The Impairing Curse

The Impairing Curse

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Lady Knight Era
In workout classes I often think of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, in which bootleg copies of an sophisticated interactive device — A Young Lady's…
Well-ness
The chronically sick rarely get to enjoy wellness culture.
Speculation
I watched both seasons of Severance as one long domino, having been too sick when it first came out to watch TV or partake in cultural discourse.
Care infrastructure
Five years ago, I became the kind of ill that the medical system and our social safety nets are ill-equipped to handle; that loved ones turn away from…
Sweetness
Normally, the body breaks the carbohydrates you eat into glucose — from the Greek glykys (sweet) and gleukos (sweet wine).
The Year of Doing New Things Badly
2024 was the Year of Doing New Things Badly, testing if I had regained the ability to (re)gain anything, to build proficiency, strength, skill…
Private practice
Last spring, I got COVID again tending a lover who got sick celebrating the birthday of her once lover’s lover at a raucous house party I did not even…
Death Becomes Her
Neither etiquette books nor necromancy texts cover rules for after resurrection.
We keep each other alive
Sit sweet-mouthed in the doctor’s office in your best ‘reliable witness’ costume, ghosts braiding your hair.
Auto-
There is built-in blame-laying in the “auto” of auto-immune, described as the immune system misrecognizing your own body as both threat and threatened.
The scientific passive
I am not the first to describe keeping a chronically ill body alive as playing biohacker or necromancer: a mix of prescription and over-the-counter…
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Alternatif vu
The Clock Test is a common tool for testing cognitive decline in executive function (advancing planning, attention, etc) and visual spatial deficits.
Repair-ations
There are some things that repair on their own, or with time: a heated conflict cooling off, a sprained wrist glueing itself back together with…
Mourning ritual
Neither I, nor the band, made it through the launch party for Richard Laviolette’s All Wild Things Are Shy without crying.
The Impairing Curse
The Impairing Curse
The Impairing Curse is a long-form, serialized experiment in lyric essay, science journalism, and policy analysis, on being ill in a pandemic.
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The Impairing Curse

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