Gather around, my young friends and fellow dinosaurs, let me tell you about some BULLSHIT no one ever tells you about. I’m talking about menopause and perimenopause. Now, menopause has a very stringent medical definition. You have to not have had a period for exactly 12 months and a day to be considered in menopause. All the bullshit before that day once you start going through The Change is considered perimenopause. Here’s some bullshit you might experience that people actually talk about when you’re in perimenopause:
– shorter time between periods
– irregular periods
– hot flashes and/or cold flashes
– fucked up sleep
– OMG NIGHT SWEATS
– Vagina as dry as the Sahara desert
– lighter periods and/or endless bleeding like it’s The Flood but it’s in your pants
– lack of interest in Adult Fun Times
This time of joy can last anywhere from a couple of years to a god damn decade and there’s no medical way right now to predict it.
Here’s some of the REAL bullshit they don’t tell you about but your dinosaur aunt is here to let you know:
– You can start perimenopause in your 30s, don’t listen to idiot doctors who tell you you’re “too young” because they don’t know your body like you do.
– Perimenopause will make you HELLA DUMB. Seriously, I’m talking Bigly broken brain. Brain fog? Check. Short term memory? Wave goodbye to it. Ability to make words form out of thoughts? Yeah, good luck to you.
– Perimenopause can cause horrible fatigue because in addition to losing estrogen, you’re also losing testosterone. Oh and that also leads to muscle wasting, cool cool.
– Things might suddenly hurt more because estrogen is known to be neuroprotective.
– If you’re super lucky like I am, and like to collect rare illnesses, you might even get Burning Mouth Syndrome đź’€
– There are entire online clinics right now (I use Midi Health) focused on providing care for peri and menopausal patients and they will happily prescribe you HRT even if your regular PCP or OBGYN do not (if you meet the criteria). I’ve been pretty impressed with how holistically they view the patient. For full disclosure, I learned about them from my integrative health doctor and they do not accept Medicare (yet).
I’m 46 years old right now and I’ve been symptomatic for perimenopause for the last 8 years, although it’s gotten the most dramatic in the past 2 years or so, which I hope means I’m almost done, holy hell. Yeah I was on the early side, but if it can happen to me, it can happen to you, so it’s never too early to think about these things. And I hope to at least spare some of you the mind-fuckery I’ve been through because no one told me about most of this stuff, including my own mother who just DOESN’T REMEMBER what happened to her and now I completely understand why. And because I also have a connective tissue disease, I used to just dismiss my pain and fatigue as being caused by that illness rather than the loss of hormones.
Anyways, this is why we need Elders in our lives, so they can do Grandma Story Hour like I just did and validate you when the entire medical field tries to gaslight you. I hope you’ve found some or all of this educational/useful. Please share with your friends because we really do NOT talk about this stuff enough. (Ewwww Moon Blood!)
Stay well, and don’t let the bastards grind you down!
Dropping this link in here for the NAMS website. It will help when looking up a menopause specialist (because not all ob/gyns are willing to prescribe hrt, and even if they are, could still be operating on old data). Even with this, there might still be practicioners who are registered here and are still not willing (please don’t ask me why I don’t know), so don’t get discouraged if one of them tells you no when you believe you should be on some form of hrt.
Also I highly recommend Estrogen Matters by Avrum Bluming and Carol Taveis. They delve deep into those studies that have been debunked and what was happening with all that and why it’s important to get in hrt early rather than later. Eye opening shit, man.
Also also. There’s pretty good subreddits for menopause and perimenopause. They have lots more information available all tucked away in one place and I’ve found the people who hang out around there to be very supportive.
[ID: the “Is this a pigeon” meme, showing an anime character pointing at a butterfly. It’s edited, the butterfly is captioned “some ducked up shit”, and the character is now asking: “is this an EDS comorbidity”. /end ID].
Linings are important. They are a peak into the private space of a character or garment. In the case of Agatha’s coat, I wanted to design something that would be a pictorial history and prophecy of Agatha’s character arc within the show. I knew we might only glimpse it on camera and so it in truth… I made it for Kathryn. By creating a complex and private art piece that only we might know is there, it became my personal spell I was casting for her to “have a good show.”
It starts with a murder of crows gathering in a chaotic cloud up behind her shoulders. They begin to dive down and pour themselves into columns in each of the skirt panels and as they fall, their bodies transform into protection runes. They collect near the hem organizing themselves into elaborate sigils, each one telling part of her story. I asked my costume graphics designer @sergiomechoulam to pull lots of inspiration from Norse symbology.
Each of the skirt panels contains 1 talisman from left to right:
I’m trying to figure out a good way to say “you really should actually learn the basics of small talk” with sounding like I’m biased against autistic people.
So here’s the thing:
I see a lot of neurodivergent people talk about small talk as this baffling and meaningless waste of time that neurotypicals do for some unknown reason, and as an autistic person in an industry that is extremely based on building relationships and engaging with others, I’ve actually found a few really key important pieces to small talk.
1. Small talk can make interactions feel less mercenary or transactional. Having even brief exchanges about something beyond the reason that you’re interacting can make it feel less like the only goal of the interaction. Especially for relationships that are not fully transactional (e.g., coworkers), this can help build a relationship with them.
2. Small talk can be a way to find commonalities and help bridge cultural or power divides. Recently I was on a call with a couple of Indian colleagues, and while we were waiting for everyone else to join I asked them where they lived in India. They didn’t expect that I had heard of it, but I knew it because my dad had traveled there for work every couple months for a year or so, so we could chat about it briefly. Even for a couple of minutes, we were able to connect on this unexpected commonality. If I hadn’t had that connection, I would have been able to learn about somewhere, helping narrow the privilege gap of them being expected to know more about where I live than I am about where they live.
3. Small talk can show knowledge about a person, which both builds connections and indicates that you see their life as important enough to remember about. The stereotypical “How’s the wife?/How are the kids?” shows that you know the person has a wife/kids and have enough interest in their life to even ask.
4. Small talk can ease tension and reduce pressure from others, especially in a professional setting if more junior members are expected to speak. Especially for junior staff members, it can be difficult to be the first person to talk and break the silence, so engaging in small talk beforehand allows for a lower-pressure transition from silence to whatever the presentation is about.
5. Small talk provides a low-risk way to identify commonalities. While conversations about religion, politics, etc. may lead to tension or discomfort, even if they bring out commonalities, small talk is specifically structured to minimize tension while still providing the opportunity to learn more about each other. A conversation about the weather can reveal that you both like hiking when it’s nice out; a conversation about the weekend can reveal that you both have family in the same state.
Small talk in many cases is signaling, a way to indicate certain things to people. It’s a more indirect version of it than many autistic people like, but it is one.
But, you cry, I don’t know how to do small talk!
Small talk actually has some pretty clear guidelines, even if they are often unspoken.
You are generally always safe starting with a question.
Weather, traffic/travel, and non-political events are generally a safe bet, because those are commonalities even if you are in different locations. “It was so nice out here this weekend. What’s the weather like near you?” “I got stuck in that big traffic mess on my way here. Did you get caught in that?”
If you have some knowledge about that person, use that to inform further questions. I knew my coworkers lived in India, so I asked where in India. If I had just known that they didn’t live in the same country as me, I could have asked where they lived.
Let them offer information about their family before you ask about it. Family can be complicated, and if you wait for them to offer that will indicate what sort of information they are comfortable sharing. You can then mirror their language (e.g., if they mention a wife then you can ask how their wife is doing, if they mention a partner then you can ask how the partner is doing). If “how are they doing” feels too personal, language like “what are they up to these days?” can be a bit more neutral and feel less invasive. If you’re really not sure, feel free to avoid questions about family altogether.
When asking about where someone is from, don’t ask “where are you from originally?” unless you know for a fact that they are not from where you are. Instead, you can ask things like, “Did you grow up around here?” which is a more neutral phrasing. This is especially common for the area where I live where a huge percentage of people are transplants (including me) and so people who actually grew up in the area are a bit of a rarity.
Politics, religion, and money are generally not good starting points for small talk
Weather, traffic/commutes, non-political events, and weekends/time off are generally safe bets
It just struck me how unusual it is that Star Trek TOS had no smoking. Not on the Enterprise. Not while people are relaxing on shore leave. Not by desk admirals. It was the 60s and this was actually pretty unusual. Go under-the-radar accurate predictions!
(after reading through the various notes) Leaving aside the concept of Roddenberry purposely having thought about this and ruled smoking out of the show (which is absolutely possible): it strikes me as likely that if they had ever wanted to depict smoking in an episode, they might have had to have fire marshals present on the set. Which would have cost extra… and ST:TOS was already routinely the most expensive TV show shooting in LA at that point.
Anyway, I’m curious about this now. I’ll go ask David Gerrold: he might very well know.
ETA: David got back to me and simply said in response to the query “Did Roddenberry explicitly rule smoking out?” — “Probably.”
During the making of Star Trek: The Original Series, Gene Roddenberry and others associated with the production fought NBC and Desilu so that cigarettes were omitted from the series. “Even with the heaviest smokers, including myself, I fought for it,” Roddenberry recalled. “In the end, it paid off for everyone; I think everyone now agrees that the original episodes would not be rerunning so successful if we had yielded to advertising pressure and put a ’twenty-third century cigarette’ into the mouth of Kirk and others.” (The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, p. 43)
jim lights a cigarette and bones materializes from out of nowhere with a fire extinguisher “your ass isn’t willingly getting lung cancer if i can help it”
![screenshot of a note reply from nicotinesicko reading: Mads Mikkelsen "I consent" Daniel Craig "I consent" Director "isn't there somebody you forgot to ask [side eyeing emoji]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/e98017cf34e949321994f2be3813c05e/0198e6c505af2cbb-66/s640x960/f3233dbd0aa941eb22b370e4b9a5c21076164845.jpg)
amhrancas 