who only by moving can balance

The current State Of The Alex is more or less "unending self-pity, leavened only by high-fat sweetened dairy products" but I have thus far resisted the temptation to make myself a warm mug of Bird's custard and furthermore it's been raining for most of the day, so when we went to the supermarket (on a stupid little walk, for our stupid mental health) at closing time (to see what was reduced) we came away with not one, not two, but all three of my Current Primary Comfort Foods priced to clear.

Which is how I wound up sat on the sofa with my favourite teaspoon and an individual raspberry trifle listening to Dreaming (Marshmello, P!NK, Sting), and not actually crying but definitely having a whole lot of feelings. We followed up, naturally, with Fields of Gold.

I am so grateful for these small quiet bubbles of joy, that move through me even here.

(The Word, Tony Hoagland.)

This morning I have been Making A Contribution To Medical Science, and consequently I have a plaster with a dinosaur on it. The ?nurse was very apologetic about it being paediatrics plasters, until I went DOES IT HAVE A DINOSAUR ON, at which point we were excitable at each other about Sophie the stegosaurus. As we were getting to finishing up paperwork, having spotted the quearring also, I tentatively enquired as to whether I might ask an intrusively personal question. "... yes," he said, warily. "You've been very carefully saying partner..." I said, and he ducked his head and looked at his ring and said "yeah, husband, we've been together for ten years and married for five", and then we had a cheerful little discussion about queers and how his husband's one of very few male midwives in the country, and they've just bought a house together and are looking forward to the long weekend, and CATS and PAINTING THE HALLWAY and in general domestic bliss, and it was lovely.

And I am updating you all on this from Homerton College Cambridge Cambs, where I am sat in the sunshine in a scented garden next to a sundial and a water feature gently applying desensitisation therapy and leeching eduroam, and when I am done I shall pack up my computer and head over the railway bridge to have lunch with my mum.

-- to say that I am doing very well! The absence here has been because I have slightly-to-my-surprise been busy.

I am currently actively reading Saladin Ahmed's The Throne of the Crescent Moon for book club; I have poetry by Audre Lorde, Stephen Dunn, Carol Ann Duffy and Rilke out on loan; I have just finished reading a book by Nnedi Okorafor (Zhara, the Windseeker) and am now intending to read everything else she has ever written. I continue listening to Vienna Teng on loop; I have just watched Elementary S0309 twice and am having lots of feelings about it!

Yesterday I made three huge vats of curry, some rice, and some chapati. I fed lots of people. It will keep feeding lots more of us.

I have code that increasingly does what I want. My slightly scary meeting with my supervisor on Friday was in fact incredibly exciting: I plotted up all of the data I've spent the past 15 months acquiring, and some really intriguing things popped out. The paper we were conceiving as "the ocean island basalts" paper - relating to intraplate volcanism only - looks like I might actually have things to say about all volcanism on the planet. And ergo mantle processes in a much broader sense than expected. Which -- yessss. All of a sudden I feel like my project is taking shape and making sense.

Also received a very pleasing compliment-shaped-thing on the topic of my poetry, aaah.

I have just flung myself through the shower and am heading out to Kew for a little while now with my useless ex and my housemate; this evening we are going to watch a free livestreamed CN Lester gig at 8pm GMT (I seriously seriously recommend CN if you haven't come across them - singer-songwriter, pianist, dealing awesomely with interpersonal interactions and mental illness; plus they're genderqueer so, you know).

We practise with building bricks and breccias.
Just so--a castle. Just so--in my embrace
if only I hold fast enough, you'll be transformed--
your fragments grown into a plated armoured whole--
your red unblinking eyes your sturdy heart.
As with all complex structures, engineering is required
on every scale from child's play to mountain range;
chance and happenstance tend tenderly toward decay.
With these hands I thee knit together
or a sweater or a scarf; with these hands I thee play
music, best I can; I write for thee solemnities
in careful lines. I create for thee this waxing
waning love, albeit it small, or great--
and at close of day we'll sweep
the sawdust from the floor, we'll bank the fire,
we'll knead the bread--from these quiet domesticities
is all love made.

Poetry in St Paul's this evening, which was not quite what I'd been after but which left me with a lot of thoughts and a very comforting place to doze gently; then dinner; then a walk from St Paul's to Waterloo along the Thames (including crossing it!) with Nik, who remains one of the people I am fondest of in all the world, at least some of which was an amiable amble underneath illuminated trees with his arm slung round my shoulders and my arm round his waist and the river next to us. Good.

I occasionally mention the concept of making. the job. smaller. Overwhelmed by a task? Okay, alter your concept of "success" to something manageable. You're not going to write a novel today, but you can write the prologue. Or half a chapter. Or whatever. And then you can do another half chapter tomorrow. And then you get to the end, and you look up, and there's a novel.

Counselling and mindfulness and a whole host of other things have, over the years, trained me to at least consider the possibility of don't make the job larger. That's not a framing it's been given explicitly, but it's not exactly an unrecognised phenomenon: to some extent, think sneaky hate spiral (ALL OF THE THINGS ARE PROBLEMS), but also catastrophising (THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD).

For me, it tends to go a bit like this: the Thing is terrible. If I am already overwhelmed, it is even worse than that. I cannot possibly control or have any effect on the Thing [note that this is a distortion: instead of making the job smaller, to make it less overwhelming, I abnegate agency and power in order to do away with choice and responsibility, both of which are Hard]. Anxiety about the Thing then gets displaced onto anything that looks even slightly similar within a large radius: "there is no point in even trying to Deal with the Thing, because it's not like I can handle the Badger either." And thus I spiral further and further into telling myself I'm shit and incapable and incompetent and can't manage anything, and get distressed about wider irrelevant putative problems that may not even be problems, and all the while the Thing looms larger and larger above the foothills of self-hatred.

Mindfulness techniques, as it turns out, have really helped me with this. The meditative practice of sitting with thoughts but gently redirecting one's focus to one's breath, or heartbeat, or whatever, has an awful lot in common with looking at the thought that goes you are too incompetent/ill/crippy/lazy to be on this PhD programme, you can't even adequately read and synthesise literature, there's no point even trying to fix the transfer report, you might as well fail out now and be done with it and - not ignore it, but nod at it, show it to the waiting area, and return to the pargraph at hand.

I sometimes summarise this - possibly via Pratchett - as you do the job in front of you. There's no "just" about it - like I said, it's taken me years to get to the point where I can semi-reliably do this under pressure - but over the course of this evening I've realised just how far I've come in this respect, and I am enormously grateful.

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.

because it is 1am and I've just wolfed leftovers quesidilla and spilled the tomato sauce all over myself and my housemate left the hall light on for me and I'm about to wash and clothes are the worst and I spent 14 hours at work today and got data and I am buzzing--

-- and yes it is the euphoria of sleep deprivation but it's also the euphoria of data and of I love my job (and some of the exuberant delight in it is precisely because every single person up my line management looks at me and goes "... for fuck's sake get some goddamn sleep" instead of telling me to do more work), and -- this, this, this is why I do research completely divorced from social implications, this is why I care about shit that maybe 20 people ever will really engage with if I'm lucky --

because I get this from it, and that is enough to keep me going through the endless trans 101 and the queerbashing and the ableism and the bullshit. When I am needed I do my real work, and the rest of the time I fuck around with volcanoes, and actually that's pretty fucking brilliant.

(I mean it about Wednesday as downtime. Thursday through Sunday is going to be kinda hectic again, but I'm then intending to spend most of Monday asleep also once I've bundled P. out the door in the direction of the Eurostar; I know I'm kind of giddy at the moment and this maybe looks a bit concerning, but I promise you don't need to worry unless I don't get the downtime I'm committing to. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night and I pass by my not-exactly-an-altar and I smile at the art on my walls and I say "today I will try to make good choices", and those choices include that downtime, when it's scheduled. And by "downtime" I don't mean "the evening", I mean "I am unlikely to get out of bed for longer than it takes to shower", and in the meantime -- this, this, this. Only this.)