As always, Aleph gets it into her head that she can overcome neurology and manage to work during the chaos and upheaveal of moving (and this time, also a divorce), and so she always tries her heart out. It is kind of like watching a kitten run into a wall over and over, and each time, it is SURE that it can break it down. It's very cute, but eventually, it's gotta be stopped before it hurts itself. ;)

All the disruption is just a bit too much for an autistic brain, and I really want to keep her from having too many meltdowns while she's struggling through all the emotional stuff as well. Moving is rough for anyone, but it's especially hard to feel safe enough to work in a space that's so temporary and so soon about to be dismantled entirely.

So, I am making her rest and TRY to relax for a few more weeks, just until we can get settled into the new place and things calm down a bit. Things have been pretty insane around here for the past few years, but I hope it all makes a little bit more sense now that the truth is out. I have a lot of hope for our new life, and I think it'll be a lot easier for A to work consistently when things are getting so consistently and so badly disrupted on a constant basis ><

Thanks to everyone for being so understanding, and thanks to the very sweet people who sent messages to me about the divorce. A's still going to work on UDA for the time being, but we'll be moving soon enough (19 days!) and I can't wait to get her set up in the new place!

We're going to spend our time with friends, and A is being well taken care of, never fear. She's going to need time to heal, of course, but we are deeply passionate about the comic, and we're going to work really hard to pull everything together and transfer everything over so that things run much more smoothly than they've been running the past few years.

Thank you all for your continued support and your patience, it means so very much to us. Be well! <3

Peek first:



Image updates as I make progress


I think one of the main things that was making the grief hard to deal with was the way I was trying to hold it all in. My marriage was so important to me, it was in every aspect of my life-- and I didn't know how to face letting people know it had fallen apart. Working for 11 years at anything and having it go down in Hindenburg-esque ruin, well, it is pretty damned humiliating.

It is a relief though, to find out that this wasn't because of my illness, and wasn't because of a failing in me. Once I got past the regret and the embarassment and the pain of loss, I felt almost guilty for the enormous relief that followed after. It felt like cruelty for him to say, this has all been a facade, a lie he told himself, a person he wanted to be. In the end it was kindness too, because if he hadn't owned up to it I would have felt as though despite all of my best efforts, all of my trying, I couldn't maintain a relationship after all. And this one, from which I had drawn so much foundation, more than half my life-- around two thirds, actually, now that I think about it, if you count the part we spent as friends-- well, if I couldn't maintain that it made me want to just draw away from all the other friends in my life before they turned out this way as well. His admission made it easier to let my true friends comfort me.

I'm angry now, and that's a relief, because it was impossible to think while I was in a crushed and numb space. I'm working, but very slowly-- still seized from time to time with the process of processing, still driven from time to time to get away from every reminder of then and remind myself that I have a life outside of anything he's touched. I'm done apologizing for that-- it's insulting to the folks who have been with me and stood by me even though they had no idea what was going on behind the scenes. I know their faith. I rely on it. I appreciate it deeply and will not cheapen it by pretending it needs me to herald and applaud it.

I am deeply, deeply grateful for a few people who very gently came to Syl asking for advice on how to approach me to comfort me about this-- I appreciate that respect so very much, and I'm sorry the right answer is pretty much 'just let her process it in her own way', because I know they are just trying to help. The heart behind the gesture is appreciated, and the comments Syl related to me were incredibly sweet. I promise, I will come to grips with this in time-- the next month or so will be tumult but our little apartment in the sky is so beautiful, and Syl and I have such a calm and happy family vibe, it's a good place to heal.

I am deeply, deeply annoyed at a couple of people who barged in thinking they knew all about divorce and all about what was going on. In all but one or two cases I understand that this is a simple misunderstanding-- in one case it was part of an ongoing pattern of seeing fit to tell the zombies who we are and how we think without bothering to consult anybody involved about what's going on. I don't think the person liked Syl's response to being approached that way-- I am not going to get wrought up about that.

So that's the situation and why things will be slow, but I got the UDA installment up and I am pecking away at the strip again. I figured I'd stop the grass shading and switch gears to wings, get myself out of the headspace I was in when the whole world went kerplooey on me. Hopefully that'll help me get over the loss of all momentum. Dunno. If it doesn't, well, we've been through slow times. At least the central reason for those slow times and overloads is about to be over.

If only I believed in confession. If only I believed that I could come to Father to somehow absolve me of my grief, somehow take away my errors. If only I could sit myself down in a quiet little place, and say, forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It is worse, I think, to feel that I have done nothing wrong, that no one is angry at me, that I have placed every foot right and still ended up in a place I never wanted to be.

Forgive me, Father, I would say, for I have sinned. I have drawn so much validation from my marriage, and been so proud of how hard I have worked on it and found in it a safe place. But the God that I believe in would fault me none of those things. Forgive me, Father, I would say, for I have fooled myself for a long time into feeling as though the way I was being mistreated and outright sabotaged revolved around my own failings-- I, who promised to refuse any sort of self-delusion, used this premise to completely delude myself to what was truly happening in my life. But the God I believe does not offer me anger and absolution for this, only comfort for my grief at having led myself astray. Forgive me, Father, I would say, for asking those closest to me to trust this person that I myself didn't really know, for leading them to pour their hearts into helping and comforting someone who was not even appreciative of the help and comfort I offered. But the God I believe in only honours the faith with which we served such a person, the pains we went through to honour commitments that had never been honoured in return.

To assume responsibility for all this would be comforting-- it would give me the illusion of control. If it were my fault, then it would be something I could have prevented. There would be some error I could correct, some sin I could not have committed, some way all of this would not have been a waste.

I tried to take this in stride. I did. I tried to keep it to myself and contain it. But I have been too foolishly free with my personal life and as a result I would feel like a liar not correcting what I've said and offering the truth in its place. As much as I believed (or wanted to believe) that I had found a relationship that really worked, I had not. I was deceived. I am deceived still.

I say this having consulted him and cleared this confession with him, because for all my hurt I still want to serve my oaths responsibly: The reason I stopped working suddenly was that my husband no longer wants to be my husband. It was something I saw coming but tried hard to look away from. The worst part is that I am not being left for any failing in me, anything I could blame. I am being left because he simply wants someone else. He doesn't think that person is better than me, more deserving, or anything else. He doesn't even want to be him. He wants to change everything, walk away from everything, and go after something he wants more. He's been pretending to be the person I knew and loved, and for the past 11 years I have been a part of the role he wanted to force himself into playing.

It is much healthier to him, to me, to everyone around us for him to drop the facade and go pursue the life he wants instead. It is devastating to me to understand that the sabotage has been deliberate, that he has made a shambles of everything from our finances to our business to my health on purpose, all to try to drive me off rather than admit he is not where or who he wants to be-- that he is not even him.

It makes a liar of me, for I have always held him up as a shining example, always helped him maintain the lie. I cannot absolve myself of that easily, because I cannot ignore that I could have examined him more closely, could have taken responsibility for thoroughly examining the excuses rather than simply accepting them to maintain how I wanted to feel and believe. The person I gave all my heart, all my faith to-- he never existed. That breaks more hearts than mine, but they are better broken than left to dwindle and wither as mine has. So many people have suffered having to stand by and watch me suffer through this, unable to help me because by my oath they had to be put at a lower priority than this person who did not deserve their respect and did nothing to earn it. I have much to atone for with them, but for now they won't hear of it, and the fact that they are comforting to me rather than angry with me leaves me no absolution with them either.

A little more than 30 days to decide whose things are whose, six months before we sign divorce papers and I have to figure out how to live a life I systematically dismantled to make him happy. In 24 hours we went from this person I thought I knew trying to atone and repair the rifts made in our little family by all the neglect and broken trust to this person, this stranger, telling me that perhaps atonement was just impossible and we should go our separate ways.

Syl is taking me in, bless her heart, and I find great comfort in that. Right now I am curled around myself in shock and I can go no further than that. I have spent every day staring at the art and story for as long as I can, then, when the tears start rolling down too quickly to read or see any more, firing up the video games and doing what I can to find comfort in spoiling my remaining loved ones rotten. They have sat with me, talked to me, sang to me, cut loose with years worth of things they haven't wanted to say to me out of respect for the vows I'd chosen. I am cared for, I am loved. I know it. I try very hard to feel it. Mostly I feel numb.

I'm sorry. I've lied to you too, I just didn't know it. I thought we had a relationship forged in common trials and loyalty, I thought he was understanding when in truth he was just so good at managing facades and manipulating me that he convinced me how he was treating me was better than I deserved. The stress has been wearing me to bits and tearing me to shreds and literally destroying my heart, and throughout I have believed he was my ally, when in fact he was burdened with me and wanted to be rid of me. If only he had told me. All he ever had to do was tell me he wanted me to go. As helpless as I have seemed I would never stay in a person's life to obligate them to me. I have no fear of death, or harm, or deprivation, but I did, I deeply did have fear of becoming a burden to anyone.

Forgive me, Father, for I didn't learn much from my earthly father, and just as predicted, married someone just like him, and gave him the same blind, stupid, unyielding trust only to face the same result. Forgive me, Father, for shying for too long from the humiliation of having loved unwisely, and putting my friends through so much in the process of watching someone slowly demolish a person they trusted and loved. Forgive me for letting him silence me, dim my voice in this world, and cheapen my understanding of love. Forgive me for letting him play on every permutation of our past, for allowing that to blind me to the way he'd decided to live the last 18 years in complete falsehood. Forgive me for clinging so hard to a person I thought I'd known since I was 13 years old that I wouldn't notice that I'd never really known that person at all.

I know you're not angry at me. Just... forgive me anyway. It's easier to bear than pity. It's easier to bear than regret. It's weak to beg for absolution because comfort is just too bitter. I know I want there to be something more that I did wrong because it's harder to realize I put every ounce of everything I had into serving my part of the relationship and even admitted along the way that I couldn't take responsibility for both sides of it, that I couldn't make it work on my own. I wasn't even deluding myself into thinking I could single-handedly make a marriage work. The true delusion I clung to was that the husband I'd originally married was the reality and this manipulative person was a temporary malady brought on by my being ill and unsatisfactory. The truest delusion I clung to was that I somehow deserved what I was going through.

It's weak to beg forgiveness when I can't bring myself to face the idea that it was a waste, effort rigged against me from the beginning because I wasn't a person to him, I was a prop, an accessory to a con on the world around him.

But I feel weak right now. So, please, forgive me anyway.

Well, it feels sometimes like it will neveeeerrr be stable here at Malakh Studios, like one thing after another bounces us around and every time we think we can breathe for a while it goes boom! all over again. Right now, we are preparing to move again, somewhere closer to school for me and away from the middle-of-nowhere, and so obviously things are going to be a bit chaotic and hectic and whatnot around here.

Poor A's brain was just getting back into work-mode when all this stuff went kablooey, and so I'm having her just try and soothe the frazzled autistic brain however she can for now until we can get to somewhere more stable.

Things have been very stressy for a while, but I am confident that once we move and get settled in, A will be back to her old productive self - the A we watched work like a fiend all the way back in Arc 1 when the interruptions and stress weren't making it practically impossible for her to function at all. I think I can make a calmer and steadier environment for her to work in, so if you'll just bear with us a little while longer, I do believe things will get significantly better.

It might take a while, since we have a bunch of stuff to deal with and clean up around here, but rest assured, I will make a good headspace conducive to artsiness, and at long last her poor brain can relax and work like it used to. Candles and music and art and cleanspace are win!

We adore you guys, and are very grateful for how long you've stuck by us through all this craziness and unending interruption. UDA and the strip will resume when it is possible, but we love the comic and we love working on it, and we'll keep pushing through and keep working on it. It's very much part of our lives, and you can rest easy knowing we wouldn't ever give it up without an enormous fight - well, you'd probably have to kill us. ;)

Thank you all so much for being so patient and so awesome. Feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions or comments, as always, and I'll be around bitching about trying to find apartments during exam season on the forum. ;)

You guys rock. <3 Thank you all.

It wasn't something I could see coming, but it was something I knew would happen, if that makes any sense. It wasn't something I could prepare for, but it was something I was ready for just the same.

I don't really want to make public the massive upheaval that's just gone on, I will just make sure my readers know that it is a massive upheaval and much as I would like to just batter through the confusion it causes, I am going to have to concede to reality and let my autistic brain simmer on it as long as it needs to. It is a huge change to my life, my future, in some ways for the better but in other ways it's sad too.

Anyhow, I will get cracking just the second my brain gives way to my efforts, but right now I'm in a numb space and I haven't even processed anything that's happened since Sunday. I know I will, and then I will either cry or rejoice, probably both, and then I will put stuff up again. It's wretched that this couldn't have happened during the illness but I can see why those involved didn't want to spring it on me then. But, the end result of this is that in about a year I will have a much more stable, peaceful environment and far less interruption, so, it'll be good in the longrun. I'm a bit sanguine about it for that reason.

People are complicated and difficult to schedule, but, I'm still content and happy, because the people who love me will always be close to me and that's what truly matters. Just takes the poor broken brain a little while to catch up with the rest, and while it does, nothing else gets done. More ASAP.

All I have floating around in my head is a bit of prose, just disconnected sentiment. Who knows why, but some folks like hearing what rattles around in my head when I shake it, so I'll go ahead and post it.

Now sentiment:

---

Every word is empty but your name. Every sound has disconnected. Music thrashes futile above the chasm left in your wake. You cut a furrow in the sunlight, in the birdsong, in the clear blue sky.

All I get now are pieces-- strands of hair, red and gold, falling over mine; a neatly cuffed shirtsleeve slipping from view beneath a butter-soft leather jacket that smelled like warmth and home. The corner of your mouth as you turned away, a secret smile you made sure I'd see. Pointed shoes, boots, you always made sure everything about you was a sharp straight line. Only your hair softened you, gilded red waves falling around hardened green eyes. Your hair framed you in gentleness, and that was all anyone cared to know.

But I would pull it back, wouldn't I... I would draw it to your neck to lay my head on your shoulder. I wanted to see those sharp, unforgiving eyes. Even now I shake my head, when others tell me they pine for your soft and dreamy gaze. I never saw what they saw. I never wanted to. I liked your expression hard and cold, pretense cut aside as smoothly as anything else that tried to dull your crisp straight lines. I would sit for hours, feeling like a little girl curled up in your lap: my face turned up towards the sun, listening to you breathe.

That was the sound, the only sound that would ferry me into dreaming, carry me past the light. A sound drowned now by the tumult of black water, muffled by the pressure of headphones pumping empty noise past my ears. I want it to be meaningful-- I demand it speak your name. It answers in burbles and blasts, nothing but babble trying to wear your shape. It has none of your clean, stark lines.

Perhaps you are to them a pretty thing, a mournful song, a wistful man left pining in a widower's world. You give them what they'll take of you with hardly a glance in their direction, it's no wonder they have to fill the gaps in your expression. Perhaps a similar conceit paints my thoughts of you in white, black, and gold, all crisp edges and sharpened points. That you are unforgiving demands of me that I am unwavering. That your sight penetrates to my core demands I be true to the quick. That you are all hard edges makes it shatteringly beautiful when you let a corner of your mouth soften; so quick I have to chase it, so subtle I barely believe it was there.

I would have you come home. I would not ask you to be healed. I would ask for your grief, for your anger, for any burden you carry that I could bear. The first words I spoke as the whisper sank to earth were to say this: I wish I had forced your hand then, so I could take the blame from you now. You would scoff at that, if you dignified it with a response at all. And that would be a comfort, my heart, my breath, my friend.

UDA is posting again, way overdue. It'll get a new chapter every Tuesday. I'm back at the drafting board, and feeling better. I just had a chance to catch up with email and board correspondence, and to find out what was going on in my absence, more or less. I haven't had time to catch up with friends who don't keep in touch with me at the site-- at this point I have to say, regretfully, that I can only manage to keep in touch with people who keep in touch with me. I'd like to be more outgoing but at this point I am so far behind around here that I don't have an ounce of focus or energy left for anything outside it until I catch up on my obligations.

Remission is good. I haven't had an attack of 'whatever the hell' that bad since '97, and hopefully I have another 10-11 years before I have to deal with this stuff again. This time I waited until I went about 2-3 weeks without any major problems before assuming things had let up on me, but it seems they have.

As for what it is, well, I might never know. The peripheral problems it causes have all been diagnosed and are being treated, the only mystery is what sets it off and makes everything else flare up. That and why my brain is losing control of my muscles. It's too intermittent and unpredictable at this point, I either have to live with it as it is or wait for it to progress to the point where it is more easily measured and recorded. They gave me some anti-convulsants and after a long time those finally started to work, the tremors are more or less under control, and with them went a large portion of the pain and neuralgia. So, it doesn't have to be diagnosed to be treated, at least.

The bleeding problems just cleared up for no reason anybody can tell me. I'm not going to question that, I'm just going to be glad to not be bleeding. Nothing sucks the life out of you quite like being low on blood volume. The swelling disappeared completely, and the white spots on my MRI were in the end deemed too small to be diagnostically significant. The visual problems were attributed to getting older and no longer compensating as well for my defects and injuries to the head. Water under the bridge, I'll just work a bit harder is all. I think freaking out about it was doing more harm than the problems themselves-- something I've been assured is perfectly understandable given the circumstances.

In defense of my doctors, only one of them ever treated me like a hypochondriac, and she was the idiot who didn't even bother to read the MRI films or even know they'd been taken when she walked into the appointment. Way to read a chart. Plus she's the one who screwed up cortisol and cortisone, she's old news, Syl just really hangs on to a grudge because she was shocked that a neurologist would act that way, and from then on she was extra-suspicious of everybody we came across. Syl's mind operates that way, it latches onto one example of not being able to trust someone who is supposed to be trustworthy and then uses it to defend herself from trusting and being let down in the future. It ends up painting a bleaker picture than I'm really facing, though. Her experiences with Canadian medicine and with some of the doctors we encountered and rejected early on are horrifying, too, so I can understand her being biased against medicine in general.

For the largest part the doctors I've come across have been excellent and professional. Two of them are downright amazing and diagnosed me on sight then immediately ran tests that confirmed the diagnosis. How my endo spotted that mass I will never know, he's got an amazing eye for his work, I am STILL super impressed about that.

The bad doctors, I replace. Right now I can say with confidence that I only have good medical doctors. I can't fault them for not being able to figure this out. The one thing Syl's endless research turned up over and over is that people routinely go years without a diagnosis for a wide range of COMMON conditions everybody's heard of. At least I'm getting treatment for the ones that can be diagnosed.

For all I know there could really not be any connecting cause at all, I could be one of the unluckiest people ever and just have a whole mess of unconnected malfunctions. I suppose someone really COULD win the lottery while being struck by lightning in the middle of a killer bee attack. :P Statistical anomalies happen. Maybe the search for one connecting cause is just the wish to treat one thing and rid myself of all these symptoms rather than treat a bazillion things individually. Could be. For now it doesn't matter, all urgent things are settled and all major malfunctions managed.

I had a dream this morning and the 'actor' who plays Nathan in my head smacked me on top of the head. "Quit worrying about it," he admonished me. "Quit apologizing, quit fussing, and just do what you do." When I woke up that part was still ringing in my ears, and still is-- "Just DO what you DO." Yegods when did I stray so far from that advice, that was one of the most important things a certain grouchy two-toned blonde ever said to me. So, with no further ado, that's what I'm doing. Next post you see from me will come with a peek.

Happy New Year, everyone! Hope you all enjoyed the April Fool's front page and made it back here okay; poor angsty, emo, sad sad Ben and his plushy-doll friends. Emo writing is good for the soul. That was probably the funnest thing I ever had to write, now I can actually see the appeal of emo bloggery.

Anyway, thanks to you all for sticking by us through this year, I know it's been bumpy with the health issues and the necessary hiatuses. But you guys have been incredibly awesome and supportive, and I always tell A that everyone just wants her to get better and to rest.

It's heart-warming, it really is, to have fans who don't throw hissy fits about not getting their free content. Instead we have fans who are sweet and caring and funny, and it means a lot to us that you've all stuck around.

April 1st is always the start of the new year for us; it always seemed a little bit odd that they changed the original celebration of the new year from being in the spring to being in the winter, during one of the darkest days of the year. We do the champagne stuff and whatnot, but our real new year is today, when we let go of all the follies and regrets that we've hung onto in the past year and start the new one fresh.

It's hard to let go of things, especially things we've clung to for a long time - the things that make us feel like we have some semblance of control in the chaos and frenzy and confusion of life, the careful delusions of order and understanding that allow us to function in a world where nothing is certain, nothing is permanent, and nothing is ever truly secure.

It's hard to let go of attachments to bad relationships, or feeling like bad things that happened are our fault, because even suffering through these things that hurt is better than feeling like a victim, or feeling like we can't really affect very much at all in this world, that we can only make our choices and we cannot control the outcomes.

This is really where the angel in Nathan comes in, where his virtue shines, where his grace is most needed - in accepting this, in allowing ourselves to get folded back into the stream and flow of life, instead of fighting it at every moment to steer the course when all the forces of the world converge and collide to alter the directions.

It is a beautiful thing, to let go and accept that you can't fix everything, that you can't control everything, that your influence is limited and the world will go on churning. It feels clean and pure and quiet, all of a sudden, it is a stillness that washes over.

It's always hard for me to let go, and even when I thought I let go of things some part of me would always cling, desperately trying to hold on to the idea that I can order things, control them, that things can be rational and all in the right boxes. That if I just tried hard enough, I could make everything just right. (Yes, I had OCD, I am a psycho freak, and I hate Monk with a burning passion (yeah, sick people are HILARIOUS).)

Sometimes it feels like if I don't hang on to everything, to even just the slim belief that I am in control of far more than I actually am, then everything will spiral out of control and fall away from me, and everything will collapse before I can stop it.

But we don't control our worlds; we barely control anything at all but for our decisions. There is peace in that, even if it is hard to reach sometimes, when the world seems especially chaotic and the sky seems to be falling. Everyone has their own follies, their own regrets and attachments, the things they cling to, but this particular one is the bane of so many of us. Also, it is only really soothed by angel-Nathan's virtue, and so I thought it fitting to ramble a bit about that on this fool's day. Letting go is how we celebrate our New Year, and how we say goodbye to the old; letting go and remembering that this is a new start, a new chance to live better and take care of each other and slowly strip away the remnants of old things that still hurt.

So: May your New Year be warm and beautiful and full of family and friends, may you all come home to people who love you, and may you all let go of the pains and beliefs that no longer serve you.

Happy New Year, everyone. You guys are awesome. <3 Thank you all for staying so faithful.

So, a couple weeks ago I was feeling a little blue. I was also, as usual, phenomenally tired of almost all earthly things, and crankily complaining about how unoriginal everything was. It was the middle of my spring break week and despite my random moodiness, I was having a really lovely time kicking back with A (who is the only person in the world who can ever make me relax) when something truly, absolutely awesome was delivered to our door.

It was this.

I'd never seen anything like it - seen commercials in passing but it was hard to believe that a fruit bouquet would ever be as lovely in life as on TV. But it was indeed that gorgeous, and more! I have never seen such enormous, perfectly shaped strawberries, or such adorable chocolatey-pineapple hearts. In fact I've never had or even heard of pineapples dipped in chocolate ever!

The entire thing is actually edible - underneath the fruit, the vase/planter is stuffed with lettuce, so technically you could eat a fruit salad. I did not :P But it's still cool.

I've always had trouble with receiving gifts, and viewed impending gift-time with suspicion and semi-dread. It's far too much blah-blah to talk about here, but this really was the first gift, I think, that I didn't internally respond to with semi-panic and anxious withdrawal.

It was just too beautiful, just too thoughtful, and just too overwhelmingly sweet an expression of love and care. It was so beautifully, perfectly arranged (and this is me; my OCD means that my happy place is A's sleep doctor's wall, where all her zillion diplomas/board certs are arranged in perfect, straight-as-a-ruler order), the strawberries were mind-bogglingly massive, the pineapple hearts were so sweetly nestled among them, and the grapes were shiny little purple jewels coolly complementing the vivid red and yellow of the bouquet.

The way the strawberries were arranged, they really did look like gorgeous rosebuds. The fruit was so fresh they must've been picked that day - no freezer burn, just the sheen of carefully selected, quality berries grown on a local farm.

Just gorgeous.

Rather than order everything chocolate-dipped from the florist, the zombies provided store-bought microwaveable chocolate fondue-dipping stuff instead, and it was so much better that way - the chocolate was all warm and melty and not too sweet, it was perfect and swirly and yum. I had had no appetite the whole day, but this surprise fruit-dinner (dipped in chocolate) cut easily through all my stomach's refusals to ingest anything but liquid.

It was an enormous bouquet, but I kept stuffing A with strawberries until she groaned mercy, and I ate a completely ridiculous amount myself, and we finished the entire thing for dinner. I saved the pineapples for the next day (and ate them with salt, because I like my pineapples salty! MMM, chocolate-salt-pineapples yum), but we ended the night with tummies full of chocolatey strawberries. The strawberries didn't just look perfect, they tasted perfect, too - they were the sweetest, freshest strawberries I'd ever had, and I grew up picking strawberries at local farms every summer, near where I lived north of Toronto.

Thus, I have discovered, there is nothing in the world that makes me as happy as eating gigantic sweet strawberries with warm melty chocolate late at night with A, who I alternately shoved strawberries at and dive-snuggled all squee-ful-like. :D Whee! Jay is allergic to, well, everything except the grapes, so I just kept picking up the grape-stems and passing them over.

Sometimes nothing feels innovative, just the same old tired recycled crap - but this was something completely, totally new, and it was just pure awesome. Flowers are pretty and all, but something beautiful AND edible that you can share? Too cool for words; I love gifts that allow you to share the happy, it makes me feel less selfish and self-conscious.

Needless to say, the bouquet made me ridiculously happy, and enormously grateful. The zombies were very sweet to surprise me with such a lovely gift, and it really was for no occasion at all other than me being kind of droopy. I have never been treated so well as I am here, never had my feelings paid such attention to, never felt so much like I mattered, like a real person instead of a robot.

It feels like I am finally where I belong, after so many years of struggling to get through day after day just to get close to my dear boss zombie. She is home, and she is so indescribably, so generously loving and warm and everything good in the world. I am so very lucky, because I don't think I could've gotten so far without her, or without her being here to come home to. She's still so very weak and ill, but she takes care of me in every way she can, and gives me all the comfort I have wished for in all the years before.

I used to think I'd always feel alone and disconnected from the world, unreachable by anyone, unable to be comforted by anyone, but she always gets through to me, somehow. She has always been, since our first meeting, the one exception to every sad rule I've made for the world, the one bright thing that cuts through all the smoke and mirrors. She is extraordinary, she is the one person who will always be comforting, even in the situations where no comfort seems possible or deserved.

There is no one in the world as giving, no one as understanding, no one who is so faithful and serves so patiently, no one as loving even towards the most difficult and frustrating of people-with-issues (i.e. me; I once got an e-mail back from a guy I asked to stop contacting me that just said 'u have issues...' - marvelously articulate).

There are so many pretenses in the world, so many ideas of love that have never meshed with mine; how blessed I feel every day that I found someone whose idea of caring is the furthest thing from selfish you could ever imagine. She can lift a heart up from the darkest and loneliest and lowest of places, she can heal the festering wounds that seem the most hopeless. She is the very best friend anyone could ever have, and the very best person I have ever known. <3 <3 <3

Anyway, back to fruit! Edible Arrangements is truly terrific, and they have a terrific selection of bouquets, but I think mine is still the best out of all of them. A thought so since she picked it out for me, and I went and browsed the rest of them on a whim and it really is the prettiest out of all of them. It makes for an awesome present for any occasion, and they have special ones for everything from Easter to apologies to St. Paddy's Day - so if you ever want to surprise someone you love with something refreshingly new, I can't say enough good things about edible bouquets. I still daydream about my perfect, chocolatey strawberries. Yummm <3

As for our dear boss zombie, A is still very sickysick but hopefully the flare-up will ease up soon. Hopehopehope *fingers crossed*. Back to the endo on Friday, and he's a smarty so I hope he'll do some tweaking with her meds or at least let us know what progress and such we can expect.

A's having a rough time with a lot of her systems so she still needs to rest a lot, but she misses the comic and you guys terribly and can't wait to get back to it, whenever that will be possible. She feels terrible about keeping you guys hanging like this, but rest assured none of us have given up on the comic, nor are we doing the whole "we give up but we're not going to tell anyone about it" bullshit that so many other places fall back on.

You guys are awesome - thanks for being so supportive and wonderful, we really do have the best fans anyone could ever ask for. Thank you guys. <3

Today is Emridhs' birthday! Of course, it's still the 27th here, but it's already the 28th in the land down under, so I'm cheating a bit. So, Happy Happy Birthday, sockman! (Everyone can wish him a happy birthday onna forums!)

Emridhs has been with us since the very beginning of Malakhim, five years ago, and has been incredibly loyal and wonderfully supportive throughout our ups and downs. He has come through with shining colours during some of our very difficult times, and it's been awesome having someone to have our back.

He is truly our alpha-fan: his forum post count pwns all, and he was the first, unsurprisingly, to post on the new site. He is always there to talk to (sometimes even at 3 am Oz time!), always there to offer support or a quick pool game; where others have come and gone he has been one constant here at the Studios for half a decade. That's a long time!

He is entertaining, funny and downright quirky on the boards, and he'll always keep things lively when things get a little too quiet. More importantly, he's been a great friend to us here at the Studios over the years, and has been awesome to Aleph during her very-down times.

Less and less people seem concerned with taking care of each other, these days, let alone each other's feelings, in this strange, dominance-obsessed, interaction-forcing culture that's developing - and it's always good to meet someone who is actually, consistently genuine and who actually, consistently cares. We're all, sadly, far too familiar with fairweather friends and people who disappear at the first sign of strife, but thankfully Em's never been one of those people (besides, sockman is a scrapper at heart, eh? more likely to incite things than run away like a ninny! Yes, yes, I know, I owe you a pool game). And, despite my getting regularly swamped by life and not e-mailing back for a while, I know he'll still be there to respond and to express concern about us.

Thanks for being so awesome, Emridhs. Have a terrific and amazing birthday, and don't forget to eat enough cake for all us zombies! (we can't eat cake. It would go out through the holes in our necks! And arms! And faces!) I would send Mushi-Mushi over to send well wishes, but unfortunately he says Happy Birthday the horizontal-hail-of-shuriken way, and I don't think that would work out so great. ;P

<3!

First infection, now freezing rain and sleet - there was a storm warning on Friday, when we were supposed to go do the LP, and after watching the weather channel and pondering whether the radiologist would even bother showing up, we decided that it was just not happening. It's beginning to feel like there's a big flashing sign in the sky saying "Don't let them poke you in the spine!", since some of Aleph's symptoms are also remitting and thus decreasing the chance of them finding anything in her spinal fluid.

So, we decided that we're going to wait until we live in an apartment with an elevator to do the LP. Then, ice will no longer necessarily mean limb breakage->death by infection/autoimmune reaction, and we can wait until she has another really severe flare-up so they have some chance of catching this thing. Going to try and make her lay low and rest for the next while, let her poor brain ease up some rather than living from stressful appointment to the next (to see doctors who mostly say, "I dunno" or "Here's your prescription, bye"). Hopefully being able to be a shut-in again and not having to go out so much will help her relax some; it's rough for autistics to have to go out and interact with strangers all the time (and for her, even doctors we've seen for a while become strangers after weeks).

Thank you all for being so patient and awesome. We miss you guys and think you are the greatest, honestly - it's so amazing how you're stuck by us for so long, I know it's frustrating waiting and believe me, I wish I could cut all the waiting short and have A healthy and working again. Hopefully, she'll go into some sort of remission and be able to work again soon.

In other news, I just want to point out Richard Paey's story. He has MS and terrible, intractable pain from a car accident and botched surgery, is in a wheelchair... and was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for having too many painkillers. Despite the prosecution not having any evidence that he was trafficking, the jury still convicted him (though at least one regrets it). Whatever happened to reasonable doubt and the prosecution's burden?

He couldn't find any local doctors to prescribe him pain meds, so he had his doctor in NJ send him prescriptions - and it's a little confusing here, whether he was writing them himself or his doctor was just not filling in the dates or what - but considering his conditions, doubtless he needed all he was taking and more. The prosecution based their case on the presumption that no human being could take as much pain medication as Paey was taking.

Dude. The guy has a morphine port stitched into his BACK. How is it that a US attorney could possibly declare, as if he were any sort of authority, that no one could possibly use or need so much pain medication? The man's developed a tolerance, for god's sake.

Thankfully, he was pardoned by the Governor of Florida and has since returned home to his wife and children. But there are others like him, and more patients who don't get pain medication at all, because their doctors are too frightened to prescribe them. So, as medical knowledge has advanced to the point that it can treat most kinds of severe chronic or acute pain, patients complaining of such symptoms are overwhelmingly undertreated. The DEA in America rules with an iron fist, and millions suffer without hope of recourse because of it. It doesn't help that many doctors themselves are skeptical about pain management and would rather lose a patient than risk surveillance and investigation from their friendly neighbourhood DEA agents.

So it goes. I will keep you updated, and thank you all again for being such terrific fans and standing by us. There aren't enough words to express how much we appreciate you guys. More news as it comes!

Well, the LP has been rescheduled and hopefully everything will go according to plan. Somehow A and I have contracted the Coxsackie A virus, otherwise known as the hand-foot-mouth disease that affects children. Yes. We have a ridiculous, minor, PEDIATRIC illness. My doctor asked me if I worked in the daycare center at school. No, I said, and stopped myself from adding, but I do live with a petri dish!

Seriously, I hate the 3$)@)#$*@#)( metro here. Not only is it completely retarded sometimes (three same-destination outbound trains arriving at once while we wait indefinitely for the other, MORE IMPORTANT train) but it is just filthy. Filthy I say. I sanitize my hands like an OCD ninny but clearly that does not change the fact that people perpetually cough IN MY FACE. This place is just a nexus for foreign viruses, even my super-strong immune system has gotten so confused that it just seems to let everything in.

Anyway, we're still sitting tight and A is semi-resting to get over the new infection and prepare for the LP. We saw another specialist last week and have yet another condition to add to A's gigantic medical sheet (I am a nerd and organize it, whee), but that's being taken care of and it's nothing life-threatening. I now know so many big words.

Back to doctors. I know I should probably vary all this health talk with something more interesting, but I have such a woefully limited attention span and really don't care about things that, well, I don't care about. I know there are people who have an opinion, well-informed or not, on pretty much everything under the sun, but I'll never be one of those people. I get very focused on a particular problem and my brain will chew on it and accept information pertaining to it for years if it has to, and everything else is just necessity. Like, when I was new to constitutional law and all wide-eyed and idealistic about things that happened 200 years ago that I never knew about since I am a dumb Canuck, I pored over everything Commerce Clause/War Power related until my brain went kerplooey. I still like that stuff, but I think my brain is over it because there is no consistency and nothing magical about it for me any more. Things evolve, things die, there is nothing workable, no guidance to rely on that I can really find in the mess anymore except "they make shit up".

Anyhoo. I do have something more positive to bring to the table, this time: apparently, doctors who are sick of this impersonal, harried system have been leaving their practices for a new type of service. Known as "concierge medicine", "retainer medicine", or "boutique medicine", these clinics limit the amount of patients their carefully selected doctors see, and in exchange for anywhere from $1,000-$20,000/year on top of regular insurance, they will give you a doctor who actually spends time with you.

The services each clinic offers vary, but they seem to converge on providing quality, personalized care and focus on preventive medicine - which means giving you tests BEFORE you get sick. You can make same-day appointments, even house calls, and not have to wait in a crowded waiting room. Doctors will spend as much time with you as you need. You can call your doctor whenever you need, 24/7. Some clinics have specialist networks, and will handle all your referrals, all your medications, etc - and your doctor will even accompany you to see the specialist, in some cases. You get all your medical records on a CD, at one clinic I've found. They give you a thorough, several-hour physical every year.

See them for yourself: PartnerMD serves Virginia, but the pricier MD2 right now has only reached as east as Chicago, its roots being in beautiful rainy Seattle. The news has been relatively quiet, with the requisite complaints about this being too elitist and unethical and widening the gap between the rich and the poor, yadda yadda. I have no idea why it is unethical for doctors to want to make enough money to pay off their ridiculous debts and feed their families and live a comfortable life. How has it become unethical to want to make money and live well? How has morality become correlated with how poor you are willing to be? It's ridiculous. Besides, not everyone interested fits the exaggerated profile of being too rich for words. This is a godsend for people with very sick children or relatives with chronic conditions, for caregivers with very ill charges - not having to be terrified that the next time your kid gets sick in the middle of the night you'll have to either wait weeks for an appointment or hours and hours in an ER amongst a slew of contagious people.

I think it's unethical for doctors to remain in the overly busy clinics where they have thousands of patients, know none of them, never read their charts, never do preventive medicine because they spend only five-ten minues paying attention to only the most acute symptoms, and aren't even aware of the patients who give up and acquiese to the reality that they will probably have to live with terrible pain and slow degeneration until the end of their days. Doctors complain about how unfulfilled they feel, not knowing any of their patients and just spending their days rushing from one to another - and really, it's like being a caregiver. There is no saintliness in martyrdom, in ignoring your own needs to serve everyone else's. It is responsible for a doctor to seek a more livable working environment, one that doesn't cause ridiculous burnout so that ultimately every single patient suffers.

Knowing that concierge medicine practices are increasing and expanding is an immeasurable relief, and I am incredibly grateful for it. Within a couple years, I'll hopefully have a firm job and be able to subscribe to one of these. It seemed completely delusional to think we'd ever find a doctor who remembered shit-all about us and was human enough to care about solving our very own medical mystery - but now I have some tentative hope that we'll be able to find someone after all. I wish people weren't so obsessed with equalizing everything and forcing professionals to work the hamster-wheel so that everyone has access to universally bad healthcare and everyone has even less money because it all goes to huge taxes.

Denouncing the physicians that go into concierge practice as immoral and unethical because they want to limit their patient size so they can spend more time on their patients - and trying to get insurance companies to bump them off and legislation passed that forbids the practice - does no one a service. Spending money is about priorities, too. People spend thousands of dollars on clothes and cigarettes and lattes and fast food a year. Why should I be denied access to this service because other people spend more money on their hair? No one wants to hold people responsible for their choices anymore, and so many people act like they should be entitled to the best possible lives ever because they don't have choices and even if they did, they don't have control over making those choices because of biology or environment or status.

I don't expect or want good patient care for free, just because someone went to med school for eight years - anymore than I would expect a barista or waitress to serve me the perfect latte or act as a perfect hostess just because they're trained to. I want it to be a contract, and making it explicitly contractual, without insurance companies that hinge so much on quantity mediating the relationship, gives me great comfort. Doctors forget they are employees, that they are a service profession. Lawyers do too. A contract demands specific performance, especially in the case of these prepaid retainer physicians. The doctors aren't bound by insurance demands, the doctors are bound by the individual contracts, and their duty is to fulfill their part of the bargain, give their promised consideration. It will be far more difficult to just dismiss symptoms and give up on a patient who has the contractual right to call you every day, 24/7, whom you have a contractual duty to respond to by e-mail and by phone, whom you have a contractual duty to take care of.

I don't know about you, but I want that promise; I want the security of a contract and its remedies. I want to be able to hold a doctor to his promises directly, not in the winding, indirect ways medical malpractice works. I don't feel entitled to free executive physicals or PET scans or whatever. The payment, the consideration - it protects you, it gives you bargaining power, it gives you domain. When things are free you are at the mercy of the other party, with only the relentlessly annoying government moral police (and their utterly ineffectual bureaucracies) at your side. When you enter into a contract, you are protected by the bindings of both promises, on equal ground, whether you are poor or rich or middle-class, and even the poor can still bring a claim in small claims court, even the poor have access to legal aid and pro bono lawyers that will fight for them.

(I loooooooove contracts; my contracts prof clerked for Justice Blackmun and was like everyone's mother - she baked brownies and cookies and made dip for our four hour exam, and stayed around for moral support. She rocks.)

I would beg the American public to not let them take away this new mode of medicine, to not let the rhetoric about 'retail physicians' and high-class executives being the only ones who have access overwhelm the reality that this is something the country desperately needs, and these are real, ethical physicians trying to do right by their patients. You can't save everyone. If you open your arms too wide, everyone falls out. It is better to try and help who you can, then give substandard care to everyone who walks in through the door. Operating under the delusion that equality is attainable and utopia is possible is a detriment to society, it is damaging and destructive. Life is not fair and it is not just - we just all have to try to struggle through it as best we can, work hard for what we want, and take care of the people who love us and whom we love, not try to single-handedly save a village or a nation and ignore the people at home. If everyone did this, no one would have to struggle through alone and unloved and uncared for, and everyone would have someone helping them through the hardest and most terrible of things. Sometimes I think some people secretly want the government to create a welfare state because they're so unwilling to take care of people who depend on them, they want so much to join the Peace Corps and be some world-renowned humanitarian who saves the world, not just 'some housewife'.

Don't take away the few chances left for people to take care of their loved ones, don't put all the caregiving into the hands of this bloated, torture-happy government. They aren't good at taking care of people, and it really shouldn't be their prerogative. They shouldn't be given the privilege of taking care of your families; they shouldn't be given the right. In giving the state more and more responsibilities, you give up more and more of your rights, your choices, your freedoms. When you make it a duty for the state to save or protect one group of people, another group will lose something in the process. You can't create a system based on a fictitious premise, an illusory possibility - that of perfect equality, universal, equally good services for every individual. It's like building a house made of paper in a tornado-stricken area; no matter how much believe it will protect you, reality begs to differ, and reality will always win.

It's not about the strength of the human spirit or making everyone fit into your particular mould of morality. It's as objective as a hurricane sweeping through a rice-paper house. You cannot make something true untrue by closing your eyes to it and pretending it doesn't exist. You cannot make people not die by dreaming of a society where everyone lives forever and then build a society upon that delusion. You can just take care of the tiny part of the world you have the power to affect, and why pretend to be more powerful, why the need? It is a privilege enough, a grace enough, to be able to help a handful of people you can actually, concretely help - how can they be worth less than the faceless masses, the amorphous 'public good'?

The world has become so shrill. I will always miss the dignity, the humility of those who worked hard to take care of their own, without recognition or glamour. Those who took pride in the spaces they could move within, built their character in even the most confined places. There is a certain quiet way of service, from the highest levels of society to the lowest, that has always transcended status and class. This nobility and lack of hubris, this gratitude for being able to serve at all, knowing how vast the universe is, and feeling blessed for being given the chance to honour some good part of a beautiful and savage world. The current culture of entitlement and omniescience runs so contrary to it, and feels so alien. But in the end I am still grateful, for the little things - for the people that brought about concierge medicine, for the people who try to keep it alive and expand it, for the people who still fight for and take care of their loved ones, the people who don't take them for granted or use them for their own ends.

Okay, enough soapboxing. And happy V-day, everyone. We don't really like V-day, and that topic is for another day, but I think I will attempt to make something chocolatey. Key word being ATTEMPT.

I'll keep you guys posted about the LP and the health stuff, and thank you all, as always, for being so patient and sticking by us. You guys rock, and we're always grateful for you. We all really miss the comic and no one misses it more than A, who very much wants to resume working but it's just not really possible right now. We can't wait to go back to updating, and hopefully all this stuff will get resolved soon.

<3! Be good to each other!

We miss you guys! Just to let you know we're still here and still, well, undead - we caught a nasty infection over last weekend and it kicked our asses. I kicked its ass right back, but Aleph is still sicky from it and we had to cancel the lumbar puncture, which was supposed to be tomorrow. Good timing since it's going to be freezing rain tomorrow, not a good time to be going out. I'll reschedule it once the infection subsides, hopefully it will be soon. Cross your fingers!

Okay, this is where I rant: please note as always that this is just my personal opinion and does not represent the opinions of the Studios or of the other zombies, yadda yadda. Also I apologize if this is disjointed because I wrote this long rant and then LOST IT. BOO.

It has gotten extraordinarily frustrating dealing with the medical system. Specialist after specialist and no one has any answers, at least not for A's central problem. Even what seemed to be diagnoses that could explain everything, like the apnea or the heart enlargement, don't account for a lot of the newer symptoms. I'm desperately hoping the LP will give us something tangible, but sometimes neurological diseases just don't show up on tests.

People want to socialize medicine here, and coming from a country which supposedly has one of the best socialized health care systems in the world, I think it's a terrible idea. People romanticize Canada; almost everyone I've met here thinks we have free education, free health, and all in all live in Utopia. It isn't. We pay for our education. It's cheaper, but salaries are far lower, especially after taxes (which go up to 65% in upper brackets). We pay for health care in those huge taxes, and in monthly fees per province.

When I had debilitating headaches that kept escalating until I thought my head would explode, and I could barely get up and get out because any light made me want to shoot myself in the head, my doctor pulled some strings and got me an MRI in half the time I would have had to wait otherwise, which was 10-12 MONTHS. If I'd had a brain tumour or aneurysm (thankfully I didn't) I would've probably died. My father couldn't even get a blood test, despite having all the symptoms and being in a high risk group for colon cancer, until months and months later. By that time they didn't even bother doing a blood test, they just rushed him into surgery and opened him up, only to find a disgusting mess of metastasized tumours in his guts. He was a horrible person and I'm relieved he's dead, but this happens to good fathers too. It happens to a vast number of people that you don't hear about because people like Michael Moore salivate over the welfare state and gloss over everything terrible that happens every day.

I've had doctors accept pages from their BANK during my 5 minute appointments. I've waited hours in walk-in clinics because no general practictioners within a 20-mile radius would accept a new patient. I've gone to specialists who dismissed me after 1 minute of their time, even if I waited months to see them (and then five hours in their packed waiting room). I've had a psychiatrist who missed the equivalent of huge flashing lights in my psychology and refused to diagnose me because he didn't like labels, and was so pathologically resistant to some issues that he reflexively dismissed me whenever I brought them up. It's damaging to see a psychiatrist like that, and while he was in a high position where he worked, an instructor, a director, and other things, he was not trained as a therapist, but did therapy anyway. I've had poorly-paid, bitter nurses ignore my grandfather, who is half-paralyzed from a stroke, when he needed help to go to the bathroom - he used to have wait hours sometimes. I've had an optometrist FORGET to do a glaucoma test on me despite my having some warning signs and a significant family history of it. I've had a doctor who prescribed me a heavy hypnotic that had a potentially fatal interaction with other medication I was taking. So yes, everyone gets healthcare in the Great Northern Utopia. My stories are not unique: it's just bad for everyone, and very often it's too little, far too late.

When Aleph needed an MRI here, I found a snazzy, state of the art place in Baltimore, and we went there almost immediately. Blood tests aren't something you have to fight a doctor for. There are family clinics all over the country that accept payments on a sliding scale, and won't make you pay anything if you make less than $30k or so. I'm not happy with the medical system here either, but my problem is more with the doctors themselves than with the actual structure.

In general, though, beyond how bad an idea I think socialized medicine is, my opinion of doctors has fallen terribly. I even like lawyers better, and not just because I'm becoming one, but because I've met a great deal of lawyers who are genuinely dutiful and hard-working. I have no small experience with doctorws - between Canada and here, I've met very many of them, and I think the medical system should learn from the private legal world. People complain about lawyers and their high salaries, hand in hand with the CEOs of gigantic corporations, and how unaffordable legal assistance is for the poor and middle-class. It is true: it is very expensive, and the big firms cater to corporations, that is no secret. But the majority of big firms also do extensive public interest work, because they have the money, the resources, the time. A law firm defended the Algerian detainees at Guantanamo in the latest Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush. A law firm defended Angel Raich, and a law firm defended Korematsu. Many public interest organizations refer their big, difficult cases to law firms to complete the work and bring it to trial.

Some lawyers make ridiculous salaries. Some of them are assholes, and some of them are philanthropic and charitable, donate to schools, create foundations and sponsor large public interest branches in their own firms. Some lawyers make very little and will struggle forever to pay off their student debt. I don't know about you, but I would rather have a well-fed, not-struggling lawyer or doctor, rather than one who is trying just to get to the end of the month to have enough money to pay rent. A well-paid employee is always better than a bitter poorly-paid employee, at least as far as I've seen in the working world.

I will never apologize for wanting a big salary at a successul law firm, and I get tired of the self-righteous everyone-should-only-do-public-interest-and-be-poor people. It's become a bad, morally bankrupt thing to go to law school because you want to be rich, or, at least, to admit it. By the time I graduate, my debt will be over $105,000. I paid my way through college, and I borrowed and paid my way through law school too. I'm not like the other kids at my school, who complain about their maids and talk about how entitled they are to two-hour lunches and easy workdays during their summer courting at the big firms. I am grateful for it, always, for I have someone very ill and very much beloved to take care of, and I want the status and the money to help her get the medical care she deserves and needs. Honestly, I think it's selfish, to have a family and work for next to nothing under a huge debt, to fulfill your dreams of being important and saintly and altruistic at the expense of everyone around you, but I'm an ass.

I've worked for several public interest organizations, including one last summer. It had almost no staff, no money, a ton of cases, and very few resources. The case I worked on had languished for years, going from intern to intern, scattered in a dozen different places - binders, computer documents, rooms, different firms. Cases that could have been brought to trial and even resolved quickly remained on the backburner as they struggled to keep on top of the most urgent ones. Kind of like the Canadian health care system, really.

By contrast I've met lawyers and partners at big firms who are passionate about public interest, sometimes spending an entire year just doing public interest work, bringing it to the firm, getting things done quickly, case after case under their belt at firm-speed. Firms make huge money from their corporate clients: but it is this very money that helps them get stuff done, rather than take on humanitarian cases and then struggle to get anything done on them at all.

It was, after all, the big law firms of this country that refused to back down from the government's threats after they took on the Gitmo detainee cases, the big law firms who hired the best lawyers in this country (many of them profs at my school, actually) to carry the cases to the Supreme Court, the big law firms who also wrote amici briefs in support of the detainees and tried to create precedent against torture and unlawful detainment and the denial of habeas corpus. Of course there is corruption, of course there is unethical behaviour and money-maximizing and all that. But there is no denying the concrete, substantial good they have done, either - whether it's for publicity or not, the cases are still completed, the issues resolved, or least petitioners are given the best possible chance at resolution they can have.

At least in the firm world, you are expected to admit you don't know things, that you'll take information down and listen to your client and go do your research, rather than rattle off the most common answer and then send them home. There is a recognition that each client and each case is unique, and needs work.

The majority of lawyers I've met do pretty extensive research because the consequences are dire: losing your job that pays your debt, losing your license, malpractice suits, the bar association coming after you, being passed over for partner, a judge chewing you out in front of everyone. If you litigate and you don't do your work, you will be humiliated and it will be part of public record forever. Sure, there are a lot of dirtbag lawyers out there who forget key dates and screw their clients and don't do any research at all, but that's really not the big-firm world, where the competition is fierce and you WILL get fired for this kind of crap.

Clients pay a lot of money for a good lawyer; firms count public interest towards billable hours and will often give you a bonus if you do it. The consequences of failure are often very obvious and public - missing one deadline can have you suspended or even disbarred. The medical profession is quiet, secret, behind closed doors, and I know the various boards have hearings and suspend various doctors but most mistakes are never quite as public and enduringly obvious as some legal mistakes are.

Firm lawyers have incentive to make more money, to keep client loyalty, to get promoted and get better cases, and so they churn out better work product and do their due diligence. If doctors had the incentive, to keep patient loyalty and make better money, if there was more supervision, even self-regulation of the profession like law, maybe they wouldn't be so quick to dismiss a difficult case, maybe they wouldn't be so eager to get rid of a patient they can't figure out and can't fix just by throwing some pills at.

Most lawyers I know would pounce on the difficult cases, because it's how you make a name, how you make money, how you advance, how you make a life and pay for your kids to go to college. None of the doctors I have met have done so. I'm not talking about some of our very good specialists, but doctors in general who haven't spent very much time trying to be even remotely holistic and find some unifying theory for A's bizarre illness.

I mean, I always care about my clients, from the HIV+ inmate I helped back into an early probation program to a foreign country's poor population to the corporations I'll encounter this summer. Even my fictitious clients for writing classes. I cared more for and was far kinder to customers at the coffeeshop and the restaurant than most doctors are to their patients. I remembered more about my many many customers than they ever remember about us. My uneducated, 40-something year old co-worker at the restaurant cared more about people, despite working on her feet maybe 70 hours a week, and treated them better than I've seen doctors treat cancer patients.

Doctors' egos get in the way and they think they are superior because of their status, but they aren't special because they have a fucking degree. They swore an oath and committed to a duty and so many abrogate it if it gets too hard. A professional isn't worthy of admiration because he's a professional, he's admirable if he does his duty, because of his character. Otherwise he's just another shitty worker doing a half-assed job and getting away with it.

Doctors have so much power and so much authority with their patients, and they don't realize how damaging it can be to act like their patient is a hypochondriac or lazy or that their disease is their fault. It's downright cruel, is what it is, the way some doctors treat their patients. It's like kicking a hurt puppy in the face, it's petty and mean. I think doctors forget they are employees, and that they are employed by the patient.

Sometimes I just want to reach out and hug the vulnerable people who believe so much in their doctors, and have absolute faith in them when they say that their illness is their fault or that they have nothing at all, I want to tell them that doctors aren't infallible and no one should dismiss them like that, no one. It should never take 5 years to diagnose something like MS, you should never take neurological symptoms lightly.

People assume all kinds of things about people, and doctors are no better. People used to think sickle cell anemia wasn't painful and that people just complained, but now they know it is severely, chronically painful. People still think that fibromyalgia is a drug-seeking or lazy person's disease, but they've done autopsies and nerve biopsies and found fibroids on the nerves of dead patients.

Minorities get less pain medication from doctors and ERs, too, because while the majority of prescription drug addicts are white, doctors just assume they're more prone to abusing drugs. In the meantime, there are astonishing and ground-breaking headlines in the newspaper, like "Ongoing Stress May Trigger Stress Symptoms", or research abstracts about how getting hurt in a war will probably give you PTSD (No way!) or that treating a person's severe hormonal disorder will make them LESS DEPRESSED. There are dozens of articles out there that conclude that ill people - neurological illnesses, endocrinological illnesses, etc - are more depressed than other people. Unfathomable, that people who can't walk or work because of debilitating, constant pain might be SAD. Just because suffering isn't obvious or shows up on a test doesn't mean it isn't there, and no one has a right to declare that someone doesn't suffer, especially not a doctor with all his authority and all his influence.

I am tired of doctors who give up after a couple of tests, I am tired of doctors playing hot potato with their patients, I am tired of doctors who don't even know the current standard of care or diagnostic criteria for very COMMON illnesses, let alone uncommon ones. I am tired of doctors who don't even know what drugs are most useful, I am tired of doctors who act like they know everything when there is so very little that is actually known about the complexities of the human body. I am tired of doctors who act like if you don't have some common illness, you have nothing, because so many things, so very many things can go wrong in the body without any test catching it. They act like MRIs and CTs and blood tests are infallible, but brain scans are structural and can miss all kinds of non-structural problems.

I am tired of doctors who refuse to treat pain seriously and doctors who mix up cortisone and cortisol, doctors who don't know the interactions and side effects of drugs they recommend, doctors who don't keep up with medical updates, doctors who think they are God and judge you and your lifestyle based on absolutely nothing. Doctors who miss obvious, severe peripheral edema and doctors who refuse to educate the public and themselves about illnesses that affect so very many, like sleep apnea, which hits a great deal of the population and probably cause a lot of sleepy-driver car accidents.

And I hate doctors who act like everything is treatable and if you are taking medication and still sick, you're just whining and want to be sick. Modern medical science doesn't know EVERYTHING. Stop pretending to be divine. No one actually WANTS to see you. Patients are so incredibly vulnerable and trusting, and doctors treat them like hypochondriacs, attention-seekers, drug-seekers. There is a huge amount of untreated chronic pain in this country because doctors are either too scared of the DEA (or locked up by the DEA) or because they don't even take it seriously.

I am tired of doctors who insist you see them regularly and threaten to stop having you as a patient if you don't comply, even if you can barely walk or stand at all. I am tired of doctors who are clearly far too stupid to be doctors and probably got Ds at the crappy local medical college and slept with a senior doctor to get a fellowship. If you are stupid, please don't become a doctor.

Socializing medicine removes incentive, and will make doctors less efficient, more incompetent, less accountable. It will make health care universally available and universally bad, and everyone will have to wait and wait until it is pointless and too late. There is nothing efficient about a system that ultimately encourages (this is what it seems like in Canada, from my experience) cutting costs by NOT doing any prophylaxis and then goes deeper into the hole when the only options left are tremendously expensive. There is this obsession with equalizing everything in the world, and it is not possible. If lawyers were socialized (ew), I have no doubt the same would happen to us.

Professionals have self-interest, even the altruistic ones, and acknowledging and rewarding that self-interest could have saved a lot of lives back home. Few doctors get sued in Canada; all the su-age seems to happen here: but I think they need the fire under their feet sometimes, the feeling that they are responsible for the consequences of their negligence, their ignorance, their intentional disregard. I have no absolute faith in the market or in capitalism either, I just think it's better that there is good health care to work towards, and save money for, instead of a castrated medical system that serves and fails everyone.

Aleph is an extraordinary and difficult case, and I wish more than ever there was a Dr. House, asshole or not, who would genuinely care about the weirdness and uniqueness of her situation enough to try to work it out. It'll get someone a research grant someday, or maybe someone will get the disease named after them. There is actually fascinating research going on in all kinds of areas, but it never seems to get down to the level of practicing doctors. I read more of this stuff than some of the doctors we meet, and I have a ridiculous reading load and other work but I still manage. I wish we could meet someone who cared more about her than their own ego.

She deserves better. Everyone deserves better, to be treated like a person, and not just fodder for your ego and pathetic identity. A lawyer like that would probably get booted out of the modern firm; no one likes the egotistical jackasses who act entitled and make assumptions about people and gets blinded by their ego. I don't know. Nothing is perfect, and maybe I'll get bitter after a few years in the firm world, but I am glad and grateful I am going into law and not into medicine, because I cannot understand how anyone abides by the way doctors act these days. Aleph has been such a trooper and so strong through all this, and I don't ever think the doctors acknowledge just how extraordinary she has been and how much she's struggled and fought. I think if they were in her situation they would crumple and die and give up.

Anyway, sorry to rant like a ninny, but I figured a Syl-rant was long overdue, and what better time than during our hiatus. I am crankycranky, grr!

Well, we love you guys and appreciate the hell out of you. I can't make any promises but I can tell you that Aleph desperately misses working and is terrible at relaxing, but she really needs to rest. I hope the LP will get us something, hope against hope, and will let you all know when we get the results, whenever we end up going. Aleph gets really tired out from all the doctor stuff and the medicines and all, but I'm being mean and making her keep going, don't worry.

Thank you all for your support, and e-mail if you have any questions or comments, as always. Take care, all of you. <3!

Sorry, I haven't even been able to sift through my email yet, but I wanted to do a quick note here to let people know I'm not disappeared. I think Syl pretty well covered the steroid -> infection saga so I won't rehash that, honestly I am getting to the point where I am so sick of all this stuff I can barely tolerate the appointments much less talking about them.

I'm going in for a lumbar puncture shortly, I might need some time to recover from that depending on how fervently my immune system objects to the situation. I can't project when or even IF I will be able to get back to work, I am frantic to do so but every time we get one problem under control another one pops up and frankly I am beginning to wonder what the point of trying to fix anything is anymore. Something in my genetic code is just defective, nobody can put a name on it or explain it, they just keep sending me to more kinds of doctor. I'm exhausted. I don't want to meet any more strangers. But I'm doing what I can because that's what my zombie family wants me to do.

So I'm not dead, I just kinda feel that way, but I will try to wade back into my email and respond personally to everyone in a few days. Give me a while to get out from under this latest round of tests and doctors and I will try to get into a better mindset. I have a lot of tertiary diagnoses and a ton of pills and none of it seems to be getting at the problem, the root cause of my body just breaking down. Somewhere in the middle of all this there's a culprit, but no one can explain it. I really don't care what the explanation is, I just want it gone. I just wish any of the dozen treatments I am undergoing would even slow it down.

If there's a lesson in this, I can't wait to learn it. Right now, it just feels like a crappy joke nobody really gets, they just laugh because it's uncomfortable and that's what people do.

Well, it's been a hectic month so far. While the bronchospasms were improving, ironically, the steroid A was taking to help out her poor lungs weakened her immune system enough for her to get a whopper of an ear infection in her middle ear. Ear infections suck, and her ear was uber-ouchy - but the nice doctor at the urgent care clinic gave her a good antibiotic to kick that infection's ass. The infection's subsiding now, but she has a few more days of antibiotic to go.

As for the neurologist, unfortunately, we still have no answers. It's mind-boggling, because A has so many obvious symptoms of something wonky in her system, but whatever it is, it's seriously baffling the neurologist. A just has a really weird, rare disease, whatever it is - I keep telling her, maybe they'll name whatever she has after her ;)

Anyway, the neurologist has scheduled a couple more very important diagnostic procedures. Hopefully they will turn up something we can work with, because it's getting rather frustrating to still have no concrete diagnosis. Boo. I'm trying to schedule the procedures to be as soon as possible, because all the waiting is so stressy for A. I'm making her keep resting for now, though, though she desperately wants to come back to work. She misses doing the comic for you guys terribly, but whatever is wrong with her system is making it very difficult for her to function at all, much less do art. She is being a total trooper though, and still being terribly dorky (and adorable!).

Thank you all for being so patient and for sticking around us. I promise to keep you guys updated, thanks so much for the support and the well wishes, we appreciate it so much. We have the bestest fans <3. Thanks for everything! More news as it comes.

Happy New Year to everyone (though we celebrate our new year in April), and we're so grateful to see so many of our fans hanging in there and being so patient with us. You guys are truly awesome, and we hope everyone had a great Decemberween and a nice happy drunken new year's celebration. We're still waiting for our real new year's in Spring, but we did have champagne and angel food cake (Aleph had hers with kahlua, yum!) and other yummy things.

As for the Boss, we went to the doctor again after the bronchitis wouldn't let up, and got an x-ray just to be sure. It hasn't developed into pneumonia - the infection actually has cleared, but for some reason she's still coughing uncontrollably. It's a very bad, wracking cough; she's having very bad bronchospasms and it might be another symptom of whatever neurological disorder she has. We're going to see the neurologist again in a couple weeks, so we'll see if she can shed any light on the problem.

In the meantime, I'm making her rest for the next few weeks until whatever this is lets up - hopefully the steroids will work, and I won't have to keep doping her up with cough suppressant which really isn't working very well anymore. It's naaaaasty (cherry flavour my ass!) and all the medicine makes it very hard for Aleph to function.

Anyway, thank you all again for your continued support, we love you guys and Aleph really misses working, so with any luck she'll be able to get back to it soon. We will, as always, keep you posted. Smile!

Salt is my friend today. Nibbling little bits of sea salt seems to improve my feeling greatly right now.

So, wiggy thing happened, while I was getting better from flu, I managed to pick up a bronchitis. Syl thinks she knows who I got it from, a receptionist at the doc's office who attempted to be comforting by touching me a few times, but looked sick and was coughing. I don't blame her, I mostly just feel bad for flinching, it was not a great coping day for me.

Since I thought I was just waiting out a flu, I didn't go to the doc right away, so I'm teetering on the edge of pneumonia, but I got sooooo much antibiotic that I am pretty sure I will do just fine. My only real problem is hypoxia, because between the heart problems and lung problems I am not breathing real well right now. They gave me some treatments to open up my lungs and reduce the inflammation-- I'm a little worried about the steroids but they do help when autoimmunity goes wackanuts.

I am soooo depressed about not doing art though. I really miss it, all the time. I'm not allowed to do anything that puts strain on me until I get over the bronchitis, but, I am chomping at the bit to get back to work.

I don't know-- I feel really discouraged right now, but I refuse to give up. All of this crap I'm going through was part of what drove me to do the art, because I was getting too weak and too sick to do anything more productive. I needed Nathan then, and I need him even more now. If anybody ever wanted to know why I put so much care and detail into each strip, instead of just re-using art and simplifying everything, this is why. It's because each strip is a little bit healing for me, comforting in a big way.

But, for now, it's breathing treatments and antibiotics and little bits of sea salt. And lots of love, from so many people around me. Which is awesome, but not enough. Nothing's enough until I'm doing something worthwhile again.

So, um, the whole giving-it-a-couple-days to make sure no relapse - yeah. Aleph has indeed had a bad relapse after all, so I'm making her rest some more just so she can finally get over this nasty, persistent-as-hell bug. Some of her new medicines have been pretty hard to adjust to, too, so.

This flu, though, needs to die and not come back in hateful super-strength zombie form. The periodic exposure from going out to doctor's offices and suchlike isn't helping either, but we're trying to limit that as much as we can.

In the meantime, Aleph is kicking so much ass at Guitar Hero II even when her fingers are all twitchy, it's ridiculous, but I can't be cranky because she unlocked a super-cool character for me. WINGS! He even reaps the audience! Bwahahah. And we unlocked the Dethklok song available, Thunderhorse (rocksome rocksome song!) Those guys deserve mad props; I tried the bass line for the song on medium, and I thought my arm was going to fall off.

Aside from fun rock stuff, it's a pretty busy month for us, and next month will be even busier, so Aleph is going to need as much pure resting time as she can get. I'm going to be home on vacation from school for the next couple weeks, so I will make sure she drinks lots of fluid and eats lots of fruit! I get to boss the boss around, wheee ~~~

Anyhoo, we have another doctor's appointment this week, and a bunch more in January. Hopefully some of these will give us some more clues, if not answers, as to what's going on with her neurologically. We will be sure to keep you all posted, you guys have been so amazing and patient and awesome. We are always fantastically grateful for our fans. Aleph really can't wait to get back to work, but it'll be a while longer from all the sick that's being tossed around this winter season (why do people NOT WASH THEIR HANDS, especially if they work in DOCTOR'S OFFICES?!).

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes, btw! We had a nice low-key party at home, and I got a red velvet cake! Wheeee. Jay wrote "It's red!" in Malakhrit on it, in blue icing :D Yums. Thanks to the zombies, it was the nicest birthday I ever had <3

We'll keep you all posted, thanks again for being so patient! You guys rock. Happy Decemberween to you all! Enjoy your sugar comas!

It's Syl's birthday, and I can't express just how happy I am that she was born. This is her second birthday with us, I think-- my memory is fuzzy so I can't remember if she was here for her birthday last year but I'm pretty sure. I can't really give her the kind of post she deserves-- I'm not doing too great today-- but I will say a few things that are on my mind about her.

Syl isn't just a good person, she's somebody who works hard every day to be the best person she can be. Over time she's slowly learning that it's OK not to be perfect all the time-- but at every step she strives to make not just the right choice, but the good choice. I have never seen anyone, myself included, work so hard every day to make sure everything they do is the best possible thing they can do in a situation.

It's amazing how well she's taken living in a new country, going to a really intimidatingly awesome school, and handling all the stress of financing that education from across the border. On top of that, it hasn't exactly been peachy here with my being so sick-- it's got to be scary for her, but she takes it in stride.

She's a constant source of strength. I'm incredibly lucky to have her around. It's been a priviledge helping her deal with law school, and watching her excel under so much pressure has been inspiring. It helps me go on, to see how hard she works every day.

So, happy birthday, Syl, I'm stunned as always by how much you've made of another year. You've come a long way, you've been through a lot, and you've always shone through it all. I'm looking forward to what you'll show me in the year ahead.

Heh, well, so the flu wasn't done with me-- I have no idea why the other zombies don't fill more dead air when I'm sick, it's kind of the point of having other zombies. Except, Syl is studying for finals, so, I can't really fault her for not having mindspace for anything other than books.

This one was determined to stick out its entire 21 day course with me and kick my ass the entire time. Today I felt a lot better though, managed to keep my breakfast more or less down, and as soon as the joint stuff lets up (which is usually a day or two after the other symptoms, dunno why, that's just how I roll with flu) I should be OK.

Meanwhile to cheer me up the zombies brought home Guitar Hero II, which is good except that it was pretty hard to move my fingers at any reasonable speed while achy :P Still, it's something new to do together so it's a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to trying III, which has a cooperative career mode, which will be a lot more fun. I've been curious about this game because of the strange effect it seems to have on some people-- I don't know, I still don't really get why they get caught up in it. It's a fun game, a lot of fun, but, it's not threatening anyone's sanity around here :) I got as far as unlocking the Grim Ripper for Syl (because she didn't like any of the other avatars, and the Ripper's got WINGS!) and had no trouble putting it down. Though it's easier to put it down considering my fingers got sore-- I still hold the frets down as though I were really holding strings, that's going to be a tough habit to break.

As for the strike-- the guild is beginning to make individual deals with companies, and I think that will free my conscience up enough that I can write again. I'll see how that goes, I'd like to begin bringing the supplemental materials to readers again. Honestly I wish someone would look into the antitrust issues with the AMPTP, so many people are suffering in this situation and all because none of the individual CEOs will stand up against the collective. I will say this though: Whoever breaks the AMPTP ranks first is going to have the majority of talent at its fingertips. So I hope it's not Fox. :P

Anyhow-- some of my medicines make me a bit more susceptible to infection so I'm gonna have to coast a day or two past when I think I'm better to give myself a bit of peace of mind about relapse. Jay is contrite about not having gotten a flu shot and will be more careful about preparing our food when sick. All in all I am not sure how functional I would have been anyhow since adjusting to some of my endo's prescriptions was a pretty rough experience. By the grace of saltines, cola syrup, and ginger ale, I will be back at the drafting board soon, and healthier for it in the longrun.