ourself, behind ourself concealed

My boss left and gifted me her armchair, which is blue with yellow stars. I took it home and today I steam cleaned it. I reorganized my room to fit the chair and my book case. I finally unpacked my books and hung my framed things on the wall. One of those is a cross stitch my mother made before I was born; my brother and I have also taken up cross stitching recently, and I love sharing this with them. I picked up Thai food for my roommates and myself. I carried a spider outside and was treated like a hero for this. My dresser is under my window now and Toula likes to sit on it watching cars go past. I trimmed her nails today, which she's gotten so good about. Now she's on my lap. I'm in bed drinking flavored water and eating lemon oreos. The little ball of misery never goes away, but I can watch it roll without chasing it out into traffic.

Tired of witnessing the people I love be so cruel twds each other. Don't understand how they can be so horrible to each other and so good to me, except I do perfectly understand their love puts me under the sword of Damocles. In short need better friends

I don't have the pic on my phone now, but once in an antique shop I found this wooden case of sort of all-purpose farm & pet animal medicines--little glass vials with indications for everything from indigestion to cancer. It was cool but sad. Medical history is difficult to consider, because part of what draws me and I expect many people to medicine is the fantastic nature of it all: We understand many physiological processes, how to detect them via diagnostic imaging/labwork, how to treat them, how and why those treatments work. Obviously many things, even many aspects of broadly-understood things, we are still in the dark about because bodies are insanely complex systems & we've had finite time (and money) to study them; but the further you go back in time, the less and less we knew. For the vast majority of human history medicine was guesswork based off a combination of observation, association, and religious/spiritual/folk belief & it just chastens me to think how powerless it must have felt to be a town doctor with a patient whose illness you didn't understand, grasping at whatever straws the knowledge of the time provided you, watching them fail, unable to even discern if their death was natural or iatrogenic. It's a privilege to live in an era when so much of the human body has been decoded.