Seattle (Japanese class trips, dad's visits, one epic trip around Seattle with Jo-chan and Francesco).

My Japanese was never quite good enough to read more than a couple pages at a time and scanlations hadn't really taken off yet (I think the average bandwidth was too low), so I was downloading txt files of translations. It was delightfully old school. But still a pain and I wouldn't go back to it.

The series wrapped up in 2002 and apparently wasn't popular enough to keep back issues in the store, so the last missing copy (I believe it was volume 3 of all things) I picked up on e-Bay in 2003. After 40 volumes, the series encyclopedia, and a nice artbook/poster book I was finally done.

Dark Horse eventually translated some more, but then quickly canceled it again. My goal for my Japanese studies (something I don't drive terribly hard for, cause I'm lazy) has always been to be able to read this. Comfortably intermediate reading skills and access to my manga collection seems a decent target. Though it's all scanlated, if you're interested.

Though I do really like the manga, I'll admit part of the appeal has been tracking down and following something that has never really been a major fandom in the US.