So far, 2011 is a pain in the ass

That's a literal statement.

About two weeks ago, on a Monday, pain developed in my right buttock. By that Friday, sitting became excruciating. I set up a doctor's appointment for the following Monday afternoon. But by Sunday, I had stopped eating and was feverish and nauseous. Not good. So, with Mom's help, I limped into the ER Monday morning.

What a long, slow day of poking and prodding; no fewer than six people spent quality time checking out my backside. And under the awkward florescent lighting, I was mortified. And scared. I kept thinking cancer and welled up pretty easily throughout the day. The nurses kept offering pain meds. But that wasn't it; the pain I could tolerate; the humiliation and fear were overwhelming.

Diagnosis: perirectal abscess about the size of a kiwi

Funny, in all my Google searches that week, abscess is the one word I never saw. Plenty of boils and cysts and other colorful things that come up with searches on "tenderness in buttock," "firmness in one buttock," "pain in buttock" . . .

So, in the ER at 9 a.m., diagnosed by noon, admitted at 4, surgery at 5, postop at 6, discharged at 9:30. Looking back, I'm not sure I should have been discharged. But I think my fierce attitude scared the young nurse on duty. I was a hot mess--barely walking, draining everywhere, and full of pain. She literally looked both ways down the hall and told my mother and me to just go.

I am now two weeks into recovery. The first week was a Vicodin blur. But I have vivid memories of removing the gauze. The surgeon had said, "There will be a lot of it, and it will hurt." What a fucking understatement. I stood in the shower for 30 minutes, intermittently tugging for 10 seconds, then holding onto the bar and breathing for 10 seconds, watching blood run down my legs and the tail of gauze behind me growing. I asked my mother to come into the bathroom to talk to me so I could focus on something other than the pain. The sensation . . . like pulling a dull sword through your ass at about a half-inch per minute. I was lightheaded with pain. The last tug almost brought me to my knees. I held the gauze up. It reached from my feet to my collar bone. That gauze was inside the wound. This open wound in my ass. I exclaimed that we should bronze it, or certainly a photo should go on Facebook. But Mom quickly put it in a bag and whisked it away. My body was shaking uncontrollably, my modesty and pride shot to hell. She prepared a sitz bath for me, and I sat in warm water, pulling a towel around me and shaking. I was humbled.

For days after that, I slept, mostly. Very little movement, very little eating. Loss of appetite is a peculiar sensation for a foodie. At the same time, I had to succumb to the fact that I was "unable" in many ways. Unable to do just about anything for myself. A horror to an uber-independent woman. My mother visited every couple days, calling ahead for a grocery list and taking out the trash on arrival. She kept telling me to rest, to appreciate the trauma my body had been through. But this is new to me . . . this inability to bounce back. And when I called to say I would be out of work a second week, I felt ashamed.

I'm feeling almost complete again. I've stopped taking the Vicodin because I would rather feel pain than cloudiness. I can sit with mild discomfort, and I can drive. I left my apartment for the first time yesterday, and felt both weak and victorious. It felt good to clear snow off my car, to use my body, to breathe fresh air.

The moral of the story is to never underestimate the importance of your own ass. Sitting is a beautiful thing. And no matter how hairy or puckered or weird you think it looks down there, embrace it. Love your little balloon knot, your dirty penny. Mine looks very different now. All hopes of being an anal porn star are dashed for me. But it's still healing. It's still draining. I'm not fully me yet, but I'm getting there. And I'm sorry there are no pictures to accompany this post, but, frankly, there's not one goddamn thing about this that you want to see.

Fin

"Carrot Nose" from Ewe & Eye & Friends
Stitched on 32 ct. linen, DMC floss

Whee! Just made it! I managed to get one last project finished in 2010. Not that I started it in 2010. But whatever.







I've been busy crafting this month. It was a tremendous feeling to make gifts, rather than buy them. I barely entered a store all month. One of my favorite pieces of handiwork was for a woman I work with whose name begins with F. I found this pattern on Flickr and couldn't resist.

For everyone else, I wanted to make an ornament. Something small and simple. Something I could work on while watching Netflix... So I flipped through a new book I picked up: A Rainbow of Stitches. I love everything in this book. Each chapter focuses on a color (green, pink, red, blue). It's mostly straightforward cross stitch, with some other types of embroidery thrown in. The pictures are great, and it has a modern and French feel to it. Yummy book.

I settled on a mitten in the red chapter. And I started stitching...and stitching...



About 20 in all. A perfect thing to work on with morning tea, or while watching TV.




Then I needed to figure out what to do with them. My first thought was to do something with felted wool.


But it wasn't a pretty sight, and I'm not the most precise crafter. Using that many pins per mitten didn't sound like a hot idea. And I'm sure whatever I was doing here I was probably doing incorrectly.



So I went through my fabric stash and looked for the tiniest print possible. I think this green is perfect. Next, I set up an assembly line of stitching, sewing, pressing, and assembling. It took a few tries to figure out how to work the thread in to create the hoop to hang the ornament. But once I got it, the project came together in no time.







All my little soldiers!

It was one of the most genuine gifts I've given. And I think this is something I will try to do each year.



Happy New Year, everyone. Hope 2011 brings brilliant surprises for us all. xo

Where I prove two things

1) I can't let go of things and 2) I'm correct.

So I'm reading Joyce Carol Oates' The Faith of a Writer. It's highly . . . academic. A little stuffy, but with some gems. One of them goes like this:

One thinks too of William Faulkner's composition of this greatest novel, The Sound and the Fury, which began as a troubling and inexplicable image--the vision of an unknown little girl with muddy underpants climbing a tree outside a window--and slowly expanded into a long story that required another story or section to amplify it, which in turn required another, which in turn required another, until finally Faulkner had four sections of a novel, published in 1929 as The Sound and the Fury. It was not until two decades later when Malcolm Cowley edited The Portable Faulkner that Faulkner added the Appendix that is now always published as an integral part of the novel.

"I am doing a novel which I have never grasped . . . . There I am at p. 145, and I've no notion what it's about. I hate it. Frieda says it's very good. But it's like a novel in a foreign language I don't know very well--I can only just make out what it is about." (89)

Aha!

I hear the sweet bells of victory and righteousness ringing. They sound nice.

While I enjoy analyzing a book as much as the next person, that can be exactly the problem. The reader always reads into the piece more than the writer intends. And while a writer's voice is a hallway into his or her psyche, it's only a hallway. And it doesn't always open doors that lie in the shadows. As I write, I think more about my duty to the reader, to making the words sound true. I'm not always sure where the story is going, and sometimes there is no story. But I reread and rewrite out of respect for the reader. Not because I need to make grand statements about life or relationships or the universe. I'm only opening the front door to my hallway.

Nuts!

This weekend, I fell into rapture with this blog: lilfishstudios.blogspot.com. Awesome photography, high regard for nature and the outdoors, and some seriously awesome crafting. While there, I came across her recipe for West African peanut soup. And holy shit--who can say no to a soup that requires six cloves of garlic and a jar of peanut butter? Not this girl. I quickly got to work.

First, the band of characters... EVOO, peanuts, natural peanut butter, broth, chopped tomatoes, brown rice, red pepper flakes, green bell pepper, onion, garlic. You can get the actual recipe here. Note: I did not use as much liquid as she lists; my Creuset can't handle that much. And I prefer a thicker soup.

Saute onions, peppers, garlic, red pepper flakes in olive oil...

While that's all cooking down, open all the cans and chop the peanuts...

After a while, you get a goulash-y soup going. I was worried that I should have put more rice in or used less liquid...

But then I added the jar of PB and the chopped nuts. As the soup cooled a little, it got gooey. Like, well, melted peanut butter. Mmmm

My favorite part has been sopping it up with crusty bread. It's seriously filling, and I have been eating half-mug-fulls at a time. It freezes really well, and it will be awesome to heat up on nights like these when the Canadian winds are sweeping in and bringing the first serious snowfalls and I just want to put on wool socks and pull the quilt closer around me.

Faulkner Follow-up

From the Amazon.com official review:

Notoriously “difficult,” The Sound and the Fury is actually one of Faulkner’s more accessible works once you get past the abrupt, unannounced time shifts—and certainly the most powerful emotionally.

Um, emotionally powerful, yes. Because I hated every minute of it. Difficult, yes. We're in complete accord there. One of his more accessible works? Good lord.

I finished it late last night--just to finish it. The characters are all despicable, and I found nothing about it riveting--besides maybe the second chapter, Quentin's stream of consciousness. But even that was only moments of lucidity strewn between odd action and thoughts. Had Faulkner seen Boston? I'd like very much to know what part of Boston this little girl is supposed to live in. I couldn't picture it. Poor immigrant rural-ish housing along the river and uncrowded? Even in 1929, I can't see that in Boston.

This book pissed me off like Death of a Salesman pissed me off in high school. Men having breakdowns--loud, yelling, confusing--but not believable. And offering nothing to really latch onto or empathize with. Both stories trigger eye rolling on this end.

I'm almost dreading choosing my next book. As are you, I figure.

Fuck Faulkner

  

I innocently grabbed The Sound and the Fury off my bookshelf Friday night. I settled into my jammies, got under the quilt, put on my reading glasses, picked just the right pen with which to make notes, and opened this musty-smelling edition. And immediately thought WTF?

It's so incredibly difficult to understand. Quickly I became the Fury and the Sound was my incessant bitching.

I've been sharing online my favorite passage of rubbish nonsense:

I wasn't crying, but I couldn't stop. I wasn't crying, but the ground wasn't still, and then I was crying. The ground kept sloping up and the cows ran up the hill. T.P. tried to get up. He fell down again and the cows ran down the hill...we went toward the barn. Then the barn wasn't there and we had to wait until it came back. I didn't see it come back. It came behind me and Quentin set me down in the trough where the cows ate.

Yeah. That's page 15. It would have helped to know that the first chapter is written from a mentally ill person's perspective. I got that nugget off Amazon--and my mom. I grew up in a house with few books, but my mother apparently loves this book. Wha??? It makes Infinite Jest look like a pony ride. So now I'm reading it because it's pissing me off, and it's pissing me off as I read it. It's sort of a zen cycle I've got going on there. I like a lot of obscure stuff, but I'm not enjoying this.

***

And then there was the cooking portion of the weekend. Shepherd's pie this week. Seriously lazy shepherd's pie. I used a lot of store-bought crap, which goes against my push toward fewer processed foods and fewer chemicals. The stomach tends to steer the cart sometimes. Don't hate.

Cheddar, beef, premade mashed potatoes, gravy mix, cream cheese, creamed sweet corn. This is clearly not a dish for the faint of heart. But with all the kale and beans I've been eating lately, I decided to go in the opposite direction this weekend. The word cheese was floating through my head like a blimp made of sparkles.

While heating up the potatoes (to which I added cream cheese and butter), I browned up the ground beef.

Once the beef was browned, I added the gravy.

Into a casserole dish, I layered the beef, corn, and potatoes. I then added lots of cheddar. No pussyfooting around here--lots of cheddar.



Thirty minutes in the oven, and out came this little gem. Can I get an amen?!

 

While eating, I found the BBC rendition of Bleak House (nine salacious chapters to this miniseries). It doesn't get a lot better than jammies, melted cheese, and a period-piece movie. Heavenly. We'll see about Faulkner in the coming days.

Gone quiltin'

The whiteboard outside my office. Nashua quilt show begins today. Pictures to come.