Dark Sweet Frozen Cherries

Watched the first couple of minutes of American Gods (Starz) S02E01, after @Erika Ishii reminded me it existed ¹https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu1ZwrvA2P1/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=1kigg02ht8ghl, just to pull it into the recently watched list so I can watch it with Shanda. That show has a lot of style, and I love the characters they describe with it. The book hinges on the idea that everyone’s rules are real to them, and gives us gods so we can see that belief is power. I think the series does really well with that. It yells the truth out loud at us so we can see everyone’s psychosis and their honest intention, and then lies to us in exactly the way their rules demand self-deception. Sometimes we can see it, but sometimes we can’t, or don’t want to. It’s exactly real life for those who listen, and it’s great to see a powerful adaption.

I read about lucid dreaming after E suggested it, and was reminded of it again today when someone discussed nightmares. I don’t have nightmares these days – I’m pretty sure I trained myself to not remember dreams when I was like 12 ²When I was young I had nighttime panic pretty regularly. I don’t have a clear enough memory to know if it was related to dreams or just regular anxiety or both. But there was never any comfort available about it so I learned to self-soothe, and eventually to not respond to the distress, or maybe to be less distressed. Or maybe just to detach … Continue reading – but the concept is still intriguing to me. Several techniques related to it require conscious memory of dreams, which is a problem for me. I don’t feel like I’m repressing or avoiding anything even when I carefully consider the idea of dreaming upon waking, but of course it’s impossible to know for sure. The throw-away response in the literature is that dreams you don’t remember don’t matter so lucid dreaming would be irrelevant in such cases. Which I guess could be true, though I haven’t seen anyone present a clear basis for that claim.

I have tried considering my feelings upon waking to see if I can reverse engineer a dream from them but I have not had any success. The methods that don’t require memory of dreams suggest making reality tests a habit so they also happen during dreaming. I don’t usually explicitly test for a dream state per se, but I am commonly concerned my participation in reality, which seems similar to me. I am going to try making dreaming specifically part of that evaluation, just to see if it makes a difference. I’d be interested to hear about other people’s experiences, if you have any to share. Taking about other people’s dreams feels sort of like a punishment because by their nature dreams are bad at stories, but I’d put up with it for some perspective.

Apparently F5 is buying NGINX. Now that we’ve cleared out the old execs to make room for the ones we’re importing ³I wish this were a joke but it’s a thing they called a same-day all-hands meeting to announce last week. The CEO wrote a letter I’m sure he thinks was neutral but that actually said “I pressured him to leave for months and he finally ‘agreed’, good riddance”. With today’s announcement I’d also read “when, after being harassed, he … Continue reading. That leans heavily in a direction away from hardware, which is going to make people nervous. I’m not sure the acquisition is a great plan – it’s not terrible but I’m not sure it promotes new innovation – but it does mean F5 is holding less cash, which will protect it from being pumped for cash by a private equity firm. It’s still being pumped for cash but now in a deal that doesn’t remove public ownership, which is a relative win. Corporations make my head hurt.

Got myself super worried this afternoon about literally nothing more than a reactive change in schedule. I got over it before too long but I should have done something else to stay out of it in the first place, or to have help with it. Being afraid and alone is hard, and I’m trying to imagine a world where I don’t have to spend as much time there. Where I can have help stepping away from such panic.

Other than that today was mostly calmer than yesterday. I got through work feeling pretty good, only one important task scheduled for Tuesday. The all-hands meetings even supercede most of my regular Tuesday meetings so I don’t have to go into the office. And I made my boss feel good about the conference last week; I’d sort of like to make him see the pain but he’s already so nervous about me and it wouldn’t actually protect me – he thinks he is protecting me by sending me in the first place.

I made some cherry-honey-mustard sauce [fig 1] for my meatloaf yesterday. Which was real good. I like meatloaf because it’s easy to make and I can build sauces for it using my condiment scavenging skills. Instead of trying to find a way to eat using only garbage food, pulling calories from ketchup or hiding the rancid flavor of something spoiled under fish sauce I get to make good flavors for a lump of fresh protein. And I can even have more than one per meal.

Shanda talked to me about The Giver (Lois Lowrey), a book that’s on lots of school reading lists for people who are about 12 (though I’m slightly too old for it to have been assigned before high school, published 1994). You really like it, the idea that you can have feelings even if your parents don’t. That you can have a seperate existence from others that includes more depth and color than you thought was allowed. That you can save the baby and possibly escape from this place. But I don’t connect to the young protagonist, I connect with the outgoing Giver. I already have all the pain and it’s my duty to protect people from it. To live a life alone with it and be “strong” to keep other people safe. When I tried to share it in the past it killed the only person I had any connection to. I don’t get to save the world or anyone I care about or even myself. Even if the world does improve I have no place in it – my role is merely to deal with the crisis before I die. I’m glad you like the book, and that it helps you feel accepted and empowered against your history of emotional neglect. But it’s not for me. For me it’s a world where my isolation is permanent – honored and enforced by society – and my best hope is that I can connect with one person for a few months to show them they don’t have to be alone, before they leave to find a better life that I can’t share. Before I blow up the world and myself and hope the next one is better.

I have a whole sad rant about costume and manipulation and socks and being skinny and maybe gender and simulating love. But it’s already late and that could be long so let’s save it for tomorrow.

ZiB

—
Sent from a phone.

•