3 of 5

Another OK day, as days go.

Nightmares: Didn’t have any. Had a really strange dream, but dreams are like that.

Work: Got to work with no troubles, and settled in fairly well. I felt better than I had before I left, so the leave did have a noticeable improvement. However, I was felled by cafeteria food at work, and ended up sucking down a triple-strength brew of peppermint tea to make it go away. This meant that I had no room for my usual afternoon blacks or greens, which left me exhausted about halfway through.

The work I did was decent. Nothing to write home about.

By the by, the car’s old battery apparently wouldn’t hold a charge—dead as a dodo. (Unless, as Keffy pointed out on Twitter, someone hooked up the wiring incorrectly.) Thus I got a new battery under warranty, so the work was all free. All I had was the tow company bill, which is cheaper than past battery grievances.

Schedule: So one of the things that helps me is a regular schedule. Any kind of regularity is a sort of hanging-on point, something predictable when my emotions are anything but, or when I’m being pursued by demons. Back on Sunday, I scheduled my dinner cooking much later, about when I get home from work on weekdays. This has helped quite a bit, as has the regular showers at 10pm, even though it’s a bit late than when I “should” be doing such things.

So far, so good. I even made up a large part of a bento for tomorrow from leftovers and rice.

Books: Oh dear, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove. Oh dear. Well, the good part is that I’m still reading it; any bad parts seem to have been mitigated, but damn, were they bad.

To give you an idea of the kind of the bad parts from the characters:

• Near the beginning, when Theophilus Crowe is interviewing the bereaved husband of Bess Leander, he asks if she was depressed. When the husband indicates that Bess was likely suffering from OCD, Theo writes down “crazy” in his notebook. You might think this is just like the idiot EMT Vance, who’s into stereotyping the Amish, but Theo is supposed to be our ultra-sympathetic character (by which I mean, he’s sympathetic to the point of seeing all sides of a situation). Ahahahaha.

• Molly Michon, a troubled girl who, like apparently suicidal Bess, also takes medication, is repeatedly, creepily hit upon by an out-of-towner. She definitely over-reacts by biting his leg, but Mavis (bar owner) says she should have appreciated the attention. No one points out this is stupid. Not even Theo, our ultra-sympathetic-to-all-sides character, although he is quite understanding of Molly otherwise. This is actually mitigated later when we see that Mavis is generally prejudiced (she doesn’t question her casual racism at all) and a bit depraved, so her views are… a bit bad. Still, though.

• Valerie Riordan, a money-grubbing psychiatrist, has been assigning people medication willy-nilly. She thinks it might have resulted in Bess’s death, “poisoning” her when the Hippocratic Oath says not to, and she feels so much twisted guilt that she practically needs her own psychiatrist. This is also mitigated by showing the bad effects of her deciding to wholesale give everybody placebos, resulting in the downward spiral of a local artist and increased sadness amongst the general population of Pine Cove.

But yeah… the portrayal of psych medication is getting more nuanced as the book rolls along, and the sexism is likely tied to a single less-than-good character. So thus I’m still reading Lust Lizard and will likely continue to do so.

Link of the Day: Oddly enough, “Vampires Dance” by Vladimar Sterzer. There’s not a sense of Twilight vampires here, but I can see watercolor animation of old-style vampires dancing, sometimes together, sometimes alone, sometimes as bats, a la Fantasia.

Cow of the Day: The Overcow, for letting me hold onto her this morning when the world temporarily spiraled downwards, even without nightmares.

Writing: 238 more words, some of it being deletions and rewriting of previous scenes (of which there are a grand total of three). I’m afraid that I’ve ended up writing a small romance in the middle of a story about acceptance, of the shirt-ripping kind. 1561 words in all, so the gods help me.