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. :)

Burning Man 2014

This year definitely ended better than last one - no traumatic eye injuries, short Exodus, good fire, minimal drama (handled mostly like adults). But there was certainly a lot that was minorly disappointing. I won't dwell on that however.

There's something that I've been realizing though - some years back I stopped taking pictures, trusting to the world that they'd get better ones than I could hope to capture. And ever since, I've been basically absent from the online world, existing as a ghost or a silhouette in the periphery of other people's photos. Some part of me decided back then that anyone else would have more interesting and important things to say (we're talking years ago now) and, again, I've basically stopped existing for a lot of my friends. Out of sight, out of mind. Time to stop doing that.

So part of that is blogging again.
SO!  I'm writing about Burning Man, because it stands as a coherent quantum of time I should memorialize.

We left Friday. I'd packed the car late the night before, so I'd had plenty of time to remember things I'd forgotten, and I headed out to pick up Mike at a reasonable hour of the morning. We made our way up to Reno and bought a day's worth of water, since we'd expected our water to arrive on the Truck only a little after us.  We hit Gate road at dusk (siiiigh), and only spent two hours waiting in line to get in. Apparently, that was an amazingly short period compared to what was to come. As last year, I dropped a basic tent setup (draggable) since nobody in camp gets placed after dark.

OMG WE JUST GOT TO GATE ROAD

Saturday morning we placed ourselves, though the tent was totally overstuffed with our gear since the shade structure was also on the Truck. Camp setup was mostly done, except for other stuff that was also on the Truck, so Mike spent some time exploring the nascent city while I hung out at camp. Honestly, that was most of Sunday too, though the Truck arrived Sunday afternoon.  By that time we were on our last jug of water, I was awfully dehydrated, and we were borrowing from other folks - so my stress levels went through the floor when the truck arrived.

We set up the shade, and got to work on the camp bar, then all took off to work a late-night opening show at Gate. At 11:45, the shift changed and we set out our product, then at 12:01, comets and gas mines lit the night.  Apparently we were on the list of art projects. Lovely stuff, and nearly zero cleanup.

As we returned to camp, Jack told me that there'd been a weather report predicting hail and rain at 4am, so I piled as much of our gear away from the edges of our shade as possible, and went to bed. Waking up to the sound of hail on the tent while safe and warm snuggled up with Mike, is probably my favorite memory of this year. There were lightning flashes so bright that they woke and re-woke me through my eyelids, through the tent, and through the shade structure.  The thunder was loud enough to shake the bed. I'm told that the City was struck twice; once in DPW camp where some poor soul got zapped but didn't die of it thankfully, and once on the main comm tower. I don't know that I believe that it was only twice.

Mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.

As we woke in the lovely cool and dim of the morning, the mud was a Thing and the portas were so far away, and the reports from the Gate line were horrifying. The camp wifi allowed me to check and confirm that the BMorg had in fact closed the City.  Good thing the Truck had gotten there when it did. So Monday was also mostly spent hoping to see things, but with the entire playa a few days behind schedule.  At the same time, we *did* do BurnIt! again on Monday, even though the city was ostensibly closed. By that time the playa was dry enough.

And here we lapse into "stories not mine to tell" land.  Sorry about that, all.

I'd put aside time to do pyro on Wednesday, but ended up building the roman candle guns for TASM on Friday for most of the day, and then not having a shoot in the evening.  TASM was a huge success, but not without some logistical and theatrical hurdles. Trying to organize a crew of 26 across playa with changing conditions and meeting times was just fucking ridiculous. But we managed that, plus two "main dudes" in the show, plus drive-bys of two volleys of art cars - one with hand-held boards of comets, and another with propane flamethrower effects.  It was a bit slow between cues, but it went well and we got props from lots of folks for the show.

Burn Night was interesting. The same glue-lam stuff that they'd used in the Temple last year, that caused so much strife and work to burn, was used in *massive* main structural members on the Man, and consequently it took him an hour and a half to fall.  I was happy to be watching it from the tower in camp, and to have the ability to climb down and do things like, oh, I dunno, go to the bathroom.  We heard lots of stories about people not having that option over the course of the evening - and I pity the Ranger Sandmen. That must've been a hellish shift.

Sunday, it turned out we weren't needed for the Temple after all, since the crew who built it this year knew what they were doing and didn't use glue-lam. I honestly don't recall much of what we did during the day except that we visited Chef and Pollen in Nectar Village.  The Temple burn itself was beautiful, with mostly quiet burners in respectful (sniffly) silence. The Temple's descent was probably the most beautiful thing I can imagine: the domed vault's intricately carved plywood flapping in the breeze like fabric to reveal the bones beneath, and the structure's final graceful spiraling collapse into a bed of coals.  After that, we took a tour of the remaining art cars, marveled at how much saner the City felt without the sound camps blaring and fighting each other, and wandered around looking at the few remaining pieces of art. There was someone putting a refractor (?) in front of the giant searchlights at one sound camp, producing amazing shifting rainbows spreading out across the playa. There was also a lovely set of electronic sound and visualization toys at Illumination Village, one using iPads to select and create viz using the touchscreens, and another using a Kinect to create both sound and viz by waving your hands around in a cutout frame.  Lovely stuff.

Monday was teardown, and it went surprisingly fast. The truck was loaded by 3. We left at 3:15. We were off-playa a scant hour and a half later (hour-and-forty-five if you count the transit from 4:30 and A to the Gate road). We took a shortish detour to try the acclaimed Indian Tacos on our way out to Reno - it wasn't great, but maybe that was a function of the one we stopped at more than anything else.  Nevertheless, food that I didn't have to cook was a nice change. We drove south from Reno to the Carson Valley, and rolled into David Walley's Hot Springs resort looking like some kinda refugees. (Mom had gifted us an overnight reservation - which was one of the nicest things...)  We took probably the longest showers in years, scrubbing and scrubbing and soaping and scrubbing some more.  Then we did the same thing again in the morning before hitting breakfast.

Civilization!

Because of road closures, we ended up taking a rather longer and circuitous route home, which took us through some lovely country. We also ended up at a place called Lockford, which I recalled from Cherylynn's tales of their Hawaiian sausage - so we made a sausage stop. I need to grill those up soonish and see if they're as good as everyone says...

Beautiful country (click to enlarge)

I dropped Mike off and headed home to start a flurry of unpacking. I got it.. mostly done in one day. Two loads of laundry down, most of the camping gear stowed in the shed, the clothes unpacked and the tubs stowed. All that remains is a load of bleachables, and a trip to the laundromat to handle the sleeping bags (which are just too big for my apartment complex's washer).

Last night I took out my braids. This morning I washed the sticky, waxy goop out of my hair. This evening I put quarters into the air machine at the gas station and blew the playa out of my sideview mirrors and engine compartment. I'll take it to the car wash tomorrow, and soon this year's event will be just a memory.