stir crazy

Two weeks in the not-a-cast today, and I'm going batty. It's ostensibly a walking cast, but when I walk in it, I sometimes feel the weird sensation that got me to the doctor in the first place, which is apparently my achilles tendon abrading the sheath around it. Since the idea is to make that go away, I'm reluctant to walk more than absolutely necessary. I got out of the house for New Years, but took cabs or got rides almost everywhere.

I find the fact that I feel that sensation even with the severely limited motion my ankle can make within the cast really worrying. I've felt better the past few months than any time in years, and I'm terrified of losing my mobility now I've just begun to enjoy it.

On top of that, I'm sure I've gained weight the past couple of weeks. Eating is my response to stress, and with no exercise to burn it off, I'm sure I'm backsliding. But I can't get an accurate weight in the cast so I don't know how badly.

Wednesday I couldn't even be bothered to write down what I ate, which I've done religiously since June, even when I slipped and ate crap. Then to top it off I snapped at a friend in email. I don't do that. My father always took out his frustrations on the people around him. I don't.

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I'm going to start trying to journal every day, even if it's just stupid angsty shit like this. I tend not to journal when I'm down; not journaling leaves me more socially isolated, which leaves me feeling even more down. So what the hell, I'll try writing even when I feel like crap and see if it helps.

Yes, Virginia, the Republicans really are that stupid

From a Seattle Times article, "Iowa Results Scare GOP":

"November could be dark," said Republican strategist Scott Reed.

Um.

(Those of you who've always lived among civilized people may not get it; I know I didn't the first time I heard it. I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, looking for a place to live, back when the way you did that was by reading classified ads in a newspaper. I made an appointment to see a place, headed to the part of town where all the buses converged, found a bus driver, and asked if he knew which route I should take to get to that address.

He told me, and then, in what seemed a friendly, make-conversation, sort of way asked why I was headed that way.

"I'm looking at an apartment."

"You may want to think about that. That part of town's mighty dark."

I thanked him and went off to catch my bus, trying to figure out why one part of town would be darker than another. Was it in the shadow of one of the area's few hills? It was only when I got there, and realized that I was the only white person on the street, that I figured it out.

I'm not going to say there's no racism in the Northwest, but I had certainly never encountered overt racism in the flesh before. Not only did I not know the code, the code was almost beyond my imagination. I wonder if that (along with plausible deniability, of course) is what Mr Reed was betting on when he used that phrase?)