Vortexing

In April of last year I "broke up" with my otherwise-lovely therapist of over a decade. She's still a wonderful human, but she's a mother, and very happy with her femme-ness, and I felt our paths had diverged too much for my comfort. At some point it felt like she was trying to force a reconciliation with my mother, not because it would be good for me, but because she empathized with my mother's grief over the estrangement. And I couldn't quite shake the feeling that her idea of full self-actualization involved bearing and rearing a child. That uneasiness grew, and eventually I had to call it off.

I spent some time in April halfheartedly looking for another therapist, but nothing "fit". (And one of them was attractive enough I felt like I'd have trouble actually working with them, damn my brain's preference for baby dykes and femme men anyway). So instead I spent the last year working on the psychiatry end of things - which is differently expensive, and differently helpful. It was a relief to have one less thing to worry about scheduling. And I'm not going to lie, having those $600 a month back also gave me a little more breathing space in my budget.

But looking back at this blog, it's been one loss after another after another. I listed them two posts earlier, but let me add... my father, more Faire folks, my wonderful neighbor Matthew, and a good friend's amazing husband (coincidentally also named Matthew).

So at this point, when I cannot tell what's grief, and what's perimenopause, and what's overwork, and what's medication interactions... It's time to finally go back.  

In some sort of fugue state last night I sent four...? five...? different interest pings. Two meetings tomorrow, one on Friday. I hope that one of these works out.

Fatherless child

I began writing this on April 2nd, 2026. It's now May 10th, and I am trying to return to it because I think the numbness is wearing off and I am not doing so well with it.

---

It frequently feels like I am the only one in my family who has contemplated death enough to internalize that it is coming for each and every one of us, and that nobody gets a last-minute save and a redemption storyarc.

Last Wednesday, he thought he would go home in a few days. Just a few days, they'd figure out how to get him to keep down solid foods, and he'd go home, and they'd figure out the rest of the cure from there.

A New Year

 I realized this has been the least I've posted on the socials in a very long while. Many thoughts about why this is, including the eternal refrain "it will never be Livejournal", but the preponderance of ads and "growth content" (aka getting you even further addicted), and getting sucked into video after video is part of the problem. FB itself will ignore you when you say "hide this type of content" for the intrusive Reels box, so, today, I used uBlock Origin Lite to create a filter. Reels no longer load, THANK DOG.

Maybe this will help? I don't know.

It has been a very strange year, starting in January with trying to finish the back room, February starting a new job, the horrorshow that is politics right now, and the tripled, interweaving stresses, deadlines, and projects of each. The job feels like it's going well...ish? It's hard to tell with startups, but this feels like incremental progress, while riding another rocketship. Politics has, for better or worse, barely affected me personally. Mostly I see people moving _back_ to California, secretly pleased to be returning not just to office, but to a semblance of human rights.

And while it doesn't feel like it many days, the house stuff is... going. We're like four inspections away from being able to close the curséd foundation permit of 2022, take a breath, and finish the nice downstairs bathroom. Then figure out how to best group and phase the remaining work, and decide how and if we want to the next few projects. (The kitchen needs work, the upstairs bathroom too.) But then I count off the many things we've done since the start of this madness - new roof, the solar, all the knob and tube replaced, a second bathroom, sooo much new plumbing, the seismic upgrade, the new basement space, the more secure garage, and so on and so on. The garden has been cooking along too - although it was barely hot enough all year to set any tomatoes, my passiflora edulis flowered through the entire season and so while everyone else is getting bumper crops of Meyer lemons, we are drowning in purple passionfruit. Oh darn. Oh darn.

It feels like I barely did any travel at all, but I traveled to Santa Cruz and San Diego for work, did my normal Write the Docs Portland trip, visited Booneville (wine! CHEESE!), and then after a really-too-long slog of a summer and skipping Burning Man, visiting the Caribbean on a cruise. (Basically the polar opposite of Burning Man, where someone else cooks, cleans, and drives for you, and you just have to wander around enjoying the stuff and not making yourself sick on too much of anything.)

There's been a lot of grief and loss: Nighty, Tonda, but also my own grandmother, suddenly and unexpectedly Frederick Lighting Leist of Odd Salon, Bryan Chiwito of Rumbustion, Will Wood from Faire (and a number of the Faire folks I remember from the old Tribe.net days), the list goes on.

And then Odd Salon itself; after the grief at Annetta's passing last year, we strode into the new season with hope and determination, planning that this would not be an end to the event that'd become so much a community. We were all ah, misled, shall we say. A furious Signal chat developed into several community meetings which developed into a New Thing. And as the New Thing takes shape and picks up steam, it appears we might... might?? be okay. We might have managed to jump the gap and bridge the transition. Or at least we're selling a good number of tickets, which is a relief. (We, the producers, have committed to taking the financial hit if we're unable to make our ticket minimums. So getting like, a third of the way to that minimum in a few days feels, well, I'm not going to count my chickens etc etc but I think we're all breathing a bit of a sigh of relief.)

This draft has now been sitting for four days, so, off it goes.

Again, and again, and again

The thing about being a precocious child, is that you turn into a precocious teenager. And a precocious teenager doesn't really want to hang out with other teenagers, and makes friends with older and more mature fellows.

This leads to heartbreak and being left behind. 

First memorably, by a group of women I admired and counted myself a friend among for a decade, and who forcibly removed me from their circle - uninvited, explicitly, to my face - because I was "too young" and they didn't want to admit in my hearing what it was like to be aging. (Years later I have not yet recovered from that shock fully, and I don't think I'll ever trust a group of women as unguardedly as I had.)

And now, as I'm at the dreaded "middle age", I am getting my heart broken over and over as the older people who I am still friends with all these years later, go on before me. My final grandmother passed. Friends from high school, and college, and after college. The work colleagues who I hear about passing months- or years-belatedly, of some ailment, of some disaster. The number of live-hard die-hard Burning Man folks who've passed due to illness, accident, or by their own hands. The unending march of the Skyfaire list, of all the Rennies who've passed on to wave banners and eat turkey legs at a perfect-temperature dustless faire in the sky. The Odd Salon fixtures who seemed an unending well of stories, suddenly capped and inaccessible.

The more interesting people I meet in my many lives and many travels, the more it seems I am just going to eventually lose. 

Tonda, Teflon, my amazing goth friend, old school St Maxian, Burning Man Cafe shift lead, historical costume stitch-counter, Georgian romance writer, mastiff enthusiast, historian spitfire Juno of a woman, is dying. The brain cancer we thought was in remission is no longer, and they've reached point where nothing they can do for her will extend her life more than a month or so at most. And so, on reflection, she has decided she's done. I haven't heard her voice in ages, but I can hear it in my head - loud, firm, brash. She is DONE. I immediately got a mental image of her in her Germans, tellerbarret cocked at a jaunty angle, kirtling up her skirts and kicking Charon off the boat and into the Styx, poling herself across the river on her own time thankyouverymuch. 

But it's hard to remember her howling with laughter with a cocktail in her hand, watching Duel at Blood Creek at 1am at Costume College, when confronted with her dozing unconscious form, the hovering hospice care workers, the resigned quiet of the room. Her hands are still soft, but cool, and held them while I told her about all the people who were shocked to hear about her going, and how much she is adored, how much she will be missed. There will never be another like her. And we all know that and are bracing ourselves for impact. 

There is a sickening symmetry with last October, leaving with a few hours notice to visit another friend, insensible and dying in a hospital bed surrounded by loved ones. This is too soon. Too much death. Too SOON.  

There's a comfort in the fact, once again, that my friend has made a choice, and is leaving with dignity and agency intact. And in this case at least, comfort in the fact that she's not in any pain. (I only recently learned that brain cancer apparently doesn't hurt because your brain doesn't have pain receptors. I can't tell if I'm relieved or horrified.)

I love you Tonda. May you pass gently into the next world, your work here being so well discharged. May we meet again in joy and light, far far from this earthly plane. 

The things you leave behind

 I don't like to talk about where I'm from much. There are a lot of reasons and it's hard to put a finger on why I shy away - I'll tell you I'm from the blue end of the BART line. I'll tell you that it was a great place to grow up, but terrible after you turned 18. I'll tell you that you can categorize my graduating class into two groups: those who got out, and those who didn't. Most of those who didn't, didn't because they already live incredibly privileged lives, and they had nothing to seek. I was obviously not one of those people.

I looked further afield for happiness, for love. I had to because home held little for me. I ended up at an internet cafe in Livermore, where all the other weird kids (and former kids) hung out. Several social circles converged, and I took joyful part in most of them. While there was a great deal of friendship and camaraderie, there was also a great deal of immaturity, abuse, casual sexual assault, and a certain amount of what I have to admit now was grooming. But there were safe parties and dancing and dressing up, hanging out and singing and playing games. But then again there were also the darker moments like waking at 3am at a sleepover LAN party because one of the hosts threatened their spouse that they'd commit suicide, and were being taken away in an ambulance. 

I don't like to talk about where I've been. I've lived so many lives, left so many people and things behind when they hurt me. I think many of us do.

My first "boyfriend" was a boy I kissed at 4H summer camp. My second was a boy from the cafe who also went to my same high school. The third one died on Wednesday. Her name was Chayna.

It's hard to look back at a picture from January 12, 2001 and think about where I was and what I was doing. The world was completely different - you could meet your loved ones at the airport arrival gate. Gas was a buck something a gallon. I was waiting to see what college(s) might accept me. I had a free FortuneCity webpage where I put my pictures from 4H camp (laboriously scanned, cropped, and converted). Webvan still delivered, and the Dot Bomb was two months away. I carried The Leash, my name for the navy blue Nokia candybar phone I was obliged to carry (in the first stages of what I realize now was a troubling crackdown on my burgeoning independence). The iPhone would not be released for another five years. And we went, of course, like the nerd kids we were, to MacWorld.

It was a group of us from the Hotline server where we'd built a weird sort of outsider hackerish aesthetic community. We all cut school that Friday - they were giving out free tickets for the last day - and took BART into the City, walked to Moscone Center unsupervised, and were juuust mature enough to not be a nuisance worth the effort of kicking out. And most of what I remember was seeing the Mac G4 Cube for the first time, and that I was in the end stages of a debate about if we could be polyamorous with another boy from the server we all shared. (Spoilers: we could not.) I don't even remember the other guy's last name anymore, but it's weird to see that one detail with a twinge of guilt, still, a quarter of a century later.

I lost all of the emails and conversation logs from this period of my life to Hotmail wiping my account for inactivity, some time in the spring of 2002. Thankfully I had at least saved some of the oh so gothy photos we took together. They're very very small files, in retrospect.

The person I dated was not great. Quick witted, playful, passionately caring about friendships and community, a giver of thoughtful gifts and care, I could even say loving (such as it was at that age); but also mercurial, temperamental, simmering with sarcastic anger that sometimes boiled up into rage, inflexible to downright bullying when opposed, and unwilling to admit when they were wrong. And damningly, pushy about wanting to make certain um, sexual milestones, together. We were young and we were exploring, but I knew that was happening on my terms or not at all.

In the lee of the breakup my old alias was banned from the server, so I made a fake one unbeknownst to her, so I could keep talking to the rest of my friends. When staring at the blank "new handle" field my mind went blank as well and my attempt to make my handle `ConcretePretext` (as a nod to my excuse for being there) became `ConcreteContext`. I do think in retrospect I would've been found out and booted the second time a lot faster without the error.

Later, when I decided in my second year at Burning Man that "Hestia" was giving the wrong idea as a playa name, I fell back to Context, and thus has it been ever since. When I had to give up my old alias that had become inextricably linked to naked pictures of me, I added a second syllable, making it a bad three-part pun on Comic Sans, the Japanese honorific, and honestly at 1 in the morning with a glass of whisky I can't remember the third.

So she's been a subtle part of the history of my online identity - nearly from the start of having an online identity - as well as of my individuated identity from so many other things.

I got into UCSC. I did ren faire as much as humanly possible as an undergrad, and still hung out with the crowd from the internet cafe, so I saw glimmers around the edges of the social media sphere. She was frequently at the costumed events I went to, honing her already formidable photography skills. At some point I think she made a point to tell me she wasn't mad anymore, but we didn't really hang out at all until the cocktail hours at Bandersnatch. And even then not that much because of work and the long drive. 

We reconnected at a funeral. The one I went to because I needed, in that dark moment, to remember what suicide does to your friends. She was, weirdly, there for me, and I later spent some fun time haunting thrift stores for aesthetic components for her home. Our text messages were mostly about Edwardian silverplate and gold-rimmed cocktail glasses from the 50s, all going cheap at the Menlo Park Goodwill. But I was living in the South Bay and having My Own Shit Going On™️, and mostly we traded notes about the silly-valley from afar.

...

The goth scene is not without drama. Some of it I am ashamed to say, goes beyond mere "drama" and into more serious problems, and I admit some of my distance was intentional. I was busy trying to make a living, and having been badly burnt in both love and friendship at ren faire, distancing myself from that whole world as much as possible while I plunged into hashtag startuplife. It was easy to stay uninvolved and remote. 

At some point she went to Asia and came back with beautifully tailored gentlemen's suits. Then she disappeared again as if into a cocoon. And she reemerged as Chayna. 

My impression, which I will never get to ask her about now, is that transitioning was as much about finding peace within her being, as bundling up and putting behind her all the toxic traits associated with her fragile masculinity. A repudiation of what had been. I didn't speak much to her post-transition because I'm not part of that scene anymore - definitely not cool enough to hang with these folks, and certainly not putting out any art at all, much less of the quality that would attract notice. I'd been more distant recently because there were some parts of her I didn't want or need to see, and boy howdy were they on display. Forced intimacy is still a hard line for me.

On my first date with Martin we went to Wicked Grounds, who were for some odd reason having a cookie-painting event. I painted (a very bad from-memory version of) Chayna's iconic picture from her trek in Namibia on the cookie. Partly because it was fresh in my mind, partly because it was easy shapes to paint, and partly because they happened to have (mosst of) the right colors. It now pops up on the anniversary of our first date each year.

My first thought on hearing the news this morning was thank god it was an accident, and that she hadn't picked a fight with someone. Then anger that she had been working in the vehicle alone. Then grief, because it was so senseless, and so early. 

People are complicated. I am having complicated feelings.

Catching up

On December 2nd, I logged in to work as usual, did about half an hour of my usual Monday catch up routine, and then got a message from my then-new-manager, asking me to join a conference call. I held out hope until about 15 seconds into the meeting that this was about the project that I'd been trying to get resources to get off the ground, but instead I was laid off.

Backing up a bit to catch everyone up...

And the other thing...

A friend passed away, suddenly (or at least it appeared suddenly to those of us who she'd kept in the dark about the cancer coming back), and tragically.

She was a person I greatly admired, envied even, but whose open-heartedness and open-handedness with her resources made it impossible to do anything other than love her back. It's strange to think it, but I only knew her twelve years (ONLY??!? my brain is going... ONLY?!?) which is far fewer than most of her friends.

The message came on a normal Tuesday mid-October while I was boiling pasta for lunch. I thought at first it was some sort of tasteless joke - no, no, she'd been in remission. I would've known if she was sick, much less dying. She was at the event last week wasn't sh... no she hadn't been. Oh shit. This was real. Hours or days. Come say your goodbyes.

I messaged Martin and choked down my lunch, weeping in shock. I messaged my team I was taking the rest of the day off, I messaged my lead that my friend was dying and I was going to say goodbye.

Walking into the ICU was so surreal - familiar from my December 2020 adventure, but also no longer crammed full due to COVID crowding. But so unfamiliar on foot (rather than gurney), and with tears in my eyes. 

How were we supposed to know where to find her? Somehow we managed to tailgate someone in, and the nurse just.. pointed. It occurs to me now that they must be somewhat familiar with the gathering cloud of pre-grievers, and know not to make it any harder than it has to be.

We walked in. There she was, swollen and sedated, looking nothing like the bold, vibrant, excitable person I knew - my friend - and I could see that death was nearby. I don't know how. I hate seeing it. It scares and unnerves me and I become instinctive and irrational. 

I took her hand, warm and alive, and spoke my truths to her through my tears. And we stood there and then sat there for awhile, holding her hand and trying to let it seep in that this was her, this was how she was doing, this was ending.

After awhile her family came back in, and we gave up our spots to them. 

I was told there was a waiting room, but I had no idea how I was supposed to find it. 

I shouldn't have worried.

A few short steps down the hall I looked in to the first waiting room, to find it full of people with colorful hair and tattoos and rock/metal aesthetics, and I knew Her People Had Gathered. And among the awe of an all-call being answered across the country, that Her People Must Attend, I felt the familiar pangs of being an outsider. 

I was so honored to have been called at all, to have been let into the knowledge before it was too late, to get to say goodbye. But I still felt myself on the outside of twenty- and thirty-year friendships, felt awkward and unsure. As more people arrived and the room filled up, I felt I had no right to be there, taking up space that those thirty-year friends might need, and so we departed. 

That night I tossed and turned, thinking of her partner's quiet calm and strength as he gently shuffled people in and out of her room. If she didn't wake up, would he have to make the call for her? I could only imagine in the three years since her diagnosis, they'd had time to discuss it. I hope they had. I tried not to think about it too much.

I finally got off my ass and got my trust and will printed, so we can notarize it.

The call came the next evening. The only bright spot was the nexus of love and support that coalesced around her, and that she'd been conscious enough to make her wishes known. Her partner did not have to make the call. She passed peacefully in the arms of her community.

We were asked not to vaguebook about it until an official announcement could be made. We tried - but for those of us who know the Odd Salon crew, the signs were there plain as day. We had a wake. The announcement went out. But I've felt emotionally constipated for weeks now, like I need to hide how I feel about it. Like I don't have the right to my own grief. Like writing this down is going to get me in trouble somehow.

But I'm grieving so much these last 24 hours, it feels like this just sort of... fell out... along with everything else.

Numb

 I am still immensely grateful for the antidepressants. I am holding it together really well, like even to the point where I look at myself from afar and go "huh, she's doing pretty well" even while there's an endless churn of fear and pattern-finding and worry going on inside.

I went to our favorite adventure-themed bar on election night because they had an all-night happy hour. It helped to be with people, even though I felt somewhat pathetic being a decade older than all of them (at least a decade, possibly two RIP). I got to talk theatrical effects with the designer which was SO incredibly pleasant after wondering for all this time.

But the display in the corner kept ticking up for Trump, and the nausea that had plagued me all day didn't play super well with lots of cocktails, so eventually I walked myself home. Bereft of a food plan, and still feeling nauseated, I made popcorn. And as I sat down to eat it at the table, I opened my phone and saw that they'd called it.

I sobbed. I grieve. I feel that I've seen the death of a nation. I feel that I've seen this before.

In January 2017 I wrote, in the other place

And then it's Yeats chasing Niemöller, ["First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist...", and the world is] turning and turning in a widening gyre.

Looking back at the things that terrified me then, I realize how much we've lost. The US's unchecked capital greed has weakened it to the point that it's been completely captured and encircled by a hostile outside entity. 

I do not know what will happen next, but I do know that any last lingering promises of the "normal" life my parents were given have now been made effectively null and void.  Between climate change and the total breakdown of democracy, with a sham Supreme Court and regressive insanity in the executive and senate, even if the House evens out it's going to mean nothing. We on this coast are a popular topic for sneering and fearing among the right, regardless of how much, if any, of it is deserved. We'd just been crawling our way out of the "liberal hellscape" lies toward the recovery that'd been withheld from us. 

The country (appears to have*) voted for war and famine and inflation and death. 

We now have until January to brace ourselves for impact.

Goodbye sweet Luna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I still cannot fully believe that she's gone. 

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

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

I think she made it.

Hello 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello 2023, may you be less stressful than 2022.

Some updates and some anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Kiss

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

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

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

But then we got to The Kiss.

...And now I have to backtrack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over a year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now I can write about the rest.

A running thread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incivility in unrest

Last week, someone I was once close with died of cancer. 

I say "once close" instead of "a friend" because we'd drifted apart over years - they were part of a group that was formative to my youth and to my young adulthood, but which turned quite toxic and eventually I quietly left. (At least I thought it was quietly.) The last thing she asked me was advice for making skirts out of the elastic-smocked-top crushed velvet yardage from Joann's, and that was more than a decade ago. She was medically obese, and was working hard to be seen as a woman. The skirts were an easy way to get an infusion of femme without trying to also tackle the toxic women's diet industry at the same time. I can only vaguely recall her deadname at this point, because her nickname was what we all called her. I hadn't really spoken to her since before her transition. I had cut off that entire part of my life like one cuts off a decaying branch.

I realized that I stopped doing Faire in 2006 (or 2009), and Dickens in 2013; it's been fifteen (or twelve) and eight years I've been outside those groups, respectively. While I miss the camaraderie and I miss the absolute joy of the places and experiences we created, I do not miss the toxicity of the people involved.

Dickens Fair is having its #metoo moment, simultaneously as it's facing criticism for it's casting policies, business practices around the volunteer staff, and acknowledging the hurt and harm that cast members receive at the hands of both patrons and other members of the cast and crew. There needs to be a change, that much has been acknowledged - even by the people who run the event. They've promised many things before and been caught short, so the performers are right to hold their feet to the fire. However, I do not think that the timeline set out in the demands are reasonable, and I believe one of the demands in particular is unreasonable. Others agree, but several of the leaders of this movement cannot abide others who don't agree wholeheartedly and are actively sealioning and dogpiling other folks who raise the slightest objection. I'm seeing signs of a cortisol/dopamine cycle addiction that I find really troubling. To quote something extremely relevant:

Self harm that is rewarded by society looks like: 

5. Social media ‘outrage’: social media outrage occurs when we (without breaks) consume content that puts us on a cycle of emotional addiction. These platforms are designed to use our dopamine + cortisol hits to keep us using the product. They can lead us to feeling helpless + have a narrative of the world that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.

I've been trying to write this for an hour and I keep looking away. 

My brain does not want to talk about how traumatized I have been by people who I thought were my friends, who enjoy beating others down on the internet, and who have done it to me with a shockingly casual and final cruelty. Before it was Facebook, it was LiveJournal and Tribe, before that it was forums, and before that usenet groups and mailing lists. I have had these righteous types who I thought were my friends do real and lasting harm to my self-esteem and mental health, to say nothing of my social life and emotional connections. These are people who see themselves as good people, and who are blind to the harms they do, be it in the name of The Cause or on a personal whim. I will not abide this treatment, and I leave. For better or worse, when I disappear from their sphere of influence it doesn't even register.

I have been fortunate enough to not need Fair or Faire in the economic sense, and so cutting them out has impacted my social life but not prevented me from thriving. We talk about "drama is as drama does", but the reality seems to be that people who cannot control their external lives spend much of their time enforcing their views on the internet instead. I am all for moving the Overton Window in the direction of Social Justice, but I am not for magical thinking when it comes to social organizing. I get that people have been pushing these objectives for months and years, but it has been (slowly) getting better. I get that the time for BLM organizing is now, but I also think that timelines for demands should take into account that we're only just now starting to emerge from a global pandemic in which the things which shut down first, and most-thoroughly, were special events. 

There seems to be a thread of "we can rebuild this on our own if the Powers That Be deny our demands" and to that I just have to purse my lips grimly. If your main method of building consensus is to shout down people who hold other opinions, you are only going to have people join who already agree with you lock, stock, and barrel. And I doubt that will be as many people as you think. Facebook is the wrong place to organize, because it enables and normalizes building and maintaining the type of filter bubbles that enable other magical thinking movements, like Q-Anon. 

I want change for the better. But I also want to stop people from spending their entire days writing thousand-word rebuttals to people who say they disagree with any part of a plan. It turns out, arguing these things at this length, in person or especially on the internet, does not have the persuasive effect you intend. But keep chasing that dopamine.

I want change, but I also want people to stop being assholes.

I guess they're people, so maybe that's not entirely possible.

Just desserts

 Day 7 of Wellbuterin, and I wish I'd done this sooner.

I have avoided "drugs" all my life, because of the bogeyman they represented; my mother's fears about loss of self made manifest in her children. I remember my first time "driving" for a significant other on MDMA, and when he told me he loved me, I asked the next day if that was him talking, or the drugs? Who am I without tinkering with myself? Am I still me? It's an Odysseus' Ship problem, except on a more abstract scale: you could argue that the animating intelligence is what makes a person, no matter if their appearance, limbs, even organs, change. It's much less clear when you're tinkering with that intelligence, when what you're changing could materially affect how one thinks and perceives the world. If you are behind the wheel, but the drugs are driving, are you really behind the wheel?

So as I sat listening to music on the beach and Incubus came on, song that I rolled my eyes at in high school because it was "too popular", the line "let the fear take the wheel and steer" hit me like a poleaxe. I have been so afraid of letting the drugs steer, that now I find that, somewhere between 12 and 20 years later, that it hasn't been me per se driving, but my fear and anxiety.

It has been like realizing that you've been putting up with intense, grinding tinnitus for years and years without realizing it. It's like finding that you'd been carrying around a leaden weight for all these years, and like in a dream-state, been unable to look at it, put it down, or speak of it to other people. Suddenly, thinking about my relationship doesn't fill me with dread and terror. 

TikTok in loco parentis, TikTok in lieu of therapy; there are so many genres of self-help on the app that it's always amazing to me when I find something that makes me sob. And so I've been thinking about what happened to me around 2008, and I've been thinking about worthiness. I sobbed over a DnD NPC video where the barkeeper hands me the key to the tower room because I look like the kind of person who's not very good at letting themselves rest and I scribbled onto a post it note:

Why do I feel like I don't deserve:

• rest
• care
• to say no
• to ask for more
• to feel better

Sometimes catching the fleeting thought is an important part of acknowledging what hurts. I was in the middle of unloading groceries, thinking about the last time I felt like I could be sexually free, when it struck me: The last time I felt free was followed by horrible horrible times, and I felt I was being punished for something. An unjust breakup, a divorce, a housing situation falling apart, a job loss. Over the next year I rebuilt my life entirely, and closed myself off to many things. And while some of those things crept back into my world, I never fully uncircled the wagons, so to speak.

It's pretty shit, you know, when you're raised with these ideals of Karma, and how they're supposed to release you from a Judeo-Christian god-guilt. And yet, and yet, I felt like I had taken too much, and much must be taken from me in order to balance the scales. What rubbish. And yet here I am unable to truly fathom that things might go well for me without them also having to go poorly.

New starts

Appropriately, I started Wellbutrin today, on Ostara. 

I was not prepared for the emotional overwhelm of getting the vaccine on Monday. I was not prepared for the intense feelings of guilt about getting it while Martin couldn't. I was also 100% unprepared for the sudden burst of "omg pandemic is almost over, time to get the meatsuit in shape".

On Monday night I sent a flurry of emails, to my PCP, to my gastroenterologist, to my chiropractor, to a dentist. On Tuesday I scheduled a bunch of appointments. On Wednesday I cleaned frantically in prep for cleaners the next day, and my mood dropped. I started thinking about knives, and guns, and car exhaust while making dinner. I actually scared myself. At midnight, I wrote a short and slightly flippant note to the psychiatrist who I'd connected with in the weeks after my surgery. I considered using the "send later" feature, but figured that if nothing else could convey a sense of urgency, the timestamp would. She responded with an offer of a date in April, but also that we could work something out "if I needed to be seen sooner". 

Readers, I have never been so relieved, and felt so guilty, to see those words. I struggled to just *take the offered help*, but in the end we had a consultation on Friday during her lunch break. Filling out the family history forms was hard, and gave me a lot more fear. There's a lot to cover; anxiety, BPD, schizophrenia, manic depression, bipolar, avoidant depression, and that's not even touching the ADD/ADHD symptoms that are still lingering. (Even if the neurocognitive stuff is decreasing, the inability to focus isn't.) We didn't get through everything, but we ruled out a few things much to my relief. I was absolutely shocked (relieved-shocked) at how quickly we went from "nice to meet you" to "here's a prescription". Wilder still, after avoiding these things all my life, of struggling with everything related to getting mental health care covered, to have insurance cover my prescription with no questions asked, with a copay of $15. Trepidatious but relieved. 

We talked a bit about sleep, and how it's one of the things I've struggled with - and how that's ticked up in difficulty recently, and how incredibly important it is that I get back to having long, restful, non-apneatic sleep. So now I'm also scheduling and ENT appointment. 

I spent a lot of time last night thinking through it all. There's the family history of hating and fearing western medicine. There's the family fear of spending money on doctors. It's a potent combo of scarcity mindset and naturalistic fallacy. There's this idea that if I was a good person, this body would be just fine for the duration of my stay on this earth with no medical intervention necessary, but boy howdy, with a history of chronic sinus issues, an UID, two dental crowns and fucking plate in my neck, that ship has absolutely sailed.

What would I change with this vessel, if I could? There are some [embarrassing items redacted], I'd get my knee and feet looked at by an orthopedist, maybe get Lasik? On a super long shot, I'd consider getting something done to stop my inner thighs chafing. (I don't need or want a thigh gap but I'd like to be able to wear a skirt without shorts and not make my tender thigh skin bleed. And yes I've tried body-glide et al, and I just sweat them all off.)

I've been thinking a lot in the last week about transhumanism - the idea of hacking your body to make it work better for yourself, and I think I'm going to lean into it. The idea that maybe I don't deserve to suffer for all the fun things I did (all those ballroom dance injuries), and that maybe I DO deserve care (what?!) is really hard to process. But I'm getting there.

So this morning I took my vitamins, took my allergy pill, and before I could think too hard about it and psyche myself out about it, my first Wellbutrin. 

Here's to fresh starts.

The Ides of March

 ...or, how I got unexpectedly stabbed.

On Friday I got a text from the state saying to review the current guidelines about vaccination eligibility. And to my surprise, I found out that anyone with a BMI of 30 or above was eligible here in San Francisco. So many feelings. My BMI has prevented me from getting care for my pain and suffering for years, so to find it suddenly is getting me preferential treatment is both humiliating and... feels a little like reparations.

I made an appointment for Monday afternoon, and the followup for April 5th. I didn't know what to expect and my cuticles are a mess from anxiety. In the end I convinced Martin to come with me; I was hoping they'd just give him a shot, but honesty won out in the end. But I'm glad I had him there. 

I didn't expect the massive emotional... thrum - there's no real way to describe it - when she lined up the needle. I closed my eyes and thought about all the fear, and the pain, all the uncertainty and the loss. Of people suffering and dying in the hospitals alone; of medical workers forced to do their best over and over in the face of mounting losses and public indifference; of mothers laboring and delivering alone; of my own terrifying solo walk towards major surgery and possible death. I thought about the trips we'd planned; Melbourne, Burning Man; Costume College and Carnevale, Hawaii, London, all the good things we'd had to let slip through our fingers, then further and further away. 

I was in so much emotional pain I didn't even feel the needle, only the hard plastic seat, the hot wetness at the edge of my mask, and Martin's hand in mine. I can't believe that this is almost over.

And then I looked up at my partner, who is not labeled obese, who is not eligible, and who I am now terrified for. I didn't expect the shot to come for me before July and I didn't expect that we wouldn't get it together and now I feel like a horrible person for taking it and not waiting. 

I got stabbed on the Ides of March, and I will be fully vaccinated by May Day. It's a lot to take in right now.

One year gone

 In two days, I will have been working from home for a full year.

It's strange to think of all the things that I've grown accustomed to, in that year. No N Judah trains rumbling by, no lunches at work, no commute, making my own coffee, doing nothing, seeing nobody. I can't make myself participate in any of the online versions of the things I love, because... well, I don't know why. Honestly, staying home seems preferable to the disappointment of the pale shadow of what it was.

The question I posed in my second pandemic blog post was - what will be left when this is all over? So many of our favorite things have opened again only to re-close, and each time they do it wastes precious resources. How many times will they open and close, and will they ever open as they were, again?

And what am I going to be like? I feel like some sort of slug, like a potato. I can't get up the enthusiasm to get out of the house or go anywhere. Martin wants to make plans and I just can't get excited about anything. 

Part of this is that I'm still healing, I'm sure. I'm not back to 100% and I don't know when I will be. I honestly feel like I've been chasing 80% for weeks now, and not quite making it, but trying to get back to "normal" life again, whatever the hell that means, despite the pain and stiffness. My 3-month check in is on Monday and I'm terrified that they're going to tell me that the fusion isn't working, or that the third level we were supposed to do as an artificial disk has now failed and that's what's causing the pain. I don't know. I don't know. I'm scared. And I want so desperately to get back to "normal" even though there is no normal to get back to.

Some part of me has been observing with wry detachment as my brain... recovers... from all this pain. The silence that's rung in my head since May of 2017 (interspersed with gratingly loud loops of gratingly repetitive snippets of music) has been fading away. I thought it could've been that the breakup damaged my brain, because the rest of me felt weirdly physically fine but - what if it was the car crash? What if this degeneration started with whiplash in May of 2017 and took nearly two years to blossom into the first spasm (March 2019), and another 18 months to cause the second? I oscillate between dubious and angry that it could be true.

I'm angry at a lot of things right now. The housing market, politics that pits humans against their own interest, the pandemic, climate change. 

I would just like to go somewhere for awhile where I can make things and not be angry anymore, and not have to worry about how I'm going to get money or food or shelter or healthcare. I just want some sort of rest.