The place I'd most like to visit

This is actually kind of an awkward question to answer, because - well. Because I had the kind of upbringing where I've been to botanical gardens on four continents; I can pick up enough-to-get-by in most Germanic languages (and the majority of Romance ones, if I grit my teeth hard enough) in a matter of hours; and I've hiked in both the European and the New Zealand Alps. I lost a copy of the Thief of Time in Finland. I've lived in Cambridge, London, Switzerland, and LA; I've broken a hammock with an opera singer on Vancouver Island; I've done an overland daytrip to Malaysia and seen Uluru with waterfalls running down its flanks and performed in the Edinburgh Fringe and snorkelled off the Great Barrier Reef, and there's a stretch of the Cornish coastal path where you could show me a photograph taken from anywhere along it and I'd be able to tell you exactly where you were standing.

Which is to say: honestly, I'm kind of exhausted by travelling.

I won't ever tire of watching swallows migrate over snow-covered passes in September, in Austria, where they speak the language of home; or of picking bilberries; or of the way the wind howls around the corner of the house and the heather stands as tall and unbowed as the gorse in Cornwall, but - oh, but I am tired, and what I mostly want is to grow roots, to be home.

I don't regret any of the trips I've made (except for reasons relating solely to the people present), but - but while I'd quite like to see the aurora at some point, that's not really a place I'd like to go. And, really, when it comes down to it, what I want to do is to rest my face on rock and close my eyes and listen to breezes moving through bracken, and this is some of why it feels so strange to be learning to love London (where there - are more stars than in Los Angeles, it's true, and yet-), but - the places I want to go are the ones I can't.

I try not to think too hard about how much I want to spend a year in Antarctica, with wind and quiet and the bright brilliant chill of the cold places, the high places, where the gods live. And I can't, because of my body; and I can't even walk the coast path any more, either, except to the Marconi monument and back, and some things are just a little too hard to look at straight on. But - thank you for asking, because these things (all of them, yes, especially my privilege) are worth acknowledging.

A little about the people in my important relationships

[This was requested for tomorrow; but I am operating on five hours' sleep and 10 hours' in-and-out-of-lab today, so I am going to leave "working out my gender identity" for tomorrow, when I am more likely to be able to do it justice. There's still a masterpost!]

I ended up explaining to sebastienne the other evening that I distinguish the concepts of clan and of chosen family: the latter is approximately what I think family should be like, and the former is we may be unruly and fractious and liable to explosive disagreements, but by the gods you are mine and I will do my duty by you, no matter what.

I am going to restrict this post to brief discussions of people I consider clan, and people I'm dating, and the intersection; because if I started talking about everyone I would firmly & without hesitation call chosen family, this would be a very long post and I'd need to run it by about a million people to check they were okay with me describing them in those terms, and - perhaps another time. (For some examples of important-to-me relationships I'm not going to discuss further here, see my post on talking about poetry.)

So: there's my mother, and my entire maternal side of the family. I think with my mother I will leave it at: it was only in late November that I got around to explicitly telling her how important it is to me that close and long-standing friends get to meet her, get to see us interacting, because it is the best way I know to explain an enormous amount about who and why I am, and - she is important to me, and I want people to know that and recognise it and understand it. (I said this, and she went suddenly bright-eyed and abandoned her violin practice to give me a very tight hug.) I spent tens of hours every year picking redcurrants for her, and tens of hours peeling and stewing and preserving kilo upon kilo of apples, and most times I go home I make up a huge batch of shortcrust pastry, some of which gets frozen. This is important, this is right, because it is what she did for Mama when she went home, and - this is what we give each other, all the way back.

( Grandparents; WWII. )

The cousins, various. My ridiculous baby brother, with his easy grin and his strength and the guitar and bicycles he's built piece by piece, and how very, very proud of him I am.

And - the reason this came up in discussion with sebastienne is that I was remarking that the way I feel about this ridiculous polymer I've found myself in is, increasingly, that it is clan.

( Dear polymer: please feel free to identify yourselves in comments if you want to! )

I think that's more-or-less a summary; if you've got more questions about any of them, do please feel free to ask away! Though I am going to be a bit more circumspect about answering questions about other people than about myself, obviously. But - yes, yes, this is how one builds a life.