One Month Post-Op! What I've been doing + a movie review.
I watched David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future last night. As a person who, and there's so much here I might as well break it out into bullet points...
Has a long-term relationship with both chronic pain and chronic loss of sensation.
Has multiple food allergies and digestive disorders.
Had a laproscopic hysterectomy just one month ago.
Where they found the second rare, non-cancerous growth my body had produced.
which immediately made me consider our capitalist culture's relation to rarity and worth, which is openly discussed in relation to rare body growths in this film.
Has tattoos.
Regularly attends the kind of performance art the movie is constantly referencing.
Has been a fan of Repo! The Genetic Opera for 20 years now.
I thought it was absolutely hilarious. I loved it. I will likely re-watch it a few times.
I'd imagine my laughing my way through this movie (after the opening sequence, of course) would come as a surprise to... just about everyone. But first of all, the movie is pure camp. It doesn't have the campiest of visuals, like Repo!, but it's absolutely just as campy. Secondly, Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart both play awkward weirdos so well they don't even trigger my social anxiety response, which is incredibly impressive (or maybe they do and I was just laughing through it). Thirdly, absolutely all of the philosophizing all of these characters are doing about a science fiction topic are thoughts I've had that are very real to my life in the here and now, so seeing them presented in a fantastical way really struck my funny bone for some reason.
And while the chair looks like Geiger designed a highchair for adults, after I spent a particularly sleepless night last night thanks to being VERY overdue for a steroid injection in my damaged sciatic nerve root, I want the bed. It FLIPS you?? I have literally trained myself to not move in my sleep, and instead wake myself up if I need to adjust my body, after flopping around in my sleep gave me a major back/hip injury. I want that goddamn Lovecraftian walnut shell bed. Speaking of the bed, they never really explained the technicians' motives, that's my one main complaint about the movie. We understand the purple candy bar cult's motives, we understand New Vice's motives, and we understand both Whippet and Timlin's motives... but not the tech duo. And they were fun characters. They were all fun characters, really.
Anyway. It's been three weeks since my last post-op update.
The first week and a half or so went as well as to be expected, I did start spotting a little when I started picking my activity up a bit... doing a small load of laundry, making a batch of snack balls (more on that in a minute), etc, etc. Which, I thought was fairly expected considering what I had been told about how to gauge my activity during recovery, but when I went in for my first post-op and not only was my blood pressure elevated but my gyno was concerned about the spotting... never mind, complications have arisen. A visit to my PCP and a change in how I take my blood pressure medication fixed the problem, and I finally feel like I might actually be cleared at my six-week on the 18th. Which I can't believe is in just two weeks!
As for what I've been doing with all that down time... I've been compiling recipe zines. Three zines, to be specific.
I've been wanting to get into recipe zines for some time, before my current diet, even, and my Canva account is full of discarded ideas that I either couldn't bring together or couldn't get excited about.
Why zines? I missed out on the birth of riot grrl in the 90's because I was too young and too Midwestern, but I found zine culture very soon afterwards, and have been following it ever since. My career taking me into the "cool media job" where I actually worked in producing magazines not only gave me a lot of insight into the nature of periodicals in general, but also in how to communicate in brief, collected short-form. And I was in this job when I was introduced to and started working with the Standing Rock Movement and learned the ropes of decolonization, too. A traditional zine is something I can publish very easily with my available resources, and is a useful format for sharing recipes - recipe pamphlets are a classic vintage kitchen staple.
I just never had a "voice" for my recipes until now. I've known that my diet is too useful to market just to the allergy community. But exactly how to do that was the issue, how do you market a diet without the most popular foods in it to a wide audience? Particularly when "diet" has been the most fraught word in the culture for decades, long before my existence.
So, I'm over here living my best decolonized life, organizing my clothing swaps, and wearing the clothes I find at the swaps to drag bingo, where I'm bringing along a homemade charcuterie board to munch on while I play...
But it took consuming just the right content and having just the right conversations with the right, random people to put the diet together with the rest of the lifestyle, and figure out the pitch.
The pitch? Decolonize Your Diet, Feed The Revolution.
You may have already realized that my blogging is hyperverbalizing my way through an idea, in essay format, to a faceless audience (I'm one of those internal dialogue people, "talking to myself" is always kind of complicated...). So, I already kinda worked this out in a post about a week ago, but here's the full elevator pitch:
Fuck the corporate conglomerates. We're always told to boycott Nestle, but when Nestle makes EVERYTHING, what are you supposed to eat? This. This is what you're supposed to eat.
You're eating like the human being you are. That means, very satiating quantities of low calorie, high nutrition foods. Are there food rules? Yes, see point 1. But those rules prioritize a diet that regulate leptin and ghrelin production and release, so you can truly eat intuitively, and focus on energy, and health, and things that aren't food and hunger, not restriction and size.
Is it "gruel"? No. I know how to season food, thank you. I don't even rely on seasoning mixes, for the most part. You're about to have a very plush spice cabinet.
High nutrition food produces real, lasting, quality physical energy with no drop and no chance of addiction. This means you have the extra energy to put into organizing around social justice goals.
This is the most affordable diet an American consumer can eat right now. It's also easily scale-able for community food situations, like potlucks, cookouts, disaster relief, organizations... I understand there's a dad-type at Gathering of the Juggalos that hosts a free meal tent all weekend, if he wants to message or email me his address, I have some very scale-able vegan recipes to send him in zine form. Same for anyone who runs a community food outreach like that, drop me a message, I want to send you some free recipes.
When I was an anthropology student, any kind of extracurricular Anthropology Department event focused on two things - a guest speaker, and food. The guest speaker part is obvious, the food part is because anthropologists understand - and take great pains to teach by demonstration to their students - the social importance of sharing a meal. Potlucks aren't just traditional, they're an ancient social custom, and social organizations preserve them as a bonding ritual very deliberately. Having accessible community recipes is a boon for social justice work. The people who eat together, stay together.
As for the three zines themselves...
Feed Yrself: the intro guide to a decolonized diet switch. Features around 20 fully from scratch recipes for iced lattes and other drinks to fill 40 oz tumblers that don't use artificial ingredients, a pumpkin spiced latte syrup made with natural sugars, various breakfast concoctions of oatmeal, seeds, fruits, natural sweeteners, and dairy/nut/soy-free yogurt that can be made in a microwave, and seven nights of flexitarian dinners prioritizing beans, rice, polenta, barley, and minimally processed meats if used. There's tomato-free spaghetti & pizza sauce, and tomato-free barbecue sauce. For dessert, there's cacao cake, and raw pudding and ice cream. And I share my dough recipe that will make you break up with the bakery for good.
yr Auntie Cooks Seventh-Day Adventist Favorites! : I cooked my way through religious and diet trauma, and ended up with high-protein, low-cost, incredibly scale-able vegan foods without any dairy, soy, or nuts, that can serve a family of four on a weeknight, or a gymnasium of 400 after a flood. If we're talking food + social justice, you can't get more useful. This has another 20-ish recipes.
Eat My Balls: my family's favorite snack, that I now make a double batch of around twice a week since I developed the recipe, is a canned bean, ground seed, raw coconut oil (which, I can't control if you infuse or not before using in the recipe...), and either ground cacao or oat flour based snack ball with natural, nutrient-dense sweeteners, fruits, spices, and all kinds of goodness, that only take a food processor to whip up, and a bit of time in the refrigerator to set to a truffle or cookie dough kind of consistency. And you can't beat the middle school puns. It's full Christmas 1998 again. This is a mini issue, so far there's 8 ball variations, which I'll probably stay at since the number as written looks like a pair of balls turned sideways.
When it comes to the practicalities of things like printing, assembling, distribution, and cost/price I haven't quite gotten there yet. They will be a bit heftier than the average zine, since I'm insisting on 16 point Open Dyslexic font, for ease of use. Details forthcoming, of course.
So, that's my update. August 2026 was... quite a lot, but it sure was productive.
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