Some Wins!

I feel like everyone could use a little boost at this stage of the apocalypse, and so - as I nibble on the pretzel chips and humus that constitute roughly 80% of my Spring Migraine Anti-Nausea diet - I am delighted to share some recents wins.

First and most significantly, I’ve been officially approved for another year of long-term disability benefits through NY Life. This is HUGE, because it means that even with the postponed Social Security Disability hearing + decision (now scheduled for June 12), I will continue to receive 60% of my former salary through at least February 2027. This also gives me a year to convince my new neurologist, who specializes in viral infections of the central nervous system, to experiment on me with new treatments - maybe even those coveted eighteen pediatric chicken pox vaccine shots?? (My former neurologist is moving to Boston; we’ve already had our final visit, during which she said, with a tone of nostalgia usually reserved for fast-growing children: “I’ll never forget calling you when you were on your way to Michigan and telling you to turn the car around for that first spinal tap.” Me either, Dr. Miranda. Me either.)

Second, I got to go to Chicago for a few days in February for the Central meeting of the American Philosophical Society! People are rarely excited enough about the Central APA to merit exclamation marks, but it was not only the first time I’d been able to attend since I got sick but also the tenth anniversary of Andy’s and my realizing that we were honest-to-goodness in love with each other at that very conference. Andy, who was commenting on a paper, diligently went to various sessions and events; I mostly split my time between seeing long-lost friends and resting up in our hotel room, but I did dip into two sessions, and it was fascinating to meta-observe my brain in philosophical action. Andy’s session, for instance, was on a familiar topic (the early modern debate about vitalism vs. mechanism as played out in Anne Conway’s treatise, for those who care), and trying to follow the argument felt like trying to follow a conversation in a foreign language that I was mostly fluent in. I knew each individual word and could track sentence structures and meanings, but it took fierce concentration to hold them all in mind and then a perceptible but ineffable “movement” to put everything together and grasp the meaning of the argument as a whole. Still, I could do it - and I figure if the foreign language analogy holds true, I can continue to build fluency. And it was a relief to feel at home again at a philosophy talk and nothing short of soul-nourishing to spend time with friends in their three-dimensional and huggable forms.

The Palmer House lobby makes for a better photo than me gleefully squashing friends and laughing with joy, but please imagine that happening right below this lovely caryatid

Last but not least, I finished what might just be my first beginning-to-end hands-craft project since my face imploded almost three years ago. I am by nature a fidgety person, and my mother wisely (perhaps desperately?) taught me to knit and embroider at a young age as acceptable outlets for my restless energy. Since then I’ve knitted and hand-sewn/embroidered my way through countless flights, conference talks, committee meetings, and TV shows. I used to make David a sweater every winter (to his specifications, which over the years included a Golden Snitch, a wrap-around dragon, and a Rebel flight jacket like Luke Skywalker wore in The Empire Strikes Back), and the annual birthday outing with my goddaughter Margaret always involved going to a fiber arts store to pick out the yarn she wanted me to knit her something from.

This rebel flight jacket ended up being my crowning achievement for David-sweaters, since after this he stopped wearing sweaters altogether and wore nothing but the same hoodie for the next four years.

By the time Andy and I started dating, most of my friends’ children had grown out of the adorable knits stage, and so when I discovered that he possessed approximately 87 identical black v-necked t-shirts - the Brooklyn uniform, if you will - I promptly decided a few of them needed embellishment.

Still one of my all-time favorite photos of Andy :-)

Over time, this became a tradition, so that now when a beloved shirt is fading Andy will often bring it to me and ask if I can liven it up. Although I’ve started several projects since Summer 2023, however, I don’t think I’ve actually managed to finish and hand off any of them…until yesterday.

The impetus was Andy’s making me the perfect Valentine’s Day card. Before anyone goes “Awwwww” and forms the impression that loving comes easy on the Delaware River, let me be clear that having serious illness upend the balance of our marriage has been ridiculously difficult. I am fiercely independent (yes, to a fault), and now I spend multiple days a month dependent on Andy to carry out all the tasks of everyday living for both of us: the dog-feeding and care, the laundry, the dishwashing, the meal prep and cooking, the emailing, the socializing, etc. I would really rather be holding my own (and then some, just because I can), and we both deeply miss the equal partnership we built our relationship on. In addition, Andy continues to mourn the loss of previously-brained me. But planning the trip to Chicago gave us a breath to remember why we’d chosen each other - and to choose each other again, now, in these new and unforeseen circumstances. And so this is the card that Andy made me for Valentine’s Day:

In case it wasn’t obvious, this is Love, Medieval-Style. Or, to be nerdily precise, this is a combination of two of my favorite visual tropes from the Middle Ages: the personification of Love as a female archer, and portrayals of St. Sebastian.

A 14th c. wooden chest at the Met Cloisters. Look at the tiny bow and adorable arrows! Look how sweet he is about handing her his heart, all shot with arrows! Look how this prefigures all sorts of images of saints handing their own hearts to God as a symbol of devotion!

And as for St. Sebastian … ahhhhhh, well isn’t that a fun rabbit-hole for anyone who wants to jump down it! Leaving aside - as almost everyone does - the actual story of who this Sebastian is and what he was supposed to have done to become a saint, the important thing to know is that images of a mostly-nude St. Sebastian tied to a tree and show with arrows are extremely popular from the early Middles Ages onward. Whether shot with a whole quiver of arrows or NOT EVEN ONE (in which case his lack of clothing is the big ‘tell’), whether displaying an rigid set of iron abs or a softly sensual physique, St. Sebastian is everywhere. David and Andy and I play ‘Where’s Sebastian’ when we visit museums and churches in Europe, and we’re never disappointed. I hereby constrain myself to two of my favorite examples:

I call this one “My parents found my Crushes Sketchbook so I added a bunch of arrows to prove that the dreamy boys are SAINTS”

Perhaps my all-time favorite: St. George in full armor standing over his slain dragon chatting with a St. Sebastian whose treasure trail is on full display and who holds two arrows to symbolize his wounds, since the artist - clearly a full-grown man whose parents no longer dictate what he gets to paint - refuses to mar even ONE INCH of that perfect bod.

In any event, as soon as I saw the card, I knew that it needed to be immortalized. And so I got Andy to sketch the figures on what we agreed was the perfect shirt and started stitching.

T-shirt courtesy of Onyx Coffee, whose slogan is “Never Settle for Good Enough”

Originally I was going to outline the figures cartoon-style like in the card, but that didn’t work visually so I went full medieval marginalia

It was challenging figuring out how to portray muscle definition via thread, but giving Sebastian little French knot nipples made it all worthwhile. Who knew Heated Rivalry could count as an embroidery tutorial!

Final product: dog-loved, Andy approved!

I have a million more photos of this in progress, but I’m hitting the email-length limit for this post, I’ll post them somewhere else.

Until next time, I am clinging to the good in this world and hope you are doing the same. Be gentle with yourselves, and don’t forget to be nice to your noggins!