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.