Posts by sarcozona

How duration changes the experience of pain

Having some sort of time limit on suffering makes it endurable. It’s the same way that running a marathon is tolerable because you know that it will eventually end. Every step gets you closer to relief. I don’t think I’m a lightweight. I like to believe that I’m an expert on pain, thanks to hours […]

It’s all in my head

People with migraine have a degraded “objective self” – that is, their “taken-for-granted notions, theories and tendencies regarding [their] human bodies, brains, and kinds” have been damaged. Sometimes people with migraine don’t even believe their own pain. – Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight. I remember crawling across a bathroom floor, vomiting, wondering what was wrong […]

How the expectation of relief changes pain

Pain is a complex experience …I enjoy the waiting. Once I have decided that today is going to be a tramadol day, and I’ve given myself a deadline before which I absolutely will not cave in and take it, my experience of pain is transformed. Rather than grinding and hopeless, it feels charged, electric. The […]

You know you want this

I am very much looking forward to reading You Know You Want This after reading this interview with the author. at 36, I have a handle on power dynamics and gender and all of this stuff. And it just seemed to me that at 20 – which is an adult, officially, at which age it […]

Don’t touch the art

I went to the local art gallery while they had a big Alberto Giacometti exhibit. Giacometti was a sculptor and his figures are very elongated and textured. The proportions are alien, but expressive. I wanted to touch them so badly, but, of course, that wasn’t allowed. So much art seems made to be touched, especially […]

Nationalize the Irvings

The Irvings are a Canadian family who own the Atlantic provinces. That’s not hyperbole – they’re in the top 5 North American property owners – and they own much of the resource extraction and development, transportation, and English-language media in the Atlantic provinces – especially in New Brunswick. The Irving empire was founded more than […]