A letter to my boss.

Originally posted to QCDN.

Dear Boss,

Please make an effort to lock the bathroom door when you're using it.

Regards,

Anesly.

MY EYES!!!
Goddammit, I knew I should've stayed home today.

What the hell is going on with escalation of violence in Russia? In just a few days, two airplanes downed, suicide bombing in a subway, and now this siege at a school. I guess the Chechen fighters decided the world wasn't paying enough attention to them.

And I suppose they are at least somewhat right about that--the world at large seems to care not a whit about the reported human rights abuses and ongoing war in Chechnya. Sure, it gets a blip on the BBC or NPR radars, but you don't really hear about it in the more popular outlets. They are too busy covering the mindnumbing, selfcongratulatory schmoozefests that are the Democrat and Republican Conventions. Putin proclaims normalization, lumps the Chechens in with the war on terror, and the international community seems all too eager to let Chechnya be the proverbial elephant in the room (and it's getting crowded in there).

Though Putin rushed to join the "war on terror" bandwagon and put the pro-independence Chechen thorn in his side in the terrorist category, he has turned down the feeble calls for a greater role for the UN in the area. There's been fighting in Chechnya for the last ten years.

Separatist or pro-independence groups are a sticky issue. On the one hand, in theory, it'd be nice if no group of people had to stay part of a country they don't want to be in. But it's not really practical--the world's existing countries have an interest in preserving the status quo and in not encouraging this sort of thing lest it happen to them. And I think if this were the case (that is, if chunks of any country could leave their parent country at any time), it'd be much too easy to quickly descend into chaos--a worldwide Balkanization. I suppose after some time, small nation states would start grouping together to form larger ones, until people started getting sick of it again, and dissolve into small groups again. I can only imagine what kind of havoc this cycle would wreak on world economy--trade, transportation, infrastructure, etc.

The existing nations of the world, of course, also have an interest in not letting countries invade each other--because (among many other reasons) of the precedent it sets for them.

I think it's easy to see where these two interests might come into conflict. What's the magic number to mark a country as being invaded recently enough to warrant help in ousting the invaders, at what point have the invaders been there long enough to consider the affair done with? What about conflicts that have the support of the majority of the native population and have been ongoing for a very long time? I don't have the answers.

At any rate, I was able to gather the following bits of history on Chechnya, mostly from the BBC (which I love dearly). Chechnya was first conquered by Russia in 1858. My own native Chile was only about 40 years old then, the war for independence from Spanish rule having only started in 1810. Similar pro-independence movements were going on throughout South America. In 1922, Chechnya was declared an autonomous region (and a Soviet Socialist Republic in 1934); in 1944, Stalin deported the entire Chechen and Ingush populations. Sixty years is not enough to forget that kind of sociopathic madness.

By 1991, with the collapse of the USSR, the local Communist leader was overthrown, and Chechnya was declared independent from Russia, and a year later, adopted a constitution that defined it as a secular state governed by a president and parliament. The Russians, none too happy with this, came in 1994. According to the BBC, up to 100,000 people were killed over the next 20 months. One. Hundred. Thousand. That's 5,000 a month. That's September 11 and then some every month.

It's hard for me to relate to carnage of such proportions; I know the numbers are large, but the casualties and the effect on individuals remain abstracts, blank cutouts in a shooting range. Maybe that's part of why the world doesn't do anything. The advances in technology haven't changed the fact that places like Chechnya are very far away--even though you may be able to get there in just a few days, you don't get to see what's going on there in a meaningful, everyday way any more than you did a hundred years ago. Sure, there's TV, but the images of TV resemble an action movie more than anything real--sanitized and dreamlike.

In 2000, Russia appointed Akhmat Kadyrov as the head of its administration in Chechnya. In 2003, Kadyrov was elected president in an election that was at least suspicious and troubled. Less than a year later, this May, he was killed in a bomb blast. In August, Kremlin-backed Alu Alkhanov was elected as president, though critics claim that, again, these elections were not free or fair.

But though I think there is plenty of blame to lay at Putin and Russia's feet, the Chechen fighters have been making things worse. The strategy of hostage-taking goes back to as far as 1995, when hundreds were taken at a hospital. I admit that my sympathies tend to go towards the people fighting for independence instead of the rulers in this type of thing, but spreading the conflict to civilians, resorting to hostages and suicide bombings of people who aren't directly involved in the conflict are simply not acceptable in my mind--that's where you cross the line and become simply a terrorist.

Russia captured Grozny in 2000, after attacks by Chechens (including a series of apartment block bombings that killed some 300 people). Some 200,000 civilians fled Chechnya.

And of course, there was the theater siege in 2002; sure, Russian response wasn't good by any stretch of the imagination--more people died when the soldiers stormed the place than at the hands of the Chechens, but goddammit, you can't just go in to a theater full of people and take them hostage and expect anything good to come out of it.

Which brings me to today. Whose bright idea was it to take a school hostage? I have to assume that the people who did this don't care about sliding from freedom fighters into terrorists; that they think hostage-taking is a valid way to get things done; that they don't care about involving the civilian population. OK. Not fine, but OK. Even taking that into account, didn't it occur to anyone planning this thing, that, if nothing else, it's really bad PR for your cause? It's a bunch of schoolchildren, parents, and teachers, for crying out loud. Just add some grandmothers and puppies, and you're set. It's not even like they had the excuse of saying they were acting suspicious, or allied with the Russian government, or causing trouble. These are just people starting their schoolyear.

Even discounting the adults, no one likes to see children harmed. And surely this played an important part in deciding to take them hostage--they must have figured that it would put the Russian government in an untennable position, that the families and community--the world--would be pushing for the hostages to go unharmed. And that's true. But on the other hand, people are probably also cheering that these terrorists rot in jail for the rest of their lives, and any shred of sympathy for them is gone. From a purely strategic point of view, it seems idiotic and shortsighted; the more gruesome the actions by a group like this, the more strongly the government will react, the more that common people will turn against it, the more the international community will clamor for harsh actions to be taken against them. The long-term harm an action like this would bring to any movement seems to me to far outweigh whatever demands might be met because of the shock of who the hostages are.

I find myself so tired and frustrated with the world news. I do hope those bastards get to spend their lives in jail, but they'll more likely end up dead. Which I guess is OK. Like everyone else, I hope the hostages come out of this fine, but honestly, I'm not optimistic.

Pop Vultures: Public Radio for Dummies

I am a total NPR junkie. I actually don't mind pledge week. I can recite the weekly lineup off the top of my head. I get annoyed when programming changes suddenly or a host is replaced (yes, I'm still cranky about Bob Edwards). I am, in short, a big nerdy NPR addict.

Our local station, KUOW, has one of the largest audiences in the country, so we sometimes get to listen to pilots of new shows before they are established and go national. One of them, Pop Vultures, had a nice enough premise: a group of friends who discuss pop music. The people sound fairly young, and they aren't professional critics. They're just people who really like pop music. I had hope for this show.

Unfortunately, the show collapses under the weight of its own meaningless drivel and self-indulgence. The host, Kate Sullivan, is in her thirties, but sounds much younger--partly because she seems unable to string together a coherent idea without using "like" or "you know" every fifth word or so, her speech is full of awkward pauses, and she ends every sentence with an upward lilt of her voice that's usually reserved for questions. In short, she sounds like the worst kind of insecure, giggling teenager.

The format is conversations between Kate and the rest of the Vultures, her friends. I can understand the awkward pauses in this format--they're going for a natural feel (though awkward pauses on NPR are too often used by writers and commentators to telegraph "I am saying something very important and emotionally touching right now"), so I can understand the decision to leave those in. But I can't help but think that any grown woman should be able to come up with something better than, "Four is like, an organic number. [...] You have four Beatles." To add to this, her delivery is stilted, punctuated by random giggling, and a lot of "Umm..." and "Uh..." (in addition to my above complaint of the constant use of "like" and "you know").

Ironically enough, Sullivan stumbles onto what I think is one of the major problems of the show on the first installment: "Coolness," she says, "is in the eye of the beholder." It's tough to critique music in a meaningful way--it's almost entirely a matter of taste. The show doesn't bother to acknowledge this at all; the Vultures' opinions are presented as fact, and anyone who disagrees is either a snob, ignorant, or just plain stupid. I don't expect reviews or critiques to agree with me, but I think it would be much more effective if the Vultures' actually bothered to explain why a particular band matters to them, why they think it has some historical importance to pop music as a whole, and what it is about a particular singer or song that touches them and stirs them. For example, on the first show, Sullivan talks about The White Stripes. She is a big fan, and at the start of this section of the show, she says, "When I talk about The White Stripes, I get really dumb. Because I love them, truly. And, I think that when you love a band, like deeply, you get really really stupid." This is actually a good start--who can't relate to the giddy, exhilarating feeling of passion for a singer/band, that feeling that takes your dignity and leaves you a drooling fangirl/boy? She goes on to talk about The White Stripes with another one of the Vultures, who says that they remind him of "really bad music. [...] It's like, somebody forgot to get a bass player, there's, you know--someone forgot to buy new cymbals." This is actually a nice change--for the remaining episodes, the other Vultures are mostly relegated to the role of yes-men. Sullivan's response to her friend's opinion of her beloved band though, is more typical of the tone of the show: "Who cares if they can't play. What-ever. But even if they couldn't, do I give a shit?"

The program does occasionally show some flash of insight. Some of its best moments come in conversations between the guys (Sullivan's conversations with her friend Hillary tend to degenerate into giggling and just agreeing with each other over and over). They will actually occasionally explain why they like something, or, even better, explain the context that a certain song came into being in, and explain why they think it's important to music as a whole. These moments are few and far between, and the conversations between the men feature a lot of Beavis-and-Butthead-style laughing and drooling over female performers' "hotness".

In between these glimmers of insight, we are subjected to statments like "The teen pop phenomenon, I think, started with the Spice Girls. I would contend that the Spice Girls were the big bang of teen pop." Because there were no teen idols before the Spice Girls, right. Or, when calling her friend to talk about the "Britney-Christina debate": "Everything Britney touches turns to fairy dust." "And everything Christina touches," her friend adds, "is just...normal."

In fact, some of the lowest points of the show come in conversations between Kate and her friend Hillary. In show three, they go on at length about Weezer's Say It Ain't So. Sullivan actually seems to have a good grasp of what the song is about (alcoholism and repeating the destructive patterns of, in this case, a father). But then, there's this:

"And like, when you see them live, that's, I mean, I think that's their most popular song, like, that's certainly the one where all the kids are singing along impassioned and, punching their fists in the air, with like, the passion of someone who lived through it, and that's when you really go like, 'alcoholism is the epidemic."

Call me cynical, but I'd be willing to bet that most kids at a Weezer concert are just pumping their fists in the air to a really rocking song.

Sometimes, Kate and Hillary's conversations descend into the downright catty. Also in show three, they spend almost half the show bashing Sheryl Crow. I am personally not a big Sheryl Crow fan, especially not recent songs (I do like The Globe Sessions, though), but the tone of this conversation is beyond petty. They offer no reason as to why they do this. I can only guess that Crow has failed to meet some unstated standard of coolness.

"Hillary, I don't wanna drag you down, or tie you down, but I want you to talk a little bit right now about Sheryl Crow."

"Puh-leeease. She's like, the richest person in the world, sitting in the front row of Versace shows, and singing about how she's so poor..."

"Nooo!" gasps Kate.

"There's a line that says, 'I don't have diddly squat,' I think."

Hillary continues, to more astounded gasps from Kate. "It's true. It's in the song."

"Aww, nuts," gasps Kate.

"She's singing like, 'I can't afford anything but everything's gonna be ok.' Uh..."

"Oh, it's so brave of her!" Kate adds in a condescending tone.

Apparently the idea of a song not being a biographical documentary has never occurred to them.

Sullivan starts trying to explain what her problem with Crow is, and it degenerates into an extended rant:

"It's that, like, you know, there are so few women in rock music, in rock and roll, pop, whatever you wanna call it, so few, and there's so many vacuous, just, idiots, women in pop, that like, if a woman actually, like, gets to a certain level of notoriety within rock, you, you kind of, hope that she's gonna kick some ass, that she's gonna, she's gonna stand for something, she's gonna mix it up a little bit. You know, like maybe even like Madonna, like just, just mix it up and freak people out and get controversial, just cause it's fun, for no other reason, you know, she's [Crow] done nothing like that, and she even had like, potential, like, she seemed like she was kind of a liberal, you know, sort of, pro-choice, and sort of, vaguely hippie-esque, and now she's just like, really rich, and gross, and she never does anything controversial, you know, her big political statement is like, having dinner with Bill Clinton. Hel-lo?"

I guess everything Sheryl touches does not turn to fairy dust.

Kate and Hillary laugh, and continue on:

"I feel the same way about Liz Phair," adds Hillary.

"Oh, totally! Total rich housewife. Rich Chicago housewife."

(Are rich Chicago housewives more evil than regular non-Chicago housewives?)

"Yeah!"

"The first time I saw her," Hillary adds, "she was so scared to go on stage that she was throwing up before, and like, was absolutely terrified to be on stage. And then you and I went to see her at the University, and she was kind of doing that, she was like, tan, remember, she was tan?"

"She was really tan, and that was really disturbing," agrees Kate.

"I know, she's tanned, and she had like, some flowy pants on her, or something, didn't she? And like, nice tennis shoes, and she looked like a housewife, and then she was kind of doing that awful skippy dance across the stage, and she had all these backup singers, and stuff, that were like, beaming at her."

Tans and flowy pants, the unmistakable signs of bad music.

"And the show was really really short, cause she just got..."

"And boring," interrupts Hillary.

"...tired, or didn't feel like it," continues Kate, "and it was boring as hell, and you just really got the feeling that, underneath it all her goal had been just to be pretty, and rich, and well-known..."

"And well-liked."

"And well-liked, exactly." Agrees Kate. "And when she had achieved that, then it was time to have a baby. And um, and Sheryl Crow, I kind of feel like the same thing, like now that she's you know, famous, and pretty, and she gets to wear Versace, and go to Versace shows, and eat Versaces, and..." (Versace pronounced "Versa-ce" each time.)

"And she can wear really high-heeled shoes because she doesn't have to walk anywhere anymore," adds Hillary (though a couple of shows later she praises Mary J. Blige for being able to hop around the stage in really high heels).

"Right, and she can talk about how, how bad it is that teen pop queens get, get half naked in magazines, and the she can pose on the cover of "Stuff" magazine, in shorts going up her butt."

"Yeah, it's fine..."

"It's fine..."

"Whatever..."

"Yeah, it's all good..."

"That's not even good controversy," concludes Hillary.

"We hate her, let's not talk about her."

I could only wish they had decided that before spending half the show on this.

"She's not interesting."

"No, she's boring."

And so is this conversation. And that may be its biggest fault; I like snark as much as the next jaded bastard (see TWOP for some great, witty snark). I can appreciate a good rant. But this is just self-indulgent rambling--which is fine to do with your friends, but it's not worth building a Public Radio show around.

The rest of this particular show is spent bashing Sting, whose sin is, apparently, that he's "so completely unaware of his own complete whackness."

On another occasion, Kate talks to Hillary about her experience watching Snoop Dogg. They get right down to the important musical issues: Kate wants to know what he was wearing. After they sort that out, the rest of the conversation revolves around how hostile Dogg was towards the audience, and how, according to Hillary, that was "just so hot" and "sexy." It made my head hurt.

To close, I'll just leave you with some choice quotes from Sullivan:

"One of the things I liked about ["American Idol"] was like, I felt that, in a sad way, it united America." (maybe Bush should use that as a campaign slogan: "Uniting people through, like, you know, 'American Idol,' and stuff.")

"Anybody who actually says the Backstreet Boys are bad, either they're not listening or don't know good music."

About current teen fashion: "I don't know how it happened, I mean, I suppose it's the eighties revival, whatever, but it's one of those revivals that is so completely not annoying." Almost the entirety of show twelve is built around how the eighties revival is, after all, pretty annoying.

"I mean, I guess what I, I guess what I like about Pink most of all is that, uh, I don't know, like she smokes a lot. I like that about her, like, she smokes menthols, and to me, that's like, keeping it real."

"Well, Outkast make me feel like I fit in this world, like I have a place in this world. And maybe I have a place in other worlds too. Um, Outkast make me proud to be an American. Outkast make me proud to be a black man."

Rock on, brother Sullivan.

Rigor

One day when I was 20, I woke up achy all over. I thought I'd slept funny--I had kind of an uncomfortable bed at the time--, and didn't give it much attention. The next day, the pain was still there, but again, it happens, some times muscle pain lasts a few days. This didn't quite feel like any muscle pain I'd had before, but I couldn't think of anything else it might be, and it was mild enough to not seem to warrant any additional attention.

The pain never went away, and it got worse as time went by. My joints would swell up in the morning--my fingers and toes felt like sausages. I started walking slower. I was having trouble getting to the second floor at school and having to take the elevator. I had piano class first thing in the morning, and it was torture. I still didn't go to the doctor, not sure why. I'm sure the fact that I was really depressed played some part, but I wonder if I didn't think that I was just lazy or something. Who knows. About a year later, I finally mentioned it to my doctor, who referred me to a rheumatologist, who ran a bunch of tests on me, and declared it rheumatoid arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a fun condition where, basically, for reasons unkown, your immune system decides to start attacking your joints. This was kind of baffling to me; all I really knew about arthritis was that it was a disease affecting the joints, and that it affected older people (and getting enough calcium, etc., throughout your life helped so you would be less likely to suffer from it). That's of course an entirely different type of arthritis, but I think this is what most people think of when someone mentions arthritis. It now seems a bit odd to me, but I accepted the diagnosis without any denial or anger or anything. Might have been the depression--when I'm really depressed, I have three moods: numb, sad, and suicidal--, might have been just the way I am--my general attitude towards life could be summed up as "kind of amused." My parents, however, were an entirely different story. How could their 21 year-old daughter have an old person's disease? How was it that, living in the US, people didn't know what caused it? Surely there must be some cure, this is not some third-world country. My own feelings at the time were just a mildly curious "huh, arthritis, chronic disease. Huh."

I didn't go back for treatment though. I don't remember why, probably put it off as part of my strict regimen of Not Doing Things Because of Depression. I didn't realize at the time that I was depressed--not in the clinical sense, anyway--and this was the year that it all came to a head. But that's another entry--for now, all that matters is that depression had seeped into every part of my life, paralyzing and stripping me of even the most basic of impulses. The RA got worse. I dropped out of school, and had no insurance. I didn't see a doctor for over another year.

I got married just before turning 22, and then got insurance coverage through my husband. By this time, doing anything was a very painful ordeal. Walking was this odd slow-motion activity with tiny tiny steps. Getting in the car meant walking my pathetic walk to the door; opening the door; aiming my back towards the seat; throwing myself in, stifling a scream of pain, and dragging my feet inside.

I found a great rheumatologist. She put me on antiinflammatories (steroids) right away, and it was an incredible rush. But of course you can't--or rather, you shouldn't--stay on on those for very long. You have to find some medication to actually control the disease and maybe reverse or stop the damage. We tried medication after medication. Nothing worked. And arthritis medications have nasty side effects--because it's an autoimmune disease, the medications weaken your immune system, which means you're more prone to catch all kinds of other things. At one point, I was taking an arthritis medication, something else to prevent possibly getting tuberculosis, and then something else to counteract a peripheral neuropathy (damage to the nerves on my legs, in this case) caused by the TB medications.

We finally found something that worked. It involved going to the hospital once a month and getting an IV infusion, and it was amazing. It was almost like I didn't have this insidious disease at all. And then, of course, I started having an allergic reaction to it, and had to stop. It almost seems like a dream now.

We tried a bunch more things, nothing worked. In November of last year, I caught a cold that lasted through the start of the year, and went into my nastiest bout with depression since being diagnosed at 21. My arthritis flared up to the point that often I couldn't get out of bed and had to miss work. I also developed fibromyalgia--my body's threshold for pain plummeted and my muscles went to hell from lack of use, meaning I was in constant pain not only in my joints, but also on every bit of flesh in between joints. I'd fall asleep through the day, because at night I'd wake up every two or three minutes because of the pain.

There was basically one more medication to try out, and then we'd, as silly as it sounds, just run out. This one involved injecting myself once every two weeks. It seemed to do nothing. I was feeling desperate at last. My doctor decided to add another medication that I had tried before, but that I'd had nasty side effects from, and luckily I tolerated it fine this time. It was very slow going though--it took a long time before I actually started feeling a difference. Not feeling "normal" by a long shot, mind you, but only mildly stiff and swollen on my best days, and able to move around, for the most part.

I have been on prednisone (the antiinflammatory) for about three years now, on relatively high doses. This has done all kinds of nasty things to my body. Even on good days, I'm usually not able to bend down, or do simple things like put on my own shoes and socks. On medium days, I can't stand for any length of time or take a shower. On bad days, I can't stand at all, can't get out of bed, and am confined to laying there and listening to the radio, because I can't even hold a book to read.

I often feel like I have no meaningful frame of reference. When my doctor asks me how I'm doing, I stare blankly and try to figure it out. Luckily she understands. I've lost all sense of what being a healthy person feels like.

My Saturdays start now with 12 pills of various arthritis medications and a shot (not to mention the myriad daily pills for depression, etc.).

But I'm at work.

On good days, I can chase my dog (walking fast) halfway across the living room.

just so you know...

I'm still around. I have been busy being sick, etc. I'm feeling a little better. I don't really answer personal email because I don't want to talk to people. But I'm still around.