fuck. yes.

my hands and shoulders hate me - as well they might, I spent most of yesterday pipetting and a startling amount of today typing - but I have DONE THE THINGS. Or at least first drafts of the things. And I think I found something out earlier this week at around this time of the morning. And I have an alarm going off in four hours in order to get the next batch of chemistry done so I can keel over without feeling guilty tomorrow evening (seriously if I am not in bed by 8pm local PLEASE shout at me) before, um, Thursday + Friday on the mass spec. (which if I feel proper rotten tomorrow morning I will convert to friday+saturday, saturday's currently free, so I can do that no penalties).

i am the human being of only-wanting-to-set-CHX-on-fire-about-twice, probably-has-an-appointment-before-2015, holy-crap-the-wait-for-phlebotomy-was-preposterous.

BUT. I have lunch ready to go for tomorrow, i have washed my water bottle so it's usable, I should... really put my wheels on to charge, wow, no way am I walking anywhere worth a damn tomorrow, I can still write terrible code when half-asleep, I've tamed the work inbox to some degree, head of group apparently likes the short piece of writing I have done on thallium+lead=bffs???, and I have SENT OFF A FIRST DRAFT OF THE POSTER. Which, er, I need to print on Monday. did I mention my supervisor's on a boat somewhere off the coast of Taiwan working 12-hour shifts with fuck-all internet? yeaaaaaaaaaaaah. did I also mention I was supposed to have this two her by the 21st of August? yeah, well, medication happened, it was a bit shit, this is kind of why I'm thinking about going part-time. on the upside, I wasn't supposed to have the lead+thallium doc to her til the 11th, but that's already happened...

... and it was sunny and I ate fantastic food with sebastienne and geeked gender and reading and brains and life goals and fanfic and shit and it was pretty awesome, and i made pasta bake for dinner, and I should really do the washing up again one of these weeks before my housemate entirely justifiedly ( stream-of-consciousness glib metaphorical murder??? )

(either my s key' gone very sticky or my hands are even more fucked than i thought) (wrist braces + antiinflammatory gel tonight OH my) and I read a bunch of tiny bit of fiction by queer PoC so that was pretty awesome

and i have taken bedmeds and, via hand-care, SLEEP.

ps i still really like Scribus

also feel free to place bets on how long it takes me to disappear into avoidance and pretending i don't have a work e-mail address again

Introductions meme!

Folk, it's been a while since the last one of these, and I've met a lot of awesome new people over the past few weeks incl via WorldCon. In particular, this has been sparked because I'm wanting to flag up that davidgillon has just joined DW - he's a fab disability activist, and he's fannish about speculative fiction and diversity. We met after a panel on politics, I was a successful wheelchair evangelist, and he provided a great write-up of WorldCon on Wheels.

If you'd like me to write you a short introduction, then, well, I'm going to (again) copy the blurb liv wrote when starting this up:

If you would like to, please comment to this post, and I'll introduce you to everybody else by giving a reason why I think you're great. Some people I know better than others, so I can't promise all my introductions will exactly encapsulate why someone might want to get to know you. You're also welcome to comment to someone else's thread and ask for a specific introduction to that person; I know some people are more confident than others about just jumping in and introducing themselves to a stranger. I am also happy to matchmake if you would like that; ask me for a recommendation of a personal journal and / or community from my circles.

And of course, feel free to repost this game in your own journal, if you think it would be a good way to make connections between some of your people. I think this could go quite well if it spreads a few hops away from here, but also worth doing even if no-one picks it up.

Entertainingly, I last did this almost exactly a year ago! So yes - please do play if you're comfortable to do so. <3

Thoughts swilling around, a miscellany

• Despite not even a tiny bit being in MCU fandom, I look forward enormously to recessional's Winter Soldier shortfic snippets - they seriously make my day; they feel like a gift every time, as does Mia's art, as I've mentioned, and a whole bunch of things the rest of you do, that just feel like moments of grace. I was feeling slightly wistful about wanting to be able to provide that, those bubbles of joy, and then I realised that probably actually I do - probably some of you do react to my poetry the same way, and that is a wonder in itself.
  
• I had an excellent conversation with @taliskimberley at WorldCon about craft vs inspiration wrt poetry/lyric, and about how the 50-poems-in-a-year project I have going on is about teaching myself to trust craft more.
  
• I was at a poetry event a few months ago, about mental health and poetry, and one of the participants - I think one of the support acts? - made a derogatory comment about "confessional" poetry. It's been getting to me; I'm struggling with the fact that most of my poetry is very short, is intensely personal, and is about experiencing the world as myself in a very direct sense, rather than having... grand sweeping scope? And I'm mostly okay with that, but occasionally I let the thing rattle me (and, surprise, it was a middle-aged white dude being all "pfft who needs confessional poetry anyway it's just DULL"), and I'm trying to work out how to work with that.
  
• On an entirely different topic, while drifting off to sleep the other night I had an obviously brilliant insight about why we're so drawn to narratives where a protagonist has a destiny to fulfill (into every generation, The Boy Who Lived, etc), and then I fell asleep before writing it down, and now I am managing to reconstruct it only piecemeal - something about having purpose, about external executive function, about finding a place in the world, about what it means to turn away from manifest destiny and why we seek it out, and so on. Perhaps I will be able to put it back together at Some Point; perhaps not.
  
• One of my bits of brain-homework that I've been stuck on for a while is "It’s easy to ignore our talents when we measure them with the wrong yardstick. Not everyone is good at public speaking, computer programming, or heli-skiing—and not everyone should be. This diversity of talents is what makes the world so interesting. Ponder: Which of your own natural talents, preferences, and abilities have you been judging by a faulty yardstick?" Now I reckon I'm pretty good at knowing my capabilities and ways I want to improve them in; I don't think are many things I'm actually good at that I'm overlooking/ignoring. So, er, would you all mind saying if you think there's anything that meets this? Because I suspect finding it this difficult is a good reason for me to keep staring at it. *chinhand*