After Hours Trading
There’s a tension when I’m tired. After PIC has authorized responding to bring tired and checks out there’s someone else who wants to be up. This is often the person who eats for me. They’re responsible for some other aspects of my bodily care too.
If I distract myself with a narrative audio or other distracting focus I can sometimes stay awake enough to see this. The thinking still feels like me but the pattern of feelings is not the same. This person knew Dog in a particular way – I can see that after eating with another dog. This person maybe doesn’t talk.
They’re maybe the feral me who doesn’t do humans. The one who trained to know what would make us sick and what was food. The one who figured out how to eat and take care of us even as a toddler. In charge of the parts of my life too disgusting or dangerous or important to delegate even to Mother, (or even,eventually, to PIC). They can’t relate to me; they can only be me.
Or maybe it’s something else entirely. But I’m pretty sure there’s someone waiting to come out as I “fall asleep”. I’m pretty sure that’s one of the places where PWW comes out – how they stay awake even when my body is tired – particularly after a day that has required lots of PIC. And the story doesn’t need to be technically accurate, it just needs to animate me long enough to do the next step in connecting to this person.
I’m looking for a new therapist, which is the worst. I’m told supply is low too. I am not super convinced I want more therapy right now, but I should at least have a rebound therapist before I decide that. And so I do the search. I let some racist middleman introduce me to therapists who agreed to the same, hoping to find the sort of person who I might not hate and who is in the same protection racket as my employer. The middleman won’t let me filter out Karens or Nazis or find someone on a bus route or even who is currently accepting clients, but does have a category for people offering religious trauma in place of therapy. Why we let capitalists control our access to other people is beyond me, but needs must.
I do wish I could inspire people without terrifying them. I feel like that would let me have better help in many contexts. I feel like it would help me motivate myself. It’s probably wrong to imagine that I do the terrifying – they were afraid before I got here – but certainly people connect with their fear when I challenge them with things as mundane as my life. Maybe I wish I could better share my calm? There’s a thing to know here, about myself and the world, but I can’t quite smell it yet.
I got pretty PVC parts for my screen and did a test fit if the uncut components – it looks like I have everything I need. I’ve picked a size and taken measurements of the space. But then I stalled out. Next steps are measuring the joints, a little math, and cutting. I’m still interested, and I’ve been legitimately distracted by more urgent things, but there’s another feel there too, pressing against realizing this project.
It smells like… having a plan. My brain is somewhat resistant to the idea that I write down a technical design instead of pulling it whole cloth into existence. Art was only safe if I could do it all in my head and spill it out in one go. And so this project becomes work – becomes something I have to detach from – as soon as it requires me to take notes.
I can see that same feel in work on my cloud conversion. Technically all I’m doing is writing down a specific configuration for computers, but I keep having this feeling that I should be making the process more general. The tool I’m using has an expressed and embedded philosophy of recoding static, fully-defined configuration statements. But still I feel bad when I type a magic number into the file.
I did make progress today though – Gluster is up and working as expected after I figured out how to enable SSL debugging. So I should be pretty close to having the disk host done. I’m thinking probably a firewall, fail2ban, something that will let it relay email to me, and maybe monitoring? What would I use to do gluster monitoring? I should get it finalized – I will – but I might move on to building a prototype container farm, just to keep it interesting. Operations are much less fun than design.
I think next though is another round of circuit design, so I can keep momentum on that. I’m eager to get a board printed so I can feel like I know what I’m doing, and to start thinking about how there might be an art version along with the lighting runs. Another day of picking components and adding them to the schematic and footprint and model should get me ready for layout, which feels like progress.
I don’t know how I’m going to do any of that with a day job next month, but we’ll see what I can work out. Right now the plan is to carry a little momentum and pay attention to what causes the most drag. What eats the space I need to actually make things?
This is terrible writing. It’s okay coordination with myself. It’s far to slow to track the feels and scams but too fast for big themes.
One step at a time.
ZiB
—
Sent from a phone.
