The Raven's Roost

Got a call from my doctor about the mammogram results and he left a message for me to call back. Okay.

Returned the call and talked to one of the assistants who said, "Well, he hasn't noted anything in your chart. There's a note here about North Florida Surgical Associates, but it doesn't say why." WELL THANKS MICHELLE THAT HELPED A LOT.

So I'm sitting here enjoying a glass of wine while waiting on him to finish with a patient and call me back. FUCK. Fuckity fuckity fuck fuck.

Anyway, it's probably an order for a biopsy. Which will be loads of fun, I'm sure.

I'm also looking at changing my ringtone from the Cyanide & Happiness theme music to "Superstitious" by Stevie Wonder, I'm just not clear on how to navigate Android's inner workings. Fox could do it in no time, but it would be neat to learn to do it myself.

And I had a great Zox day! I won a contest on the FB page and this lady sent me a strap I didn't have plus a rainbow chain maile keychain. Normally my personal style is old-school Goth, but during Pride Month I make a point of looking like the love child of a unicorn and RuPaul. I also received my monthly Mystery Pack, which was three of their more psychedelic designs, and all three had Maya Angelou quotes on their cards. That's kind of an interesting trifecta, given that we're told the Mystery Packs are put together blind, so not even the packing lady knows what you're getting. 

The human brain likes to find patterns and discern trends - it's part of how gambling can become such a problem for some people. They're convinced there is a pattern and a logic to what is, in reality, completely random. The universe is made of chaos, nothing means anything, and we're all meat robots trapped on a rock hurtling through a screaming void.

No, I'm not at all worried about this phone call.

Today was my errand day, when I do the grocery shopping and any other stuff what needs doing. I wanted to go to Jax Oriental Market - they have the beef bones I use for my beef bone broth, plus lots of great Asian veggies, noodles, and interesting candy. Plus a ton of weird pickled shit in jars. It's awesome. But it's also raining like hell here, and I'd have had to drive across the Buckman Bridge, which I do not wish to do in a hard downpour. There have been too many fatal accidents for me to flirt with that disaster. So I stuck to Middleburg and Orange Park, and I feel like buying some wine was prescient on my part, as things are right now not at a level that Buspar can handle by itself. I'm not planning to get drunk but this is like getting on an airplane for me - I need the edges taken off or I'm going to freak out. I'm a terrible travel companion, actually. Just ask the Norwegian guy who had to sit next to me on the flight to Iceland. Poor bastard.

This chardonnay doesn't taste like I remember. I'd say it's oxidized, but the color is good. When white wine has air get to it, it turns the unpleasant color of urine. I think I just haven't had any in so long my palate forgot what it was supposed to taste like.

But I got a Starbucks fix, and acquired a new water bottle. It's purple and red and has leopard spots - you know, subtle and tasteful. ;) I am a great believer in reusable bottles and coffee cups, and I actually use them instead of letting them gather dust in a cabinet while I throw out paper cups. A single Starbucks reusable cup, in my case, pays for itself in about 14 months when you consider the ten cent discount for refilling your own cup. Yes, I drink a lot of coffee. And I'm more a fan of Starbucks now that they have those blonde roasts - everything else tastes burnt. I'm also a fan of green tea lattes, but man, the sugar ...

...

So ... there's my phone not ringing. Hmm. I'm cutting my doc a lot of slack because he's a really good guy, and I fear he's getting close to retirement age. Content warning - I'm about to go into diet and weight loss talk here, so skip to the next paragraph if you don't want to read. He never said a single word to me about my weight, and he had every reason to, I was medically obese. But in the patient summary I got recently he added a note congratulating me on my weight loss, "if it was intentional." Yeah, it was. I put a lot of work into it, and I was kind of stoked to see that, if I stay where I am for the next oh, ten months? I'll qualify for the Nat'l Weight Loss Registry. That's a major thing with the female side of my family - my direct mother is tall and doesn't have a lot of excess weight, but she takes after her dad who was a beanpole. I got the height ... and the tendency to run to ... let's say largesse. My aunt is half a foot shorter than me and currently heavier than I was at my highest weight. The scale says I'm heavier than I'd like, but I am also starting to do strength training, so I generally disregard what the scale says. It's one metric of several I use to gauge my overall health (except for, you know, my boobs) including my resting heart rate. Which recently hit 49 bpm and I am absurdly proud of that.

Dammit. I hope nothing major happens with me - I'm signed up to run Disney's Dopey Challenge this coming January at WDW. That's all four races that weekend. It's part of a major Bucket List thing for me - Disney Coast to Coast - run the marathon or half at WDW and the half at Disneyland in California in the same calendar year. That's not a race bucket list, or a travel bucket list, but The Bucket List. Like Iceland. Like Morocco. WTF have I been practicing Arabic for if I don't get to go to Morocco? Yeah, I choose some seriously hard languages ... but my French is pretty damn good, so I may be able to so Morocco on the strength of that. Please ignore the strong Cajun accent.

I know this is running long, and if you're still reading you deserve a cookie. Heck, you deserve to come to my house, pet my cats, eat my ice cream, and try on all my Zox if you want to. I just don't feel comfortable sharing any of this to Facebook, even though I want to let my Mom and my sister know. I think I'll ping my sis and get her email address. Mom's had cataract surgery and can't see too well right now. She had the same fibrowhatever I do, but Mom and another aunt both had full-blown cancer, and the aunt actually had to get a double mastectomy. Mom had just one removed rather than do chemo and radiation.

*sighs*

Maybe I should just go make my pizza. But this has kinda nuked my appetite. I dunno, what do you eat to not get cancer? I know what you feed a cat on a cancer diet, but I'm not a cat, and I dislike raw eggs. And I'm pretty sure Dr. Goodguy doesn't want me sucking down raw chicken and spinach smoothies. Wow, that sounds gross even to me. And I poke dead things with a stick.

I hate pink. Why is breast cancer stuff so freaking pink? Pink actually grates on my optical nerves, like certain shades of orange. Just, no. It's not that I regard pink as "girly," I regard it as alarming and kind of annoying. Isn't that the shade they used to paint psych wards to keep violent patients calm? Yeah, no. And every October everything gets pinkwashed, and there's all this stupid shit about "save second base!" Because we should totally be sexualizing a deadly disease. Because femmes are just a collection of erotic parts and not actual people. (And I kind of have to ID partly as femme because I'm genderfluid, and because even if I wore a three-piece suit and had a five o'clock shadow my body shape still screams "woman," much to my chagrin. Honestly I'd like a break from being read as female sometimes.) The first time I saw a "Save the Ta-Ta's" sticker I laughed, but now it's just annoying. These stupid fat bags aren't just here for male entertainment. And in my case, I've hated mine since they started developing. And yes, I got a lecture from my Mom about how she wished she'd had breasts as big as mine when she was my age, and it was absolutely as unhelpful and irritating as you'd imagine it would be.

Fuck it, I'm going to go have pizza. Thanks for listening, everyone. I wish I could give you all a hug, but a virtual hug will have to do.