My Nails Are Getting More Ridiculous

Seriously.  This shit is getting out of hand.  Holiday-themed nails?  That’s huts.

I Always Take Advice From Kiki Dee, or: The Coronary Crossroads

I set a record at the doctor’s office yesterday.
“In twenty years of studying blood results as a certified lipidologist,” he said, “I have never seen cholesterol results as high as this!” At which point he started to recite numbers that sounded like the Dow on some record-breaking day.
“Uh, I knew my cholesterol was high,” I demurred.  “…But I was hoping to reduce it through diet and exercise?”
“We could send you to Auschwitz and these numbers wouldn’t drop enough for my comfort,” he said.  No, really, he said that.  The doctors at Premiere Physicians are nothing if not characters. “There’s something about your body chemistry that’s off.  No, no, you need statins.  Now.”
So here we are at a crossroads in my life.  On the one hand, I’m not overly worried.  My stress test and ECG look, and I quote my Auschwitzian doctor, “Great.”  I’ve always had high cholesterol, as does my family, and we’re pretty long-lived.  If my body produces such vast amounts of cholesterol, I’m reasonably confident that it’s probably designed to absorb amounts of it, since my body and my family have proven remarkably resistant to various things that are about to kill you.
That said, I remember my teeth.
The galling thing about my five years spent without front teeth is that I had warning.  I’d been to a dentist before who’d said that I had gum disease and should have my teeth cleaned periodically.  And I said, “Sure, yeah, I absolutely should do that,” and then forgot to hit the dentist for years at a time.  What I should have been doing was flossing like hell, using Listerine, getting a Sonicare toothbrush to ensure that my teeth were as healthy as possible…
…but that seemed like a lot of work at the time.  Flossing was clumsy, hard to do.  I hated the taste of Listerine.  So I went on, and then one day I spent $10,000 on surgery to have my wobbling teeth taken out. And spent several years, embarrassed and mortified and in pain, getting false ones back.
I could shrug and move on, but these days I take an extra five minutes every morning to floss and swish and brush, and it seems like such an obvious habit I’m aghast that I didn’t condition myself to do it before.  But I remember how awkward and clumsy and stupid I felt flossing, since I wasn’t much good at it, and I realize there was a hurdle I should have crossed.
The problem with me now is that I hate fruit.  I mean, fucking hate it.  I like fruit-flavored things, I like juice, but the pulpy nasty skin-shredded texture of fruit grosses me out.  And the taste of fish is like ocean shore rot in my mouth.
…but I also used to hate the taste of salad, and broccoli, and snap peas, all of which are now staples of my diet.  I just ate them.  And learned to like them.
What I need to do is just bear down for a month and eat a box of fucking berries every morning, and have fish three times a week.  I need to learn to condition my body to crave healthier stuff.  Which is why, the other day, I went out and got a box of blueberries and ate half of them.
I despised every bite.  Tried not to gag.  I know many of y’all like fruit, but imagine eating ants.  Imagine sitting there at a big ol’ anthill, scooping out a handful of wriggling insects and choking them down.  Then imagine not only eating ants until you were full, but eating ants daily for the rest of your life.
I mean, you could do it.  If you had to.  Which is what I’m doing now.  I’ve eaten fruit every morning now, and had fish twice, and both times afterwards I was ravenous for real food.  But I’m at a crossroads now, where I can learn to love a leaner lifestyle, and maybe be okay… Or go the route of my friend Steve, who had a huge heart attack and now has to approach food like it’s some traitor at the gate, checking every bit of content, for a bowl of ice cream could literally kill him.
I can ignore shit until my teeth fall out, or I can make a concerted effort to change shit, so… I’m gonna change shit.  These high levels might just be a quirk of my body chemistry, or they might be like my Uncle Billy, who’s had to have heart surgery before the age of 65.  I could hit the snooze button and wait until everything hits crisis levels, or, you know, I could try to be a rational human being.
So I’m gonna wince and cram down some berries.  And some fish.  And maybe, if I’m lucky, in a year that’ll be something I’ve come to enjoy.
Today, though, I’m nose-first in the anthill.

Labels, Stiff As Amber

I was never prouder of my wife than when she refused to get her first marriage annulled.
The reason why was because she had been told that to get it annulled in the Church, she would have to claim there was nothing valid about her twenty-year marriage… And she wasn’t willing to do that.  Her first husband had been good for her when they met, providing a stability and sensibility that wasn’t present in her family life then.  Maybe the marriage had soured later on as she evolved, but there were many good years when she was happy – and she refused to deny that valid, useful, and now-fading love.
She hasn’t been back to church since.  So it goes.
————————————
I don’t know whether I’m “a poly.”
Dan Savage went on a tear last week, claiming that polyamory wasn’t an innate orientation the way that homosexuality supposedly is, leading to a long rebuttal from Franklin Veaux  saying that yes, polyamory is something where you can indeed be “born this way,” and we should all acknowledge that.
I agree that you can be born poly.  I’m just not so sure we should be so eager to label that.
I have problems with labels like “poly.”  I mean, I am poly, and I’m loud about it.  I blog in public spaces about polyamory because I think that non-poly people should know more about it, and poly folks should see as many different perspectives on how this strange and oft-uncharted territory can work.  (My poly’s not your poly, mang; that’s the only clear rule.)
But I don’t know that I’d be proud of being poly.  It’s a relationship orientation that works for me.  It’s kind of like defining myself by my pale skin, or of living in Cleveland, or of my sense of rhythm; yes, all of these are things I take pleasure in, but do I want to build portions of my identity around them?
I get skittish around labels like that.  Because what often happens is that you have this marginalized group, like gays or polys or gingers or doms, and the outside world brings the Big Press O’Hate on these poor bastards, and then those folks internalize that label to go, “FUCK YOU, YES, THIS IS WHO I AM.”
A valid empowerment.  I approve of all things that turn external hatred into internal pride.
Sadly, it rarely stops there.  What then usually happens is that for many, that label then becomes a way of justifying their whole existence, and then they start viewing everything through the lens of this new identity… and eventually, you wind up with these folks getting so wrapped up in the label that they start disliking anyone who doesn’t fit into this mold.
You see that in gays sneering at bisexuals, in doms and subs sneering at switches, in poly folks looking down at swingers.  A lot of that hatred comes because you’ve defined yourself as X, and anything that spills out beyond the boundaries of X becomes threatening.  Because hey, you’re this!  And they’re that!  If they’re not this, then they’re fucking with who you are!
What often happens with labels is the same old fucking struggle, inverted; we’re better than you are.
So I am poly.  Am I “a poly”?  Fuck no.  I’m not proud of my polyamory.  I’m proud of the happiness my polyamory brings to me, and I’m pleased by the common emotions I share with others who also like polyamory… but my polyamory doesn’t make me better, or worse, than anyone else.
It just makes me different.  And I feel that internalizing labels often leads to imposing ranking orders.
Franklin was born “a poly,” and good for him.  But I don’t know why the distinction would be inherently meaningful to anyone who wasn’t trying to date him.  I wasn’t always “a poly.”  I was monogamous for many years, often in happy relationships, and monogamous for many years with my wife, happily.  We could be happily monogamous again, if we needed to be.
Does that make me a “poly-switch”?  Or “bi-amorous”?  Or “why the fuck would that even really be an issue”?
I dunno.  I’m not refuting Franklin, for I believe that some are “born that way,” and it makes a difference in a few situations.  What I question is whether it’s ultimately healthy to really wrangle all these labels about.
Polyamory is like sexuality and BDSM in that I wish we’d get away from trying to enclose this mutating, changing, evolving sense of wonder into little teeny boxes.  You over there!  You’re poly!  And that other guy is monogamous!  And that person there was born a poly, and that person is deciding to be poly for now!
No.  I was monogamous, and that was cool.  Now I’m poly, and this is cool.  And like my wife, I’m not going to deny the goodness inherent for me in being monogamous back then, just as I’m not going to deny the goodness inherent in polyamory today.
More importantly: I think that if I’d gotten caught up in asking who I am as opposed to what makes me happy, the labels might have actually served as a hindrance.  Because I’d have been attached to a word that might not enclose me.
Look.  There are those, like Franklin, for whom anything but poly has never been a choice, even as there are those for whom anything but gayness has never been a choice, even as there are those for whom anything but dominance has never been anything but a choice.  But for most of us, there’s this squishy Play Doh-like mixture of nature and nurture at work, seeking our environments in which we’re free to experiment and then discovering what fuels our inner happiness.  And our happiness is mutable; if, at the age of 28, all you like is exactly what you liked at the age of 18, you’ve probably had a very stilted existence.  We should be constantly questioning, experimenting, discovering new happinesses and discarding old ones that no longer work.
Labels are often used to exclude and manipulate those experimentations, and so I’m leery of them.  Even now, on FetLife, I’m labelled as Vanilla.  Why?  Because though I’m often – usually – dominant, I feel like I’m more than any Dom or Master label could bring me.
As for what I am right now, that’s polyamorous.  But that’s not a firm label.  It’s  useful as a short-hand to explain to others where I am in my journey right now… But it’s not anything I think of as being inherent in myself, because I may want something else next year.  Or in ten years.  Or in twenty.
There’s nothing wrong with that.

Silly Bits From My Life: The Chris Moose

So from 2005 through 2007, we had a lit moose on our front lawn during the Christmas season.  Not a deer, but a moose, to celebrate our Alaskan roots.  (Well, Gini’s Alaskan roots.  I had tendrils.)  And we were very thrilled to have our own Christmas Moose, as it was usually the only holiday lights that we had, but the uniqueness of the moose was also the only way people could find our house in this 1950s cut-n-copy suburb we live in.
(We drive by our own house twice a week.  Seriously.  This neighborhood is a maze of cozy houses, all alike.)
Alas, in the winter of 2007, during a particularly vicious snowstorm, the moose was run over by a plow.  And so our Merry Chris Moose was dead.
But lo!  Our good friend Steve gifted us with a light-up moose three years ago!  Except, sadly, it was a deer.  We can’t pass a deer for a moose, and we have traditions.  (Tradition!)  So the next year, graciously stubborn in the face of our truculence, Steve bought us an actual, honest-to-God light-up moose.
…which we kept in the basement for two years.  Partially this was out of laziness, partially it was because we’ve taken to spending Christmases with my Mom in Vacaville, so we don’t bother to decorate the house.  But the world felt less festive.  And less moosetastic.  So, on Saturday, I spent several hours carefully assembling Steve’s Wicker Moose. Which was a thatch of difficulty for someone as spatially challenged as I, but look!  Moose!

Yet after that, we still had Steve’s light-up deer in the basement, and it seemed silly to have an LED menagerie hanging about unused.  So, last night, I ventured into the basement and assembled the deer. In the kitchen, because it was chilly outside.  And when it was done, the deer looks so majestic on our kitchen counter that I could not move it.  It was like a Patronus, ablaze in light:

And when I went to go troubleshoot some JavaScript libraries in my living room, the deer looked on encouragingly:

I’m currently petitioning Gini to allow me to keep the deer in the house.  Even in the daytime, this deer looks badass.  Gini says she needs the space to, you know, cook and stuff, but I think she just doesn’t appreciate the value of public art.  I mean, just look at it!  This is one kingly fake deer.

Alas, the deer will probably be evicted soon, as Gini has officially denied it an indoor existence.  However, the whole thing was made worthwhile when our daughter Erin sang:

“We wish you a Merry Chris-moose and a Happy New Deer!”

Thoughts On Clone Wars

So I’m about a third of the way through the first season of Clone Wars.  While it’s not a great show, it’s a perfect exercise show: it’s got two action sequences per twenty-minute segment, and switches around in locale a lot.  This frenzied pace helps to take my mind off the anguish in my legs.
The two things that constantly amuse me about this show:
1)  It’s brutal.  For a kid’s show, they don’t pull any punches about people dying in horrible ways.  There’s one particularly gruesome episode where they infiltrate General Grievous’ lair and the Jedi and Clone Troopers get picked off one by one, and I’m like, “Damn, son, errbody gettin’ killeded.”
2)  The accents.  I suspect a lot of kids won’t know that the Clone Troopers are based on an Australian accent.  So some day, there’s going to be a confused kid meeting an Australian who’s thinking, “What the hell?  Is this guy a Clone Trooper?”
(EDIT: Apparently, it’s a “Kiwi” accent.  My ignorance of Australian and New Zealand culture knows no bounds, apparently.  Sorry, guys!)