#so like. its not a miracle cure. the side effects are really kicking my ass

[bulldagger-bait]

LONG ramble ahead. Feel free to skip. (Also this stuff is probably a bit too personal but i dont really care tumblr is my diary and i just have to get these thoughts out)

I had my first almost completely pain free day today and... It was fucking magical. Like, I still had pain in all of the niggling areas i always do: muscle tension, joint pain.

But my nerve pain. My nerve pain! For a good while it just wasnt there. And because the pain wasnt there, the FND couldnt kick up a fuss. I felt strong. I could stand. I wasnt hurting.

When i woke up after my surgery nearly a decade ago, i was in the worst pain of my life. I was writhing and screaming and begging to die. 10 out of 10 out of 10. And over the course of my hospital stay it diminished. Went from 10 to 9 to 8. And then 8 is where it stayed. It became my new normal.

I forced my way through the first year of recovery waiting for it to get better... But it never did.

I tried to push through and not let anything hold me back. I dont know how many times i sobbed to myself quietly about how unbearable it was. I tried to take my life twice, and the pain was a significant reason why.

Eventually i got on meds that knocked it down to a 7, and a 7 is where ive been for the last 5 years. Every day.

Eventually i just kinda resigned myself to it. I couldnt think about the future because whenever i did, all i could feel was: "every moment of the rest of my life is going to feel like this". I accepted it, and i tried to move on. I found someone that i loved enough to stick around for. Someone who made living with the pain worth it.

And now, with this new cocktail of drugs... That burning pain is gone. Or at least, its no longer an electric, burning, blistering, grinding pain. Its tempered to what feels like a candle flame. And for a few rare moments here or there it goes away.

I dont know what to do with that. All of my other pain pales in comparison. They're their own little burning pains, but it doesn't feel like it matters. i can live with them.

And im finally hopeful about my future. Because for a few minutes last week i felt nothing. Blissful nothing. I was so shocked i couldnt even believe it.

When the pain came back i didnt even care or feel cheated, because all ive wanted for so long was just a few seconds pain free, and i got it. I didnt have to be drugged out of my mind (well ... Excluding the cocktail of drugs i was on). I just was. And when it was gone i wasnt upset because i knew if it could happen once, it could happen again. and i had a reason to be excited for my future; my long term future.

Im not just sticking around for other people anymore. Im sticking around for myself too. Because i deserve another five minutes without pain.

(sidenote: do i feel insanely guilty about having a break from my pain; and that its not fair; and that other people deserve it more than me; and that i shouldnt talk about it because its just rubbing it in everyones faces; and that i must have just been exaggerating the pain; and i dont deserve to even call myself disabled anymore; and that im scum; and that i should instead continue to suffer in pain because its all i know, and i dont know how to be myself without pain because its become such an integral part of who i am; and because its who ive been for near as makes no difference a decade; and that im just waiting for the other shoe to drop and somehow prove that im a fraud; and that the pain i had was never real, nor is the pain i have that the meds havent affected; and that im lying about everything; and that I dont deserve help; and that everyone in my life who has pain and hears me talk about this hates me, resents me; and that im terrified of losing the pain because it knows me intimately, and i know it, and that this severing is making me question who i am; and that the answer im getting in my head is: no one; you are no one without this.... Yeah, maybe. Maybe i am thinking that)

[precuredaily]

Precure Day 160

Episode: Yes! Precure 5 12 - “Protect Urara’s Stage!” Date watched: 23 November 2019 Original air date: 22 April 2007 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/KiGZvA2 Project info and master list of posts: http://tinyurl.com/PCDabout

When did this become the Precure stage show?

As I indicated in the last review, this is one of those episodes that just really sticks out in my memory, but it turns out I don’t actually remember much about it at all. It’s not as impactful as I recalled, but it represents a step forward for Urara and it has a kickass fight. Let’s get started!

The Plot

Urara has been tapped to host a stage show at an amusement park, which is a big break in her career. She meets her friends at the park, along with her overly prepared manager Washio and Masuko Mika, who’s there to write about her for the paper. Mika and Washio hit it off right away, speculating about where Urara’s career could go from here, culminating in a Hollywood movie and an Oscar nod.

Urara arrives at her rehearsal, goes through wardrobe, and starts going through her routine. Unfortunately the star of the show has had an emergency and called out. Nozomi quickly volunteers to play her part in the show, to save Urara’s debut. Unfortunately, she isn’t a very good actress, but it’s too late to cancel the show now. Outside, we see Girinma handing out fliers for the show and making ominous remarks about its content....

At showtime, the stadium is filled with children and their parents, wanting to see the forest animals show. Nozomi is extremely nervous, despite Urara’s reassurance, and trips and falls during her entrance.

Before she can recover, Girinma drops a mask onto a prop tree, which turns into a giant Kowaina. Out in the crowd, Mika is confused by this strange story direction but the audience all thinks it’s part of the show. (no magical falling asleep here!) Rin, Karen, and Komachi all rush onto stage with Nozomi and Urara but aren’t sure if they should transform with all these people watching. However, Urara’s actor instincts kick in and she tells the audience to look at up just as Karen convinces the stage manager to turn on the spotlights, blinding the audience members momentarily. The girls seize their opportunity and transform into Precure. They fight the Kowaina as the opening theme starts playing, and it’s a very visually spectacular fight as they run, jump, and dive through tree branches and vines to try to land a few solid hits on the monster. It tries to shoot a leaf storm at the audience but Mint blocks it with her shield, and then Girinma tries to attack a nosy Mika, who is protected by Aqua. Dream manages to shoot off a Dream Attack, defeating the Kowaina, as Girinma retreats. There’s a gag during all of this where Washio is worried because he can’t see Urara, and somehow didn’t connect the dots when the five girls transformed on stage.

Mika, recognizing the Pretty Cures from her first meeting with them, takes lots of pictures of the battle and plans to write a piece about them. They’re sure that this time they’re busted, but once again Nuts runs interference, going up to her in his human state and saying hello. The next day at school, all the students are crowded around the newspaper again, and wouldn’t you know, it’s an expose on Nuts and Mika’s fated reunion, with a tiny article about Urara’s stage show at the bottom. Washio comes up and asks Urara to put on that show again, because the Precure fight was a smash hit with audiences, but the other four girls wave it off, and the episode ends.

The Analysis

I don’t know where to start. Urara is giving it her all in this stage show, and she even improvs a bit to keep their cover and distract the audience while they transform. She’s really good at what she does, and she has a promising future as an actor ahead of her. She presents a really energetic performance for the kids and tries to mitigate the danger by making it seem like the monster attack is part of the show. The show must go on, indeed! Additionally, when Nozomi steps up to play the part of the rabbit, despite fumbling in the costume and having trouble with her lines, Urara just rolls with it. I love that all the girls are really rooting for this to work out for her, and during the fight they defend the sanctity of the show and Urara’s part. And honestly, props to Nozomi as well. She’s trying her best here. She’s clumsy and has been kicked out of the drama club before, but her heart is in the right place, and there are no better options so the other three girls agree to help her with cue cards.

there’s a new kaiju in town

The battle itself is action-packed and filled with some dynamic scenes that I will turn into gifs. It’s one of the better fights in this show so far. I love how the girls fly around through the vines and branches, delivering some swift ass-kickings. There is some reused footage from the opening, namely the part where the five girls line up as the song counts off “One, two, three four five!” The kowaina makes itself a difficult target, despite its large size, and that keeps the battle interesting. It takes some work for the girls to actually get to the mask and break it. The large amount of civilians keep the stakes high, as they’re easy targets for a massive attack. This lets us see Mint use her shield in a more interesting way than normal (because I’ll be honest, a lot of the times she blocks the enemy’s attack when she could just dodge). I love getting to see her make use of her strengths. Shield cures are highly situational, but this was a situation in which it was very effective. Also, I liked how Mika’s insatiable lust for a scoop put her in danger. She won’t learn from it, but it’s an action that had nearly fatal consequences because Girinma was out for her head, and it took Aqua intervening to save her. When she did that, she referred to her by name, which might cause Mika to recognize them down the road... I don’t think so but we’ll find out.

Speaking of special attacks, there’s something I want to discuss about them. In the FW shows, the special attack was only ever used as a finisher. They never used Marble Screw or Twin Stream Splash to attack in the middle of a battle, but they do use their special attacks in Yes 5 as both attacks and finishers. Some of their attacks simply don’t work as finishers (I mean, I’d like to see them TRY to finish a monster off with Mint Protection, that’d be cool), and pink rules so you usually see Dream Attack used to take down the monster. What they don’t have is a clear group finisher. That will change, of course, but as long as this persists, I get a sense of inconsistency about what will and won’t destroy a Kowaina. The use of special attacks that aren’t finishers is a bit of a deviation from the original concept but it’s still tame here. I don’t think they ever go too far down this rabbit hole, but it’s worth noting.

This episode manages to mix in a good amount of comedy on the side, without overwhelming the main plot, and I admire the balance. Washio is a fun manager but he is really over-prepared. He appears carrying two giant duffle bags for Urara, despite the fact that her outfit is provided, and among the many things he has brought are some charms for....

Nono Hana could use that last one

He and Mika play off of each other really well, they’ve got a nice comic relief duo schtick going on. Mika, of course, is mainly in this to get a good story for the paper, and having a local celebrity at school is a good outlet. Reporting on her career advancements is a big step up from reporting what she ate for lunch. Both of them readily buy into the fight scene, assuming it’s part of the show and not that there was some kind of actual danger, and Washio is just distressed that Urara has disappeared instead of fearing for his life. At the end of the episode, both of them ramp up the comedy in their own way. Mika’s crush on Nuts has not yet gotten old, and probably won’t for a while yet (don’t quote me on that), so continuing the running gag where she gets distracted from a big story by a chance (or intentional) encounter with him gets a thumbs up in my book. I don’t get tired of seeing Nozomi and Rin’s exasperated faces when they see her reports.

Also, Urara has a nice little gag there where she’s hopping up and down trying to read the paper because she can’t see over their shoulders. I’ll gif that soon.

Urara gets a couple of other moments of note, where she seems to be breaking the fourth wall. At the very start, when she’s sort of practicing her introductory speech to the crowd, she turns to speak to the show’s audience, and Rin questions who she’s even talking to. (Rin makes a good straight man, by the way).

The last gag of note is when Coco and Nuts say they tagged along because you never know when a Pinky could show up.... and then a Pinky shows up right then. Yeah, Pinkies, remember them? They’re kind of supposed to be driving the plot. There’s more of them than there are Heartiels and Miracle Drops combined, yet they’re barely mentioned.

Just some other small observations before I wrap this up, I love everybody’s street clothes in this episode. They’re a little different from what we’ve seen them wearing before.

except for Rin

Urara’s sailor blouse and knee-length skirt make her look a little more mature than her normal attire of puffy shorts and sleeves. The other four are wearing outfits strongly reminiscent of their clothes from the ending. Rin and Nozomi’s outfits are exactly that, except for the butterflies. Komachi and Karen’s outfits are the same as what they wear in the ending, but the colors are a little different.

for reference

And for some reason the art in this episode is very hit-or-miss. A lot of good shots still seem slightly off model. It’s a little jarring, it’s not low-detail (except for one laughably bad frame), it’s just that faces are drawn with warped shapes. Yes I am going to chronicle every time this happens in every show, it’s notable.

What happened here is that they quickly zoomed out to show the whole stage, and they wouldn’t need to show much detail, so to achieve the effect, they started way zoomed in on the cell before pulling back, rather than create a new drawing for one just frame. It’s not really visible when watching.

So, animation stuff aside.... this was a great episode! Since the major theme of this show is finding and chasing your dream, showing each girl’s different progress in that regard is important, and they do it so well. Urara is a bit further ahead than the others, but she still has a lot of work to do to become a famous actor, and her friends want to help her however possible. It’s what this show does best, and this was a fun stepping stone.

Next time, Rin is getting pulled in every direction at once! Look forward to it!

Pink Precure Catchphrase Count: 1 “kettei” by Nozomi herself, 1 each by Washio and Mika (spoken together)

NOTE: I’m going to come back to add some gifs to this post at a later date. I really wanted to include them the first time around but due to unforseen circumstances, this review was delayed several days past when I wanted to get it out, so I didn’t want to delay it any further. I’ll make a post on @pcd-status​ when I update this.

[austinpanda]

Dad Letter 022121

21 February, 2021

Dear Dad--

The past week was mostly filled with concern about everyone without power in Texas (and, I believe, Oklahoma too) and how awful that made life at home! I’ll get to that in a bit. I hope you and Elaine are warm and have power and haven’t had any interruption to your water service or burst pipes or any other such excitement.

The most interesting thing that happened to me personally last week was a song. Zach, being a young person, carries his phone around and plays music from it all the time. And Zach’s musical tastes don’t have a lot of overlap with my musical tastes. A lot of what he listens to could best be described as experimental. But he listened to this one song just enough that it lodged in my brain and I began listening to it on my own. The song is While You Were Sleeping by a guy named Elvis Perkins. And the song might not seem like much at first; it’s kind of odd, and he sings this weird “Uh-OH,” part a few times, just to have a couple of notes to end a phrase. But the meat of the song is really catchy and it became an earworm, and now I listen to it a lot.

Then Zach told me about the guy who wrote and sang it, Elvis Perkins. Whenever I see the name “Perkins,” I think of Anthony Perkins from Psycho, and sure enough, that’s his dad. Anthony Perkins, whose first few relationships were with male movie stars like Tab Hunter (surprise), eventually did the nasty with Victoria Principal, his first experience with a female, at the age of 39. This is all on Anthony Perkins’ Wikipedia page. After that, I suppose he sort of converted to the Church of the Vajayjay, and he found this female photographer and actress named Berry, and they got married. They had two sons, Oz and Elvis. Anthony Perkins later died from AIDS-related pneumonia, and I couldn’t believe what happened to wife Berry Perkins, the mother of his boys; she died on 9/11. She was in the first plane that hit the World Trade Center.

So now, every time I listen to the song, which got me started on all this, by way of being a kick-ass song, I think of this singer and his Psycho dad and his 9/11 mom and appreciate the song even more.

But! As I mentioned, most of the last week was spent fretting about all my friends to the south. Stacy, and everyone else I know who doesn’t live here in Maine, lost power about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning last Monday. No biggie in itself, except it stayed off, and because it was so cold outside, it quickly became cold inside. I went through this with Zach after we’d lived here for a couple of months; we lost power for a couple of days during a cold snap in November, and we got to learn the special joy of that kind of power outage: Do we die from hypothermia, since it’s 40 degrees inside, or do we die from boredom, because there’s still no power? After a while, Austin decided to increase the degree of difficulty, by having enough of its water treatment facilities go offline that the water was no longer safe to drink.

Not that everyone even had access to the undrinkable water! So many pipes burst, that the fire department couldn’t respond to all the emergency calls to shut off water. I’ve read that maintenance guys are noticing some pipes didn’t just burst, they exploded. They’re finding shards of pipe nearby, flung outward by the force of the burst. Texas just wasn’t ready. I read elsewhere that the whole of north Texas has about 40 snow plows in it, about as many as every neighborhood has in a place like Chicago. So I get on the internet and all my friends are cold, they’re all miserable, they can’t sleep, and half of them have flooding to deal with. They can’t reach their landlords or property managers. Cell service begins dropping. I have to wonder if everyone in Texas with a fish tank didn’t just lose all their fish. Stacy had to keep her pet snake alive by wearing it in a cloth sack around her neck.

Took about four days, but by now, everyone I know seems to have power again. And they have internet again, but they still have to boil their water. That’s such utter bullshit. Zach and I had to do that for a while in Austin; there was some issue with sediment, and for a week, all the tap water in the city was no longer potable. To have to deal with that on top of having no electricity, and in the freezing cold...I would have given up and fled town to the nearest hotel that wasn’t gouging the guests too badly, and just put the whole thing on a credit card. I just wonder how far I’d have had to drive. Probably have to leave the state. And now all the finger-pointing begins, it’ll be investigated, ERCOT will get a lot of attention, and maybe stuff will change, maybe not.

Then I read an article that pointed out it’s not that hard producing electricity in extremely cold weather. The article said that people in Alaska, and Russia, and Maine do it every day. It occurs to me that we haven’t lost power at all this winter, and I’m very, very grateful. We also haven’t had much snow this winter, which, ironically, pisses me off. All the snow we’re not getting seems to have been delivered to Texas, by mistake. We’re ready for the snow here; I WANT the snow. I just looked at the Washington Post photo essay about it, and it had pictures of the HEB grocery store where I used to buy my groceries. The photo was taken from a nearby hillside that featured a homeless camp covered with snow. I’ll include it with this letter.

This week I think I’m going to spend a little time planning on things I’d like to do once the plague is over. For the moment, I still don’t know when I’ll be able to get vaccinated, but it occurs to me that we won’t have to wear masks outdoors forever, and that’ll be a glorious day, when we’ve finally defeated Covid-19, and we can have Chinese buffet restaurants again. Aside from those, and movie theaters, and book stores, I’m most looking forward to being able to visit friends again. It’s terrible watching a friendship begin to grow malnourished because it can only happen with text messages. On the plus side, the number of new Covid cases here in Maine, which had been approaching 1,000 per day, is now lots closer to 100 per day. I suppose something must be working! Perhaps now the vaccine will be more available and I can sign up for it soon.

In the meantime, I’m watching a movie called The Midnight Sky in installments. Some movies, even when they’re good, simply can’t hold my attention that long, and I can only watch them a few scenes at a time. I’m doing that with this movie. And it’s interesting so far; George Clooney is a scientist with a terminal disease, working in an Arctic research station. And there’s a nuclear war, and everyone at the research station leaves to be with their families, but George Clooney stays behind because (a) he’s dying anyway, and (b) he hasn’t anyone to return to. After a couple of days he discovers a little girl stayed behind when everyone else left, and now he’s got to take care of her. (Having a child in your movie is a treacherous thing, but the potential negative effects of this one are ameliorated somewhat by the fact that she doesn’t speak.) Meanwhile, there’s a spaceship returning to earth from deep space, (This is a science fiction movie!) and they’re wondering why the hell they can’t raise anyone on earth by radio. I’m about halfway through the movie now. Based on the movie’s tone, I don’t think George Clooney is going to find a miracle cure for whatever’s ailing him, but I am curious to see what happens to the little mute girl. Will advise!

I really hope you’re staying safe and warm, and have plenty of water and electricity! I’m about to get my day started, watch another ten minutes of movie, and do laundry. All my love to you both!