Derailed

With the lack of posting here, you might think I've been super productive on the diss. Not quite. I have been working and making progress, but I got derailed last week and now I'm trying to get back to work. My work cycle is usually a few days of migraine, a few days of work, a couple of days off. Repeat. Last weekend we threw a retirement party for a very good friend in the department (the one that hired me) and another colleague. It was fun, needed to be done, and I'm glad we did it. But oh my hell, the cleaning. Days of cleaning. The house will never be this clean again. Then after the party I started getting really dizzy, like I all did was sit on the couch or lie down for days dizzy. Walking to the bathroom made me want to throw up. Husband and I thought it was a side effect from a migraine med (the diuretic I take for menstrual migraines), so I stopped it yesterday. And today, only dizzy once or twice. I am feeling normal again!!!

Other things to complain about:

• The heat. We have now reached the part of the year where inside is hotter than outside. But outside is breeding mosquitoes. Horrible, horrible mosquitoes. It's hard to work in the heat. We have fans, but no air conditioning. One of the guys who used to live here left a window unit in my office. We turned it on today and it works, but boy is it loud. I think we'll be moving it to the bedroom. And also, I think we may be going in to my office on campus in the afternoons to enjoy the air conditioning there.
  
• Women's television. Being couch ridden for a few days has meant watching a lot of daytime tv. I didn't even feel like reading, so tv. I ended up in the Lifetime/WE/OWN/LMN/Hallmark cluster a lot of the time. They show older sitcoms and romantic-comedies I like, and Charmed. But the original programing and films suck. The women's channels cluster should be named "TV about how horrible women are," or Internalizing Misogyny TV. At least on Spike all they do is objectify women as sex objects. These channels paint women as various shades of evil and sell it as entertainment to "better" women. Every single origional program or movie I watched (or tried to watch) was about women abusing each other, manipulating each other, hating each other, or just screwing other women over in general. It's awful. And even the "uplifting" programming where women support each other has underlying messages about how you must be thin and beautiful and married to be whole. Years ago in a women's lit grad class I made the argument that I would rather TV be filled with shows like Charlie's Angels, where women have to be sexy before they can be anything else, before anything on Lifetime where women have to be abused, beaten, and raped before they can be strong. I still stand by that and think that the programming has just gotten worse. And I'm not talking about shows where women help other women leave abusive relationships. I can see something socially productive about that even if it is horrible as entertainment. But what I watched/tried to watch this past week was much more about women hurting other women to get a man than women surviving abusive relationships with men.