The tree is quite large, and my phone doesn’t want to focus on the moon. C’est la vie. It was a gorgeous and wonderful evening.
I’m on the road visiting with family, hence today’s brief post. A note to my future self, though: I want to talk more about the perils of not sharing health stories, and of not embracing health education. That’ll be for another time.
This is a week for arthritic pain, fatigue, and wondering what makes “funny” things funny in Dungeon Crawler Carl (which I wrote about last week).
I’m pretty sure I’ve got Lyme disease. I’m already on doxycycline. I don’t yet have a positive test for Lyme disease, but I’m not waiting for one either.
I have enough circumstantial evidence. I walked through scrub forest and near tall grass in a high risk area—Cape Cod—while on my way to the beach. Two days later Ley noticed I had a weird bruise. About a week after that, stiffness and pain started spreading through my left leg and up my left side. I also got even more sleepy.
Weirdly, some part of me is relieved.
Continue readingI’ve gotten so behind in tracking what I’ve read in my reading journal, I’m not sure where to begin.
The problem? LitRPG books.
No wait, the problem is that I don’t have the focus to keep up with my usual book logging commitment. I don’t have that focus because baby. And I don’t make time for logging the books I’ve read because… baby. Baby, and everything else that needs to be done.
Another part of the problem is that I can read ebooks on my phone while I’m doing other things, including while I hum and rock my baby to sleep. That works just fine. It works far better, far more easily, than…
Continue readingI wrote last week about how fatherhood has changed my experience of masculinity. That post focused on what my prior experience had been, and how my own relationship with that experience had changed. To sum up, I’ve got more skin in the game now. I don’t want to retreat from cultural ideas of masculinity, I want to confront and change them. I’m carrying the banner for my son, trying to give him healthier ways to be a boy and a man than I had. I want him to have more room, to not be squashed by our society’s limited ideas about masculinity.
But there’s more to the ways that fatherhood has changed my own experience. Having my baby with me changes how others experience me. He’s like a magical secret handshake that opens the doors of social contact, that makes strangers suddenly say “oh he’s got a baby, he must be alright.” Somehow being with an infant or toddler makes me safe and acceptable in a way that I can never be without one.
I say all this like these ideas leapt fully formed from my brow like Athena’s critique of gender ideology, but that would be a lie. These thoughts took time. Besides, what really drove all of this home for me was walking through public spaces with an empty baby stroller.
Continue readingBecoming a father has changed my experience of my gender.
I think it’s a good change, but it (like most parts of parenthood) also feels like more work.
Continue reading
Fistful of Wits 