Custodial Chicken

I’m getting close to having a screen again [fig 1]. It’s not the final version, but it’s something that will give me a tensioned projection surface, can be non-destructively removed and reinstalled, and hopefully that can fold up overhead without being removed, so that it can be left installed even if we aren’t using it for a day or two. There will still be hassle in getting the projector out, I still won’t be able to project at full-size, it still won’t be quite easy enough for daily use. But it will be easy enough for weekly use, and even with some setup hassles it will be a lot better than than 27″ life we’ve been living. It’s maybe even good enough to get me interested in setting up the gaming system.

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Ben stopped by this week, bringing someone with him, seeking advise about navigating paternal rights. It would be nice if Ben wasn’t so anxious and could, you know, tell me this was going to happen instead of just showing up. Not it it would have made a discussion about perfecting the rights to a human any better. It’s a terrible system that hurts everyone involved. It’s also the only system available to officially intervene in the life of a young person. So I offered what advise I could about recording parentage and establishing physical custody, which basically involves making preemptive CPS reports to try to avoid sending a newborn to an unsafe home and hoping you can avoid being dragged down while they “help”.

One of the parts I find particularly difficult to stomach is the way that these interactions often focus on excluding contact, not as a safety measure but as a purely social one. It seems so low-stakes to be worried that someone you don’t like will have the right a 4-hour visitation every 6 months. I get this person is shitty and that you do not want them in your life. But its so often treated as make-or-break in placements and I’ve seen people reject an adoption because of (probably temporary) twice-a-year supervised visitation. When you give people jealousy and individualism on top of parental rights it’s such a clusterfuck.

Also the hypocrisy of bitching about someone else’s drug use while carrying three different kinds psychedelic drugs is amazing. I mean, I’m glad they brought me drugs – unexpected drug delivery goes a long way toward making up for the unexpected parental rights discussion – but it seems like a dangerous game to accuse the other bio-parent of too much drug use while you’re carrying enough drugs for a medium-sized rave.

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I’m trying to let my hair get longer. It’s super uncomfortable for me and I’m not yet at an inch. My hair has been between 1/4 and 1/2 inch almost continuously since I was like 15. I’m sure occasionally in there depression or other stresses delayed my haircut, but it was always right back to 1/4″ when I could muster the motivation to run the clippers again. For a while I tried letting other people cut my hair, which was nice for avoiding cleanup, but it didn’t help me have any more hair – mostly it made me feel physically restricted while being touched from behind and asked to do smalltalk.

But I’m going to try letting it get longer. I can handle the fluffy stuff on top. The hair is fine and thin and it’s super white right now because I bleached hard after being blue. But I really don’t like the way my thicker hair feels when it’s this long. I don’t like how I can feel it as it touches other things and I don’t like how it feels when I touch it. I don’t like how it takes longer to wash and dry. I don’t like how it requires better treatment to avoid being damaged. I gave up having hair because I couldn’t keep it clean or trimmed or healthy. I gave up having hair because it made me safer and helped me impersonate a real boy.

I’m not sold on having hair again – wigs would let me use hair without having it – but I would like to feel like I’m not trapped in that decades-old survival choice. I would like to feel like it’s safe and sustainable for my body to exist in its default state. So I’m going to try having a little more and see if I can find a way to feel safe enough about it to get past some of those old feels.

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I’ve been thinking about why my recent fried chicken experience feels so new in my life. It’s a thing I’ve made many times. Had good feels about it even, or at least as good as my feels get about eating and related activities. I’ve had people appreciate things I make before. The Kids liked many of the things I cooked, and Shanda does too.

It’s easy for me to imagine that the best – often the only – help I can give someone is to teach them to not need me. I can believe that people want my practical existence. I can believe that people like the specific results I produce. I can believe that people want to learn what I know so they can use it themselves. But it’s really difficult for me to believe that the thing people want is my service. It seems very unlikely to me that people prefer my involvement over the same outcome without me.

But I think maybe the chicken is important because it matters that I made it. Maybe it’s not just the procedure or the food or the nostalgia of repeating an experience you liked before. Maybe it matters that I’m doing it for you. Maybe it matters that we do it together.

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After I obtained a cookie story I did some work to investigate why that is. There are lots of trauma reasons that I don’t have any cookie stories from childhood, so that doesn’t surprise me. And it’s possible that someone else in here has a cookie story that I don’t know how to connect to. But you’d still think I would have a cookie story from sometime in the past quarter century, even if I lost a couple along the way. I eat cookies and the idea I’ve never made them seems unlikely.

So I tried doing cookies with Shanda to see how it might work. Mostly it didn’t. It turns out you’ve got cookie-specific triggers that make it pretty difficult for us to do them together. Lots of food things are hard for you to share with me, but this one in particular pushes your stress real high. Which in turn makes it unsafe for us to do cookies together even when you want to make cookies. We have made cakes together. I’ve made many fruit crisps and the like by myself. But I can believe that I haven’t made cookies by myself, and that cookies you made excluded me.

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I still don’t know what the plan is for getting back to the day job. Life still seems like plenty just managing myself and my projects. Life still feels like a lot when there’s an external schedule, even when it’s not 8 hours a day. It’s not that I don’t think I can go back, but I’m not sure I can go back without giving up important bits of myself. I’m not sure I can play the game without putting a corporate drone into the driver’s seat for 8 hours a day.

I do feel like Shanda might not die if I had a new captialism scam. It still feels like you’d be forever panicked if I stopped having an employer, or if I asked you to be in on the scam, or if the scam required you to give up any of your childhood fears about managing a household. But I do feel like you handle me having a different day job. That wouldn’t make work easier – it would make it harder for a while at least, while I get them to accommodate my disability – but it would let us have more money, and that would make things easier.

I’m also not sure what I’m going back to. In theory my production goals have been transfered to our colonial team in India. I’m actually for someone else ¹I’d prefer it wasn’t someone who, while working from home on the same product and processes, make 1/3 as much as the person they replaced due to their colonial passport. I’d prefer if colonialism wasn’t a thing I personally did as part of my daily duties. But the idea that any big company isn’t making me participate pretty directly in … Continue reading doing that production work – I was years past sick of it – but I’m not sure my team is supposed to survive the change. The people in charge of certification for the grift will stay, and the testing staff will stay with them. But I think the vulnerability and rapid response teams will disappear. I’m mostly for that too, particularly if it gets me a few months of severance pay. But there’s no way to know what I’m going back to, and that’s a bit stressful even if I’m satisifed with most of the possibilities.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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