Daily Archives: October 15, 2022

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Dating Scream

Happy Halloween, darlings, and let’s make you scream.

I am the Witch of Fourteenth Street, at least, I take a woman over on Fourteenth Street on Halloween. I can’t control her year round, but once a year at midnight, she is mine. Mine, mine, mine.

There is only so much evil one can do from midnight to one am once a year, but THIS year. Oh, darlings, this is so much FUN. She already identifies as a feminist. I can’t make many changes, but I can get away with one. A dating screen. Or a dating scream, if you prefer. While I am in her brain, I tweak a neuron here and a neuron there: just a little. If you mess with too much, they go all schizophrenic on you and some witches have been trapped in brains. I’ve been delicately tweaking this brain for years. Just a touch and then out and wait for the results.

Delightful.

So she wakes on November 1, and does she notice? No. I have to tweak lightly, so my touch doesn’t even go into effect right away. In fact it takes months. She is just having the result now.

“I have a new dating screen,” she says to a male friend. “Have you ever read a trashy romance?”

“No. Why would I?” says her friend.

“That’s my new screen. All these guys I know say “I don’t understand women.” If I ask them if they’ve read a romance, they act all insulted. They say why would I do that? The conservative ones act like it is beneath them.”

“Um.” says her friend.

“But if these guys are interested in women, why aren’t they interested enough to study women’s culture? Romances show exactly what our culture is packaging for sale to women. Bodice rippers. Harlequin Romances. And so forth.”

“Well, I’ve read two articles in Cosmopolitan about women.”

“The truth is that most men think women’s culture is beneath them. It is unimportant. They scorn Harlequin Romances, knitting, women’s work, women’s culture. And guess what? I don’t want to date some jerk who thinks he’s superior to me. Men expect women to respect male culture, but they have no respect for women at all.”

“Hey, not all men.”

“Yeah? Will you read a romance?”

“I have a long list of important reading.”

“Oh. I am disappointed. I would like to discuss a romance with an intelligent male. Never mind.”

“Uh, well… Um, maybe you could pick one that would get your point across.”

Oh, darlings, aren’t I the greatest witch in the world? I primed my victim with quotations. “Women’s virtue is man’s greatest invention.” Cornelia Otis Skinner (1901 – 1979). “In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on woman.” Nancy Astor (1879-1964). “I thought that the chief thing to be done in order to equal boys was to be learned and courageous. So I decided to study Greek and learn to manage a horse.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902). My victim has been thinking about the quotations and has reached a conclusion.

And darling, do you think she will find anyone to date?

Shall we start a pool?

(Evil laughter.)

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Birds

Rainshadow Chorale is going to sing like Shakespeare birds on November 5th and 6th. I think this will be another delightful and really fun concert. I tried out for a solo wearing a cowgirl hat. My hat got a solo. I got a small group part. I’m too jealous of my hat, of my hat.

Why a cowgirl hat for Shakespeare? You’ll have to come to the concert to find out! We have composers ranging from Purcell to modern, all using Shakespeare’s words.

Anyhow, mark your calendars. My father was one of the initial eight choral members in 1997 and I joined in 2000. Sing on!

Here is our website: Rainshadow Chorale.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: birds.

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A Good Reaction 2

I am still working my way through my immune response to an influenza shot and six days later, my Covid-19 booster.

I am kicking myself a bit for having them that close together, but at least my immune system responds. I think my immune system takes a shotgun approach and raises ALL the antibodies, and since I most probably have some antibodies that attack my own tissues, it’s not terribly much fun. I’ve had to put pulmonary rehab on hold until my fast twitch muscles work again. They aren’t working and my slow twitch muscles are very pissed off and stiff at having to do double duty. If I do aerobic things, my rib muscles hurt for two days. THAT feels awful.

The good thing (ha.) is that I am having the antibody response but I do not have pneumonia. The working theory is that I have PANS and antibodies to tubulin. Tubulin powers muscles, including lung cilia. Their job is to clean any trash out that gets breathed in. I am at much higher risk for getting pneumonia while the lung cilia are on auto-immune vacation. I am mostly staying home and masking when I go out. A friend got exposed to Covid-19 and refused to test at day five. Well, ok for him, but he could be asymptomatic. So he’s not allowed anywhere near me for at least another ten days. I disapprove of his callousness towards me and others.

Tobacco also paralyzes lung cilia. When I was working I would warn smokers that they might cough more when they stopped smoking, because the cilia would wake up and clean house. “Hey! No one has swept here in years!” A year after quitting smoking, the lung cancer risk drops almost to that of a non-smoker, because those cilia clean house. Isn’t THAT cool?

I don’t know how long my fast twitch muscles will be screwed up. With the last pneumonia, it was nearly a year before the antibodies finally went down. I woke one morning with my slow twitch muscles insanely stiff and my fast twitch back but weak as a newborn kitten. My slow twitch muscles were yelling at my fast twitch: “Where have you BEEN? We’ve been doing YOUR WORK!!” My fast twitch were confused, weak and surprised. I could barely walk down my stairs that day.

Even so, I am lucky. I have a version of chronic fatigue, but because only my fast twitch muscles are affected, I can still do stuff while sick. The people who can barely get out of bed, my working theory is that it is both the fast twitch and the slow twitch muscles that are affected.

And then there are the brain antibodies. Ugh. The silver lining is that the antibodies make me a bit OCD and a bit ADHD, so I am organizing the house. I vacuumed the stairs. That sounds trivial except that I HATE the vacuum. I usually use this peculiar cat hair sponge thing on the stairs, but this time I got the vacuum out. I think organizing and vacuuming are hella funny symptoms of autoantibodies.

Here is a blog post by another physician, also about brain antibodies and encephalopathy. Brain inflammation.

https://www.potomacpsychiatry.com/blog/infectious-diseases-and-psychiatric-illness

Great blog post. And the NIH paper on multiple studies of encephalopathy:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6455066/

If I have the energy today, I may try to look up the trajectory of antibody rise and fall after immunization. My brain tells me somewhere between 6 weeks and 6 months, pulling old data from somewhere, but I took immunology classes when I was working at the National Institutes of Health (late 1980s) and in medical school (early 1990s), so there may be new information. Science changes. I am hoping for less than six months really, and meanwhile trying not to get pneumonia.

Blessings and peace you.

I took the photograph in 2021, while I was REALLY sick. Glow in the dark Zombies stealing the cat food. I have to entertain myself somehow when I have pneumonia.