Inspired Interrogative Individual

Closed out the week without doing any SR work. Had a meeting about BZ that will make my boss more calm. Not looking forward to the queue next week but I’m glad to have had a few weeks off – it has been rare in this job to ever feel like I get time to step away from SRs even when we rotate the queue.

No robots today, as there were no classes. I used the time to see C and get some work done on the studio. Pulled the ancient and failing Radeon 5870 out of my old desktop and went down to one monitor. Cleaned up all the other monitors in the room so there’s more desk space now, and rotated stock on my other low-end monitors before lining the leftovers up to give away. I couldn’t quite bring myself to give up my 30″ but I at least got it into a better working configuration. Had a disk failure this week, the rare kind with a clear broken noise to confirm a permanent failure. Finally got the md arrays relabled; it requires offlining the volumes and the encryption layer to change their names so it’s easy to put off, but I took a minute to do it while I was changing hardware in the media server. Now disk failures will be eaiser to repair and much, much easier to give instructions about.

Talked to M for a minute, for birthday wishes and self-advocacy. I can see you’re worried and not without cause. But I think there’s enough safety in your life to imagine that literally all outcomes will be tolerable, and would only delay not ruin your future plans. I know that’s only a small reassurance, but an upper bound on loss is often an effective tool against abject hopelessness. While you’re stuck in the middle of it try to remember that you still have power to exert, and that merely hoping other people are kind is not your only choice. You can protect yourself and advance your interests even while other people do things to hurt you. In fact you must, because this process that has been assigned to you is designed to cause pain, and just letting it roll over you will make it worse and leave you further from your goals.

There’s a thing to say about protecting yourself from people and organizations that have proven they are willing to hurt you, but I need to let that swim around for a minute to find the “you” that covers everyone here (including me, since I’ve been well-trained to bear pain and wait for others to change).

Wedding today. I’m excited to do colors with Shanda, and for myself. It’s a wedding where candy red hair is part of the main event so we’ll be able to go big and be well appreciated. I also get to pick a ridiculous hat. And no one is asking me to wear a poorly-fitted rental suit or shoes. I always promised Caleb he’d owe me a day of wearing a bad suit but I never got to collect. He could have been fabulous in his casket, if I knew the right heist.

Got past some angry feels with Shanda, which feels like a big relief to both of us. There have been big, old feels about being stuck, on top of recent medium stresses like illness and individual stresses like disconnected interactions. But I think we’re on the other side of some of that, and it’s clear how the new feels make lots of things easier. The oldest bits are enormous and hardened and will only slowly leak out, but just keeping those seperate from the current bits is a huge help, and is the path to working those crusty old feels out. I was worried about being very seperate at the wedding but now it feels like a thing we can do mostly together.

Unsolicited general social drugs advice: share with your friends. With their friends too, even if it’s just a one-time thing. If that’s an interaction that will get you taken advantage of in the long run, don’t be involved in these people’s drug use and keep yours seperate. If financial transactions ever feels like they make the situation better you’re already dealing with people you don’t trust enough to be this vulnerable around, legally, physically, or emotionally. If you don’t know how to square up with your friends about drugs, ask how to help instead of just throwing money at the feeling. If you don’t know how to get the drugs you want, or feel like money is a barrier, ask your friends for help. Same rules apply to sex, or food for that matter. There are versions of sex and drugs and whatnot where money is a reasonable plan, but not with people you have standing social relationships with, and certainly not with people who hold power over you. It’s too easy to get hurt, and they money bit is unlikely to be valuable enough to make up for the pain.

I watched @BPS talk about inspiration as an activity, which was really useful as a way to think about finding color. I promised HA4H that I’d write a story about finding color but have found it difficult to accomplish for a lot of reasons. Some of them expected – I knew it would involve some hard feels – but it has also been difficult to pick out the relevant process from the broader context of my life. But I see it now, how it happens when I’m playing ¹I know there are lots of distractions right now, but I’d love to actually share about Markers 1 & 2, when you can spare the brain space. I planned and cried and made and wrote and sent and I would like to imagine a life where there’s another step in that process – one where we close the loop and I learn things from other people and not … Continue reading, not as a result of some previous change but as an activity I undertake. It’s not a thing I learned and know, it’s a thing a learned to do. I’m hoping that lets me write about it. I’m hoping that understanding of process helps me play more with writing.

ZiB

—
Sent from a phone.

•