Health verdict

I'm singing the vegemite song. This is because all the various test-results are in and they're lovely. My thyroid is working perfectly and my blood sugars are perfect. I'm at the later stages of perimenopause and my blood pressure should be within reasonable levels in a week or so.

The bad news is mostly what I knew already. My eyesight is now funky, my heart is no longer perfectly proportioned. I have a smidgeon of kidney damage and elevated cholesterol. My cardiologist-to-be will apparently get to the bottom of this.

I narrowly missed out on really evil stuff. I consider myself to be very, very lucky! My source of luck is my optometrist, who picked up on it before I lost a lot more than some eyesight.

(no subject)

Ever since I wondered at a fantasy hero's incipient sex-change when he suggested he might be turning into a 'bluestocking' through reading to his dragon, I've been watching out for modern use of 'bluestocking.' It seems to have a fuzziness of meaning attached these days. I haven't done a proper study of the word, though, so I can't be precise as to what it means except that it's associated with intelligence and reading. I also can't find my copy of the book that raised the question of words shifting in meaning in the first place, so I may well be misremembering the context. This is the only instance I can remember, however, where 'bluestocking' was used by a man, referring to himself.

It bugs me, and I guess one day I shall have to trace shifts in meanings. I'm reluctant, however, because I rather suspect that it would be depressing. What if the shifts in usage in modern novels are from a lack of understanding of who the Bluestockings were and why they were important? It's not just an ignorance of the achievements of a group of women - it's a lessening of their accomplishments by making the word almost generic in nature. I understand slippage and change in use of words, but I wish it could be done without forgetting the original contexts.

Besides, there is a good half century (at least) of excellent studies of these women. I don't want to find out that the general public doesn't care a jot. This is called hiding my head in the sand.

Many years ago I read bunches of writing by the Bluestockings and other women writers of that time. They grounded me for a lot of my thinking about the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Without them, my brain would have been shaped entirely by Whig history, I think. They're important to me.

What prompted this post? Well, I just found a rather cool webpage with a bunch of links. It doesn't have an extensive literature available through the links, but it's a neat summary and has enough of a literature to get one thinking. The reason I've posted about it here is so that I can find it again, next time I'm bored.

Quite by happenstance, the works linked from the page are mostly ones I didn't read during my mid-twenties. I was into novels and political tracts, mostly, and not always the most obvious of either, which is a great nuisance now I've forgotten all the titles, so many years on. That's the trouble with reading for fun rather than reading to write a monograph: I have no amazing tables and summaries, the way I have for the Medieval literature I read at about the same time. And I remember them by their covers (my favourite series was all purple/mauve), which is not much use at all, when one isn't near the right library.