MeghanIsMe

I got really upset with Miriam's dad and spent most of the evening in the spare room with the door closed reading Building Construction Before Mechanization.

I have therapy at 10 tomorrow morning, and I'll have a lot of things to talk about!

There's another thing I'm angry about. Miriam doesn't deserve to have the pain she does. As she got ready to go in to the university today, she debated whether to take her laptop with because carrying something as light as a Macbook Air might cause her pain.

Beyond Covid, she's scared of being in the office because at least at home if she starts having significant back pain, she has options. The chronic pain she has is increasingly disabling. I miss going places with her: even something as simple as grocery shopping. Now, she can't be sure whether she'll be up to that much walking on a given day, and if she does it could cause a flare-up that hurts her for the rest of the day. She can't do much cooking a lot of times because she can't stand up that long.

I am so angry at the medical system that has failed her, both in diagnosing and treating the actual illness *and* in providing support for her symptoms. But I'm angry, too, that this is happening to her, and there's nowhere to direct that anger, and it makes me so sad.

She likes to send me screenshots of questions that Fearless, her finch-friend in a self-care app, asks her sometimes. Yesterday, Fearless asked whether she likes to go on adventures on weekends or whether she likes to stay home. She wrote back that she loves to go on adventures, but she usually isn't feeling well enough to go out.

I don't know if she's still thinking about that particular question, but I am. It's been hurting this whole time since she showed me. I'm hurting for her that she can't go out and do or see things. I'm hurting for me that when *I* go out and do or see things, she can't come with.

I hate this all so much. And there's just nothing I can do to fix it. I was thinking about this on the way home from dropping her off, but I managed to wait until I was home before starting to cry.

I wish there could be at least a little excitement and adventure in her being at work in person for the first time in years. Instead, there's just fear and pain and sadness.

I finished reading the architecture book and grabbed another one on the way out the door from the stack of interesting stuff that I took home during weeding. I read the introduction of Thomas Gieryn's "Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line" on the train and concluded that I can't read it right now.

This is the kind of book that was deeply important to me in my academic path. Why do people think about science the way they do? What makes it credible, or incredible, to people? How do the socially constructed elements of science affect/effect belief and, at least as importantly, policy?

But I think reading this right now is just going to make me angry and sad. I'm not up to dealing with that yet. I'm glad that I'm reading again, but maybe I should stay around the shallows for a while before jumping into the deep end of epistemology and trying to understand how people form beliefs about things that are important to me and that so many people are just wrong about.

Reading things like this hurts for numerous reasons.

So next is going to be Mario Salvadori's "Why Buildings Stand Up: the Strength of Architecture" (As well as Matthys Levy's "Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail"). I think that will be a good next step from Edward Allen on my way toward getting back to Condit's book. I'm gonna order them today!