Couple of unrelated thoughts....

[conuly]

1. While awake this early morning trying to avoid going to bed (boil hurts when I transition between sitting and lying down, or the other way around) I went to Amitheasshole to find something to read and bumped right into a thread about whether or not Stuy kids who were in Lower Manhattan that day are survivors. Which, fuck yeah, but it reminded me of how very sick and tired I am of all the press around Stuyvesant all the fucking time.

I know for a damn fact that there were two high schools much closer, wedged in between Trinity Church and the WTC, and those kids barely got any press at all. They evacuated to Staten Island, ended up at my zoned school in the rush, and the only thing I ever read about them after that I can sum up in two snippets from two articles one about a kid who had a hand fall on him from the sky as he fled, and another about how the two schools, which shared classes normally, had been placed in temporary buildings across the city from each other so that all their specials that they shared had to be changed.

Meanwhile, Stuy gets articles and documentaries all the freaking time, because it's Stuyvesant, and quite aside from the fact that this focus on them to the exclusion of all else is blatantly classist/racist, it's also toxic to Stuy students. But that whole environment in and surrounding that school is very toxic, so what else is new.

2. In retrospect, I'm very lucky that I had my mental health crisis in high school when I did, or else my mother certainly would have been in the city - she switched her hours to be later when I stopped attending regularly. (I might not have been in the city. If I hadn't missed the end of my sophomore year + all the regents I would have graduated on time, a year earlier. Come to think, I probably still could've done it if I'd been willing to heavily load up my schedule and maybe do some independent study. When I did attend Stuy, they actually had to make a rule forbidding students from having a ten period day and no lunch. Like I said, the place is toxic.)

3. Anyway, all this and the boil had me using Eva's weighted blanket which I need to return to her when the weather gets cooler, and that reminded me of something. I used to love getting x-rayed at the dentist when I was a kid because I got to wear the lead apron. It's not worth it to lug a weighted blanket or vest over to the dentist, but I wonder if I could ask him if I could just wear the lead apron when he deals with my teeth? He might say yes!

4. Also that reddit link made me think of 9/11 and I spent the entire rest of the night smelling it which ugh.

Comments

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Totes ask about the lead apron! I bet the dentist would be happy to know it's got additional use.

[readerjane]

I love my weighted quilt. Daughter made it for my birthday one year, though I had to contribute towards the materials - quilting supplies ain't cheap. She had done several smaller quilted items before, and this was her foray into a full-sized blanket.

Definitely ask your dentist. I bet he'll be glad for whatever helps.

Edited to add: I wonder whether there are any dentists out there who go so far as to find out which of their patients would be soothed by the lead apron, and to offer it? Given how common anxiety about dentistry is, I bet they'd have takers.

[adafrog]

{{{hugs}}}

[pauamma]

Re 1- I had to check the layout of southern Manhattan. I hold you responsible for that.

Re 4- I was never exposed to that specific smell or mixture of smells, but I hear you about olfactive memories. Sympathy.

[conuly]

Lower Manhattan, not Southern Manhattan. It's Lower.

Very important.

As for smells, I don't remember if my mother told me this before or after 9/11 actually, or, if it was after, if it had anything to do with 9/11, but apparently for many years after she passed by a place that had been demolished she'd think "That smells like it was hit by a bomb" and one day as an adult (perhaps recently before she told me this, idk) she said "WHY do I say that?" and after a lot of thinking she realized that this is what her mother used to say. Her mother, of course, lived through the War, in Belgium, so unlike my mother she knew what bombed out buildings would smell like.

[gisho]

I have asked for and gotten the lead apron for fillings, albeit at a dentist that bills themselves as 'for people with dental anxiety'. Worth asking.

[pauamma]

OK, I'll take your word re Lower. Thanks. (Do these refer to different areas, did I get my cardinal points completely wrong, or is there another reason like custom or culture why it's that way?)

[conuly]

It's just convention.

Though it's worth remembering that Manhattan isn't really aligned north-south, and what we *call* "West" or "East" or whatever is really offest quite a bit.

[pauamma]

*nod* Thanks. (Sez he who last Saturday, to specify where on $thoroughfare the graffitied Paris public restroom was, wrote "on the South sidewalk, at the intersection with $street", which may confuse whoever deals with the report but is what I remembered for all it's probably offset as well.)

[imhilien]

Hope you feel better soon.

I live Down Under and because of the time zone difference, That Day all happened during the night while I was asleep. That made it a bit extra creepy for me.