Goodbye sweet Luna

The most recent message in my inbox is an invitation from Martin to Luna's vet appointment on Thursday afternoon. How things change, how quickly they change.

 It's been over a year since I posted, and I feel like I owe updates, but this comes first.

In September of 2022, we came home from Burning Man to a message from the cat sitter "haha, I guess she's on hunger strike" and Luna not eating. We rushed to the vet, who looked at her moving and noted how much pain she was in. We'd later figure out that the cat sitter had put the lids on the garbage cans in our rental, making a perfect staircase for a bored, lonely kitty in a big apartment all alone. But the vet also said "leukemia" and named some eye watering prices for diagnostic tests. I should remind folks that I had gotten laid off two weeks prior, and that the contractor working on our home had also raised his rates retroactively by close to $200k. We adopted a "wait and see" stance because there simply wasn't money, and with new pain meds she bounced back. An x-ray six months later showed no change in the suspicious lump, and we thought, okay, maybe it wasn't that. 

But she'd started sneezing, and coughing, and her nose had been running... 

This is too painful to recount in this much detail, so let me just say that each time we went in for the sneezing, we got her antibiotic treatment as palliative care, to make her "comfortable for what time she had left". Each time, she also bounced back to her hold self, though she never completely stopped sneezing, not even when I figured out how to mix her antibiotics with churu so she actually got them down. Her eyesight declined. Sometimes she would make alarming noises like crunching cartilage while she ate, and she splattered her food around. She changed what foods she'd accept every few weeks. We adapted. 

Something changed right after New Years. She was having trouble getting into the litterbox. We put a chunk of wood in front of it as a step. Her sneezing increased again, and now it was red tinged. She started to lose weight faster. I left for my first team work offsite into the bitterest week of cold in Toronto in some time, and barely slept the few days I was gone because I had nightmares she'd passed while I was far from home, wondering where I was. I started looking for someone who could paint her portrait.

When I got back, we went back to the vet. Another round of antibiotics, and she bounced back again. We had our January Salon, and she came to say hello to everyone. February came and went. In early March she became withdrawn, her fur spiky, and she started missing the litterbox when she went, or going outside, or in other random places. We went through several different litterboxes to no effect. Back we went.

The vet noted that she was so dehydrated that it was hard to tell what was going on, and we learned how to give subcutaneous fluids. Again, she bounced back nearly to her old self but slower, and her meows creakier. She came upstairs to wake us at 7:15 every morning, she demanded her milk, demanded tap water, followed us around and napped nearby. But she was slowing, and at some point we noticed that while the fluids were definitely perking her up, her belly was swelling. At some point she lost her balance and fell, and from then on stopped getting up on things she could fall off of, and jumping down from anything high up. We put her cat heating blanket on the floor. 

After two weeks I couldn't stand it, and I called the vet on Wednesday and had a long talk where he talked about possibly draining the fluids to make her more comfortable. We went back to the vet on Thursday.

But we didn't go back to the same vet, we went back to Luna's favorite old vet, who'd just come back from maternity leave. After more than a year away, she was shocked at Luna's condition, and made it clear that draining Luna's belly wasn't an option, and that the humane thing was to think about letting her go. She was worried Luna would "hit a wall" soon. She offered euthanasia that day, in office, or any other day as we chose. 

We declined, we wept, we went home with the HHHHHM checklist - which we ran and decided she was fine. Mostly fine. Okay, she was pretty fine, right? That evening Luna lost control of her bowels entirely, twice, and was croaky and withdrawn. We realized she couldn't get upstairs to go to the litterbox, and had been exclusively using the downstairs pee pads. So we started taking her upstairs with us when we went to the bathroom. She was devouring whole cans of food in one sitting, and wandering aimlessly between her favorite blanket, her secret water bowl, and her food dish. When we brought her up on our laps, she'd sit for awhile, then twitch her hind end, and jump down to sit nearby. But she still purred at us and demanded pets and food and love, and we thought - she's not ready. Not ready yet. Maybe she could last out the week I was about to be gone - more work travel - and we'd decide when I got back.

But her belly continued to swell, even though we'd stopped giving fluids, and she'd started to slow down and withdraw again. The vet's words came back to us, that this wasn't going to get better, it was only going to get worse rang in our ears as we watched her waddle painfully back and forth, panting. We fretted about how she'd take me leaving for the week, since she was prone to missing me and withdrawing more. And then I realized that when the vet said "hit a wall" she was not speaking metaphorically, but euphemistically. Because the end-state of the fluid build up was not dozing off and not waking up, but rupture and collapse and pain and terror. We both agreed we would want to spare her that pain.

On Friday evening we filled out a form to request a home euthanasia vet visit at noon.

The last 24 hours have been painful and surreal. We ate pizza, unable to focus enough to cook for ourselves. We thought of all the good times, and all the things we'd miss. And we thought of all of the things we were already missing - her demanding to play with her feather toy, her chasing greenies down the stairs, asking for tap water (the counter was too high for her to comfortably jump down from now), following us upstairs. We even missed the 7am wake up calls.

Neither of us slept well. At 6am I woke to the last lashings of the rain. Tried to get back to sleep, but couldn't stop thinking about "we only have six more hours". We got up, we tried to have a normal weekday breakfast - giving Luna her portion of the steamed milk, giving her my overnight oats bowl. A sunbeam appeared and I took her outside to have a drink of the rainwater from one of her favorite plant saucers. The rain started again, stopped again, and the sun came out. We pulled her up on the couch and rolled her over on her favorite blanket, belly to the sun, and she napped quietly between us as she read. I lit some candles. I opened my altar. At noon on the dot, the vet arrived with a black bag and a basket with a pretty floral lining.

The vet was very kind, and professional, and was everything we needed. She went over Luna's history, her tentative diagnosis, saw her condition and said that we'd clearly done a whole lot for her (gesturing to the rubber-backed bathmats I'd scattered around when I realized she was having trouble walking on the hardwood floors), and we clearly loved her very much. She said we were giving her a great gift, letting her go before she was completely worn down and miserable. She explained what was going to happen, and left us some time with Luna sitting quietly on her blanket, so we could say goodbye while she was still with us, but no longer in pain. She put a rose quartz heart on her as she transitioned, which she gave to us. She helped us take a paw print, carefully moved Luna into the basket and arranged her so she looked like she was comfortably sleeping, and left a booklet on pet grief and a whole box of tissues.

Entirely relaxed and at peace I could see the sweet, sassy little cat I'd first met when Martin and I started dating. She was so beautiful and soft, even at rest. 

I still cannot fully believe that she's gone. 

We stumbled out to feed ourselves and walk in the break in the rain. When we opened the front door on our return I had a heart wrenching moment realizing that she'd never meow to greet us and demand to be picked up and snuggled by her returning family. The grief is coming in fits and starts.

As I sat writing this the skies opened up, and the sun came out, and a huge double rainbow arced across the sky. They say that pets that pass go across the rainbow bridge. 

I think she made it.

Hello 2023

 It's strange but this whole year has been strange.

I've been pretty fully shut-in the last few months, to the point where looking at my car and thinking, at 8pm on a Saturday night, that "huh I could go to Home Depot" feels weirdly revelatory.

I missed my end-of-year sunset photo for the first time in years and years. The whole world has just felt so bizarrely abstract and far off, while I'm laboring under the financial sword of Damocles which is coming soon. I guess I should back up and pick up where I posted to last.

In October I also did not get the next job, not because I bombed the interview, but because they wanted desperately to hire me but needed to be able to make the case to the Board, and needed someone who could just write shitty content until then. The hiring manager literally devoted a 45 minute zoom call to talking to me about it, and telling me that they would be calling me back "in a year". (I mean, it's nice to think so, but so many things change in a year.)

I took a weekend to grieve, breathe, lick my wounds, and recover, and then reached out to the recruiter for the place that had two different writer roles. She wrote back that they'd just had the senior tech writer accept an offer, but that she'd put me in for the staff tech writer role. Whoa, okay. I figured after bombing some of the others, there'd be no way this would be a fit but I'd give it a shot anyway. After talking with a few folks, I was surprised to get, not a writing exercise, but a strategy presentation exercise. I was more surprised to find that, while I wrote my slide deck, I could absolutely answer all these questions because I had done these things twice before. I literally put a "not my first rodeo" slide into the deck. And when I gave the presentation, I managed to get it to 15 minutes and 8 seconds, including having to pick up an interrupty Luna halfway through the preso and continue for a minute or two with her on my shoulder. My final round interview with my now-boss was interrupted by my phone telling me to duck and cover, and a small earthquake. 

It was an absolute home-run. I had an offer in hand, negotiated my start date, and set up benefits.

I was completely gobsmacked. The stuff that I'd been doing for so long at Segment, and which I'd been consistently told I wasn't quite meeting "senior" writer expectations on, is staff writer territory and wow, here I am doing it. I held off my start date for an extra month so we could get "done" with the foundation work and moved back in on Nov 20th.

We were not finished on the 20th. The house shit has been a nightmare since halfway through, and one of increasingly dire complexity. We have about $50k in outstanding bills to pay and I have about $40k left in all my liquid accounts. I put our property taxes on my credit card because I needed to make sure I could pay other bills if they came due in December. It seemed worth the fee to be able to get some breathing room there, but now it's January and I'm going to have to pay a tax underpayment bill, plus pay off all these credit cards.

And the house isn't done. The contractor who dicked us around so badly continued to dick us around, and we had to fight with him to get him to finish the work we'd already paid for. He spent a week trying to tell us that installing the doors and windows and trim wasn't included and hit us up for another $5k, which given that he also didn't reconnect our power, gas, or plumbing, was absolutely enraging. All of those things were explicitly called out in the absolutely extortionate change order he forced us to sign. And it all got mostly done just before it started raining, so we haven't had a chance to do more than prime nailheads - the windows and doors are in their bare-primed wood, most of the windows don't open, and the doors are bare fiberglass. Oh and the sunroom, which was jostled to the point of starting to fall down, is leaking water into the new work. The contractor's promise to get a crew up to seal up the siding came to absolute zero, and the shot siding and window casings all along the back of the house - that's five windows on two floors - are letting in water.

Did I mention we just had an atmospheric river, and that we're expecting another two or three in the next few weeks?

We moved back from the wretched apartment on Market st on Nov 18th, and we moved in to a house with only cold water, and only in the upstairs bathroom. We got hot water and heat the next day and it was a blessing. The plumber spent weeks dicking around finishing his work and we finally had water to all places on Dec 4th, and then he hit us up for another $900 above the $15k already paid, which we don't have. The electrician, who has been difficult to get ahold of but very understanding, invoiced us a $3k for the reconnection work, to be paid "some time in January". The heater folks haven't been back since we moved in, except to check the waterproofing on the new flue, and told me with a wink that we should "pay when the job is done" and not before, and when I asked about a payment plan, shrugged and said "sure". 

And now the walls are bowing around the windows and water is coming in and we're worried that the new wood windows we put in are getting ruined by all this rain and and and ::pant::

It's been a lot. I actually had my first ever episode of something like an anxiety-night-terror, where I fell into a spiral of self-recrimination at 1 in the morning, and some time around 2 started crying so hard I woke Martin up and he comforted me back to sleep.  So on the one hand everything feels numb and surreal and far away, like maybe I'm taking too many antidepressants, but also those drugs are working their helpful-little-molecule butts off and I am grateful to have them.

It's been an atmospheric river situation and I don't know a single person who hasn't had *some* sort of water problem, so I'm grateful for the strong foundation and the concrete keeping the water out, and the fresh new drains that we've installed to take rainwater away. I'm also trying to make my peace with the fact that we've failed to keep out the water - but also that this isn't *new* water damage happening, it's just more visible without the plaster and stager's white paint. The house is still standing.

Hello 2023, may you be less stressful than 2022.

Some updates and some anxiety

 I'm trying with some difficulty to remember when I posted last - it was June? What was going on in my life in June? It feels a little dim and far away.

Shortly after the first pour, our contractor came back to us demanding more money. The way it works in SF, if you piss off your contractor enough they walk, and then you can't get your job finished for any amount of money - so we're basically held hostage on that front. Our project that started out as a stretch, but doable, suddenly ballooned to, essentially, half a million dollars. We finally extracted a ceiling number from them, and figured out how we were going to pay that... somehow. (Spoilers, dipping into capital party of me.) It's taken me a decent amount of time to simply be grateful that I have some reserves I can liquidate still, instead of loathing and fearing that I'm going to have to sell the money I was to use to retire on.

And then things got... weird... at work. One of the engineers who has been a problem became increasingly more of a problem. I was fielding weird emotional requests, while also getting my roadmap towards the product continually filibustered and altered out of all recognition. Then there was a week of almost total silence, while half the company was out on vacation. I was counting down the days until it was my turn to go on vacation - out to Burning Man for the first time since 2019.

The day before my PTO started, they laid me off. 

Mostly I was angry and annoyed, I had so many hopes and plans and we were making progress towards having a functional product. I'm proud of myself for, in the moment, remembering to ask to keep my laptop, and for them to extend my last day to the first of the next month so I'd get another month of health insurance.

And I'm also proud of myself for just sucking it up and putting it out of mind for a bit and taking the damn vacation. I'd missed the desert and the freedom from worry that I get from Burning Man, and it was good to have that week out of time.

Of course reentry was rough. I caught covid in Reno on the way home and was sick for about a week. And then I had to hit the ground running on the job search - except that I realized that having been poached for the last job, my resume was in tatters. So first I started over on that with the help of some truly wonderful friends, then submitted a bunch of applications. And did screen after screen, interview after interview, writing test after writing test. The first one I bombed, mostly due to being unable to focus since I had another test stacked up right after it. I spent the next week regretting and assuming that literally every writing test had been a bomb. I had one job role abruptly close two hours before I was supposed to interview. I had another company ghost me for two weeks and then say that they'd found someone with more API experience. And another company that did some weird swaparoo with their job roles and now has two writer roles out there, staff and senior, and I'm honestly not sure which one they think I'm applying for. 

On Friday I got a call with a verbal offer. I was relieved, but something seemed... off during the conversation. I spent a weekend with a weird sense of relief but also dread, restraining myself from some celebratory, jubilant buying of wishlist stuff and I'm glad now that I did. The offer was supposed to come up "early in the week". Nothing Monday morning, nor by afternoon. By Monday evening I was starting to marinate in panic and self recrimination again. Still nothing Tuesday evening, when the sensation tipped into the adrenaline rush of a prolonged low-grade panic attack. 

This morning I had the hard offer in my email, but it's for literally $30k less than we discussed. 

I suddenly regretted telling anyone I had an offer, and felt like I was being punished for hubris. Immediate and total self-recrimination and a resurgence of the panic-simmer. I took a nap. It sort of helped.

It's October 5th and I'm now going on Martin's health insurance because it's less than COBRA ($980/mo) or Covered California ($590/mo), and I'm grateful that I have the option. But the house isn't getting any cheaper, and I'm starting to find myself slipping back into weird scarcity-mindset ways that are just... premature.

But I've also spent something like $14k in the last month on windows and doors, and I am just a bit freaked out about the stock market - because the stock I have to sell has to be at a price where I'll get enough to cover.

So I'm in final rounds with a place that seems super great, I finished my interviews on Tuesday and now with this panic-simmer of self recrimination, I'm thinking back to all the things I said that could've been awkward or misconstrued, where the interviewer interrupted to redirect, where I kicked myself. I know for a fact that they can meet my salary band and the benefits sound perfect. So of course I'm imagining every minute thing they could've taken as a dealbreaker. There's another promising place, but they seemed slightly lukewarm about hiring someone so senior, and while I really enjoyed talking with the lead, I've only got to the writing test and still don't know how I did on that.

I admit I am spiraling a bit. Writing it out makes me feel temporarily better; the first place's inability to value me correctly doesn't actually mean I'm worth less, just that they're unable to pay. But in this economy and with this level of debt stacking up behind me, my urge is to fawn like hell and just do whatever it takes to get a job. I have never played bluffing games because this is so hard for me. I'm just trying like hell to hold steady, and not let it shake my nerve.

I am really fucking excellent at what I do, and it's not lost on me that I still, even seven years later, still have to tell myself that.

Dark days

There was a moment, alone beside a canal in Oxford, in the summer of 2015, when the warm, humid breeze brought the scent of flowers and fruit and cut grass, along with birdsong and the murmur of the waters, and I thought to myself This is the Thing. 

I've spent years thinking about colonialism, how so many of the world's ills come from a structure of control meant to do... what exactly? To filter money to the top, so that elites could hold their slice of this feeling, of this calm and peace and abundance. 

I've lived in California most of my life, and never understood the desire for more land than you could enjoy, but then you could argue that California land will never have the same lushness of a place that gets, you know, regular water. To me, more of anything becomes more to be steward of. More fences to mend, more brush to clear, more life to tend and death to guide. I've always had a farmer's sensibilities for that. But I digress. 

Colonialism is at its core about greedily (insecurely?) taking more and more, at the expense of others, because you are afraid you won't get your share of the pleasure of life. Almost every other ill flows from this.

We're seeing the roots of a new system of slavery, aided and abetted by the online media, guided by cynical nihilist kleptocrats, and run by Christian Dominionists. They started by dismantling education and continued down a decades-long strategy from there. And yet, there are principles to this inhumane march that we are not quite acknowledging yet: That we no longer acknowledge anything like the sanctity of life; that anyone not white or Christian has no rights, and even among that privileged subset, only men should have the power to make decisions over the life and death of the people around them. All other people are to be food for the engines of commerce; while the tiny fraction of people in unjustly in control enjoy their lives, the rest of humanity exists to toil and breed and bleed to serve them. They want more people, but only more powerless people. The suffering of most for the pleasure of a few. It is the anti-Utilitarianism. 

They want us ignorant and fighting each other, distracted by struggles over who should be able to live their lives and to what extent, from the very real likelihood that this species will not survive the next century.

Because if we're all going to die, they who die with the most memories of pleasure "win".

We must not give up fighting, but we also must not stop taking pleasure in life, be it little or big.

The day after the Supreme Court shows its recent and extreme lack of legitimacy, we must understand - who cares how many people die from gun violence? Someone at the top is getting rich. Who cares how many women die? We will force them to make more.

I do not think the host - the United States of America - will survive this parasite.

The Kiss

 You're all going to laugh, but the thing I've been putting off writing about has been "Our Flag Means Death" which has been, as a queer jaded media consumer, an absolute revelation.

I put off watching it for a long time, despite friends tweets that went something like "Binged this show five days ago and am still crying about it". Or possibly because of those posts, because crying about a thing for that many days seems... uncomfortable? But then there's the implication that it's a good cry and NOW I'm intrigued and...

So we watched it. We spread it out over about two weeks (I think?) because it's really impossible for a person to consume and digest all the nuances of a story in one sitting. Giving yourself a day or so between episodes to think about the content and the trajectory really enhances your appreciation for the story.

But then we got to The Kiss.

...And now I have to backtrack.

There are a limited number of tropes in Hollywood and media in general, for portraying queer people. There's the classic one of the reviled effeminate queer, a la Peter Lorre (who lives on, immortal, as the shape of "wacky villain" in every kids cartoon from the 30s on apparently). There's the dangerous queer, the queer who inevitably dies, the comically harmless queer. More recently, we have the stoic queer, and the coming-of-age queer. 

It is so rare to see stories about us just living our lives, where the queerness isn't either the source of conflict, a dooming plot point, or played for a laugh.

So then there was The Kiss, and I literally held my breath waiting for the punch. Waiting for one of them to laugh uncomfortably, to deny the moment, to go "whoops, what was that" or react with violence or (comic and/or dangerous) unrequited lust. 

Instead it was sweet. No horror, no hurt, no awkwardness, no rejection. Just two men talking honestly, kindly, and explicitly about their feelings for each other.

It took weeks for the groundbreaking impact of that to really settle in, and now I understand "crying about it days later". I wasn't aware how much of a hole in the genre there'd been until I found the thing that patched it. That it didn't matter if they considered themselves gay or straight or what. They're pirates. They defy societal convention - why would they care about these labels?

It is no wonder that this show is inspiring such an incredibly talented and active fanbase. 

And now I sort of have a crush on Taika Waititi.

Over a year

So much has piled up in the last year that it started to weigh heavy on my blogger's conscience, which as we all know ::cough:: just makes it harder to get over that hump and sit down to write. But at some point the missing post starts to hold other things you want to say hostage, and so away you start.

Right around my last post, someone I cared about dumped me for a third time, and I sort of got... too busy. We'd hired that lead writer at work, and some things he passed on to me from the higher ups made it absolutely clear that my work was not valued. That, combined with the chaos of my company being bought by a larger one, and the utter clusterfuck that turned out to be, with turnover and broken promises and the painful process of shoehorning a small startup's tempting benefits into the reduced generosity of a larger company - it made it clear it was time to leave. 

However, in the midst of *this* our long-running search for a home finally bore fruit, sort of. The house took the maximum of our available funds, and took an eyewatering sum to be made ready to live in. We spent May not-really-believing we were in escrow, and June frantically working on the house: new roof, new flooring, new plumbing so we could have a dishwasher, all new appliances (well technically, since the water heater horked at died two weeks in), a lot of new electrical runs so we could safely work from home, and an all new kitchen. That was on top of the usual things like rugs and curtains and figuring out where to put things. I spent a month working from a jobsite, air traffic controlling simultaneous contractors, from a plastic card table in an empty kitchen. 

My delicate neck and shoulders did not care for this bullshit one bit and I started having severe arm and shoulder pain that woke me up and kept me up at night. By the time we moved in at the end of June, I was so sleep deprived and lost that the pain relief of a hot shower in the new place made me *actually cry*. It's been a long walk back from that and I'm still not 100% - but at least we're pretty sure this is muscles and not bone this time.

So, during this time, I gave my notice at the old job. My new lead had taken the day off so I had to give my notice to his boss, who I liked immensely and who'd gotten a raw deal joining a company that'd just been acquired. I was so shot I burst into tears and blabbed my heart about being undervalued and patronized, and she was shocked but saw the truth of that and just asked me not to repeat this to the new hires just coming onboard. 

The moves were absolutely traumatic. The company had refused to come and give an estimate, so we each got one day. We each should have had two; one for packing and one for delivery. M spent my move day at the house overseeing the kitchen installers, who were done, cleaned up and gone, several hours before the moving van even left my old apartment. Unloading at least went reasonably fast. The second day I stayed at the house, making room for M's incoming things - and I thought I did really well! But oh boy. That was awful. The movers "timed out" in the end, and had to dump everything into the house's garage. We spent the next four months deduplicating our things and making run after run to Goodwill to deposit duplicates.

And I started a new job. The first day of the new job started late, because just as I was signing in (temporarily from my own laptop) I started hearing water running in the wall behind my desk - right below where the toilet was. It turned out to be a bent antique lead toilet gasket, but it set me back a bit. Aside from that bumpy start however, things have been going well, and I've enjoyed getting to do all the same things at a 600x the speed of the last place, with people who take my word that these things are needed.

The months sort of flew by, to be honest. We spent a good several months interviewing contractors and trying to relax, getting turned down by the contractor we'd most liked, and having to start over. In the end we signed a contract for a whole new foundation and a bunch of excavation... and then had to sit and wait until people were available. We did things like go camping, and tried to get back to normal as vaccination rates went up, and cases went down. And then there was Delta and everything went back to the way it was before. We attended a lovely (pre-tested) party in Truckee that had some weird relationship dynamics in retrospect, but that was otherwise absolutely wonderful. Odd Salon had its first back-to-in-person Salon and it was amazing and terrifying to be around so many people so close together.

The new roof held up during the bomb cyclone that hit San Francisco in October, and in November our new stove was finally delivered, just in time for us to celebrate Thanksgiving, still in pandemic distance. We had a lovely, quiet Christmas season with lots of baking and cooking and eating. We explored the neighborhood, and joined a gym, and went wine tasting. We attended and spoke at the second in-person pandemic Odd Salon. All this while waiting for work to start on our house.

The original start date had been "in Q1 of 2022" and when I started emailing in early March they didn't have a timeline. Our architect only finally got to drawing up plans in April, and was gone all of May, doing revisions by email late at night Pacific time, from his family's place in Turkey. 

In April my work planned its first traveling offsite to San Diego, and it was absolutely exhausting and unrelentingly work work work, with only dinnertime being the "fun" part. With the international fly-ins, this was just... not great. By Wednesday I was so sleep deprived that we checked into our new, us-paid hotel and I couldn't even explain what food I needed. We had a great pizza and then I went back and slept for a few hours. We spent the next few days enjoying San Diego, though I started to have more and more sinus congestion and a sore throat - I figured one of my typical sinus infections - a few days in. We didn't let it slow us down too much. On the day we returned home, we got an email from our contractor saying they were ready to start in a few weeks and how was our move-out going? I was not in a state to really respond...

It was covid. The next ten days were a haze of exhaustion and sweaty nights and taking sudafed on a timer so I could keep breathing. On the third day I called my doctor to try to get an appointment because my throat was waking me up at night from the pain, and I was coughing up blood and green goo in the mornings. My doctor's office couldn't see me until the next week, and my actual doctor had no openings until eight weeks later. I gave up and joined One Medical, got a telehealth appointment the next day, and a prescription for the anti-viral paxlovid the day after. The next five days tasted like metal, and because of the potential for liver damage, held me off from taking the antibiotics I knew I needed to kick the sinus infection. By the end of the paxlovid and the amox-clavin I felt mostly better, though I still cough and I feel short of breath sometimes. 

During this whole ordeal we were scheduling the piano movers, movers to pack our breakables, movers to empty the garage, the asbestos company to take away the ductwork, and the heater guys to take away the antique gravity heater for a future project. Odd Salon ended, somewhat abruptly, due to health issues among the organizers, right after I started testing negative. We also found and compared a couple of short-term rentals (which I will add is HARD when you have a cat in SF in tourist/intern season) and secured and moved into an eye-wateringly expensive one that gives us a lovely view, and puts us close enough to be able to walk back to the house if we're needed. 

On the last day of May (Ramadan?) our architect returned to SF and finally took our permits to DBI - where they were approved over the counter. A HUGE sigh of relief. We'd reduced the scope to the point where all the things we were adding - drainage, sewerage, a new bathroom, etc, were just "foundation replacement and seismic upgrades". 

So that brings us more or less to today. We're in the beautiful but expensive rental, with the Pride flag out one window and the Pink triangle lit up on the hill out the other side, with Luna contentedly on her chair.

And now I can write about the rest.

A running thread

 I started this post to talk about grooming and didn't even get there.

Because when I found out that my friend had died, it came up in conversation about it with another person that someone I had cut out of my life rather earlier had also passed away (of skin cancer of all things). I realized I'd cut out a large part of my formative social scene because of the hurt (and let's face it, harm) they'd done me over the years. I said something to the effect of "Lot of people who won't hear 'no' in that group". And it hit me; this is where it started. 

I loved the place I went on Tuesday nights to dance to a local band and talk about nerdy things. I felt seen for who I was, I felt supported, I felt attractive, I felt safe; all things that I did not feel at home nor at school. I finally found a place I could take some more tentative steps towards my own erotic fulfilment, and it was mostly with people my own age. But I also endured the advances of some much older men who I did not find attractive, while considering the advances of some men who I did.

We were all subject in myriad ways to the Five Geek Social Fallacies, spread over a community of a hundred or more people. These dynamics are toxic and harmful enough in small groups, but at that size the problem is exponentially worse.

There goes my brain, trying really hard not to think about this again. 

It starts simply enough with affectionate words from a man of the group. These are missing at home and so welcomed, and so is the chaste affectionate touch that follows. With some of them, it becomes less-chaste, but never outside the bounds of some group-understood propriety. You are underage, and you are safe. And because you're safe, you let them do things that maybe you wouldn't let other people do if you didn't know they were safe. A touch that lingers. Some inappropriate comment. You don't notice it slowly ramping up. You are exploring with other young people your age, and you interleave the humiliating and awkward things you do with people your age with the interactions with the older crowd. You're praised for being so "mature" and so in control of yourself. If you stand up for yourself, this approval is rescinded.

I gave up seeking my mom's approval in 2016. It is only now, some five years later, that I realize that the gap where I was trying so hard and not getting it, was a time that left me vulnerable.

I was not sexually assaulted as a teenager. But the simmering anxiety that was bent to someone's (or someones') selfish purpose led to the inability to say no that marked so much of the last twenty years of my life. I said yes to a lot of the things I wanted, and I said yes to things I didn't want, over and over and over again, because I thought it would make me a good person. That gap in the armor made me hyperaware and a people pleaser, which left me open to emotional abuse. I was not sexually assaulted as a teenager, but I was sexually assaulted, regularly, by an intimate partner for several years as a grown-ass adult. It's taken me so long to admit that that's what happened that it's a whole new form of embarrassment to have it out there in the open.

It made me popular (for a time) in a way that I'd never been popular among my peers in school. But more and more as I look back, that time was extremely bounded: between 18 and 23. The five years in which I could still be mistaken for underage; the years in which modeling requests came with a frequency that was annoying, but also rather flattering. The years when I was frequently asked to dance, winked at, pushed, prodded, hugged, fondled and groped.

I am thinking about this because I was thinking about the person I'd cut out of my life who'd died of skin cancer, and how in our shared high school theater classes (he was an upperclassman), he insisted on hugging me. Insisted. To the point that even when I didn't want to hug (when he started getting handsy and I started saying no), he made a joke of it with another guy in the department, and they made me their "hugging post". They hugged me while I stood defiantly stiff and glaring. They hugged me when I said no, laughing and high fiving each other. And then that guy who died of skin cancer wondered why I never wanted to speak to him, once it was made abundantly clear (a few years later when I was of age) what he wanted from me. 

Older men, this behavior is on you. It's not enough to say "sorry, you're jailbait". It is not enough to say "let's not date until you turn 18".  It is not okay to cultivate friendships with underage women on the chance that they might fuck you once they're legal. It's not okay to only withdraw, or threaten to withdraw, emotional support and friendship when they don't want to fuck you. This needs to be taught, along with the curriculum in consent that's now coming to the fore, to every man on reaching the age of 18.

I am now, twenty years later, still crippled with fear in the face of making new connections, because am afraid that I am valued only for sex, and I cannot believe that my desires would be accommodated. Let me say this again. I am nearly 40 and I am afraid to date because I am afraid that the people I form intimate connections with only care about fucking me and will not stop when I say no.

I am unpicking this thread from the weaving, bit by bit.