Confessions
I’m pretty harsh on young Justin Bieber. Mostly because he’s a no talent upstart with a legion of girlfans who consider him marriage material. However, it’s true that in the early teens and pre teens, a persons tastes are not entirely … developed. Would you like some proof? Okay.
Now, at 31 I would like you to know my tastes are highly refined and excellent. All of them. Who said Right Said Fred? Get out. (I love the Freds). But if we were to wind the clock back to around 1990, you’d find me adoring the following.
1. Corey Feldman.
Lord I was obsessed. Some magazine printed a list of all the movies he’d been in (there was no IMDB back then) and I kept it and highlighted them as I hired/copied them (VHS baby WHOO). We were going to get married. Totally. Yup. Gunna happen.
How did it end? I still think he’s alright looking, but it became increasingly apparent that he’s not a particularly good actor, and is also a total douche. These things, combined, put me off the corey train. I still love “Stand By Me” and “The Goonies” though.
Ratcat
I was in the fan club, I got up early to watch The Factory and Rage to see if they were on. I thought they were AMAZING. Maybe they were, my newly aged ears hear a lot of off key shouting, but that’s youth. Blind to the shouty lyrics. Cheesy too. Terribly cheesy, cliched and loud. Just like music should be, dammit.
How it ended. I think I just outgrew it.
3. Alex Papps
He’s the one in the red robe at at the start of that clip. He was DREAMY, even with mullet. He played Frank in Home and Away. I watched the Frank and Bobby wedding episode 9 million times, had the wedding poster on the wall. Oh Alex Papps.
How it ended. He fell off the television for a while and I moved on.
So that’s three. I was going to add Tiffany to this list, because I thought she was awesome. I Youtubed and guess what? I’m right, she was awesome. Also, as someone in the comments for the vid that’s coming pointed out “Oh wow, a teen singer who is fully clothed”. Those were the days, my friends.
My arm hurts.
I don’t like going to the doctor. I avoid it as much as possible. The only real reason I go these days is because I need a certificate for work. If I didn’t have to prove I was sick, I’d generally not bother. I think it goes back to being fucked around by soooo many doctors over the years trying to get a PCOS diagnosis. Having said that though, I do like my local doctors.
When I was born, in the dim hazy days of 1978 (shut up Matt), Dr Kelly arrived mere moments after the big event. He’s still there, in the clinic, seeing people 32 years after opening his clinic. The clinic itself used to be a house, which you can tell by looking at it really. When I was a mere slip of a child it was a waiting room (the old lounge room, boarded up fireplace and all), two or three consulting rooms and possibly a nurses office. These days, with the extensions and modernizing, there’s a dental clinic, physio and 5 consulting rooms, plus large nurses office for the collection of blood and the small GP procedures, which is why I was there today.
Generally speaking, I’ve had only goodness from the doctors there. I say generally because there’s one or two incidents where things didn’t go to plan, but 2 small things in 31 years is a pretty good record, I reckon. I’ve never felt ridiculed, humiliated or bashed by the doctors there, and I think that’s probably one of the most important things. If you can’t feel that you can present with anything – no matter how small – then you’re going to have stuff missed.
I hadn’t seen Dr Kelly the elder (sorry Paul) for a long time, but I went to see him a while back with my stupid ankle. Being as I was a lady having lady problems in my teens, I switched to the female doctors back then. Still, he remembered stuff about me that I’d forgotten, despite the passage of maybe 10 or 15 years since I’d seen him to talk to. My other usual doctors tend to stop for chats as well, my most common GP – Denise – taking great interest in travel plans and whatnot. It’s good, it’s a personal service and it’s nice to have personable doctors. I dare say in a larger clinic it’d be different, but my town isn’t really a rushed sort of place (yet, they’re working on it).
Today’s visit was to get a lump cut out of my arm. The doctor (daughter of the aforementioned Dr Kelly) is 98% certain it’s nothing troublesome, but I’ll get the results next week. In the meantime I’ll just stagger around and make a big fuss out of a small pain in order to get sympathy.
Darling, we’re the young ones.
And young ones, shouldn’t be afwaid! I picked up the double boxed complete special edition luvverly jubbly Young Ones DVD set yesterday. I’ve been pondering it for a long while as the VHS copies we taped off the telly were worn out and tossed out years ago, but the price has choked me some. Finding the double set on discount was a “HURRAH!” moment.
The Young Ones first broadcast in 1982, when I was around 5. In 1984 the second run came out, and presumably the ABC repeated the first run because our old betamax was there to capture all 12 eps. I also remember, during the second run, being allowed to stay up late on the school holidays to watch it. It was on after the D-gen and I don’t remember which episode it was, but it was super exciting to be left out of bed for it!
Over the years I watched the tapes on loop, and I fully admit that jokes went right over my head. We bought a VHS player, tossed out the betamax tapes and waited for another repeat run of the show. Once those tapes were worn out, and since a 20 year old show wasn’t worth repeating, we lost the Young Ones.
Until yesterday! I watched series one while working on a crochet thing, and started series 2. There’s things I’d forgotten, and things which seem funnier, and it’s very very nice to have them back to be honest.
I think this early exposure to the Young Ones was probably what set me up as a comedy junkie to this day. I adore most British Comedy (some of it is exceptionally lame, but then so is a lot of Aussie stuff) and comedians. The Comedy Festival (which I intend to drag the boyfriend to next year) is brilliance. I love to laugh, so good comedy gets purchased and watched and yep, I do watch it over and over again. Just because I’ve seen it before, doesn’t make it less fun to watch.
A History of PCOS by Me – aged 31.
Yesterday as I staggered around Borders wishing for early death (not to be overly dramatical) I told The Boyfriend I’d picked up the PCOS Diet Book and Managing PCOS for Dummies. He said surely I could write a Dummies guide to PCOS by now, having immersed myself in it for so long.
Apparently not! Quite apart from the fact that there’s more information in one single paragraph of these books than I ever got from a single specialist, the information in them is stuff I’ve never heard linked to PCOS before. Which has put me in between relief – “Oh good, it’s not just that I’m weird, it’s the PCOS” and anger – “Oh great, another fucking thing to go fucking wrong”.
Much of my “knowledge” of PCOS is gleaned from websites, communities and books. Simply because the specialists I saw were there to treat or look at one aspect of the whole, and therefore they’d do that and wander off. So as new information comes to light about the effects this condition has on the body, I need to make sure I keep up. In this case, it’s interesting to note that poor sleep and oversleep have been linked to – you guessed it – PCOS.
However most if not all of the worst parts of the syndrome can be bashed on the head with a quality low GI diet which includes a lot of whole grains and whatnot. This is a relief. I’ve avoided looking into PCOS diet simply because of the mental “I suck at diets” block. To find page after page of nummy things to eat that I can eat daily – big big big relief. My favourite of the three books I got yesterday – The Ultimate PCOS Handbook – even includes options and advice for vegetarians like myself. Hurrah!
So now for the history part. This post will be long, you can take a nap in the middle. I already napped today, so I’m good for a while. Ready? Let’s begin. (Boys should note at this point, I will be mentioning periods. Don’t be scared)
In about grade 5 (age ~ 10) I went from a tiny elfin little creature to three times my original weight within about 5 months. BANG. At age 12, my periods started just before I started High School. They were heavy, horrible and I missed a lot of school due to exhaustion and other things related to a 5 month constant period. Then they stopped, started, stopped, started… they never lasted less than 4 weeks.
No cause could be found for this cycle, nor for my massive weight gain apart from “You eat too much and you’re lazy”. I was, at this stage, not overly lazy. If I went to a friends house, for example, we’d walk into town, catch the train to the city, walk the city for the day, come home and walk back to their place. I was moving. I wasn’t a great sportsperson because I was fat and therefore slow, and my knees and ankles were giving way in alarming manners.
The ankles were addressed by a doctor who had me use insoles to support the foot, but the problem remained. A specialist in something or other tested my blood and said, without looking up from his notebook “Ah, yes. You probably will not be able to have babies. Everything else is fine. Goodbye”. Meanwhile I was growing body and face hair like whoa, which got me a referral to a dermatologist who – and I am not joking but I wish I was – said she couldn’t help with the hair problem but I clearly ate too much junk food. When I said I didn’t, she stood over me and blasted me for lying to her because I was so fat I was clearly eating junkfood every single day. Unable to defend myself, and crying hysterically, I swore off doctors for a long time. The Boyfriend can attest it’s a nightmare to try and get me to see a medical person these days.
However, I happened to read a magazine article about PCOS and the symptoms seemed to fit so I marched back to the GP and asked to be tested. In the darkened room of the ultrasound booth, a lovely smiling little Chinese specialist sat me down and pointed out on the pictures exactly where all the cysts were, and confirmed that yes, I did have PCOS. Without doubt he is the best specialist I have ever seen, not just because he took the time to explain what was going on, but because he was sympathetic about the whole deal.
Anyways, that was 9ish years ago and back then (listen to me like it was 1963) the treatment was the Pill. This was purely to get the periods ontrack again, and resulted (in me) in more weight gain and feelings of suicidal depression. So I stopped it and gave up for a spell till I read on the internet that someone had found a link between PCOS and Insulin Resistance, and treating the IR would help the PCOS.
AND HOW. Taking metformin, a drug used for diabetics, and adding a tiny bit of activity to my life I dropped almost 25 kilos. The drawback? I felt, constantly, like I was about to puke. Medication didn’t stop that, it was just something to put up with and I decided I didn’t want to put up with it anymore and stopped met. BANG, 25kilos straight back on. I dabbled with met again earlier this year, but I really cannot stand the feeling of nausea and the idea that if you cough, you’ll need to change your pants (sorry, TMI?).
Which brings me, rather neatly, back to diet. Currently I can only do parts of it, but I hope even a little bit of the diet will help in little ways (this is because I still live at home, and my mother considers the phrase “Low GI” to be something someone made up to make money).
I’ll start slowly, mostly because I’m spending most of my time with the books reading through the case studies and thinking “Oh yeah, me too. Me too”.
Frente Party
I was at JBHiFi yesterday hunting around for stuffs to accidentally spend too much money on, and I found “Marvin The Album” by Frente on sale for $5. The second I saw it, I had to have it. My only copy is one Debbie dubbed for me in high school back when we had mixTAPES not mixCDS. Yeah, those were the days.
So now I’m listening to it, and thinking about all kinds of good stuff, like buying EPs at the crappy little CD shop in Eltham, and singing Ordinary Angels at the tops of our voices. Music most surely takes you back.