Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel

Still sort of a hard day for Shanda. Some body pain, and a continued tendency to see deviations from the Plan as interfering external control. We did get to spend a minute where you shared some of my waiting feels instead of feeling attacked by them, and that was nice.

D&D was small today – just the GM and one other player – but it was still good to get back to a game anyway. I might be playing a little too fatalistic murdery for the storyline he wants to run, but for today it was fun to drug a middle aged rich woman in her own home and dump her into rehab to get rid of her for a while. She was being mean to me, and to the young person under her control, and I was hired to keep her kid safe. Life as a corporate-sponsored terrorist can be complicated.

Testing a new campaign in the Pathfinder system on March 17th at 1PM. No prep needed. Consider showing up.

I’m feeling a bit isolated. Mostly in the way I imagine that my relationships all decay to nothing over the course of a few days. Which I know is statistically unlikely but my brain is pretty confident about regardless. In part it’s because there was no robots, because Shanda is having her own difficult days, because time off and weather and whatnot have kept me from my usual routines and contacts. And in part because I feel pushed up against other people’s anxiety, stuck in a place where all the paths my own anxiety let me see are likely to result in either continuing silence or unwelcome pressure. So it feels like there is no way toward the contact I crave, at least not without a lot of lonely patience.

Got my recent audio books scanned in to Plex and up for sharing, including The Fifth Season and all of the Joe Abercrombie stuff I own. I continue to be impressed with The Fifth Season now that I’m actually into the meat of it. The second person present tense line has a lot to say about pushing through when things are tough. And they’re all about the ways we decide which actions are ethical, and the ways we use power structures to do the things we know are unethical.

Watched some more Russian Doll. The getting stuck, not just in bad things but in bad avoidance. The Perfectionist and the Arizona Trash Person. The ways you need help. They ways you can help. The small things that change as you get help unpacking your baggage. I’m sort of afraid that talking about the behaviorial metaphor will make you not watch it, ¹I am told sometimes that it’s hard to share media with me because of what I read I into it. That because I use media to talk about my life it’s somehow separate from media consumed for enjoyment. That the overwhelming feeling I induce covers not only me but also the media I talk about, because when I react to it and relate it to my experiences … Continue reading but it’s too good to not talk about it.

Back to work tomorrow, for a full week. Not super excited about it. I’ve got old SRs and a bug I fixed but which is hard to setup a test for. If I can get through both of those and some meetings this week I’m gonna call that a win, and try not to worry about other bits that come up. I’m not in the queue so there’s a medium chance that can happen. Next weekend I’m off to SFO for a one-day conference, which I’m going to bill against work hours even though that’s not the expected practice in my office. But if they’re going to put me through air travel and weekend work and fucking “networking” I’m taking off recovery time afterward.

There is robots this week, which I’m looking forward to. Maybe Val will be around to work on our library code. Or at least to say hi. And I’m sort of planning to gym with E, though I have yet to actually make any arrangements or even do the research I promised. We can probably still work something out for this l week if I get my shit together in the morning.

I talked about sharing daydreams the other day, and how it helped me feel normal. Here’s a practical prompt for my daydreams for that I hope you’ll consider responding to: I imagine there’s a way we could see each other in person next winter. If you imagined that with me, what would it look it? What week does it happen during and who do you want to be there with you? Is there a version that lets me see more than one of you in the same place? I’m dreaming here not planning, so don’t feel pressured for accuracy or detail. And certainly not for justification. Just speculate with me so we can see if anything cool pops out of our shared imagination.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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