Worries

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

For about the past decade I've had very, very intermittent problems with my knees and back pain. The sort of thing that goes unmentioned to doctors because it only recurs on very long timescales, enough that I didn't even think of it as something to talk to a doctor about until very recently, rather than as 'something that just happens'.

But since I have started at that charity shop I have been more worried, as several times in the past couple of weeks I have felt my knee act as if it is about to give out under me, including a small yell of pain I was surprised no one reacted to. Twice in the past week I have had to swap out what I was doing to moderate back pain. At least my feet have been growing better at not hurting with all the standing involved, and that is a pleasant surprise, for it to be improved so soon.

I do not mean to say these are serious issues relative to other people, or any sort of trivialisation of what other people face, anything like that. Am just writing about what I have been experiencing and my personal consequent worry that, as the activities I have been engaged in when those pains and problems of mine have dramatically increased their presence (although not to their serious extent yet - I have neither collapsed nor had to make an early departure, in that workplace so far) and the work I have been doing to apparently bring them on is very similar to what I have done in the past in libraries (and, possibly I vaguely recall this having happened when working in them too and going unmentioned)-

It makes me worry that in the long term I may be unable to do a form of work that I do love, if these similar activities bring on those former incapacitating pains with any frequency. I hope that won't happen. Maybe should work out what to do if it does.

I bring you petty annoyances

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

ABC is replaying season 5 of the new Doctor Who series. As much fun as the show can be, plenty of the episodes of that season annoyed me, possibly more than any other season of that show I've watched. Possibly.

The weeping angels double, for example. Despite being written by the same person who originally devised those creatures, the story comes off as a betrayal of the concept when we see them moving on screen and the ploy of someone pretending to be able to see successfully keeping them frozen until the ruse is revealed. Granted we learn in the story that the Doctor's information on the angels was incomplete in their previous appearance, but the angels' freezing being volitional rather than automatic and unresistable really seems a violation of the whole creature concept. Where the angels were perfect for Blink, I don't see why just about any other creature couldn't have been substituted for them in The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone. Which is a shame since the first episode did a good job of adding some new, frightening twists to them before it fell apart.

But what I really wanted to right about was the current double (first part last week, second part in a couple of days), The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood. Mainly how enthusiastic the Doctor was in his praise of the Silurian doctor Malokeh, for his curiosity about humans. Which struck me as very jarring because at least one human in the story expressed terror of him on account of being dissected and examined while still alive and conscious. That the person in question survived apparently unharmed seems beside the point - any time humans do something similar to aliens, the Doctor has a tendency to verbally eviscerate them, if not worse. Incidents like that contribute to my view of the Doctor as having a disturbing madonna / whore sort of relationship with humans.