I suppose I should update

June 4, 2007

I suppose I should update

I did in fact eat tons of watercress on my birthday. It was excellent. Yay watercress!

The comments that so many wonderful people have left on this blog are stirring me to further thought, and will probably come up in future entries. I’m really honored that people have chosen to share their own thoughts and stories and add to the discussion. I have a lot to say, but some of it might be a tad delayed.

One of my main thoughts is that the people who don’t want us to fight for our own rights or the rights of animals, the people who don’t feel we’re entitled to our own safety, or the sanctity of our own bodies… Those people like the idea that using violence against us will derail us. They want us to feel shut out from making a difference. They want us to suffer trauma and depression. Anything to shut us up. So, facing that, it is an incredibly powerful thing when we find ways to recover, when we find ways to use our voices. If nothing else, just being vegan and demonstrating that it is possible and healthy and fulfilling, that is a powerful example. So we need to remember the ways in which we are already doing good and honor that. And we need to take care of ourselves so that we can keep on doing those things.

One of the most frustrating aspects of all of this is realizing, after all this time, that putting myself on the line to be brutalized was one of the least effective uses of my time and my energies and my talents. I did it because I was told that it was the way to make a difference. I was told that was my role; I wasn’t given a list of choices, but simply this one choice: this is what you’re expected to do. Looking back I can’t say it was worth much. Did it reach people? Did it keep bringing the focus back to the animals, or did it put the focus on me?

Those are vital questions to me. They are questions I should have been asking then, and the very questions I must continue to ask.

In other news…

So, because my birthday cannot pass without mishap, I ended up, in dim light, stepping on the claw end of a hammer in my bare feet. The claw went up into the heel of my foot. It’s not that bad, but I can’t stand or walk on it for very long, because for one it hurts, and secondly the swelling creates a weird unbalanced sensation where it’s kind of like I’m trying to walk with a marble stuck to my heel.

But it turns out that it’s been about a decade since my last tetanus shot, which was also necessitated by injury, that time involving a rusty nail. I called the doctor and they were pretty insistent that I needed the shot, not because the risk is so great, but because tetanus is so very bad. Apparently, once you develop symptoms, even with treatment it can be fatal, so they really want me to get the shot. I thought I was probably not at risk since my foot did bleed, but they said even so, since it is a puncture (deeper than it is wide) I need a shot.

Let that be a lesson to you all, don’t postpone your vaccinations. I would probably just risk it anyway and not get the vaccination, but since this is me and it’s fairly certain I’m going to step on another hammer or back into a rusty nail protruding from a door frame, or possibly tumble down an imbankment and impale myself on some kind of landscaping implement, yeah, I probably need to keep up to date on my tetanus vaccinations. Once when I was a kid I fell out of a tree onto a barbed wire fence, an old one, and ended up stuck on it in so many places that neither I nor my brother could get me loose, so I had to hang there, upside down, while he ran home and got my dad to come lift me up off the barbs. My entire life is a three stooges movie! But I really don’t climb trees anymore, so I’m probably safe on that count.

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