It's been two months

I left London. I returned to California. I went to Grace Hopper in Houston. I had a great time. I've been turned down for several jobs which I'm not only eminently qualified for, but that actually need someone with my exact skillset. I've been depressed. I've been happy. I've been depressed some more.

I've been neglecting writing. I've been neglecting the meat-suit.  My baggage shipping from the UK is scheduled to arrive next week and that tells me that I've fucked off for about eight weeks. Wow.

It is really hard to write about any of this. It's hard to admit that I've been depressed, that I've been up and down and terrified because I don't know what the future will hold and I feel utterly at a loss sometimes about what will happen to me.

A few days ago I came across one of those Tumblr posts where people post things that they do to self soothe. One of them was "say something you've been thinking out loud."  Without thinking about it too hard, I said to myself "I think I could make it as an independent producer of stuff". I promptly broke down sobbing, alone at my kitchen at 11:45 in the morning.  My skill set is so diverse it makes employers nervous: I'm overqualified for what I've done, but none of my skills slot firmly enough into defined job roles to make me an easy shoo-in for the next thing I want to do.

My skill set is so diverse it makes ME nervous.

And then I realize that it's true, the quote that I only vaguely recall now - if you're not a drummer, the drummer will always jerk you around. Replace "drummer" with "engineers". And so now I'm also thinking of going to code school. Because I'm smart enough to pull this off, dammit, and I'm tired of not being respected in engineering orgs because of my soft skills.  Seriously.

In the meantime I'm applying for jobs. And trying to wrap up a bunch of other projects. And and and.

T-minus Twelve Days

The boxes that stressed me out so badly are gone. £300 or so and they're on a truck headed to a shipping container headed to a ship, headed to Los Angeles and then in some way from thence to Menlo Park. I might see them a month after I return, or I might be lucky to see them before Christmas.

The apartment feels like a husk. Worse than a hotel room which retains its impersonalness throughout a stay; this was once home and is no more. In some ways it's worse than moving, because I haven't seen the "next home" in so long that I've had none of the visceral, animal comfort of knowing somewhere is next.  Now all I have are two giant suitcases, a really large laptop bag, and a reasonable-sized backpack. All STUFFED with things.

And a luggage scale, I should mention. It seemed as I was packing and weighing and repacking and weighing and putting things into the boxes instead, that I couldn't get even just the things I came here with into the bag and be underweight. Humidity? I guess? I sure won't miss the cold drizzling rain.

Then again, I'm hoping the rain starts up as soon as I get home, to be honest. I've been watching the onslaught of burning in California from afar, watching the Valley Fire creep closer and closer to my old summer camp, watching it spread near friends in Fresno, watching it creep up the ridgeline near my Grandma's house in Twain Harte, and hoping that it stops soon. Seriously, the burnt part of California must be larger than the unburnt part at this point, and with an El Niño coming (oh god I hope it is) we're in for some big, ugly mudslides.

I hope it gets cold, and I hope it rains (or better yet SNOWS) like crazy. But... I could use a few days of summer before it starts up, if that's okay? :\

T-minus Fifteen Days

Today, I folded up my sewing table, and then lugged my lovely borrowed Bernina back to its original owner. Suddenly my apartment feels like someone else's place and no longer my home.

My life in the last few weeks has consisted of inventories and decisions about what things I want to keep and which I will leave here. I'm living more or less out of a suitcase. On Monday, they come to take anything not in the suitcases away, and put them on a boat. I may not see them again until just before Christmas. (6-12 weeks? Really?)

I have a general level of anxiety that is simply astronomical. This is far beyond my usual travel anxiety. I am trying to quell it by smothering myself in friends and last-minute research.

I'm missing Folsom. I'm missing Much Ado. California is burning. The economy is wobbly and it's freaking people out. I'm going to Houston to a huge women in engineering conference where I hope to talk to a bunch of awesome potential employers.

I'm also going to be giving another talk at Odd Salon, and possibly be teaching at Dickens. And I feel like I ought to be looking at grad schools rather than startups, or starting my own company or something.

And at the same time I'm looking out the window of this spacious, airy flat with its view of the spire of the V&A like a pinprick on the horizon, and I'm watching the clouds roll ever onwards with their particularly English alacrity and I am both homesick for California and already sadly nostalgic about leaving this place.

I think it comes down to this: I have lots of things waiting for me when I get back. But there's so little sense of place, of community. Six months of not really talking to anyone has not helped this - I now feel disconnected from the tenuous connections I had - and now I feel like I need to start over. A new living space, a new job, a new... something? Direction in life?  Who knows.

Six to 12 weeks, really?

The Things You Miss

It's fully September now.  Yesterday was the first nice bright day in a little over two weeks, and it feels like somehow during that grey, drizzly fortnight the season changed from summer to fall. I know the retailers felt it, because all of the sudden we're into the rich and muted colors of the fall collections. The trees felt it too: the London plane trees, so bare when we first arrived, so green and leafy betimes, have now begun to shed. First a few, nearly unnoticeable dry leaves skidding about. Now the light is thinner somehow, and a little wan, but it filters through the baring branches nonetheless.

Some part of me feels cheated. I don't feel like I've had a summer to speak of. I know that's empirically, emphatically untrue, given that I've been on "hols" this entire time, and that I spent a full week sweltering in a shop in Old Street, and another week sweltering in Spain, and another week cruising the Mediterranean. But those are active summers, summers without rest, summers that do not allow for such things as relaxing and taking in the views or resting a weary mind.

Besides that, I've missed all of my usual signposts of the turning year. These are the things that make me feel that Time Is Passing (tm) and without them I feel as if I'm in a shiftless limbo.  I've missed May Day, two weddings, the Alameda County Fair, the whole entire 4th of July pyrotechnics season, costume college, a handful of Odd Salons and innumerable dances, picnics, and parties.  As I type this - 10am London time, 2am Pacific - most of my friends are enjoying a final evening after the Temple Burn before they begin the process of teardown, return, and reacculturation post-Burning Man.  I didn't expect to miss Burning Man as hard as I currently am.  And that's not quite all - the Gatsby Picnic, which I attended for the first time last year and which I adored, comes hot on the heels of Burning Man. After that, Much Ado About Sebastopol, one of the few Renaissance Faires that I'll attend with gusto - also while we're still here. And Folsom Street Fair happens just before we return so I'll be missing that too.

I feel as if I'm scraping together spilt sand when I say I'm planning to make the closing weekend of the Northern California Renaissance Faire, hoping to hit Burning Man Decompression, and will definitely be going to Le Bal des Vampires. But right now I'm a little lonely, a little depressed, and extremely temporally dislocated.

As a salve, we've been trying to knock things off our touristy "to see" list, and we've been churning through theatrical shows and day trips. This weekend we got through eight things: The Banqueting House (free as we're Historic Royal Palace members), The Ben Franklin House, a trip to Harrod's, and a pub called The Grenadier, then yesterday we caught the Changing of the Guard, went down to Greenwich and saw the Painted Hall and the Observatory, then came back upriver and rode the London Eye.

We live in an area that is below the Heathrow flight path, though not in the window-vibrating sense that I remember from South City or San Jose. But every time I go outside I see a plane arcing overhead towards the west, and some part of me counts the weeks, the days, until that plane is coming for me, coming to take me away from this adventure and bring me home.

Step 3: Forgiveness

Part of the mantra of this excellent reddit thread is forgiveness when you don't meet your goals.

Please forgive me, I skipped an evening. Okay, two. In my defense I as a) hosting the amazing Marion at my house, and then seeing the *super awesome* Bend It Like Beckham the Musical (which as a theater person I was totally amazed and impressed by).

We had a study session at the Museum of London, which was fantastic - we got to look at a number of corsets from the 1850s and 60s, including some very special ones from around 1853. (I can't spill the details too much!)  It's always amazing to me what a little goodwill will get you - I was allowed to "ride along" on short notice after my first visit a few weeks back when I donated copies of my pictures to help flesh out the museum's database. Turns out, object records in large collections are very sparse, so any information is often helpful. Plus, it feels good to share. :)

We followed that with a walk down through St Paul's Churchyard, then south to the Thames and across the Millennium Bridge, past the Tate and the Globe, under the Southwark bridge, past the Clink and the remains of the Palace of the Bishops of Winchester, the Golden Hinde, and through the Borough Market, then took the Tube and a red bus to visit another of the costume community. I love meeting new folks, especially mellow cheerful, incredibly lovely tea-giving new folks.  It was a delightful afternoon.

Right now I'm taking a break from a marathon session sorting, photographing, and inventorying my mudlarking finds for the export license. I'm about... halfway through, I'd say? The Chelsea finds were the biggest bag, and there'll likely be more of them soonish. (It's been WEEKS I tell you. I am ITCHING to get down to the foreshore again, augh augh augh.) Entertainingly, the gent at the Arts Council who's been so helpful so far took a look at my images and went "hm, we only license items over 100 years old, so you can leave out the 2-pence pieces."  The ones I'd left in for scale. Whoops! He advised me to use a ruler next time, which... makes sense.

I'm still feeling a little queasy after this week's food poisoning, but I'm so, soooo much better. We might be headed to Oxford this weekend, or possibly the Cotswolds for some walking, or maybe to Hampton Court for the tail end of the food thing, or or or... so much depends on the weather, which was gorgeous this morning, but is clouding up again.

It's definitely starting to feel like fall here. It's a little disconcerting because I haven't had any of the markers of my usual year to tell me that the summer is passing by. All of my friends are headed to Burning Man. I've missed Costume College and so much more already, and I'm missing Burning Man and Gatsby and and and...  It's a trade off, and one that feels painful right now, but that I expect will have been a bargain when I look back on it.

Nonzero

It's only almost 1am, but I'm still getting a tiny bit of writing in, so that's something, right? Baby steps. Baby steps.

Feeling much better today, though after I tried eating non-rice items my stomach started gurgling again - so we'll see.

Lindsay linked us to a long Reddit thread on getting motivated, and the thing was called "No Zero Days" - the idea being that you don't have any days when you do nothing.

So today, I did laundry, cleaned up a bunch more of my mudlarking finds so that I can inventory and send the export paperwork, started the inventory for my first box of stuff to send home, did a bit of sewing on my Regency day dress for bath, and finally got up the courage to cut the linen tablecloth that I'm using for the ballgown. I also read and closed a ton of the "interesting article I'll get to later" tabs that'd piled up. So that's not zero.

But now it's one. (See what I did there?)  And I'm going to bed.

Baby steps

I just wrote this to a friend who reached out after my last post: "I think the big thing is to just start writing, even a little bit, every day. And go from there, I guess?" So even if it's just a tiny thing, here is my little bit for today.

I'm back from a whirlwind, exhausting trip around the Mediterranean. It should tell you something when your fitness tracker's weekly step total doubles when you're "on holiday".

And I'm sick with some kind of stomach thing. In the past five months I've vomited more frequently than in the last two years. This isn't a reflection on the quality of the food so much as on the lack of control one has over one's food when traveling and eating out a lot. Some of those things I *knew* didn't sit right. Some of them I sort of expected to come back and haunt me but I didn't have better options.
Not this time though, and this was new (and I'll cut it for those of you who don't want to know):

Fermata

I haven't written in awhile.

Let me start over.  I haven't written in awhile, because I've been depressed and lonely, even among all the wonders of London.

No, that's only part of it. Let me try again.

In mental health circles right now there's this concept of the "media diet", which is to say to cease reading and looking at things that have a negative impact on your mood, mental health, and ability to function.

Yesterday I unfollowed some people on Facebook (unfollowed, not unfriended mind you) because I realized that this is a thing I needed to do.

Here in London I'm basically living in a bubble of silence. I barely know anyone here, I have Mike for company and occasionally meet someone I know from Elsewhere for coffee (or randomly on the tube, or randomly in Kew gardens, etc etc etc). But I have so few friends here and no real way to meet more. I realized that in an average week I talk to three people in person who aren't Mike, and all three are people who I'm buying things from. Occasionally a tourist in the neighborhood will ask me for directions. Once in awhile there'll be one of those bizarre, rare "strike up a conversation with a Londoner" moments. But they're maybe a monthly occurrence if at all.

And so I've done what depressed, lonely people tend to do these days: I trawl the internet endlessly, especially Facebook and things that make me feel more connected to people in my old home. A lot of people have already forgotten me, which was a bit of a shock; in the end having a job that you work 10 hours a day is apparently about the same as moving 5000+ miles away. People don't see you at events and you cease to exist.

But there are some trends in my social network which I just can't handle, to wit, that people on both the left and right are sealioning the shit out of each other, making anyone who expresses even a small disagreement the subject of harassment and emotional threats. This isn't healthy. This isn't dialogue, discourse, or the mature civility that I crave. And in the end what I realized, is that this is silencing me.

I don't want to write about anything substantial because I'm worried what people will say. Not because I care necessarily that they disagree, but because I'm so *tired* of feeling like I'm fighting everyone, like everyone is going to jump all over me for disagreeing. That's silencing. And then recently, for not agreeing loudly enough.  That was the breaking point for me.

I can only take care of one person at a time, and right now that person needs to be me. I've done a shit job of it recently and that needs to stop. I don't have the energy (because fuck you and your fucking spoons) to handle the crises of the entire world; I'm burnt out and it's 1pm in London and I haven't even had a shower or breakfast yet today.

I hope, and please if you're reading this, hold me to it, I hope I can write tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Even little things, even a bit. I have so much research backlogged, and I have so many story ideas simmering along, waiting for me to come back to health.

One Month In

Today is the 6th, and that marks one month that we've been in London.

I'm sick with a sinus thing (or possibly an allergy to sycamore fuzz?) and yet I've been insanely productive. Healthcare paid for, phone topped up, postcards written and sent, dad's packet sent to California, and a good long walk along the Thames in the rain (which I really shouldn't have done) followed with an appointment at a bank about finally getting a UK current account. Oh yes, and my financial wrangling is done for now, so I can breathe a bit easier. (Except for the sinus thing.)

As a native Californian with a worn and drought-idled umbrella, one of the first things I bought was this awesome new umbrella.

We went to Bletchley Park on Monday, since it was a bank holiday. It's much more complex than the movie made it seem, and smaller too. But it was lovely to see all the snippets of lives lived all around the superstar Alan Turing. There were other people who contributed, and we as denizens of the Silicon Valley tend to let that get lost in the shadow of one of the Founders of Computer Science.

Didn't make sitting at Turing's desk any less awesome though.

Also, it's amazing how much the Bombe sounds like the reproduction of the Babbage Analytical Engine.

A rebuilt Bombe.

I'm sort-of killing time before I go take my next installment of anti-gunk medications. Apparently although you can get pseudoephedrine over the counter at any pharmacy, you can't get anything with a delayed-release formula, so you get about a four hour dose, and you're only supposed to take four doses a day, so that's about two hours of creeping ick returning.  Since the sun is pretty fully up at 6am here, I'm just going with a 6am, noon, 6pm, midnight schedule. Also, damn, I'd forgotten how much I hate liquid medicines. Blech.

I really need to get sewing. I really need to get writing. I have a million projects I'd like to really tackle now. And yet I'm sitting here with my head all full of gunk and all I really want is a hot toddy and to curl up with another book.  I have to remind myself that time is not *so* precious that I can't take a few days to recover.  But maybe I'll sit down and write that thing that's been kicking around in my head for awhile.

Makes the World Go Round

It is raining, rather hard right now, in my part of London.

I really wanted to start this post out with a song from Cabaret, but alas the lovely Alan Cumming version that I've had going through my head the last 48 hours or so is not to be found in good quality on YouTube.

When I get really stressed out about things I can't help, I break out in a rash on my hands and feet. Yesterday morning that rash started peeling, so there's that.

I'm doing complicated things with money these days. It's hard on me to realize that even though my income this year will be, on paper, something like three times my normal annual working salary, I've earned a little less than a tenth of it (and I automatically owe half of that tenth back in taxes because I earned it as a 1099 contractor). It's maybe a bit more if you count the two months of unemployment I was eligible for before London. Directly before leaving, I paid half my savings to do one thing, and then another fifth of the remaining savings in taxes. And hopefully by Thursday (tomorrow) I will have made it all back, plus enough to make me feel better about all of it.

London is an Expensive City(tm). And living cheek by jowl to Belgravia, I realize that even working, even at my top income, in the grand scheme of things I am distinctly middle class. Maybe even lower-middle. And the financial institutions have made that quite clear.

I'm trying to take a class at a lovely historical research group. Because they are small, they have a very limited array of ways to accept payment. Their card processor has irreconcilable differences with each and every credit and debit card I've tried. And my small credit union doesn't do international wire transfers, and the external vendor they've "partnered" with only does person-to-person transfers, so even attempting to wire the funds direct from my bank was canceled. Also, I cannot get a bank account here because I'm not a permanent resident, nor can I prove that I reside here - since this is a corporate rental flat, none of the utility bills are in my name, and because none of my financial institutions can transfer my account to the UK, I can't even get them to send me anything at this address. Amex very kindly offered to convert my card to a UK card, which sounded great until the part where they expected me to pay it off each month from my UK bank account, which I can't get. That's okay they said, because you can pay by wire transfer. WRONG. Can't do international wire transfers to a business.

There are a few large commercial banks that allow you to open an account as a non-resident. But because I'm on a tourist visa and thus unemployed, I can't prove my income. And because the complicated thing I'm doing with money hasn't completed yet, I haven't got the large-quantity-of-cash they'd want me to sink into their bank otherwise. The last ditch effort might be to open a joint account through one of these (reputedly predatory) financial institutions with Mike, but the question remains if they'll let me actually use the account since we're not legally recognized as partners.

The end result here is that every time I buy something I have to deal with the surprise of the till-worker, and I have to carry a pen because nobody is used to swipe-and-sign cards here. It also means that unless I can visit enough ATMs in a long enough period to *not* trigger fraud alerts, I cannot seem to find any way to transfer money to take the class that I want.  And also, because I can't prove residency, I can't even get a library card at the local (apparently quite nice) library.

The other result is that I feel like a non-person. I feel like an accessory to a masculine lifestyle, like a housewife - the thing I was terrified of - and I feel helpless and trapped by my inability to manage my own money through no fault of my own.

Relying on Mike isn't the worst thing in the world, but it feels like giving up so much of my independence, even though I know it's not. It feels like making someone hold the straw for you while you drink. It feels like failure.

Seeking Warmth

I always pride myself in being prepared. England has defeated me.

Wait, let me back up here for a moment.

Yesterday, I bought three different jackets.  This is on top of the hoodie I brought, the trenchcoat, and my 1970s tux jacket that I tend to wear as a blazer. I bought three jackets because England has Weather, and as a native Californian, I am unaccustomed to Weather.  Also in my defense the weather absolutely faked me out: it started raining in California as I left, and when I got to London it felt like warm, mild California weather for the first few days. So, I thought, this will be fine.  Then the weather changed, and we had bitingly cold wind which pierced through everything I had, regardless of how many (4!) layers I threw on.

So I spent most of yesterday going around to shops looking for the quickly-diminishing Warm Clothes. I now have three cardigans that I can put on over things. And I have a packable (backpacking friendly!) puffy down jacket. And a £8 Primark rain shell covered in a touristy print of London landmarks... and a navy blue leather moto style jacket.

That last one cost more than I expected (but a fraction of what it was worth), looks fabulous on me, and required a second trip by Underground, a walk from Hoxton to Oxford Circus, and a serious wrangle with an over-enthusiastic stock clerk who started to put the day-hold items back a full two hours before he should've.  Seriously, after I put it on "thinking about it" hold, then raced back to get it, it was gone. It wasn't on the racks, and it wasn't on the hold pile, and it look a very nice cashier who recalled where it'd gone to retrieve it. Thank. God. The lady behind me fell afoul of the same issue, but made at least a fifteen minute tirade of it to the store manager; I was just happy enough to get my awesome jacket and get the heck out.

And then today dawned sunny and mild again, and I sort of wonder if I'm going to have a reason to use any of these jackets for a bit.  Well, no, that's not true - I'm wearing the blue today. :P

And then it was a week

Ha, it's Tuesday night. I've been here a week and I haven't blogged again. My apologies.

I've been busy, and I've fallen into a sort of routine. Mike wakes up in the morning and goes to work, I have a muffin and tea and read email and putz on the internet. And by putz I mostly mean "order things that we need for the apartment" because as much as this is a beautiful example of modern streamlined Euro-style living, it's also missing a lot of things. Like anywhere to put things in the shower. Mixing bowls. Washcloths (face-cloths). Any number of other small, piddling-but-really-irritating things that I already have back in California but that I now need to buy again.

After breakfast, I shower, and go wander the Town. There's a lot to wander.

It's strange because being an Anglophile for so long, so much of London has lived as a pile of unsorted mosaic tiles of places and things strewn helter skelter in my mind. I had the realization that we live nearish to Buckingham Palace, which is next to St. James's Park, which means St. James's Court, which is the place that Mr. Hurst in Pride and Prejudice very patronizingly offers to introduce the superior Darcy sisters into. Or that the perfumery I visited today - the one that I'd been ordering samples from back when I was graduating-from-being-into Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs all those years ago - is in Covent Garden, which is where the brothels mentioned in Fanny Hill and City of Vice were located, and which is practically on Bow Street of Bow Street Runners fame, and I in fact did pass the Magistrate's Hall on the way in.

The little tiles fall into place like colored shapes on a child's sorting toy. Except for me, they sometimes fall six or eight deep, as I recall different things that happened in one place or another over all the recorded history I've studied.

I am a huge nerd.

On day 3 I walked down to Chelsea Bridge and flummoxed by the utter lack of navigable stairs along the Thames, followed the course of the river to Vauxhall, and swept along by the foot traffic over the bridge. At which point I discovered that I was standing right in front of the MI6 building. You know, the one that gets blown up in Skyfall? There's a little walk that runs along in front of it (bristling with CCTVs, naturally) and then it crosses a little boat ramp where - get this - those same amphibious duck boat/busses that give tours in San Francisco push their way out into the Thames. And then there's a snippet of beach, pebbles and mud and ducks and not great-smelling, with plastic bottles and bits of modern flotsam. However, mixed with the anti-erosion rubble are bits of pottery and hundred year old glass, marbles and metal bits and tons and tons of pipestems. I am totally going to do that again and again and again!

We went to the British Museum, and saw an excellent exhibit on forensic analysis of mummies. I was absolutely blown away to discover that fully half the mummies I was familiar with from my childhood obsessions were... right there. There's the possibly-a-transvestite padded-and-painted mummy. There's the "all natural" sand mummy. There's the weird folded Roman child in gilded cartonnage.

And then you turn around and there's the fucking Rosetta Stone.

You walk through the gift shop, and discover that the facepalming ivory queen carving from one of your favorite material culture books is also in their collection. So is a copy of The Great Wave.

It was a little surreal. It's still a little surreal. I'm loving it.

Leaving for London

You leave your home thrice.

First, you pause and savor the moment, that strangely-quotidian, strangely-charged moment where you totter out over liminal space, knowing it won't be the same after this. Then you get to the car to start that first journey, realize you need one more thing, and race back. The second leaving is exasperated at your own sentimentality as you lock the door again. The third time involves discovering that in your attempt to stop most of the "power vampire" appliances from sitting there sucking power while you're gone, you've turned off one thing too many. Another dash back, and some troubleshooting, and you close and lock the door a third time, getting in the car for good this time.

It's not always like this, I'm told. But I do this for just about every costumed event, so it makes sense that leaving for this adventure would be little different.

It begins to rain as you leave. Precious rain that hasn't fallen on California nearly at all this winter, and it lends an eerie melancholy to things that you hadn't expected. That last lunch with your folks, their hugging you goodbye where you realize they're (inexplicably?) worried this might be the last time they see you.

As you taxi toward the north-west pointing departure strip, you get misty-eyed looking out the window at all the landmarks you can name. The Dumbarton Bridge, ugliest of all the bridges, is making you cry. Some part of you worries, like your parents did, that you'll never see this again.

You try not to think about it too hard, and this is helped by the pre-flight mimosa (sorry, Buck's Fizz - they're only allowed to call it a Mimosa if it's got honest-to-God French champagne in it, rather than the sparkling white wine in mine). The in-flight entertainment helps. The four drinks with the rather elaborate meal you get as part of your upgrade package helps.

 You catch a few fretful hours of half-sleep, finally shaking the nightmares of the last few days. You promise yourself you won't be as jetlagged and confused as you were last time. You arrive.


The next hour passes in a state of half-waking deja-vu. The habitrail of the outer Heathrow walkways, the long line of Immigration (this time sadly absent the smoking-hot Olympians who'd preceded you in line last time). The unexpected grilling of the immigration officer wakes you, and you are suddenly incredibly glad that you spent the time to print a bank statement, the address you'll be staying at, and the names and numbers of various friends in the area. The guardedly friendly immigration officer spends a long time asking you where you live normally, who you worked for, what you do, who you're here with, what they do, how much money you have, why you're here, what you'll be doing, and writes (as far as you can tell) every last answer on the back of your immigration card.

He then stamps your passport, admonishes you to always travel with an updated bank statement, and welcomes you to the country.

You reunite with your partner on the other side of immigration, sweaty and shaken, but relieved. The post-adrenaline sag hits you an hour later as you're starting to explore the rented corporate housing flat that's your new home. The bed calls urgently to you, but you're persuaded to go explore on the glorious spring day outside.

London is not the dreary, rainy fog bank you were promised. It's grape hyacinths and exotic ducks sunning themselves in St. James' Park, it's geometric modernist architecture next to two-hundred year old brick façades. It's tourists in chunky thick winter tights buying ice cream and staring at the mounted Horse Guards. It's the cheerful red terra cotta of the ubiquitous chimney-pots, and the bronze horse skeleton sculpture stark against the warm blue sky. It's the cold stiff breeze on the tide-swollen Thames. It's the delirium of seeing sixteen different monuments you cannot name and eight important ones you had no idea where so close together, while still so exhausted that you're pretty sure you couldn't retrace your route, and all with the faint tinge of panic that having a non-working mobile and inconsistently working credit cards gives you.

Eventually you are so tired you cannot read things put in front of you anymore and the constant cheerful voice of the train station announcements makes you want to hide under something and you go home to take a nap. Half an hour later you wake refreshed, and try again. Money converted to pounds, oyster card in hand, and a new sim in its packet in your pocket you go shopping, and begin to feel better.

You only peek at your Dropcam back at home once.  You're officially in London.

On Rebranding

I'm a fairly private person, for various reasons. Part of it is an inherent paranoia instilled by waaay more knowledge about what goes on on the internet than I'd really like to have. Part is that I've done some things that people would consider questionable in the past, and with the current climate of doxxing and garubergroot jackassery, I don't really want to make a target of myself.

Part of it is that I don't have a good pseudonym anymore.

There's a point at which you've lived in a pseudonym so long it becomes more you than your legal name (especially if you have a nice generic one like I do), and thus it becomes easier to find and easier to hurt you because of it. The internet is forever, and the internet is also eternally publishing everything regardless of how you feel about it. (See also: the reasons I don't post videos to fetlife.)

So here I am, with a well-worn pseudonym that is more who I was than who I am, looking to rebrand myself for... for what exactly? So I can write under my own name without fear? So I can write fiction without fear of people trying to doxx me? So I can participate in activism? So I can be "out" about the things I do and the things I'm into?

And once you're into things that are *not* specifically porn - how do you choose a new name?

New Beginnings

In December, I left the company that I'd worked at for five and some change years. It was both my decision and not my decision, and while it was bitterly disappointing in some ways, in many others it was an incredible relief. In the five years since I took refuge in that company from the market crash and attendant recession, the Silicon Valley has changed immensely, and the job I'd found myself doing did not satisfactorily allow me to partake in all the new and exciting things.

I went home and cried.  And the next day had lunch with a friend at Facebook. And the day after, spent an hour and 45 minutes discussing office culture and communications with the director of the San Francisco office of a company that I will coyly decline to name. I've spent the last month reconnecting with people I care about and who are doing really interesting things, and I reminded me of something that you forget during any struggle where you feel like you're fighting for your job:

I'm pretty darn awesome.

To be honest, regardless of cashflow, of shipped product, of office perks and culture and growth, the reason I'd stayed as long and as loyally as I did was the people. My now-former colleagues are also pretty darn awesome. At some point in the midst of a long-ago project I remember having a moment where I said to someone else "even if we were digging ditches, I would still want to be working with these folks". And that's still true. When some of those who'd left before me found out that I'd gone, I started getting texts and emails and offers of support, of interview opportunities, of coffee or lunch or dinner or whatnot.

But I'm not sure how aggressively I want to look for a job right now.

For starters, I'm tired. I've had five years of wanting to do lots and lots of things and never having the time to get to them, and quite frankly the backlog of sleep I've missed out on is pretty long too. I've spent the last month catching up on cleaning, and mending, cooking things I've been meaning to try out, sorting through my sewing stuff, and my ephemera and just generally cleaning out the cobwebs.

But the real reason is that M is going to London for six months for work, and I'm intending to go with him. We're not 100% sure of the dates at this point, but it seems like it'll be in March. This means cleaning and packing will be helpful in case the landlord decides she'd rather have someone else in here while I'm gone and kicks me out. Or to prevent me feeling trapped in my own junk if I come home after six months to a huge mess.

It's big and scary and exciting, and I've been slowly telling people not-in-writing, because I'm afraid that it could still fall through if I don't carefully guard its half-formed shape.  But I'm so excited! And that makes it hard to think about anything other than spending six months immersed in museums and visiting country houses and hanging out with reenactors and eating Eton Mess.

But we'll see. :)