I’ve always liked to watch ice skating. It has rhythm and flow and moves that thrill. This year, however, I have discovered Ilia Malinin, the world champion at the moment (although not Olympian), and he’s a world apart.
Never mind the quadruples that only he can do. Those are nice. But what about that backflip? That looks like a great way to kill oneself, but he nails it every time. I don’t know how he does it and makes it look easy. Not a single error that I could see.
I’ve watched his short routine six times so far. I’m obsessed. It makes me want to watch more ice skating, which I realize I haven’t done in a while.
The most positive change I made in my life in the past 15 years was getting on psychiatric medication. It’s not as easy a decision as one might think, even though I was in the middle of a mixed episode, which resulted in suicidal ideation in the middle of a hypomania. It was bipolar II, something I had lived with all my life, and which I thought I had managed well.
I had not managed it well, I discovered when I went on medication. Despite the fear that it would take away my creativity (a fear of many people with bipolar disorder), it gave me the discipline to sit and write. Rather than take away my personality (another common fear), it stabilized me to where I had a personality rather than mood swings. I looked back on various parts of my life where I made risky decisions, and realized that those decisions weren’t me, they were the disorder steering me toward stupid actions.
I wish I had found the medication sooner. It takes the average person with bipolar seven diagnoses before bipolar is breached. Mine was considered dysthymia (mild depression), then double depression later. The hypomania was not diagnosed because it looked like mood swings rather than a constant mania.
The medication doesn’t fix everything. I have a precise sleep schedule that keeps me on an even keel. I take care of myself and stay away from highly stressful situations when possible. I have been doing this for years and have only had minor outbreaks of hypomania or dysthymia; medication tweaks keep those in control.
I like the decision I made to go on medication. It’s made all my other good decisions possible.
There is no fun way to exercise, according to my overweight, 60-year-old body. Unless typing is a calisthenic exercise, I doubt I can call any exercise fun. And yet …
I think fun exercises are ones where you don’t feel like you’re exercising. Walking is a great exercise if you have some place to go, like an ice cream parlor. Or if you’re bird watching. Someone is going to tell me that walking slow is not vigorous enough to be exercise, which means they want to turn walking into a less than pleasant exercise.
Playing sports is a fun way to exercise if you like competition and mastery and you’re good enough to not be a liability for a team. I am slow and painfully uncoordinated, and have not found the competitive sport that will not shame me. People get hurt when I play softball. I can’t even play miniature golf.
Gardening is fun exercise, if you have fun pulling weeds. I don’t. I garden because there’s food at the end of the process, and I plant unusual herbs just for the joy of tasting something most people don’t use fresh. The exercise is just an unpleasant side effect of bending down repeatedly to pull weeds.
My favorite exercise, in other words, is accidental.
I once visited a place called the Exotic Feline Rescue Center in Crown Point, Indiana. The man there rescued big cats like lions and tigers, previously owned by people. The owner kept them behind chain-link fences, where they had enough room to roam in their pens. If it weren’t for people who would adopt cubs, only to find out that once they got big, they were not cute, but dangerous, the place would not exist.
Big cats think they’re playing, but they’re far too rough for a human to withstand. A friend of mine got knocked down by a half-grown lion who stole her hair bunchie and started playing with it. She had strained muscles down her back from the tackle. She was lucky it was only that. Sometimes big cats turn on their owners.
I don’t know why anyone would keep a big cat except to invoke fear and admiration. To have a status symbol. But the cat can strike back, cost a lot of money for their carnivore diet, and propose a big problem if one wants to get rid of it. I don’t think anyone should keep a big cat.
I wish I could say the book I would read (and have read) over and over was a high-brow book, like The Return of the King. I wish it was a staple of fantasy, something that would give me geek cred. But the book is as mass-market as any book selling at the grocery store, and it still captures me every time.
The novel is Origin in Death, by JD Robb. JD Robb (alternative pen name for Nora Roberts) writes futuristic crime novels. She’s written a lot of these, perhaps 40. Reading them is like eating popcorn — tasty, addictive, and a little more nutritious than you might think. Her protagonist is a police lieutenant, Eve Dallas, who runs the murder squad at Cop Central. She’s excellent at what she does, and she’s a bit curmudgeonly. She’s married to one of the richest men on earth, a former jewel thief who goes by the name of Roarke. Roarke, with his larcenous ways, makes a perfect partner in fighting crime.
The specific story, Origin in Death, involves a father-son pair of doctors who are killed within a day of each other. The murder trail leads to a network of underground hospital wards and a conspiracy to supply men with the perfect lover/wife. How the doctors manage this is part of the light science fiction that JD Robb trades in. There are twists to surprise, and a big chase scene at the end that made me wish for a version for the screen.
I read this novel now and again. It’s quick to get through, and I know all the plot twists. But it remains entertaining, and perhaps the best of JD Robb’s In Death series.
Daily writing prompt
If you could be a character from a book or film, who would you be? Why?
If I could be a character from a book, I would be Mary Russell from The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R King. The beekeeper, in this case, is a retired Sherlock Holmes, and Mary becomes his apprentice. She is a renaissance woman — she is a student at Oxford in chemistry and religion, she takes up acting and other escapades, and she helps Mr. Holmes solve crimes, often in disguise. I would love to be the sort of person to attract the attention of Sherlock Holmes.
The best compliment I have ever gotten is from my friend Celia, who told me once that I reminded her of Mary Russell. Wow, how could I live up to that? I wasn’t an adventurer, but I had an encyclopedic knowledge of a lot of disparate things. Not deep, per se, but wide.
I don’t think I could live up to Mary Russell, but I can sure fantasize about being her.
To be honest, there’s probably not a job I would do full-time for free, because I like to be able to afford food. But part-time? I would take care of cats and dogs at the humane society for free. I would pet them and give them lots of pets and hugs.
I would walk the dogs and play with the cats. I’d like to walk the cats, but cats generally don’t go for that sort of thing.
I would do this for free, and have done it (minus the litterboxes — they don’t have guests doing the litterboxes). I had a student who would now and again stop by my office and proclaim, “kitty therapy time!” at 4:00, and we would go to the humane society to play with cats. The humane society welcomes this because it helps socialize their cats.
The experiences that helped me grow the most in my life were my relationship mistakes. When I was younger I had what is called in the literature an anxious attachment style. It comes from a childhood with an overwhelmed mother who used threats of abandonment as discipline. So I developed anxious-attached relationships with my boyfriends.
In common language, I was anxious and clingy. I chose people with avoidant attachment styles, which means they did not necessarily want to be in relationships. The males were ambivalent, distant, or otherwise not committed. This made me more anxious and clingy, which made them more noncommittal and distant, and … it was a total mess.
It took me a long while to break this cycle. One of the best things I did was spend many years outside of a relationship, to the point where I didn’t need a relationship anymore. And when I no longer needed one, I took the risk that found me the right one.
In a workshop I participated in, my town was described as two towns united by a football team, This is most certainly true, even today. One town can be described as the college campus with its more liberal professors and staff, and the other is full of what are called ‘townies’ elsewhere. The football team is the six-time Division II national champion Bearcats.
Maryville is a town with a streak of hatred. In the Thirties, we had a lynching. In 2013, a fourteen-year-old’s rape was blamed on her. Confederate flags occasionally fly, and black students report getting harassed in town businesses. This is not happening from the University side. I don’t want this to happen here.
It’s hard for me to live in Maryville because of this, but as this is where I work, I stay here. I would like to live in a bigger town with a kinder presence. I am not sure anything like this exists in the US; we are a mean country.
My morning starts with waking up at five AM, usually before the alarm rings. I sit in bed and read till twenty after, and then get upright, do my bathroom activities, and get dressed. Richard gets up at about the same time, although more reluctantly.
We wander downstairs and Richard makes breakfast, which is cereal, milk, and bananas. I then move to the loveseat, where my computer is, and I write this blog over coffee. When I’m done with writing and coffee, I go down to the basement and tend to the seedlings. Then I come back up and check the internet and talk until 7:30, at which point I ride with Richard to work, where he drops me off before he goes to work.
On Wednesdays and Fridays I work from home, so no going to work on that day. On weekends, we play music over coffee. Today it’s baroque, but often it’s modern classical and classical-adjacent.
So those are my morning rituals. I never thought about them as rituals, but they don’t change much. This morning I didn’t get up until seven, and I feel like everything is thrown off. Off to water the seedlings…
Words Like Me 