who only by moving can balance

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.

1. 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!).
   
2. That One Lady made me a necklace and it is lovely. :-)
   
3. 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).
   
4. Good conversation with supervisor yesterday, which actually breaks down into twothree 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
   
5. 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 :-)
   
6. 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.
   
7. Aloe drink! Aloe drink with rosewater and takmuria. Food that is texturesssss.
   
8. Counselling session on Friday (assuming counsellor doesn't have to cancel. I will actually have a tantrum if they do.)
   
9. 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
   
10. The internet is still full of photographs of tiny turtles going "WHY AM I ON TOP OF STRAWBERRY WHAT DO D:"
    

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.

This is something I have apparently spent a lot of time working on, just because it makes life easier. In a lot of ways it's a superset of other skills I've learned: sometimes more conscious - like when I deliberately switch into Posh White Lady mode - and sometimes it's completely automatic, like the way I codeswitch defensively (I tend to reflect the accent of whoever I'm talking to).

I chatted about this a few weeks ago with TOL - I'd sent an offer-culture-esque e-mail to the tune of "I'd still really like to see you but I know you've got a lot on your plate at the moment, so if e.g. x or y means you'd rather postpone that's fine", and she'd had to read it a couple of times to reassure herself that I wasn't trying to get her to cancel for me. We talked through ways to avoid hitting that particular miscommunication-in-potentia in future; I said I was happy to phrase such e-mails in whatever way worked best for her, because it was effort-neutral for me.

And then we clarified: it's actually that I'm already translating-to-allistic, and which variey-of-allistic I translate to ist mir egal; but not translating isn't any easier, because code-switching to "natural" speaking - with someone who doesn't ping me as autistic - is just as much effort as anything else.

And... that's the thing. There is such comfort in the ways that I can, with other autistic folk, frequently just... talk. Relax the monitoring and the double-checking against my learned scripts and just get on with it -- but so much of it is so automatic at this point that I don't notice I'm doing it until I'm... not. Which in turn makes it hard to pass on the skillset, because when the answer is "I have a checklist for how to handle a situation where someone has just received news of a bereavement and I follow it automatically" it can be... quite difficult even to expand what the checklist is, never mind help the other party absorb all the checklists for all the different possible situations to the extent that they come that automatically. (I have talked a little about how the intersection of autism + being an abuse survivor means I have very consciously learned to... interact in ways that look like "gaming people". It isn't actually that simple.)

I don't, I'm afraid, have any tidy conclusions; I just know that passing-for-allistic is at this stage something I do reflexively, except that when I'm triggered/exhausted/whatever I find it much, much harder to do the "basic" shit like reflecting the language and modes of communication other people are using with me, and I think that ties into being perceived as hostile/aggressive.

(In turn, I seriously need to work on the extent to which I freak out when people say that they're perceiving/experiencing me as same - I know why I freak, but it is a criticism I need to be able to hear. It's on the list for discussion with my counsellor next time I see them.)

I've watched people wince when I am Obviously Autistic In Public, because I'm exhausted or overwhelmed or whatever. And maybe that's actually the conclusion, I suppose: successfully passing for allistic takes energy, but is still less work than persuading people to interact with me in ways that are easier-for-me, at least for me, because of how long I've been learning this particular lesson. This is some of what I mean when I say I've "run out of people" or "am not fit for human company" - there's a bit of constructing-self-as-monster in there, on which topic I have a first draft of something that is approximately a prose poem - and some of why it hurts so much when I get told that I'm unfairly dictating modes of communication (through e.g. advocating active listening over formal debate in one-on-one informal interactions, to pick an actual example).

And on that note I shall sleep before I ramble more, I think.

That One Lady brought her bottle of it along this evening for me to make friends with.

I think it is important that I tell you that normally, she eats spiky. She eats spiky and turns it smooth and sweet and smiley and lovely. Vetiver won't hold on her. Nothing will hold on her.

This is not, in general, at all true of me.

Nonetheless, on TOL Bulgari Black ends up somewhere that she describes as "High Femme Drag".

About this perfume, rydra_wong says:

... this doesn't seem to be stocked in department stores at all here, but is splendidly cheap to buy online. And it has a marvellously tactile bottle, simple and heavy and coated in matte black rubber. And it's another fun one for bizarre reviews; it's notorious for its "burnt rubber" note (anyone who secretly enjoys the smell of petrol at gas stations, this is your scent), but the intense smokiness is derived partly from tea (Lapsang Souchong), and it's also extremely wearable.

In many ways it's close to Dzing!, but the burnt rubber/smoky tea is more upfront (versus Dzing!'s discreet Bandaid note, its ginger/saffron strangeness), and it then turns into a plainer, richer vanilla (whereas Dzing! has vanilla in it but dries down to more of a thin sweet wood/musk). Leather coupled with rubber, obviously. Comfortable kink.

And vass adds to the conversation. The notes of this perfume are, in theory, lapsang souchong, rosewood, bergamot, cedar wood, oak moss, vanilla, amber, sandalwood and musk.

On me, it starts out smelling unabashedly and unavoidably of vodka. No, really, someone opened a bottle of really expensive vodka and let it infuse the air.

And then after five minutes they tipped a bottle of cheap vanilla essence into it.

After ten minutes, it is briefly acrid and smoky, and after half an hour? Pure unadulterated vanilla biscuits, warm out of the oven and satisfyingly buttery, all the way down. Forever.

I WISH TO FILE A COMPLAINT THIS IS NOT HOW THIS IS SUPPOSED TO WORK ;_;

1. My strategy for dealing with my insomnia last night (leave main light on, read book until can't any more, pretend is afternoon nap) was good for 4 hours' sleep, which I think is more than I'd have managed otherwise. Hurrah for coping strategies.

2. I have now finished the first Mary Oliver collection I borrowed from the Saison Poetry Library, and it's amazing and I love her (You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.).

3. I need to be in work this afternoon (and building steam has been turned back on, which means that the clean lab isn't at ambient outdoor temperature, hurrah). I was starting from Oxfordshire, via Paddington. I had my wheelchair with me. Paddington is conveniently just north of Hyde Park, which is just north of work. I had an absolutely fantastic explore along the Serpentine - ridiculous waterfowl, several types of snowdrop, narcissi, silver-fern bramble (one of my favourites), a whole pile of beautiful gradated dogwoods interspersed with salix, gorse in flower, birches with pink bark peeling, a tree with astonishing pink catkins, hellebores and mahonias and...

4. ... and yesterday afternoon I visited the Oxford Botanics with That One Lady. They are tiny and adorable and have a whole series of beds organised by which medical discipline the plants were or are used in. Also, lots of my absolute favourite iris (they're predominantly a sort of pale sky blue in person).

5. The 1am bugfuck nuts appears to have been followed by starting a bleed. Thanks, body, for your utter predictability; on the plus side, in the middle of going "EVERYTHING IS SPIDERS" I did at least manage to spot that that was likely what was happening.

6. Actually, one of the other ways I dealt with the insomnia was putting together a tentative setlist for the 10-minute poetry reading I'm doing as part of a General Evening, in late May. I'm going to have to think a bit carefully, because I've selected 9 poems and put them in a coherent order, so that + patter is clearly going to be too long... e-mail to the organisers time, I think.

7. In fact, the General Evening is a monthly event I performed at with Lashings last night. I remain absolutely astonished by my ability to make a room burst out laughing via the medium of improvisation on an approximate theme of my lines; perhaps I shouldn't be, because after all I've been managing that for nearly five years now, but hey.

8. The Situation with the Partner continues to Make Progress. We've managed another several good & useful conversations; things aren't fixed but we are stubborn enough that we're pretty sure we're going to manage, at this point, and we've got a stopgap in place.

9. It's nearly 5pm and the sun hasn't finished setting, yet; currently it is painting the sky gold, and it is glorious.

10. Thank you to, like, half the Internet for taking care of me during meltdown last night - so, so grateful that you will make the time for me. <3 Special shout-out to flippac, who handled the brunt of it solo with no warning. ♥

1. We have a new dishwasher at home. It theoretically works. (I haven't been around to test this.)

2. One of my best friends is in the country. We are making food together and giggling a lot and sharing poetry, and it is nice.

3. I am introducing him to TOL & TOG & some of the rest of the local polymer, and that is likewise going well (as far as I can tell!)

4. I really, really enjoyed Wired Love (thank you so much to skygiants-I-think-it-was for suggesting it!), and the various other books I have been reading (I am going through a patch of Fluff, and it is nice; it is on Gutenberg and it is lovely.)

5. CN has posted their brownie recipe on the internet why did I not know this thing

6. I got another round of digestions going on Friday, despite only being in work for about three hours, and I didn't kill anyone with HF.

7. I talked about my code some more with That One Gentleman and he showed me some ways to make it better (there were some horrible hard-coded bits that are still hard-coded but now less horrible!).

8. Got to introduce more people to Neruda.

9. Got to introduce P to my Lioness shinies (ps: 50% off sale on til the end of Sunday, I am attempting to not buy anything else...)

10. ... because my previous gorgeous shiny has probably only just shipped after I spent an age faffing about it (yes even though I want that other one too... >_>)

1. One poem draft complete and sent off to a couple of people to beta before it goes up here later in the week...

2. ... and a second is beginning to try to take form: meta-commentary on writing love poetry.

3. I wrote some actual code for actual work and it works and I did it almost entirely solo. (It's also ugly and hacky and took me half a day instead of half an hour, but I learned stuff and it still took me less time than wrangling the data manually would have done, and will mean every time I have to do that bit of data wrangling in the future it will Just Work, and I suspect will save my group collectively a lot of time once I've slapped a GUI on top of it and added in a bit of flexibility instead of hardcoding everything.) Seriously, I am so proud of myself - I think this is actually the first time I've gone and written something by myself and had it mostly go, and is definitely the first time I've done so for work (as opposed to for DW volunteering, but I pretty much always have people holding my hand for DW bugfixes), and - yes, yes, this is a thing I can do.

4. ... and I scraped up the courage to send off the actual code to TOG, who is interested for several reasons. (This is some hardcore brain rewiring on my part - I'm really, really twitchy about showing people things, in ways that I maybe want to ramble about with respect to posting poetry drafts here, actually. Hmm.)

5. Relatedly, I got to spend some Proper Time with That One Lady this weekend, which was very nice.

6. ... and I got to feed people a bit, which ditto.

7. I just finished reading a gloriously terrible werewolf romance, and have moved on to another round of Borges, which is not necessarily sensible. (The other two things I currently have on the go are Teaching As A Design Science and some feminist sociolinguistics from the 80s, both of which are very interesting and pretty heavy going given the day job.)

8. All you lovely folk leaving me prompts for the December-a-day thing, which I am finding stimulating and engaging and enjoyable for all that I'm only writing you a couple of paragraphs a day, on the day.

9. Exciting new I'm A Great Big Queer jewelry arrived from The Internet (specifically, a rainbow ear cuff from PictsieCrafts)...

10. ... and the Internet has also sent me a tiny daylight-temperature light bulb for the office, and if I'm lucky a thing I can plug it into will arrive before Thursday.

(Also, house-hunting again is a thing that is happening. Fingers crossed. But basically -- yes, good. I am tired but doing tentatively okay.)

As has been hard to avoid noticing, I've been having a bit of a misery with my new institution plus my name. I finally got around to logging back into the library system today, to find that my name has actually been updated (i.e. the system has presumably been updated as a whole to pull from the preferred name field). I sent an apology for having been radio-silence to the bloke who's been handling the issue, plus v heartfelt thanks, and have just rec'd in response:

No problem - figured you would holler if not sorted. Learnt something about data sharing and College records along the way so all good.

... I kind of want to ask him if I can buy him a drink.

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I get a ridiculous grin every time I think about my lovely freshers.

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Other things that result in ridiculous grinning: this weekend, as a whole, which involved (1) going to the Globe to see the Lightning Child with a subset of the polymer; I got given flowers by someone other than my mother for I think the first time in my life (the cast threw roses into the audience, as it was the last night; the audience threw them back; in the second round of same, That One Lady caught one and handed it to me; and then of course I had to catch one and give it back...) and it recovered very nicely upon being placed in water when I eventually got home on Sunday evening; and I have possibly Acquired another Person in at least some capacity, which - smiles everywhere.

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Korra! Elementary! This particular episode of Elementary, my goodness, I can't even begin to tell you how delighted I am with the... references to current affairs. In other fannish news, I am anticipatory and a little scared about having signed up to Yuletide for the first time ever.

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And tomorrow is my first day in the lab... which I will spend mostly washing beakers.