botany, shoes, books, and justice
Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties. It was all I could do to get through moment to moment, and each moment felt like an endless hour, yet days slipped silently past. Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.
from The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tova Bailey
Once, when I was much much younger, I told someone I trusted that every day I chose to live. I thought this person might understand something of what it was to live with chronic migraine. But they ordered a wellness check and our interactions turned achingly distant and coldly professional.
I am reading the October Daye books right now. Toby spends the first several books recovering from a series of traumatic events and grieving deeply. She does not choose to die, but she doesn’t choose to live either. When she encounters danger (and of course she does – half-fae knight detective that she is) she flings herself at it. She doesn’t think she wants to die, but she doesn’t want to live and so she doesn’t try.
Sometimes living is a choice. It is a good choice to make. That Someone I trusted didn’t understand, but poet Dominik Parisien does. Here is a poem from his chapbook We, Old Young Ones. It is part of Frog Hollow Press’ Dis/Ability series and now I want to read them all.
After deciding not to die by suicide, you should be thinking
of all the usual gratitudes. Too often
is it really life you live is asked of you and yours;
tragedy their anticipated narrative.
Cue slow pan on some bottles.
Hint of bluish arm.
Dramatic fade to black.
Consider: can you be disabled and contribute
something new on suicide, or will all your words
read tragic, even when they celebrate?
Are you writing using you through empathy or cowardice?
If in weariness you call the poem just a poem
even once, what harm will that denial cause?
Facing suicide, are unanswerable questions
the only ones worth asking?
Worth ending with?
Nobody knows how little we know
about this forest. And nobody
knows how much time we have
to piece it all together either,
nor how many mistakes we can make
and survive. So best believe
the ineffable gives life to what we
can love and revere, as when
we revel in the vine maple’s red riot
in new-growth forest, and marvel
at the gleaming porcelain shine of
mushrooms piquant on mossy trails.
And here, then there, along
Lookout Creek, golden maple leaves
parachute down, their descent
a rhythmic, slow-motion dance.
by Brian Turner in Forest Under Story
A long, twisting whine woke me up at 2am today. Startled, my disorientation gave way to exasperated embarrassment as I realized the sound was emanating from my own abdomen. Sleep-fuddled and with no sensation associated with the sound, it took me a few minutes.
Migraine induces gastric stasis – this is part of the reason migraine meds don’t always work very well when taken by mouth and why I can’t eat during certain parts of an attack. I’d gone to bed early in the evening with a migraine and slept through most of the acute pain part of the attack. But now that part was ending and my guts were waking back up.
Amused, I tried to settle back to sleep, but a loud grumble followed. I tried some water and my intestines responded with a drawn-out squeak like a dying rubber ducky. I tried a snack and was rewarded with the spluttering hiss of an old radiator. I turned on an audiobook, but every few sentences was drowned out by a gurgle like the DIY toilet plumbing in a basement apartment.
Finally, after three hours of constant and remarkably loud emanations, my insides quieted down and I slept.
A short period of rather more sedate stomach noises often precedes and succeeds the acute phase of my migraine attacks. A dramatic session of borborygmi is unusual. But as far as migraine symptoms go, I don’t mind it so much – at least it’s funny!
[Content warning: body weight]
Most office chairs aren’t made for people under about 5’5″, especially if they’re skinny.
I spend most of my workday at a computer, like you probably do. Sitting in one position all day isn’t the best for you, but if you get your desk and chair and computer stuff set up right, you can avoid a lot of the pain and strain common to people who work on computers all day. I have a pretty ergonomic setup, but I have struggled to find a good office chair.
Everybody needs a good office chair because sitting all weird at your desk will fuck you up. I have added incentive because basically anything that goes wrong in my body is likely to trigger a migraine. It’s like trying to cook in a house with an overactive fire alarm. IT’S JUST TOAST/a slight shoulder ache OMG SHUT UP.
My difficulty finding an office chair that fits, let alone feels good, has surprised me. While I have mild scoliosis, my body size and shape is otherwise utterly unremarkable – I’m almost exactly the average height of a North American woman and my BMI is right where my doctor says it should be.
Almost all chairs I try have at least 2 of these flaws:
The 4th can be fixed with a footstool, but the other flaws are deal breakers because it’s impossible to sit properly in them – and they cause pain in very short order because of it.
Today, in desperation, I visited a Herman Miller showroom. Herman Miller is famous for design and ergonomics and their price tag shows it. Even if you’re not a design nerd (I’m not), you probably recognize their most famous products – the Aeron and the Eames chairs.
I expected to be spoiled for choice in such a fancy store, but there were only two chairs that even came close to fitting me.
The Aeron in its “average” size had a seatpan too deep for me, but could have been ordered in small. The armrests didn’t really adjust inwards either, though you could pivot them inwards and kind of cheat. Aerons are a very common office chair and can be had used for about $600 in my city. But in several years of looking, I’ve never seen the small size for sale on Craigslist.
The Embody chair was able to be adjusted to fit me – at its limit. This chair didn’t just fit according to ergonomic guidelines – it actually felt good to sit in, which was a delightful novelty. The Embody, however, puts you on a slight backward incline with your butt below your knees. I (and most women) find the opposite angle much more comfortable. Sitting with a backward angle like that leads to extremely tight hip flexors and lower back pain for me.
Both the Embody and the Aeron are over $1000, which feels like an awful lot to pay for an office chair when every big box store sells office chairs for $70-$300.
But I couldn’t find any office chair that could be adjusted to fit my body at Ikea, Staples, Costco, Canadian Tire, Walmart, or at a multitude of online office furniture stores.
The chairs seem too big for me – and a lot of other people!
I’m about the median height for a woman in North America, but most office chairs can’t even be adjusted downwards enough for me to put my feet flat on the floor. That means that pretty much all office chairs are too big for fully half of all women and 5-10% of men. If you’re counting, that’s more than half the market*.
A too tall seat can easily be fixed with a footstool, but a bad seat depth and arm rests don’t have easy fixes. Unfortunately, it’s even harder to find a chair that doesn’t dig into the back of my knees or that lets me rest my arms anywhere near my body than it is to find one the right height.
If I’m a completely typical height, why is it so hard to find a chair that fits me?
When I noticed how hard it was to find chairs, I thought it was just that chairs are made to fit typical male heights instead of typical female heights. Human height and weight are bimodal – women are typically smaller than men. This makes for a pretty hard design problem because if you design for the center of a bimodal distribution, it’ll fit most people badly. I still think chair makers might be biased towards male sizes in their chair designs and that the ill-fittingness of many office chairs is because of the bimodal problem.
But there are a lot of women using office chairs and I think there would be more options at the low end if they were truly that ill fitting.
While my body size and shape are medically unremarkable, they aren’t typical. Most people are overweight now. 85% of women weigh more than I do – and at least 75% have a higher BMI. If I were heavier my body would fill out the chair enough to reach the armrests and get my legs comfortably over the edge of the seat.
I think the fact that most women are overweight means that chair makers get to fit more people with fewer adjustments/smaller range of adjustments – and thus lower costs. I don’t know the right search terms to find research that looks at the range of adjustment needed to accommodate different percentiles of height and weight, but I’d be interested if you are a chair expert!
Who’s screwed?
Guestimating from the chairs I’ve tried, I think that finding an affordable office chair that fits will be very hard if you are:
And based on the complaints of my larger friends and the typical sizes of North Americans, I bet it’s also really hard if
Basically, there is a big hole in the affordable chair market if
So if you know of an office chair with a seatpan depth of 15-16″, armrests that are adjustable in height and width, and has a full back for less than $500 CAD, let me know! Alternatively, if you have a Steelcase Gesture or Herman Miller Embody you want to give me, I will send you a really nice thank you card and write a review.
* assuming men and women need office chairs at the same rate.