Why weep

 It's been a bit.

Overall, I cannot complain. And yet that's all I want to do. 

I'm in this weird place where everything should be fine, but I'm just feeling so anti everything. All the things that normally sustain me in the real world are moving online and I find that they just have no savor at all there. Is it work? Is it me? Is it pandemic? Is it anxiety?

I'm sitting here writing around the edges of what's really bothering me, and it's hard to get it out so consider this bit above a preface.

I almost didn't survive 2017. I had (have!) the love of a wonderful man to prop me up, and it's been hard to admit how close I came to... whatever I would've done. I didn't, and I didn't really get *that* close in the end, but there were moments when I was thinking about how broken I was (am?) and how little point there was (is?) to living. And in those moments it was hard not to see a continuous trail of how I've bent and contorted myself to meet the whims of men who do not deserve me, in order to get their approval. What happened to the girl who stole the heartthrob of summer camp one year, who saw a boy in passing at faire and took him for her own... not once but twice? Where did the girl who owned her own sexual desire go?

I had the most surreal experience this weekend. Saw a painful ex in a photo feed, and did my best to delicately enquire if I should unfollow for my own comfort. The friend said he was now housemates with said ex, but he knew the ex and I had dated and it ended poorly. My reaction was that I must've drunkenly told him about it at some point in the past, but no - he said he'd heard about it from the ex's current partner. My reaction was to brace myself for impact; nobody could ever even want to be friends with someone like me after having a Laura-breakup recounted third-hand. I can imagine how each man I've dated and stopped dating has somehow blamed me; and for several I don't have to imagine because they told me to better twist that bitter knife.

But I was wrong. The ex's current partner knew about me because... the ex knew he'd been horrible to me and told her as much. That dislodged something sharp in my chest that's been rattling around wreaking havoc for the last few days. 

So here I am drinking bourbon on the living room floor and weeping, and writing about it.

How many men did it take to break me? We talk about the "body count" of a slut, but I wrote once long ago about how every single one takes a piece of me away with them. How much of me is left? How many scars upon scars are there, how much of me is real anymore?

There was the one who didn't want my love; the one who wanted it but only if I gave him everything and took nothing in return; the one who loved me back but rightly ran to face his own demons and left me to face the former; the one who couldn't see me for who I was; the trio of spawners in their succession - one who thought I was too young, one who thought I was too fat, one who thought I was too fat and too old; the one who couldn't face what he wanted from me; and the one who wanted and also gave nothing.

I have gotten by all these years by erasing myself from their lives, their bodies, their heads, their beds. Silent, like a secret, asking nothing in return, inoffensive, transparent as a breeze. Feed me the crumbs of your regard and I am your Echo, trailing voicelessly behind.

Where am I, when I am not reacting to layers upon layers of trained-in him-pleasing? Who am I anymore? Where did she go?

I didn't expect to find, three years later, that I am still so broken - but I suppose it's to be expected when you never take care of other wounds and simply pile more hacky work-arounds and compensation around the butcher's bill of broken parts. 

And how much of this is my upbringing? How much is that I've bent myself over backwards for decades to please my blood kin, and when that was impossible sought others who I might have better luck with? Why am I trying to fix everything for everyone?

I had a Silicon-Valley-conversation long ago, with someone far more well-adjusted than I, about why I would never pursue eternal life: my desire for my own annihilation is too strong to contemplate eternal life with anything more than horror. Why would I sign up for more of this suffering? (And to my lack of desire for children - why would I condemn another soul to join me here in it?) 

When do I get a break? When do I get to feel whole, and purposeful again? When will I not be fighting my own body, my own brain, anxiety, the capitalist system, greedy other humans. My legacy can only be something small in the end; a terrible place made - if only temporarily - slightly less terrible. I cannot take care of myself but at least I can nudge the threads in my network towards happier, stronger, better. I can do good works now, regardless of if they'll be remembered when I'm gone and that must be enough. 

But here I am, an avowed terrible person, still taking every little thing as a personal attack. Nothing feels safe, nothing feels secure, even when I know it to be so. I feel so utterly incapable of joy right now, and it's a bit of a spiral. I don't want to pursue joy for fear of rebuff, so I'm scolded for hiding.

---

I'm looking forward to getting away from this malaise. A few days of sunlight and trees, fire and dirt, and no more of this ceaseless clammy gray.

I've had this tab open for three weeks now

...trying to start a post.

I'm surviving, but I'm not doing well.

Collectively, the US has decided that since it can't coordinate a response, the only way out of this mess is straight through the meat grinder. Lockdowns are partially lifted, infections are spiking, but there's no going back now. Our best hope appears to be to get in line, get it while there's still hospital capacity, and survive.

So here we are, four months in, with no answers and no firm date to look forward to.  (Except haircuts, allegedly coming July 13th.)

It's hard to write about how I feel, because the overwhelming dread has been replaced with a numbness, interspersed with random crying jags. It feels like those nightmares where you're running away from something, but the harder you run, the stickier and more gelatinous the ground gets, until you're exhausting yourself to move at all and the thing you're running from is catching up behind you and...

I'm told that this exhaustion is called "allostatic load".  It sucks in normal times, but I think it's really starting to wear on me doubly around now.

Housing is scary. My landlords went from shitty-but-sure-whatever, to hostile over the course of a few weeks. We're now looking to buy a place. This is not *decreasing* my stress level by any means.

I find myself getting into an anxious-avoidant media consumption loop, and it's sapping my productivity which increases my anxiety. I feel like I need more time off and I feel guilty about it, which makes me feel bad, and I feel bad for feeling bad; whenever I start having meta feelings you know it's becoming a problem.

Work is... work? We're hiring a "lead writer" which... I can't even describe the fear that goes into this process. We're trying to work while the US slowly collapses into a fascist regime and it often feels like polishing the brass on the Titanic, but possibly also looking into a deck cannon.

I should stop there and try to get some sleep. My circadian rhythms are entirely shot, and I'm worried I could be getting sick.

Object Permanence

My boss ordered me to schedule time off, and to put a walk outside during daylight hours on my calendar. It's been working; I've gotten out, and though focus is still like trying to contain and recollect a bucket of bouncy balls, my mood has softened a little and I *feel* better generally.

I've been walking from my apartment at 20th and Judah down to Sunset and back each day. If I have time, I'm sometimes going to Andytown, the last coffee shop open around here, for a slice of something like normality. They're a few blocks from the ocean. Tomorrow I think I'm going to go all the way down to the beach, find a sand dune to sit on, and just not be here for a bit.

While I walk, I listen to music. Not because I want to, but because it makes the brain weasels shut up for a bit. I realized, and this is perhaps a sign of something neurodivergent about me, that for the most part I've lived my life in silence since May of 2017. It's honestly not great for me. Most people turn on music or the radio or something, but I realized I don't feel the need to do that because there is always a snippet of something or other running on an endless loop in my head. I'm not sure what exactly changed. The breakup was traumatic, but... was it so bad as to permanently alter my brainmeats? Maybe? Or is this one more thing that points again to "perhaps you should get assessed for ADHD, you nutty hyperfocuser, you."

While I walk, while the brainweasels are drowned out by pop songs, I finally have the chance to think.

It's really strange how fast all of this has become routine. It's also really strange how thick a layer it is, of "feels routine" spread over a fast-moving current of terror-fear-grief. It's amazing how fast we all went from our normal lives to standing in line for flour and eggs, to cooking with what we've got instead of what we want, to staring out the window and doing all of our social interaction mediated by an electronic service. And yet, almost anything will make me cry right now. Not just eyes-watering, like my normal emotionally-close-to-the-surface self, but sobby, streaming face, uncontrollable ugly-cry.

... Okay and there I go again.

On Monday March 16th, when Mayor Breed was making her announcement along with the six other Bay Area county leaders, I was in a grocery store. It was a remarkably quiet, but tense store, and as word got out that we were about to go into lockdown, people started *jogging*. I realized, standing in line, not knowing what was happening or what would happen, that I was shaking, and my chest felt tight. 80% of the way into a panic attack in a grocery store, but I also realized that if I lost it and started crying, it might crystalize the situation and make things considerably *worse*. I waited in line, shaking. I paid for my groceries, got into the car and drove home. And as soon as the garage door closed behind me, I started to sob. It took me a good few minutes to stop, and I've long since realized that when I start doing this, there's nothing I can do but hang on until my meatsuit is done with it.

I keep thinking back to the Tom Hanks movie, Captain Phillips, and how everyone was amazed at the lifelike depiction of comedown-shock or safety shock. I feel like this is what I'm getting, in bits and blots, any time I acknowledge what's going on outside. At 7pm this evening, I heard a bunch of weird sounds outside; when I realized that it's the "applaud for our medical workers" thing I lost it and had to go inside. Fundraisers for the things that I love are making me cry. I donate, and it feels pitifully small and insignificant, never enough, and I'm afraid for them, and I cry.

But walking, in the afternoons, it all drifts away for a time, and I have to thank my bizarrely wired brain for this one bit of peace. I think we're all waiting in a state of trusting object permanence. Object permanence is something we learn around 6 months old, which is that things continue to exist even though we can't see, hear, or otherwise sense them. In the bright sunlight, walking in the chilly April sea breeze, I can forget that these things are in danger, and I can revert to how I've always been: I trust that when this is all over, I can look for them and they'll be back. I can't see them now, or drink their drinks, eat their food, listen to their songs, watch their dances, hear their speeches and performances, feel their care, but I can trust that they haven't gone away forever.

But I don't know if that's true.

The good news is that San Francisco seems to have flattened its curve; our hospitals are seeing huge ramp-ups in covid-19 patients, but we haven't (yet?) gotten to the point where we've got more sick people than capacity for them, and the current modeling seems to predict that... we might not ever get to that point. New York, on the other hand, is loading refrigerator semi trucks with dead bodies. New York is being hit hard, and fast but I wonder if this means they'll see the peak and begin to recover faster? San Francisco's estimated peak date is 24 days from now; I worry that every little thing I love will begin to wither on the vine, sustained only limpingly for a few weeks by our collective charity before succumbing to greedy landlords. People are thinking about the tyranny of landlords right now. I can and still do hope for some sort of centralized edict of rent and mortgage pause and forgiveness.

The centralized response has resembled more of a chaos-monkey script than an actual attempt to be helpful. But in contrast to the grandstanding, showboating, and profiteering of the current federal administration, we're seeing the seeds of a new federation, new cooperations between governing entities. It gives me the tiniest sparkle of hope.

Everyone wants to find something, anything, that they can do. We've got hundreds of people making masks, every university and makerspace is 3d printing ventilator parts and making homebrew DIY PPE, anyone with contacts in China is desperately trying to import supplies to distribute to hospitals, people are organizing in the neighborhoods to protect the vulnerable, organizing the feed the front line workers, and just plain ol' organizing (fuck yeah, bring back the unions). There is a real possibility that this crisis will help undo the distancing, disconnection, and suspicion of one's neighbors that social media (and its manipulators) have wrought, even while we're standing 6 feet apart, prevented from hugging or singing together.

And that's an interesting change as well - when everyone is apart, everyone is together in being apart. I've attended a bunch of digital events with friends I never get to see; geobreakfast, classes with my favorite yoga teacher who I haven't seen since 2014, impromptu jazz concerts from musicians I'd never heard of until now, livestreaming zoo animals, plays, concerts and productions that I'd otherwise never get to see in person.

I have to believe, for now. There's no use and no sense in breaking down until after the damage is done and we're safe again; only then can we take our grief and rage and turn it into something productive.

Fear

They say that we're living in historic times, and we should journal.

Well, okay. It's been literally a decade since I fell so hard into work that I forgot to write, and I forget how much it feeds my soul. But this has been hard, so hard, and it's not making it any easier to write about.

Let's start with anxiety mixed with survivor's guilt: I still have a job, I can still pay rent, I still have healthcare and groceries and I can pay bills and my home is pleasant and lovely.  I do not appear to have contracted the virus in the many pre-order activities we did.

We're now approaching a full month of shelter in place, and while I find that I'm starting to finally hit my stride in taking the time I need away from work, I'm also finding that the fear and waiting is ramping up, not down. The list of things I want to keep alive and somehow preserve keeps growing. The number of places and services, events and providers who I want to support is growing longer and this doesn't appear to be stopping any time soon. I am afraid that so much of what I loved in the last few years will be gone when we all are able to poke our heads out of hiding. I am so scared, and so overwrought, almost anything will make me cry and I *cannot* seem to stop.

And I'm not even on the front lines. I can't even imagine what's going on for my friends who are healthcare workers, delivery drivers, other essential services. I feel helpless and useless and terrified, and I see all the dreams and plans I had, that others had, foundations cracking in slow motion as the rentier class demands its pound of flesh, crumbling a little more to dust each week. What the opera, theaters, the little independent movie house that serves truffle popcorn, of our favorite Indian places, the all-beef ramen shop, our favorite coffee shops, the tiki bars we've come to view as home? What of the sweet lady who cleans my house, my acupuncturist, chiropractor, the fine arts museum and the science museums and the MOMA, the botanical gardens, the antique fair, the bakery that makes the amazing cinnamon bread, the coffee shop that holds kink events, the tech writer conference, Burning Man? What of the home of our own we'd thought to buy? What if it's all gone when we reemerge?

I am sitting here adrift, despite my own comforts.

Life in the time of Coronavirus

On Thursday morning, my CEO sent a Slack message to the company ( 🙄) telling folks who hadn't already started for the office that they now had the option to work from home, and that, from Thursday on, we were encouraged to work from home. On Thursday afternoon, my team waved to each other and said "hey, see you in two weeks."

We worked from home Friday, and it was fine. We worked from home Monday, and it was fine, but the stock market kept butting into everyone's day. Today, Tuesday, my new work-ordered monitor arrived, and I have Coronavirus alerts coming into my feed every fifteen minutes or so. (The stock market, showing what feels eerily like Gibson-predicted instability, appears to have spiked up in recovery, only to tank again after hours. I have to wonder about the volatility of the markets since 2016. Are we being tinkered with by forces from alternative continua?)

It's hard being here right now.

Since my last blog post here, I've settled into City life. We've gone out, we've stayed in, I haven't made any new friends per se, but I've been happy and contentedly active. In the past two weeks we went to the SF Symphony twice, visited our favorite tiki bar a few times, gone to a lecture and movie, and did a number of other social things out and about in the City. And now we're all waiting, fretting, to see if we're part of the 14- or 24-day cohort of covid-19 incubation. Because we know that, like the killer in a horror movie, that it's out there somewhere, and also like a horror movie, not everyone is going to survive this.

And yet it's spring. Last night was warm, and the supermoon hung over Mount Sutro like an orb spider in her web. Someone's backyard trumpet flowers are blooming, and the smell comes in through the back kitchen door in the evening.

But the muni trains passing in front of my front window are empty at unusual hours. The commercial district two blocks away on Irving is quieter than I've ever seen it; the businesses open shorter hours, with wary proprietors tucked behind glass and masks and blue nitrile gloves. We're all watching the numbers rising, wishing that there was some way to know if we'd been exposed - but the absolute lack of testing in the state has made it impossible to do anything but wait.

So in the meantime, I'm doing what I can in order to find something beautiful at least once a day, and photograph it. If you follow me on the socials, you'll start seeing them, and I'm going to try to post them here, as well.

Algorithmic Loneliness

Hello, friends who're just finding this blog. It's funny that, after all this time dithering and missing LJ, I've just gone and YOLO'd into posting my most intimate personal life for anyone who hasn't got the foresight to look away. ;)

I've lived in San Francisco for six months now. And... I didn't think this was likely, but I'm more cut off from folks than ever. I started thinking about it - I see that friends are gathering, I see that things are happening, but I have no idea when or why. (There are also a lot of events I see happen at which I feel unwelcome, but that's another story entirely.)

Some time in the last month, Facebook  or Google discontinued the FB-Events-feed-to-Gcal integration. Is it a bug? A Product choice to make people look at the Events page, thus increasing DAU (daily active users, for those of you so blessed as to not have to think about these things)? Since the feed apparently still works with iCal, is it some sort of competitive maneuvering between Google and FB? All three? Possibly. But the end result is the same - I no longer know what's going on, and it's made me take a hard look at the infrastructure of my social life.

Years ago, we used to plan our lives on Yahoo Calendar. These days it's GCal. Evites went out by email, and we added them laboriously to our To Do lists. Blogs were written, invitations to those who found them. Parties were had.

Now, we have better technology (automatic add-to-calendar! feeds of events!) and yet the experience is so much worse. Why? Ads have broken the internet.

Spammers are ruining email. (Spammers send ads on an incredible scale for marginal return, but since the services are "free" and the tools are easy to come by, they're happy to hydraulic mine the virtual world.) An acquaintance of mine maintained a Google Group for mailing invitations to her (very popular) annual event (she'd outgrown the threshold where she could use her normal email client), but at some point she ran up against the limits for spam reputation scoring. She'd send the invitation, and suddenly her account would be locked down (rate limited). Only a third of the emails would be delivered (SMTP ban). In the end, she split the invitations into more groups that were below the "bulk email" threshold - but like so many of us in the small-Silicon-Valley, she has more than two thousand friends (including partners and plus ones) who'd be welcome at this party. Last I heard she was considering a newsletter service like MailChimp to get around how we've broken email.

What about commercial invitation services, like Evite? Evite is clearly struggling to monetize - they need clickthrough on their emails to make sure that they get their ads served, and so the "invitation" is now an envelope, which you must click, and then click again, and then a third time (three pages of ads!) in order to read the details and RSVP. If there's an "export to calendar" link I haven't yet found it. And this explains why, in an age when, when making a dinner reservation I automatically have it on my Gcal in seconds, and when my partner's arrival gate is on the calendar minutes from their plan touching down, Evite, Green Envelope, and other commercial services will never add this convenience feature. Which means that in the deluge of email, if I miss one that contains an invite, I'm effectively not invited to that party. (There are of course edge cases with spammers sending Evites to think about... but guh.)

There are Public Gcals, but nobody has time for that, somehow. There are RSS feeds, but it seems like since the death of Google Reader, so few people are actually willing to shell out a few bucks to maintain continuity of feed.

No, let's call it what it is - integrity of feed. When companies started dicking with the chronological order of information in order to show more ads, they broke... everything. We've got dark patterns, corporate skullduggery, and human suffering as a result.

So now we come to Facebook Events, and why I don't like to use them.

Facebook events are subject to The Algorithm. I noticed this the second time I tried to host a birthday party - Only about 1/3 of the list was actually shown the event. You can imagine how that felt. And yet I tried a few times to host birthdays this way - at one point I had thirty people RSVP and six show up. Two years ago, three people. Last year, none but my partner. So this year I messaged some people who were local, and who wouldn't be too put out, and I put an event on my Gcal and I invited the eight of them *by email*. It was the best birthday in years.* At some point I can't blame this on having shitty friends (though there's literally a meme about "The San Francisco RSVP") but on algorithmic meddling.

I also work with a few groups who put on semi-professional events, and I've seen where the Algorithm gets its hooks in to monetize. "That's a lovely event invitation you have there. It's a shame if something were to... happen to it. Maybe you'd like to buy some... ahem... insurance for it? Say like $5 in promotion? Look how many more people will see it!"  That works for the first event, but the next event it's $8, and then at some point it's $20 and the service says "Oh huh, you should just get a monthly subscription to promotion services! It'll save you money!"  Not today, Satan.  Every single person on our list is here because they specifically signed up, and you're holding our audience hostage?

In the end, most of these groups I've recommended get... a email newsletter service like MailChimp, so that we know that the people who want our notes actually get them.

It's interesting, because post-Tumblrgeddeon, Patreon is also building what's essentially a cul-de-sac, walled-garden shadow RSS service. I should also mention that post-Tumblrgeddeon, I *miss* seeing content (however inane) from my friends, and knowing that they're out there.**

So here's my request to you - email me. 

Let's go low(er)-tech for a bit. We'll start a conversation, and I'll invite you to things. No ads need be involved.



(* Modulo some health stuff which I haven't blogged about.)
(** Though if I can't tell your posts from sales pitches, it's not "friend" content. That's a blog for another-'nother time.)

Return

Well, it felt good until the bubble popped, at least. 

Work has been frustrating, but apparently not just frustrating, but the person I'm reliant on's inability to hit deadlines is actually endangering my employment. I'm pretty freaked out. I'm being given another task to prove myself, but... It also feels like I'm being given enough rope to hang myself.

Time will tell, I suppose.