Friday Fish Fry

Got a second set of robot work done between meetings this week, which is pretty good for me. Usually if I don’t get the work done on the same
day as a meeting — maybe later that night if I’m motivated — I have trouble picking it up again until hours before the next meeting. Usually the work is easy enough that it isn’t a problem, but it’s still nice to have things squared away. Helps me feel productive in a week when I don’t always feel like I can achieve lunch. My light day job workload this week has been very useful for catching up on bits of
my life I’ve been ignoring.

SJ wants someone to give them a nickname soooo baaaaad. Talks about it out loud and in text. But doesn’t want to pick it for themselves, or even really participate in the choosing. I assume that means, at least in part, that they don’t understand what identity they want to declare. I’d love to help; I’m a big fan of picking names and other declared identities, and I think not bad at it. But I don’t think I’m positioned to actually do so here, at least not in the short term.

Hiked up the hill to catch the 24 today, because the tracker was giving me clearly bad data about the 33. Got up there with 8 minutes to spare. The tracker kept delaying but said it had real data. About 10 minutes past the schedule it decides the bus isn’t coming, and also that the next run isn’t tracking. So I’m paying $22 for a car anyway, and I won’t have a chance to buy liquor before robots. But the bench at Bertona and 28th is nicer than most bus stops – it has a back and is set back 8’ from the road – and the traffic isn’t as bad here as at Dravus, so it’s not the worst place to sit for half an hour.

I started reading Complex PTSD…Recovering from Childhood Trauma (Pete Walker) today. I’m not a big fan of self-help books — even the ones that aren’t predatory or otherwise harmful are often useless — and at 25% done I’m not yet finding any marvelous insight in this one either. But I am finding more use in such books as a tool to talk to laypeople about the technical details of the cluster of bullshit that is my life, in the same way I use A/V media to share other complicated sets of feelings. Having someone group together a bunch of systematic impacts and tie them to a single cause — not a single event but a broad class of interrelated and recurring events — is useful for explaining the issue. One of the problems I have when trying to share my pain is that there are so many traumatic events that affect me systematically but that affect the people I share with individually each time a share one. Having a framework to comment on that distinction is useful because it helps me get to the systematic part I want help with faster and with less work for the other person. Also having a keyword like C-PTSD*, regardless of a professional diagnosis or treatment, helps other people do their own research if they are interested.

Robots went fairly well today. I got T to at least follow along with the steps for adding new motors, and tested that my previous vision changes were functional. BC showed up around 5 but didn’t really want to work so we didn’t get any more auto done. But it should be staged well for tomorrow, and we named the motors Charmy, Smarmy, Dumpy, Gimli, Gimli, Gimli, Gimli**, and Doc.

Going to dinner tonight with Shanda. She’s out picking up passes for Geek Girl Con and I have to bus through downtown anyway, so we’re meeting late for foods. And then home for the first night of drinking we’ve had in months (I think we last bought liquor for last season’s robot party). Should be nice to have some fun time together before she is busy (and likely exhausted) all weekend.

ZiB

*Speaking of which, I think some of you might find information about C-PTSD useful, either for yourself or merely to help relate your bits to mine. Particularly if you have thought about any combination of bits that includes childhood trauma, attachment issues, social anxiety, difficultly feeling/expressing anger, limited self-compassion, perfectionism as avoidance, self-abandonment, etc.

**Son of Gloin, son of Gmayl, son of Gaock and son of Goram respectively.