Contingency Plans

Emergency vet trip today, to deal with a guinea pig injury. It’s the weekend and an “exotic” animal so we had to go to Akron to be seen. Pig got hurt while being retrieved from an under-couch escape, possibly from a falling rear-channel speaker (though it’s hard to say precisely what the cause was). It’s not life threatening but it’s at least bad enough to need treatment. And there’s lots of waiting alone on a hard bench on a day when I did not get nearly enough speed. Plus it’s really starting to snow, which is very uncomfortable fro me when I’m away from home and without survival resources.

Were finally headed home, a few hours later. Pig needs some time to heal before she can be treated and will be at the vet until tomorrow. Hopefully by then she will be in good enough shape for a splint and some stitches. If that all goes well she should be back home with a reasonably good prognosis. So lots of worry and running around and I’m sure a nervous pig (and owner) in lots of pain, but with some luck things will be pointed back toward normal tomorrow.

I was up at 7:20 today (after being up until like 3:30 last night) to go the the BMV and get an ID with M. It’s such a pain if you don’t follow the patriarchy rules about land ownership or paternal rights. Even with the right documentation it required some arguing to make happen, and arguing with state functionaries can be tricky business. But it’s done now and should be eaiser to deal with in the future now that you’re back to being properly tracked and categorized by the government.

Friday had lots of good parts. Got M’s schedule so after I leave I can stare at a calendar to help me feel more connected. Got all but one appointment rescheduled to make life actually work, fired my therapist, finished all the urgent administrative work for my day job. I didn’t get my last SR squared away but I did get down to one and all it needs is paperwork. Got rid of the fish which finally let us put the furniture where we wanted it. Lots of cleaning and other minor household tasks. We even got glasses – cute purple ones with half frames and two-tone scrollwork sides and colored arms on the nose pieces.

M had a friend over for supper*** and made us all fish and pasta**. Afterward we all decorated parts of a spicy cardboard “edible” house kit, which involved the usual icing and candy as well as some ill-advised cured meat products*. And a series of sex jokes we just couldn’t get out of once we started.

I even got to watch some movie with M – we got through most of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). Which still makes me say “Mr. Anderson” whenever Weaving stops talking. It doesn’t help that he’s got such subjunctive, sing-song dialog, or that I saw saw movies so close together in time.

I also learned the CMS citation style to help with a paper and played Scattegories for the first time since probably 1992 (which as it turns out is only a few years after it was released). It technically has points but I did okay with points-don’t-mattering it and had some actual fun. At the very least I was happy to spend some human time with M before I go.

I’m trying to schedule with another therapist. The one I had hoped to try no longer had openings. I’ve got a couple other on the list but haven’t heard back from them yet. I’m not worried about finding people to try – there are lots of therapist – but it’s work and time and money to do the trying and every bit of it chips away at my hope and resolve.

In anxious about leaving Cleveland. The travel itself is hard on me, and it’s happening 3 times in the next 2 weeks. I worry about things I’ll leave not done (particularly with the time dedicated to pet care today and tomorrow). I worry about getting my life going again in Seattle. About how I’m going to keep enough job for the money I need and little enough for the life I actually want – something that feels easier here despite not technically being much different. I worry that I won’t get my 6 minutes/week of sharing, or the bits I can infer from direct observation, and that I will have trouble training myself to do with even less.

I’m hopeful that after I leave changes in daily structure might provide opportunities for more systematic self-care – am fairly confident it will, at least in some ways. But I’m also afraid that it will make dynamic self-care more difficult to achieve (and it isn’t easy now). And I’m afraid to say that for fear that it will exert unhelpful pressure about a thing I know is already hard. But hopefully I can communicate that this is my fear and not a criticism. That I’m just trying to figure out how to deal with my own anxiety, as I move into a life with even less information than I get today.

I’m trying to craft a message – to shape my life – in a way that makes it easier to see my presence in terms of integration, rather than as a force that pushes for things to happen from the outside. I don’t want to apply pressure (except as requested), I just want to promote enough sharing that we can participate in some of each other’s goals and feels as part of the same team. As compatriots against some of the banal horrors of daily life. I have such trouble expecting support when I give it that it’s easy for me to be feel like I’m never doing enough, and always demanding too much. And I have a tenancy to pick people who feel like someone paying attention and caring is an attack on their long-practiced expectations of neglect. But I’d like to imagine we could all be better meeting somewhre in the middle.

I know some of you will read the above as being about you individually, and you’re not wrong. But this is also one of those cases where several individual “you”s each get their own message because I do the same dumb shit in a bunch of relationships. And like everything else here it is fundamentally about me. So if you can, try to remember that I’m an anxious old panda who just wants scritches and a sense of belonging and to share in bits of your joy.

ZiB

*Though to be clear there are few circumstances in which eating old, prepacked gingerbread is a good idea, so adding Slim Jim’s is only marginally detrimental.

**Which was better than bad, or than log (which as we know is good). It was everything I hoped baked frozen cod fillets could ever be, and I didn’t have to do any work about it, which was even better.

***Which lead eventually to a discussion abouty favorite topic, emergency preparedness. Turns out M wants emergency supplies so I’ll get to help her build a kit after I get back to Seattle. You probably don’t want all the nonsense I do, but you can at least have some food and water and whatever other bits you do want.

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Sent from a phone.