Winter at the Gimp Compound

The holidays and the new year went well for me, though my computer needed some repairs that kept me from writing here for about a month. Happily, and for the first time in my 40 years of experience with expensive electronic equipment, my computer was still under warranty (by about five days!) and I got the disc drive replaced for free. Merry Christmas to me!

I had my feeding tube removed just before Christmas because I haven't needed it in so long and it seemed like the right time. In retrospect, I might have had it taken out a while ago if I'd understood the size and shape of it inside me a bit better. I have less indigestion and nausea with it not there to tickle my insides, so even though I expect to need the feeding tube again some day as my muscles continue to weaken, it's great to be without it for now.

Today was sunny with a pure blue sky and the snow melting off driveways. For much of the past six weeks I've kept inside and away from below zero temps that give the vent a worrisome little wheeze when out in the raw air. There's no way I know of to protect lungs from frigid air being pumped directly into them, minus the miraculous upper sinus warming system. So, I've been hibernating, reading, listening to audiobooks, watching LOST and Battlestar Galactica. And managing some little home care dramas I won't be talking about here.

I finally read Jessica Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism, which provoked so much blog controversy when it was published in 2007. It's a little anti-climactic to read it now, so long after all that discussion. I found it to be very basic, and almost entirely lacking in even the knowledge that disabled women exist -- disability is included in a U.N. laundry-list quote of women's issues, and near the end of the book Valenti mentions ability and age as two interests she won't get to talk about. But disability isn't in any other rollcall of women's issues elsewhere in the book, even when the other standards are named: race, religion, sexual orientation. Nor does disability come up when exploring the flipside of "choice" and how race and class (and disability) often mean that women in these categories are coerced out of parenthood rather than being denied birth control and abortion. None of the extensive resources at the back of the book were aimed at women with disabilities. Accessibility as a necessary part of all the activism Valenti touts was never brought up. Disabled women are invisible in this book.

I don't think it's a bad or useless book. Just rather alienating if you're not part of a specific young, white, straight, middle-class (or better), nondisabled sorority girl constituency of women it's meant for.

Anyway, my computer works now and I'm possibly staying home until Spring hits. So more blogging.