kaberett | Entries tagged with mummy

1. I've dealt with two scary e-mails this evening.

2. DW work! Cackling with

azurelunatic over spite-driven development, updating the list of babydev bait in

dw_dev_training, staring in horror at the codebase a bit but then writing a fix that seems (after very cursory testing) to largely behave as intended (so I have submitted a PR so

karzilla can tell me to nest conditions instead of replacing them). (The horror in question: the if-statement that determines whether notifications of new entries/comments/whatever provide http or https links? Currently lives in LJ::User::Styles. NOPE NOPE NOPE.)

3. Bimbling about my mother's garden this evening; I've got a box or so of blackberries to take back to London with me, my hands still smell of Liebstoeckel, and I got to eat ripe raspberries and figs straight off their respective plants.

4. Three games of Scrabble with my mother over the past few days! And it is sort of telling that they just went, unlike the last several months, which strongly suggests that this round of antidepressant is starting to work properly. (I normally score 350-400ish. Game the first: opened with three bingos, ended up scoring over five hundred slightly to my surprise. Game the second: I remain extremely pleased about GAZeTTED for 92 and WASH/Ski/Ham for 50ish, finishing comfortably over 400 and on a tie prior to sorting out deductions. Game the third: actually significantly more lacklustre scorewise, but I was still pleased at getting out with OO/bOa/rOte for 15.)

5. I picked up beads for the shawls on Tuesday, and have been cooing gently over them ever since. They are tactile and pleasing and I am making a scientific joke with them that I find far, far too amusing.

6. Cambridge-Oxford-Cambridge over 5 days is actually a really sensible way to spend time: it means middle brother and I aren't in the same building for more than 48 hours at a stretch, which means that we don't hit him actually starting to set me off badly but we do get a high incidence background neutral-to-positive interactions.

7. Lovely grounding restorative reassuring extended conversation with

sebastienne this afternoon once I'd finally dragged myself out of bed. I have more of a sense of purpose and more of a sense of where I'm going.

8. That first tattoo makes me think that all of a sudden I know what I actually want Westminster Bridge to be, if I get it. An idea to sit with for sure, but seeing that photo felt like things clicking into place.

9. Pushing home up the hill from the bus stop, toward fiercely atmospheric sunset clouds, followed by turning toward a nearly full moon suspended in the pale blue sky.

10. Here is temporarily who I am.

So a few weeks back I acquired the twinkiest jeans, as discussed: blue metallic sparkly "super-skinny" jeans with an enormous blue faux-rhinestone button fly. I was wearing them for the interaction with the splendidly queer nurse, and I mentioned to my mother that part of the reason I'd thought it might be even a tiny bit okay for me to ask him about his partner was that I was wearing clothing that read as sparklegay too.

My mother, who had been great up to that point (and as we know is generally great these days), said something to the effect of "Ugh, I don't think it's fair that any one group should get the monopoly on bits of clothing and what they mean."

That's the context; this is my attempt to put my thoughts in order enough to e-mail her an explanation. (It's extremely focussed on the context of choosing to make legible otherwise invisible characteristics; obviously I'm leaving a very great deal out for the sake of Explaining Stuff To My Mum.)

( Read more... )

(Internalised ableism, capitalism, etc.)

( Read more... )

( Some good things. )

1. I got home to find a Terrifying Letter From The DWP... letting me know that my DLA's been autorenewed through to 2016 without me needing to do anything about it. :-)

2. I am now down to two half-written poems in the stack - one's a villanelle and will be hard; one might grow up to be a sonnet but is probably going to just be my usual style of thing.

3. Domestic bliss: doing the washing up while P curled up on the sofa with my complete works of Donaghy (he of Machines and Midriver), dipping in and out and reading me bits.

4. Swedennn. Snow and sunsets and AMINALS and RIDICULOUS FOOD (the ridiculous round thing with the whole in the middle, of which I have eaten approx my own bodyweight with butter and cloudberry jam over the past few days; ditto pepparkakor; ditto ajvar; I am a predictable human with predictable tastes) and exciting new food! Semla were not a thing I had previously consumed. (hahahahaha yes I win "simnel" is indeed finest wheat flour, semolina, which means semla is too, surprise)

5. Poking around etymonline.com after triangulating through all our mutual language; the -lic of garlic is in fact the same word as leek, and the Swedish for onion and (with modifiers) misc allium, and the German for misc allium. (Spem in allium, etc etc.) We were pleased.

6. Being helpful at my mother. :-) I mean, it is deeply weird to be grown-up enough to be helpful when it comes to casting an eye over CVs etc, but pleasant! Also she e-mailed me about pirates (and did not give me any updates on the rugby).

7. ... Elementary, though, okay. ELEMENTARY. SHOW.

8. Useful work done! Retweaked abstract (hopefully I'll be able to submit it tomorrow) for baby's first talk; did a quick blitz on an area I wasn't terribly clear on the specifics of and needed to be, wrote myself a summary, and have some questions for discussion with my supervisor; did an extremely sketchy first pass on the thesis outline I'm required to submit for my 21-month assessment, and slightly to my astonishment realised that it... continues to approximately make sense?

9. Mush. (SUCH TEENAGE.)

10. I am really really enjoying hair-adornment in the shape of tulmas courtesy of

khalinche - they're beaded, and I reckon they're kind of like blue roses and P reckons they're kind of like a peacock and either way they make managing my hair marginally easier when it's hanging down in a braid, and are very very pleasing when I manage to arrange them either side of a bun. Sensory misc. Yes. :-)

(An aside: I sent my mother one of the bits of Rilke and the translation I massively disliked; she e-mailed back agreeing it was terrible and had a much better stab at it herself. We were duly scathing about the bit of the introduction that claimed that the Robert Frost quote - about poetry being the thing that is lost when a poem is translated - did not apply in this case. I can think of instances where it definitely doesn't, but...)

( todo )

( tada )

( bonus tada for today because wow )

OKAY, so, back in 2007 I went on a school trip to Rome for a long weekend. On our one free early-afternoon I ended up getting to spend much less time at San Clemente than I'd intended, because Italian lunch hours, which in turn lead to me and the others I was with eating one of the best restaurant meals I had ever had for astonishingly little money, and it was only as we were leaving that we noticed the discreet stickers on the door about the place having been voted best-restaurant-in-Rome the preceding two years running.

My mother will be in Rome next weekend.

My mother, who remembers me rhapsodising about this place, asked me if I could recall the name.

... as it happened, I could remember (1) that the name started with an N and (2) the approximate walking route to get to it from San Clemente. Ergo five minutes with online maps later I had identified La Naumachia as the most plausible candidate, despite a rebrand having apparently done away with the very memorable logo of a ship. I look forward to hearing her report on it.

(Having explained how I found it, she responded: HAH!!!! That's the sort of thing I do. Indeed it's how the rat I ever found the same hotel I stayed in back then.... you come out of the back gate of the Inquisition past the best water fountain in Rome, go under a bridge past a dubious bus stop and up the hill most of the way to the next metro station....)

From my mum, just now:

Grausi used to call gooseberries 'ogrosln'. I'm working on a Slavic etymological dictionary at the moent and on the very first page I've spotted something interesting 'Stachelbeere' leapt out at me and then I looked at the Slavic words agrestu etc.:
It gives: medieval latin 'agresta', modern German Austrian 'agras' (this in 1886), Hungarian egres, Slovenian agres. FUN!

Now back to finding out whether this publication ever had such a thing as
a title page or preface/list of abbreviations. This copy doesn't!

("Grausi" is my maternal great-grandmother.)

A little while ago I put a cake in the oven. The tin is from my grandma; the Kenwood mixer I used from Papa; and the recipe was e-mailed me by my mother: she transcribed from Grossmutti's copy of the recipe in Cornwall, which she in her turn transcribed from Grausi's recipe in Feldkirchen, probably sometime in the forties.

Happy birthday, me. :-)

On Thursday night I was at a friend's tiny opera show, and in the interval I burst into tears all over That One Lady and couldn't quite work out why, beyond a general feeling that I was isolated (and a whole lot of brain going "what? no you aren't!").

I have worked it out some. A large part of it is that I am spending an awful lot of my energy (motive and social) just getting into work and managing office niceties. But there's another contribution, and that is getting to just sit very quietly in the same room as someone I know well and like a lot. When I'm living at my parental abode, my mum and I play Scrabble most evenings: I sit with a book or some work, she reads or bimbles about doing housework while I'm thinking about my move, and we talk only intermittently. For most of undergrad, Awesome Housemate C was camped out on either my sofa or my bed, quietly getting on with her stuff while I got on with mine, plus - again - occasional bits of chat/making each other tea.

(Additional issue: my mum is offline at the moment and will be for another week or so, probably, so I'm Predictably Fretting about not hearing from her even though I know why. It is at least less intense than normal.)

I think I either need to work out how to build more of this kind of time into my life, or work out how to notice when I'm already getting it outside the kinds of structures that I'm already used to interpreting that way. Also, probably, to grit my teeth and actually use my wheelchair more, which will result in less exhaustion.

Deeply curious as to how you all manage this (and if this kind of social time is a thing other folk need!).

[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.

+ my mother is home from a week hiking - I'd been really missing her - and she very nearly the first thing she did after getting in the door was go rummaging through her backpack to show me the rocks she'd brought back. And damn does she have good taste - in addition to a bunch of really pretty stuff, there were three that wouldn't be out of place in the reference specimens collection for second-years in my old department. (One garnet-bearing amphibolite - seriously, the whole bloody matrix was dark amphibole needles; one specimen of a unit boundary between calcareous deposits + mudstone, all heavily metamorphosed; and one staggeringly beautiful hand specimen-scale example of garnet pressure shadows - the garnet's fairly well developed, about two inches diameter, hosted in Glimmerschiefer [sorry, I've forgotten the English, it's one up from shale], with astonishing green chlorite in the pressure shadow to either side. I cannot even. Garnet pressure shadows happen because they're Really Bloody Hard and very difficult to deform, so you get little protected areas either side where the squooshier minerals have wrapped around 'em.)

+ my baby brother ran his half-marathon and finished in - I think I remember correctly - 1h52. Between them, they've raised very nearly £13.5k for the East Anglian Air Ambulance (and at least £250 of that has come in since they finished!). One of the team came in at 1h21, 19th (out of over 500 people entered)! This resulted in me giving him a foot massage at the dinner table, after dessert - he started out Deeply Sceptical, but ended up asking me to explain how I'd done it so that he could carry on with it himself...! (I get a lot out of physical contact, within certain parameters - hurrah autism, all else aside - and being able to make people feel better is a Really Big Deal to me, in this as in cooking.)

+ Papa - my maternal grandfather - phoned up specifically to ask if I knew about the big geological news this week, and to offer me the newspaper clipping on the topic. I jumped at the chance, and also at his offer to read the article to me - because he thought of me, and he phoned me, and he loves me for all that our last phone conversation degenerated into a monologue about The Awful Queers (no, I'm not out to him), and - I hadn't actually read any of the details yet, and the fact that I'd had the paper open in tabs since it went around the facebook geologists yesterday is really neither here nor there compared to the fact that he loves me. We've seventy years and a lot of life experiences and a good deal of politics between us, and yet-- and yet.

( This got long. This is good. )

through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, i have fought my way here to the castle beyond the goblin city. for my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great.

you have no power over me.

My mum says this thing, "I am the spider" -- it's because once, early in her career, she mentioned to a colleague-cum-mentor that she felt rather as though she was trapped in a web with a spider pulling the strings. The mentor - who, by the way, is a fantastic bloke and I love him to bits - responded, "My dear, you are the spider." So: today I have Been The Spider relating to a lot of Dreamwidth stuff, including helping to file a bug report; filing a suggestion; and doing some substantial rummaging in

dw_dev_training. Plus, of course, That One Article. :-)

I've cooked a lot, too: two loaves of bread (okay, they were in the breadmaker, but still); two quiche cases, of which one turned into a quiche; and a dozen jam tarts from the trimmings.

Plus a lot of other self-care: three meals, hair-washing, and arranging social time over the next week. Also: dealing with e-mail as it came in; sitting outside in the sun reading my current book; helping my tiny cousin settle in; and so on.

Just for the record, this is way more than I typically manage to get done. Today? Today can stay.

I appear to get on much better with derivative works of the Sherlock Holmes canon than I ever have with the actual, er, canon. So. There's a thing.

***

( Hands. )

***

( Languages. )

I am very nearly at the point where I'll have read through all my lecture notes by the time exams start! Yes, I recognise that cramming for Finals is a bad plan. Yes, I recognise that I deserve to fuck these up (though, sadly, this is not the worst-prepared I've ever been for exams). But I am so ready for this to be over. (Ask me again how I feel about that come results day...)
I. Okay, you guys, this having come home thing? This having come home to relax thing? I cannot even. My baby brother - he's 19, and has about half a foot on me height-wise - got home this afternoon, explained that he'd had a really crap day, and then plonked himself down on my lap for a hug. I DO NOT EVEN. IS THIS WHAT FUNCTIONAL FAMILY LOOKS LIKE? IDGI.
I washed my hair and now feel Much Less Gross.
Aforementioned baby brother helped himself to my Scrabble game with my mum this evening, which he almost never does, and he did A-level maths on one side of the table while I went "AUGH WHY ARE THIS ONE LECTURER'S NOTES ALWAYS SO VILE" on the other. And we conspiratorially et the last of my birthday cake (... my father had anti-socially sodded off upstairs and is always rude when we play Scrabble so, uh, we did not feel the need to invite him to partake) and also LOTS OF TOAST and it was great. And I won by somewhere over 50 points, having had obscenely good luck by my standards (up until the final two moves, I'd only had two turns below 30, and even those were well above 20...). IN THE PROCESS I discovered "bloosme" and "blancket" in the dictionary, both of which are RIDICULOUS words I am very pleased to have been exposed to.
Stripy parrot tulips! My mother and I have developed a Thing about stripy tulips, and she got these for my birthday and then forgot to put them out, but they're still magnificent and I've been really enjoying them.
Regular meals! Sunshine! Honeysuckle and lilac and etc are all out, and the fig is doing magnificently, and we had tagine for dinner and were generally disgustingly middle-class and I have been roped into making another round of preserved lemons.
Chatted to my grandfather on the phone; he sent me a clipping from the Telegraph about a volcano, recently, so I thanked him for that; and he advised me to look into getting a disabled person's railcard when I stopped being eligible for the Young Person's one; and he wished me luck in my exams and HE GOT ATTENDANCE ALLOWANCE FIRST TIME ROUND WITH NO MEDICAL EXAMINATION. THANK. FUCK. (It's the DLA equivalent for over-65s. I was Involved in the joint clannish effort to get him to fill it out such that this would happen, but I still don't trust the DWP as far as I can throw them.)
I've got lots of Buffy fic swilling around in my head; there's In Which Lilah Doesn't Die (because, seriously, fridging someone because ~romantic tension~? Not. Cool.); also the one in which Dawn goes to Anya for advice about How Do I Even Human, and Anya is, um, entirely herself about the entire situation.
I DID PHYSIO hurrah hurrah.
I know the loveliest of people. ♥

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. ♥

I am curled up in my pyjamas eating home-made raspberry trifle (including some of our own raspberries, frozen in years gone by) dropped off for me by my mum yesterday.

Mostly, yes. I have been experimenting with not, for my other Three Weeks For Dreamwidth posts since Monday (I'll be posting a round-up on Saturday, LJ folks), but actually much as I would like to move across to DW solely (-- all else aside, LJ is about to make the friends' page unreadable for me) I know lots of lovely people who are LJ-only, or predominantly-LJ, and I want to keep in touch with them (you) more than I want to be an idealogue about my blogging platform, by and large. ;) (Plus I'm aware that some of you have Definite Reasons for not-DW, rather than lock-in/inertia, and while I'm okay challenging the latter I am not okay stamping all over people in re the former.)

I'm kind of embarrassed by how much I love the BPAL perfume "Appalling Abattoir", but it is delicious.

I'm really enjoying the likely oh-so-brief break from terror.

Realising there is something I could plausibly do, and would really enjoy, if academia chews me up and spits me out (or vice versa, natch). I mean, I already keep separate "academic" and "activist" CVs, but it suddenly hit me that the latter is good for paid gigs, too, not "just" volunteering!
Spent a fair bit of time today with little brother, including him dropping by to make himself tea & loan me some hex keys & complain about how vile my sofa is. BRO <3 etc.
Seanan McGuire. In this instance for the song Jack's Place, a snapshot of the bar where the fairytales go after their happy-ever-afters, and especially, regarding Jack himself: He says he knows the fugitives by something in their eyes/While he just might tell you stories, he won't ever tell you lies...
The Enormous Outpouring of Enthusiasm for that idea I had yesterday has made me very keen to Make It Happen. I've done some costings and am pondering putting together a tiny kickstarter/indiegogo/similar.
Mmm, books. I've read 15 since the beginning of March - five times as many as I managed in January/February combined...
I have two brothers. Today, my mum (who I'm still not explicitly out to, except by wearing my "genderqueer" button around her and being very knowledgeable about trans* stuff; in part because she remains baffled by bisexuality as a concept) told aforementioned baby brother that she does, after all, have two and a half sons. This is the same mother who tried to shield me from news of Yet More Untimely Deaths, because heavens know she knows those're the last thing I need. I really love her a lot, you know - she's kind of really, really amazing, and I am so, so proud of her.
I am managing to go through a bunch of papers and actually tabulate all of this data I've collected into Here Is What Volcanoes Do! Which is exciting. Or, well, interesting/challenging/thought-provoking, all mixed up into one. I know I said above about "what if academia chews me up and spits me out", and I know it's 2am and I've been having the shit-I've-not-been-working insomnias about this particular project for the last several weeks, but actually? The moment I get my teeth into it, it is GREAT FUN.
... I'm up to number 7 and I didn't even notice a struggle of getting here?! YAY anti-depressants; YAY being back up at 40mg; YAY having ditched the intrusive thoughts in spite of my life having got more high-stress. Experimental result: I'm not ready for 30mg again just yet.
I've had a lot of moments of "accumulated knowledge is helpful to people" in the past few days: from helping my mum critique/add to Papa's application for Attendance Allowance (seriously the mensch is about to hit 95; has been living by himself in an INCREDIBLY isolated house half a mile down a grass-and-dirt track for two and a half years; has a hip replacement; and still does the Telegraph crossword every day, around which he writes letters to it & the Times explaining that increasing student tuition fees is awful and inequitable and will have a particular negative impact on female students because it will saddle them with a dowry of debt) via giving out info on Planned Parenthood's Stateside HOPE program to agreeing to be a point of contact for a trans* dude who's going to participate in one of the summer programmes I did a few years back... yeah, I'm feeling pretty good about my ability to give back to society right now.
Yesterday I went around some formal gardens with my mum (one of the ones we visit regularly), and was awestruck and smitten all over again: I love the place so, so much, and I took a ridiculous number of photographs of the dwarf irises and the bright pink hellebores against the daffodils; and this evening, as the sun was setting, my mum showed me her [Christmas/Lenten] roses and... her other gloriously-scented shrubby thing, and -- HURRAH PLANTS. Hurrah talking about gardens. Hurrah gruene Daumen, as we heard somebody saying in the wild yesterday (and had to work very hard not to corpse over); hurrah heritage and tradition and green space.

I made Marillen- and Zwetschgenknoedel over the weekend; this evening, I roped the woozl in to help me make my first Nusspotitze. We're still working our way through the last bottle of Inlaenderrum my Grossmutti brought back from Austria.

My mother will get to eat fresh Potitz for breakfast on Christmas day, and I am just a little weepy about how much that's going to mean to her.

The woozl, meanwhile, is being very good-natured about the extent to which in-group conversations with my mother tend to involve three or four different languages; references to Visigoths and caterpillars getting mixed up with one another; especial family in-jokes and word-plays; and the like.

I... do like it when friends get to meet my family: I like people having the opportunity to see where I came from, in several senses, because - I am the ghost of my own past lives (thank you, CN Lester), and some days that history weighs heavy on my shoulders, and some days I feel like it's all that's holding me up.

It's been a hard year and a long year and a year I'm emerging from in a far better state than the one I entered it in; I've loved fiercely and gently, I've laughed, I've cooked and I've fed people, I've curled up with my books and I've sung my heart out. I'm a little older and a whole lot wiser and - tonight, right now, I can recast hollowness as dormancy.

I didn't start this post meaning to talk about depression, but apparently I want to, and I think what I want to say is something a little like this: the days are short and the nights are long and it huddles close for warmth, but: love lives again, that with the dead has been: love will come again like wheat that springeth green.

The solstice has passed, and so too will this: and in its wake I will remain myself, and I will become someone wholly new.

[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

who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

ten good things // {at this truth we have arrived/god damn, it's great to be alive}

sub/Cultural semiotics of clothing

{though there are days that I don't think of you they rarely outnumber those I do}

ten good things//when you're learning to face the path at your pace every choice is worth your while

tomorrow

... the Internet is magic.

Family history via the medium of etymology

Even though I'm... twenty-four

{and I should really wear my glasses/but my hindsight's twenty-twenty}

A little about the people in my important relationships

ten good things//i'm sick of not taking chances any more

ten good things

a collection of observations

the glorious 25th of May

-

[3W4DW] 3. Do you crosspost? Why or why not?

good things

An Cultural Experience

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

Profile

April 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags