Rice Starch & Canned Fish
Calmer today, after pushing through to the bigger feels that had put me into the treacherous place I was yesterday. I was triggered by food – specifically by the lack of a few specific things that 7-year-old me had come to depend on for low-visibility meals during times of high stress. I have intentionally reduced my stock of many of these because I rarely eat them and because I no longer love a life where I need them. But the household had gotten into a bad state.
Shanda spent 2 weeks being too stressed for feels, and another being sick, and that put essentially all of our usual coordination on hold. This is a normal condition in most households, when things get too busy for a day or two. But ours lasted longer. Once you start repressing feels it’s easy to get to a state where you feel too busy to have them, and keep yourself too busy so that you don’t have to. A state where it feels dangerous to let the feels out, or even to look at them to see how big they are, for fear it will keep you from doing things you “need” to do.
We actually were finally headed back out of that last week, but then she got sick. And I lost control of my day job schedule, spending a lot of time in the office and getting almost a dozen SRs at the end of the week. Combined with new big feels from Shanda about not getting care when you were sick and 10 it was a lot. Too much. I stopped doing even the eating I can usually accomplish and fell back to my high-stress foods. Which quickly ran out because I stopped stocking for this sort of emergency. And then I was triggered to being young and trapped and hungry and tired. I gave up on proactive management and started trying hard to do nothing at all so I would have the energy to reactively respond to the days most urgent tasks.
I’m back out of it though, after a tough evening yesterday, and several days of reactive stress before that. Away from the triggered remembrance of my youth, when running out of tuna and unflavored rice cereal and the like meant that on top of whatever was killing me to create this situation I would not be able to eat until something changed. Away from the fear I had already deferred about Shanda not working with me – fear that redoubled when I was back to 7 and in need of food. I don’t even really feel behind, though it would be good for my nerves if we could do this week’s grocery shopping. And if I maybe restocked some unflavored rice cereal so that when I panic again I can at least convince my brain that I’m not going to starve.
My boss is out so I get to skip my normal Monday meetings, alogn with most of the rest of the day job. Which is a useful break. I’m not on the queue the week but I do have like 7 SRs to plow through. Hopefully will have them all wrapped up by Thursday though, so I can clean up anything else before the long weekend (taking Monday off). I should get three weeks off SRs this time around so while I’m not thrilled to spend another week working them I will at least get a break.
Shanda watched Mother! (2017), which she liked. I haven’t seen it yet – all I can think is “Whoops, all allegory” whenever I think about it. Which isn’t to say I won’t like it, just that I currently am only capable of silly opinions on the topic. But it will be a good movie for me to try by myself, to see if I can make that go again.
Watched iZombie tonight – their noir episode. It’s an obvious choice for the show but they saved it until the last few episodes. So good. I am a sucker for banter and this episode delivers – plus the expected weird metaphors about “the city” and food, unnecessary alliteration, and slang that would have been insane even in the 30s. They’ve done private episodes before – there was a great one directed by Enrico Colantoni last season – but for this one is straight noir and they don’t bother to explain how this 173-year-old person exists in modern Seattle, they just do it. No color saturation (which is easy in a zombie show), slatted lights, lamp reveals, trench coats, a woman in gloves – it’s all here. I’m sad this show is ending because it’s so much fun. I’m definitely going to watch it again when it’s done.
Went to robots and had a low key day. Mostly reinstalled Windows and disabled Cortana, before watching Android Studio update in the least efficient way I can imagine – per user, in unrelated, interdependent batches, without checking permissions first and without even checking for hardware support before installing system services. Fraking IDEs. I can hardly be bothered to open vim most days – IDEs make my nose bleed. But it’s coming along. And S told me to buy two more computers, which will be nice even if it’s extra setup. We’ve picked up a couple newer ones over the yeara but mostly we’ve got a set of machines that were low-end old stock when I bought them in like 2015. And it will make me file an expense report so I can get some cash back out of the team for the last 200 things I bought.
I had a call today, which as usual is a highlight of my week. I’m feeling much more confident in the repeatability of this exercise, which itself is welcome relief to my recently life and historical fears. I’m told I did well in my unassigned tasks, which I hope offers relief for you too, about a topic I know is at least sometimes fearful. Got to share plans for a new project I’m quite excited about. Asked what I feared would be a hard question but got an easy answer, at least to the most practical part. That creates a new assignment for me but one I very much appreciate being able to participate in, at least a bit, rather than watching anxiously from outside. I suspect stage 2 of that plan will come with plenty of its own anxiety and delay, but I’m glad to be moving on stage 1. I still haven’t found the prompt that lets me know things about daily life, but I’ll keep working on it.
Ranted yesterday about the CASA program. How it’s sometimes very useful to individuals in hard places, but only because it positions itself at the interface where the state oppresses young people. Plus it’s staffed by empty nest’d white women; in combination with the institutional injustices of “parental rights” and the court system it can’t help but be racist and otherwise discriminatory, even beyond the way it supports the dehumanization of young people. I’m glad I fought the state for a minute as a CASA. It’s not an unworthy battle. But there’s no way to stay in it without imagining that it’s acceptable for the state to punish young people until their assigned old people to comply with capricious rules, on top of the ongoing and sometimes newly-assigned mistreatment that created this situation in the first place.
Also ranted for just a second about the idea of sick notes. They’re inherently disrespectful, a danger to public health, an unnecessary burden and expense on the medical system, and discriminatory in 11 different directions. What are they supposed to do, other than provide relief for rich people from an abusive relationship? The idea that powerful people are entitled to know and control my schedule and medical treatment – particularly when I’m ill – just to satisfy their fantasy about their roles in the patriarchy makes me wretch. No one is entitled to my “reliability” – itself an abilist and coercive concept mostly employed to allow under-staffing – and particularly not when my absense doesn’t impact the enforcing party. At best that’s punishment for punishment’s sake, and in the common case it’s one of the levers of oppression.
Tried some colored hair wax today. Much more suitable for short hair than other things I’ve tried. The spray-on paint works fine but leaves me closer to powder-coated-head than colored hair – I like it as a chemical hat, but it’s not for the face. Dye works but by stains the skin and fades from the hair almost as fast as it fades from my skin. But this stuff is good and easy to use. I will definitely do more. I may also test it for Dog color fastness.
I figured out today how to keep a thing I had previously been hoarding (and alternately fighting the urge to trash). It’s good art and has a touching story but it will need to be shared privately before I can share it here, and I’m still afraid to use the words that make the story worth sharing even in private. But that will change eventually. It involves a certain sort of hiding, which is part of the way I learned how to save it – by letting it be precious and public and invisible all at the same time. I’m not one for secrets but I am all for going unnoticed – I think indulging that will help me keep things. I’ll have to figure out how to do it with people.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
