kaberett | Entries tagged with boything

1. Serge Lutens Daim Blond. I have been curious about this for, like, ever (or at least a while), because it's described as iris, apricots, musk, hawthorne, white suede. I really, really wish I liked it; on my it goes through a brief phase of being beautifully ripe and luscious fresh apricots, and then it goes... confusing. Confusing and cheap bubblebath. Perfumes says of it:

Unlike traditional leathers such as Tabu and Tabac Blond, which have felt rich and warm, Daim Blond (meaning suede, and not, as it sounds, an accursed towhead) feels arid and cool, a hollowed-out osmanthus-like idea of peach and leather but no soapy center; it unfolds a spare, long-fingered form whose intentions seem to mark a departure from the more straightforward orientalist scents of the Lutens range so far.

... and seems to be ever the case with Perfumes, whatever the hell their skin chemistry is doing to scents is not the same as mine. Because this? This is bubblebath and digestive biscuit crumbs.

( +more )

For starters, I knew it was an option because I grew up being mentored by a bunch of folk (hi ♥) who viewed poly as normal and fine and just the way some people work; I got to see lots of examples of people making it work, and people not making it work in ways that were nothing to do with being poly and everything to do with the fact that sometimes relationships don't work or stop working.

As it happens I was still massively insecure; one way or another it was the case that I was cool with the concept of me having more than one partner, but got incredibly tied up in knots about the concept of people I was seeing having other partners, and consequently didn't think it was good or kind or fair for me to try to do the thing. Thus began (after my useless ex & I broke up) a period of ill-advised monogamy (ha, folk, I am so so sorry for turning into That One Friend Who Keeps Making Inexplicably Terrible Relationship Decisions), from which I emerged blinking and very, very mad. In the aftermath of getting on anti-depressants and out of that particular horrorshow, I found myself increasingly spending time with the boything and increasingly doing things that were unambiguously flirting and dates. I didn't properly register what was going on until his boyfriend Lucian cheerfully turned around during a birthday party and went "so, are you and

dreamfracture a thing, then?" whereupon I went "... I DON'T KNOW WE HAVEN'T REALLY TALKED ABOUT IT??? :D"

And that was how hanging-out-with-a-person morphed into a relationship in spite of the boything having other folk in his life, and mysteriously the world didn't end. I thought I was treating it as fairly casual; I was still surprised when I turned out to be completely fine with him rolling over one Sunday morning and going "alex alex alex last week I slept with a PERSON", apart from the bit where I still wanted to be asleep.

( Read more... )

"... that is quite the loveliest lemon-flavoured cleaning product I have ever met."

WELL YES I DID SAY IT WAS YOUR OVERENTHUSIASTIC CITRUS-SCENTED CLEANING-PRODUCT FRIEND. :D

(... of which I continue unfortunately fond...)

Today has been a good day.

it's okay to doubt yourself sometimes
and it's okay to fall in love

1. CNdeliMechs gig last night! (By which I mean: triple-bill CN Lester, who writes heartbreakingly beautiful music, the most recent album of which I have spent much of the past six months listening to on repeat; The Mechanisms, a band of pirates from a spacepunk dystopian future full of stories; and the Indelicates, who have my heart forever and ever and are very patient with me being a deeply overenthusiastic fan.)

2. ... which was close enough to Brick Lane that

shortcipher was willing to do a bagel run on his way to dropping me off, so we have bagels and uncroissant and unstrudel and we drove along the Thames squeezed into a car and -- yes.

3. Someone I met at the Diseases of England IndeliLaunch at the beginning of last summer - he's based in Cardiff - crashed on my floor last night, and I'm now playing him my collection of Indelicates rarities. Currently we are bopping along to the hard trance remix of We Hate The Kids, which he hadn't heard before.

4. I read the latest bit of

recessional's MCU fic this morning, with tea and croissant, and I also read the latest Strong Female Protagonist (webcomic of which I am super-fond), and it was lovely.

5. I HAVE CLEARED THE WASHING-UP BACKLOG IT IS GREAT. The kitchen is satisfyingly clean.

6. Poster is printed!

7. I'm still incredibly impressed with myself for rhyming "gluon" with "sine qua non" yesterday.

8. Boooooooooooots. The boything indulged me to very great extent by getting me a pair of the boots I linked to a couple of Ten Good Things ago, and the shape is PERFECT and guh boots. (I think boything thinks he got a good deal out of this one, heh.)

9. I have been reading a lot of really awesome books recently (a longer post on one of them I loved and hated in equal measure to come, probably), and I have more to look forward to... (so excited about Ancillary Sword; think another Ancillary Justice reread might happen before then.)

10. Housemate has got me watching Brooklyn 99 and it is BRILLIANT. Such ladies! Such casual queers! Such black gay chief of police! Such beautiful, beautiful slightly-overwritten incredibly deadpan dialogue, a la The Middleman! Much enthusiasm. :-)

Current Music: Matt Fishel - Testament

Things are not in fact all doom and gloom - I think I'm depressed at the moment, but that weird pseudodepression minus anhedonia I get and never really spot in good time because what even - so here is a list of the things I am enjoying.

Hel came over for dinner last night! Housemate is out on Wednesday nights; I'm terrible at leaving work and making there be eveningfood if I don't have someone to feed; so Hel and I are doing this thing where they do me the favour that is coming round and being fed and letting me show them Korra season 1 (currently; next up: Elementary iHope!).
That One Lady made me a necklace and it is lovely. :-)
And she has agreed to accompany me to the London WtNV recording! Which I was basically only interested in doing if it was a thing she wanted to do and was willing to spend the evening with me (audiovisual processing is hard, I'm way behind on WtNV since the episode last year with the computer that broke my brain in audio processing ways, etc).
Good conversation with supervisor yesterday, which actually breaks down into ~~two~~three parts. The first is that I had a potentially stressful meeting with my supervisor and didn't have my anxiety pre-meeting exceed baseline for possibly the first time ever in my history of having project supervisors; the second is that she has usefully strategised on ways to help me get my head round some of the issues with writing; and the third is that there is a particular thing that's been jumping up and down going PAY ATTENTION TO ME for the past week or so, and we have agreed that if in my first of these writing exercises I can convince her that following this line of investigation is worth doing, I get to give her a list of samples and she'll acquire them for me. :D
the boything got me a new enormous teal towel to go with the existing enormous teal towel, so now I can offer guests an actually clean towel that isn't a small :-)
I am ludicrously smug about the fact that That One Gent liked some of my vim set-up (configured while at OSBridge) enough that he's nicked it.
Aloe drink! Aloe drink with rosewater and takmuria. Food that is texturesssss.
Counselling session on Friday (assuming counsellor doesn't have to cancel. I will actually have a tantrum if they do.)
Oh, right, another point from the supervisor meeting -- several months ago I went "BUGGRE ALLE THIS FOR A LARK" and redeployed some lab equipment in a way that was more useful and massively reduced my frustration levels (and plastic waste!). I told supervisor I'd done it (rather than asking permission) at the time; last week she had cause to be doing chemistry with the MSci student in such a way that she encountered this change I had made in, as it were, the field. "THAT IS SO MUCH BETTER," she said, relief and gratitude all over. :D
The internet is still full of photographs of tiny turtles going "WHY AM I ON TOP OF STRAWBERRY WHAT DO D:"

The sky's beginning to turn deep blue. I appear, accidentally, to be watching sunrise around a solstice again, more or less.

Here are some things that have happened: yesterday, I finally (finally) got 24-hour access to our buildings; this was supposed to have been granted back when I started. And in spite of the fact that I was in the middle of a mass spec run, I actually managed to head home from work before 8pm; and my first use of the access was getting in at 6.45am to check on how my run was going (my machine time technically finished yesterday, but today's user wasn't going to get started til 10am, which gave me a solid 12 hours for an overnight run even if I'd got it started late), and the answer was good and I have data and tasty TASTY data.

I spent a significant chunk of the day sorting out the data-from-the-machine into something useful in my master spreadsheet; another chunk messing about with some of my incredibly shonky python; some on final tweaks to the transfer report (still need to write some and replot some graphs then send it off tomorrow, oops); and yet another on a flurry of e-mails about the solid month of labwork I've got planned once I return from the US trip, along with sitting around with my supervisor being excitable about rocks. I've got ten grams of a mica previously analysed as containing 550 parts per billion (ppb) of thallium; bear in mind that the average concentration of thallium in the mantle is ~2ppb, and most of my samples have concentrations around 30ppb. For these typical samples, 100 milligrams is enough to get three to six measurements out of -- what on Earth we're going to do with ten grams of 550ppb I am not entirely sure and nor's my supervisor, but that's the smallest quantity they'd sell it us in. (Exciting times in analytical terms, incidentally: of the three sample sets I'm wanting to shove through chemistry in July, #1 is of direct and immediate relevance to the PhD in terms of being actual data relating to the central question; #2 is tangentially related and getting me second authorship on a paper that's basically ready to go apart from firming up the numbers; and #3 is a set of geological reference materials nobody's measured my element-of-interest in properly before, which (1) have direct relevance to the PhD in terms of helping work out why I'm seeing what I'm seeing in the whole-rock samples, and (2) will make a nice little technical paper in their own right, which I have hopes of submitting by the end of the year.)

I also spent some time on the phone to Air Canada, who I am finding somewhat infuriating (oh crap, must remember to fill out my visa waiver application...), and was left sufficiently pissed off that I went "buggre all this for a larke" and jumped on a train to Brighton, where my useless ex + the Boything +

sebastienne + Entomancy + I ate dinner at Giggling Squid before a subset of us headed off to a gig.

sebastienne was there for David Devant & His Spirit Wife; I was there for 30 minutes of Indelicates, and because they were a support act and the rest of the audience were being awful and talking I got to sing along without feeling bad about it. (Also, I am so so SO looking forward to the repeat CNdeliMechs show happening in London in September -- CN Lester, The Indelicates, The Mechanisms as triple headliners, please join me, it'll be fantastic, I'll link to the deets once they've actually been announced...)

-- and then meandered my way home via the last train from Brighton to London, and shenanigans with night buses (I keep thinking I should maybe do something a bit more rigorous than go "I know roughly where I want to go and I'm comfortable navigating by a mix of dead reckoning and Boris map" for the occasions when I get back into London at gone 1 with no idea how to get home except a certainty that I can wing it) and walks: I do still adore walking round central London at 2, 3 in the morning (having said which, highly unusually for me I was wearing a skirt in public today and got noticeably more hassle than usual, though not enough to actually upset me).

Right. Yes. To sleep as the sun is rising, the better to be human when That One Lady gets into town later today...

Highlights include: the Dvorak 'cello concerto in the Royal Festival Hall with That One Lady on Thursday night, followed by a late dinner; watching the food I made vanish into people, and especially watching people discover that they really liked food they thought they didn't (and watching the food I'd made mostly vanish in ways that were pleasing); Saturday morning brunch, involving breaking in the new griddle pan; the binders I got from E&C; TOL got me Perfumes: the A-Z guide which I proper squealed over; introducing many, many people; date with That One Gent on Saturday afternoon; P. brought me champagne and strawberries from Paris (he lives there at the moment, to be fair!); the cake came out very well for my first attempt, such that I now feel I've undergone yet another rite of passage; the concert my mother played in on Saturday night, where I got to see my favourite bits of the clan and my favourite small cousins, and medium smallcousin gave me a present into which I actually burst into tears about (it's an ink-and-approximately-watercolour painting she's done of the view out to sea from the steps at the bottom of the garden at the Mouldering Ancestral Pile); I visited C. this morning and was reminded just how much I enjoy spending time with them, and how much I want to spend more; I spent the afternoon sitting in a pub surrounded by a crowd of people talking, and I mostly dozed but had a brilliant time of it; my mother gave me a Scrabble set from the attic of the Mouldering Ancestral Pile plus a stuffed chough plus a jar of blackberry & apple jam; and she fed us more Haus-u.-Hof Torte and Schlag[obers] and strawberries; and we collapsed collectively in helpless giggles on the patio as we sorted out Grossmutti's furs. And I am home with a very dear friend curled up to sleep on my floor and I have drafted an abstract and rediscovered a skirt I am going to love wearing when I have had top surgery (it and nothing else; it is black floaty linen) and I furthermore managed to bring home with me one of my saddle stools so working at my desk is going to be less vile for me. And there was the Elementary finale and I have the Masterchef finale yet to watch and, and and and.

This is not the half of it.

It has not been a terribly quiet weekend, but oh-- it has been so good to me; I have had such a fantastic birthday. Thank you, lots, to absolutely all of you; thank you for making the time to celebrate with me, and I am sorry I didn't give more of it to you, and I'm sorry I couldn't fit you all in, but I had an amazing time and I am grateful and delighted and peaceful and very, very happy. Thank you.

It is light outside when I wake up for early starts. It is light while I eat breakfast, when I walk over the road to the station. I sit on the District line with sunshine through the windows: it's above ground between home and work. There's some clematis and - a plant I know only as "abominable potato weed", sorry[1] - growing enthusiastically in a garden that backs onto the platforms.

Breakfast was apple-and-pear juice, a beautifully ripe satsuma, and a pear and hazelnut muffin made for me by CN Lester because of the boything.

I finished reading Saladin Ahmed's Engraved on the Eye (free collection of short stories; it's fantastic). I turned to

alexconall's poetry collection Lavender Blue (and other poems) (also available for free), discovered it's dedicated to me, and promptly burst into happy tears on the tube at 7am.

I got in to work in good time, via the gingko coming out outside the Royal Albert Hall and a string of beautiful I-believe-military horses being trotted down Exhibition Road. I've started my columns, and so far they're running nicely. I'm wearing Fils de Dieu and continuing to adore it. I'm reading Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn in lab, and it's fantastic.

Today is pretty brilliant so far.

[1] It's not Lycianthes rantonnetii or Solanum rantonnetti ("Royal Robe"). Hmm. Looks like this var. "blue potato bush", but none of the other photos for that search term are quite right - it's definitely got the pointier petals that point back upwards, and the flower clusters. - ah ha! Solanum crispum 'Glasnevin', there we go. [ETA for interest -- my initial search term was "potato weed purple flowers" and that was the chain of results I followed to get an answer. :-) ]

[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.

Absolutely wonderful weekend with the polymer to cap off a surprisingly frenetic first week in which very little actually got done; I managed to get my Housing Benefit application in then hare off across town for dinner + gig with people, then home to curl up and go to sleep on the boything, and then... the weekend was just lovely. (Huh. Apparently I consider the boything's place home now, in some senses. That's nice.) And now I'm curled up in my own bed in a different home - my parental home - having drunk wine (NZ GrooVee, not that I expect that to mean anything to anyone else, but it is special to us) and played Scrabble and done work and got another kilo of redcurrants in and - tomorrow morning I will have to get an early-ish train in order to get back to London in time for me 11am meeting, and nonetheless: yes. Families, lost and found and chosen.

Most of my DW presence this week has been over at

poetree, where I've written a series of posts loosely grouped around the theme of change: on loss; on bodies; on motion; on communication; and on hope.

One way and another, I am feeling very much part of a whole, and very much connected - between chosen family and my clan-of-origin and

liv's insight and advice and generosity when it comes to my feelings about how I'm about to start teaching and - just yes, really. Yes.

1. The road between my department and the student union is full of gingko trees. Full of them. It is going, very soon, to be glorious.

2. On my way home is a building fronted with garnet-bearing marble. Garnets are, in a very real sense, why I am a geologist; it was... grounding and reassuring to have that reminder.

3. My meeting with my supervisors was actually fab: we talked about #overlyhonestmethods; and we had an incredibly productive discussion, the upshot of which is: I am to have computer and lab coat and prescription safety specs ordered, and I am to be added to the lab/machine booking system forthwith. (This was by far and away the most productive and least traumatic 30 minutes of my day. Also, it contained free hot chocolate, and therefore did not involve people trying to POISON ME WITH CAFFEINE. I'm sorry, I appear to have got off track.)

4. The rubbish pancake place in the JCR is now something that is instead called "F-EAST", which, yes, gross, but on the other hand they sold me passion fruit bubble tea (surprise popping boba!) and steamed vegetable buns. That was a good bit.

5. I am wearing some of the boything's current favourite perfume (well, one of them) - I put it on last night to help soothe to sleep as well - and: yes, yes this is good and makes me feel less alone.

6. I managed to be a little bit social with other starting postgrads, instead of stubbornly hiding in a corner. I know some people! One of them is going to be working on the same volcano as my master's project was on, so I'm going to send her over some particularly difficult-to-find papers that are relevant and useful.

7. I hadn't realised that in addition to the preposterous gown I will get when I graduate (of purple stuff with white watermarked silk facings and cord), I will be graduating in the Royal Albert Hall.

8. I have got myself set up on the local iteration of wifi, so will now actually be able to work in the department while waiting for my computer to arrive. (I have a desk. It is only mildly inconveniently situated, and only slightly covered in its previous inhabitant's rubbish. And my supervisors agree with me about the correct computer set-up and will cheerfully shout at anyone who tries to short-change me on it, so I don't have to.)

9. In general, I did a fucking amazing job of dealing with the horrors that got thrown at me, and emerged not unscathed but at least with agreements that all the important things that need doing will get done.

10. I have music and boything talking to me and the Big Project for Lashings over the summer seems to have gone basically well. And you all have been giving me validation, which is something I desperately need, so thank you. Thank you.

Yesterday involved lots of good things: free cake, surprisingly effective past!me, getting a benzodiazepine prescription of my very own, half of Howl's Moving Castle, pasta bake, and the lovely boything.

Here are some things I have been reading recently:

I am not sure I am actually in Night Vale fandom (currently on episode 11), but I definitely have fanon. Very, very definitely.
have a ginger baby seal (which is also blind and abandoned, but GINGER BABY SEAL)
A little while ago, I ended up writing elsewhere about my approach to creativity
jjhunter is amazing, and some time ago hosted a thoughtful discussion on alternative medicine

Today my baby brother got his A-level results, and very pleased with them he should be too. Middle brother left for Jamaica for a year yesterday (these year-in-industry students, etc etc ;) ), and is talking seriously about applying for PhDs when he comes back for his third year. He is fairly likely to get a paper out of his time in Jamaica; I am squashing all my urges to ~guide him~ when it comes to PhD applications because, seriously, he is (a) a grown-up (b) not my problem and (c) competent, and me hovering won't do him any good. (Those of you who've been following me for years, though, might be surprised to learn he's getting consistently good Firsts in exams in addition to the above...)

I have been having lots of visitors etc over the past few weeks;

sorrillia for a few days, then dinner with

steorra in passing, and before all that J Who Is Not On DW for a week. (Actually I think they might be on DW as an RPer or something? But if so, we don't overlap.)

... aaaaaaaaaand most of my brain has been going on house-hunting and estate-agent-wrangling. Really, a lot of it. I have been gently reminded that I have told IRC about this at great and tedious length, but haven't really mentioned it here. SO: yep, most my brain at the moment is housing stress.

Approx my current mental state.

Two important realisations:
1. I don't have the foggiest what an operating curve is supposed to be in this context. BETTER FIX THAT.
2. The reason I was wiped today is that I forgot my psych meds last night, so took them this morning rather than risking withdrawal, having, um, forgotten that there's a reason I take my citalopram and amitriptyline at night...

Good things:
1. Thank you all, so much, for helpful suggestions about various bits and bobs, especially the gifts for counsellors etc.

2. For the first time in my undergraduate career, I have come home for the weekend in order to be looked after and concentrate better. This... is something I'm going to want to unpack a LOT with my counsellor, but is fundamentally probably a Really Good Sign.

3. Wove in the ends of project #1, got properly going with project #2.

4. Fannish conversation with

randomling ♥

5. ALL the people are dating. :-)

6. Three lectures to go on this wretched course, and then I can call it good (enough).

7. My lovely mum, for just saying "yes sure when would you like to be picked up what would you like me to cook you for dinner" when I phoned her up at 10pm and pathetically asked if I could come home for the weekend.

8. And also for buying me an AMAZING COMFORTABLE MATTRESS last year, when I was really ill, on the grounds that if I was going to be spending a lot of time in bed I might as well be comfortable there. ♥ (And also my lovely goose-down quilt, which was a... Christmas present? When I was quite small.)

9. Ran lots of errands, including collecting nice post and paying in cheques and lunch with lovely director of studies and all the other geologists from my college.

10. Boything came to see me last night and we got to spend time together and I was reasonably sane and. Boything! Hurrah compatible neurodiversities. Hurrah people who recognise that curling up on each other and then Lying Very Still with occasional squeezes counts as snuggling. Hurrah all round, basically.

hurrah also being more-or-less in one piece. ♥

(Bad days: I start out shaky from the pain and fatigue, go through being shaky from the opiates and fatigue, and by the time they've done their job I've forgotten what not being shaky is like - and I still don't particularly trust myself to move around the house - so it gets to 8pm before I put any sensible blood sugar in my mouth. At which point I go OH RIGHT IS THAT WHAT THE PROBLEM WAS.)

So I've mentioned that I'm starting to get into perfumery and the like.

This started out with being given an imp of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's A Wonderful Light: Three radiant ambers with honey, linden blossom, bourbon vanilla, and orange zest. The orange vanishes as soon as it's dried on my skin, and it ends up being a very rich vanilla-and-honey scent, with fleeting undertones from the amber developing with time.

And then Boything dragged me into a Penhaligon's, recently, and bought me Endymion:

Head Notes: Bergamot, Mandarin, Lavender and Sage

Heart Notes: Geranium and Coffee Absolute

Base Notes: Vetiver, Nutmeg, Black pepper, Cardamom, Musk, Leather, Sandalwood, Incense, Frankincense and Myrrh

I love Endymion. I love it to pieces. When it first goes on, it smells of apricots and vanilla on me, with something darker lurking underneath; after a few hours, it's mostly the leather, the pepper, the musk and the incense that come through, though the sage is still there if you're looking for it and there's a hint of nutmeg. If I'm struggling with insomnia, I'll put some on right before I go to bed, because it feels comforting and safe.

And... then I started thinking, and while fuzzy-headed today, I've spent a lot of time rummaging around BPAL's website, and various resale communities, and I've got a shortlist of things I'm trying to track down. I've focussed mostly on warm, dark scents, which is probably no surprise, but I've gone for a couple of brighter things too - and, of course, the set of Things That Smells Like The Celtic Fringes And Therefore Home. So now I'm going to make notes on the ones I'm after, and as and when I have bought them and they've arrived, I'll make notes about how they behave on me.

Part of why I'm suddenly so excited about this sort of thing is: I know dudes who use perfume. I know genderqueer people who use perfume. I've found a set of scents I really, really like on me, and I'm secure enough in my gender to have a play. The same's true of clothing - it's been a long, long process, but I'm finally getting to a place where I'm willing to experiment, and starting to realise that there's a way I want to dress for myself, not just to hide or to try to pass. And that's... very, very interesting to me; I'll try to make more sense out of it at some point when I'm less knackered. ;)

( The smells. )

+/- upped my antidepressants again. Intrusive thoughts were refusing to sit down and shut up, and I just don't want to have to deal with that bullshit at the moment. I'll have another go over the summer.

+ my magic wheels have been returned, and the one that was broken is fixed.

- unfortunately, the one that was working is comprehensively fucked. (Once I have made this post, my job is to e-mail them a photo going "er, realise I should've checked this over in the shop, but.")

+ went to a close-up magic competition at which Awesome Housemate C was performing. C was awesome, and so was Sweet Italian Queermo, and honestly the other Italian was also very sweet, but he was flustered and my table was a tough audience (we were all knackered), so.

- of the four competitors, it was Microaggressions Douchebro who won. This pisses me off because (a) he was not the most competent performer of those present; (b) he was shit at people with non-Anglo names; (c) he made a really shitty joke about autism; (d) he misgendered me and didn't bother asking my name (because I'd made an arch remark about point (b), I assume, and he didn't want to deal with having to call me Stanislaw); (e) he asked if he could touch my wrist, took hold of my wrist, then started making jokes about being on the Sex Offenders' Register; (f) honestly I am probably forgetting some of the other shit he did; (g) it was very, VERY noticeable that it was the old white Anglo guy who won, not the more competent Young Italian Queermo or the more competent Awesome Housemate C (who is neither a dude nor white).

+ I do also have a cushion and backrest for my wheelchair, FINALLY.

- I should've gone for the narrower backrest; and it only bloody takes imperial rather than metric allen keys (where the rest of the chair takes metric)

+ I got to see Awesome Housemate C again; wasn't expecting that to happen until after Easter.

+ I sent off my outline for my lit review, so far, to my supervisor; I got back a bunch of feedback today, and skimmed it before heading out, and I'm actually going to implement (some of) it this evening before going to sleep.

and it is at this point that I decide to bump it up to a net 10 good things...

+ I am really, really enjoying my current pulpy fantasy. So, so much. (Lisa Shearin, for the interested: it is incredibly, incredibly pulpy. It's first-person; the perspective character is an elven investigator with a family in the, ah, imports-exports business

+ I wrote a big long organise-y e-mail when the thought occurred to me, and created illustrative examples, rather than flapping uselessly at it.

+ I responded promptly to another e-mail that required actual brain from me.

+ I ate a lot of really, really tasty food. (Stem ginger ice-cream with pear and wild berries crumble! Sweet potato houmous!)

+ ... and if we ever leave a legacy/it's that we loved each other well: yes, thank you, Indigo Girls, that will do nicely as something for me to aim for. (... and so we're okay; we're fine...)

+ I have wonderful, wonderful friends, who keep an eye on me and nudge me about self-care and generally look after me.

+ Other Housemates have all left for the break, i.e. I have the place to myself, i.e. it's actually okay for me to listen to music on the big speakers according to my (currently somewhat disastrous) sleep-cycle, rather than faffing around with headphones (because of the vagaries of my set-up, this involves crawling around underneath my desk).

+ I have got the kitchen into a state such that my bedder cannot reasonably have a snit about that tomorrow (not that this will necessarily stop her), including washing up after Other Housemates (ergo I feel very virtuous).

+ oh, go on, have another: my ridiculously fancy cologne (gift of boything), which I feel a little silly about loving this much but there we go, has been cheering me up all day.

+ ... I'm surprised every time I realise how well this exercise works, in terms of refocussing me on positives and reminding me about good & cheerful things in my life.

[TW: POTENTIALLY DISTRESSING MEDICAL DETAIL] My period started yesterday, and all that gave it away was a mild ache in my lower back. This when I'm only on half dose of paracetamol - I successfully halved it several weeks ago, and unlike every other time I've tried doing so I didn't go back up to full dose after three days. So: either the amitriptyline is really doing its job, or I'm getting less pain... which would be a good thing, except that I suspect it's indicative of progression of nerve damage. ON THE PLUS SIDE, if it is progressive nerve damage this means I might be rid of the labial neuropathy one day. On the down side, that would be due to paralysis (yes, that is a thing endo can do). Er.
QuantumGIS. Unlike ArcGIS, it's not $2000 a licence, and it has useful help files. (Arc? Arc's manual says really cheerful stuff like THERE IS THIS THING YOU CAN DO IT'S SUPERCOOL BECAUSE OF REASONS LET ME TELL YOU HOW AWESOME IT IS and, er, never tells you how to do it.) Unlike Arc, it runs on things other than Windows. UNFORTUNATELY, files created under Windows that run perfectly fine cause, um, silent but immediate crashes of the entire sodding program when you try to open them under a Linux install. ... I was sad.
One of the things I did today was, er, write a (fairly polite) e-mail auf Deutsch to, er, the suppliers of my wheels. Based in Germany. Whose. Manual. Is, ah, provided in multiple languages, because that's helpful. ... the English and the German are mutually contradictory - somewhere along the line "nun" got translated as "not", rather than "now" - and I'd be inclined to chalk that up to a typo apart from some of the truly egregious other mistranslations.
... hold on is Buffy actually a series about Joss' ideal Manic Pixie Dream Girl oh dear goodness it is isn't it that's really rather distressing
In which I explain why I'm a bit of a disaster:
see I have a very great weakness for men who look good in formalwear while flirting with femininity and who will be _really wry_ at me while being musical
...
they don't have to be men though
...
sorry that was probably tmi
Custard. Isn't it the greatest?
Basil in raspberry trifle turns out to work really well.
How am I supposed to get chilli plants to fruit, anyway? Like, I've got the flowering down, but the fruiting not so much.
Corsetry! Isn't it great, though? And oh boy I am enjoying being secure enough in my gender presentation (for all that I am PERMANENTLY MISGENDERED) to feel okay about that one again.
Genitalia! Aren't they weird? Like, just sort of inherently? Not as weird as knees, obviously, but Pretty Bizarre nonetheless.
I'm feeling gently guilty about having spent £11 on a teal-taffeta-covered diary for 2013, but... teal. taffeta. How could I not?
I really, really enjoy spending time with my mother.
Beds are great.
I've been wearing that jacket, with all of the pins and so on on it, really quite a lot, and - every time I have the kind of interaction in public where I am Wearing That Jacket and Wearing My Docs and generally being a Pretty Stompy Queer Crip? But I am also polite and friendly and personable and thank people? I... kind of feel like I'm ~activisming~, in microcosm, in ways that are kind of terrifying but kind of exhilirating too. Does that make me weird?
I was whinging to pretty much anyone who'd listen about the Really Weird Looks I get for carrying my 30kg wheelchair up stairs at wheelchair-inaccessible Tube stations, and when it was Boything's turn he suggested I get a t-shirt that's plain on the front, with PART TIME CRIPPLE on the back (so it's only visible when I'm not in my chair). I... am very tempted to start making and selling those.
Relatedly, few things are more irritating than people ignoring my "no thanks, I'm fine, honest" when I'm trying to get my chair up stairs, because (a) that thing is heavy (b) most of the weight is in the back wheels (c) there's a REASON I'm keeping the back wheels on the steps (d) if you lift the back wheels OFF the steps and then move faster than I comfortably can, you ARE making things more dangerous, you ARE increasing the likelihood I'll trip and fall, and you ARE standing between, have I mentioned, a thirty kilo wheelchair and gravity, and that is a bad plan
That bit of ranting aside, I'm actually really cheerful. Sorry for taking up ALL YOUR READING PAGES today, darling subscribers. And do let me know about that one disasterfic. <3

Current Mood: garrulous

( SHOULDERDINOSAUR )

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who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

[perfume] A visit to Les Scenteurs

#10 Polyamory: identification & negotiation

[perfume] The boything on the topic of Red-Spotted Purple:

ten good things//it's okay to keep your head held high

ten good things

die Nacht zum Tag gemacht

I am very, very lucky, & I feel very, very loved

Here comes the sun

A little about the people in my important relationships

All is calm; all is bright

ten good things//because I desperately need them

State of the Alex

-

more on perfume

mixed bag

bits, bobs, other things I meant to mention today and somehow didn't

LOOK WHAT MY BOYTHING MADE ME

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May 2025

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