Longitudinal Lists for Lessening Languish
Woke up today pretty convinced that everything was terrible. I don’t have any evidence to support that other than moderate physical discomfort, but my dread is difficult to ignore. It’s not work. Work is legit slow this week and everyone there is happy with me, more or less. It’s not robots, which is finally moving toward a driving bot at about the same pace as any other year. Dog classes are done, there’s no D&D this weekend, the dog and dishes are clean. I’ve even had multiple tacos this week and talked with several people that were not part of my last week, and both of those seem good in a way that isn’t yet common for me.
But it is all of these:
•Sleep. I’m getting closer to my usual sleep schedule that involves daily naps during nighttime hours, but I’m only half way there, and so getting up is a challenge in itself and sometimes involves recovering from sugar-induced coma.
•Being pushed down into anxiety instead of being pulled up from it, as Shanda tries to find footing for her own improvements and tramples me and the pain I remind her of.
•Reaching out to people who I know won’t answer and trying to imagine connection — to extract it sidelong from tiny contacts in other contexts and breathe life into it — while being patient and quiet long enough for safety to appear and sharing and help to be possibleß.
•Writing in RBN and trying to imagine what might help all the people trapped there*.
•Imagining how I’m going to convince S that homelessness happens to real people∑ and has obvious solutions†.
•Feeling unfit even to keep my own daily life going without being a burden to others, let alone to actually help anyone. I know the goal is to share burdens so that we can all deal with not managing our own lives – because none of us can — but it’s difficult for me to imagine that anyone can participate in mine without ruining theirs.
•Remembering a new terrible thing about my life every day and trying to believe that doesn’t make me a terrible person†.
Talked with DerbyK about the insufficiencies of slow-moving legal agreements as a method to resolve ongoing social situations, particularly when those situations don’t map neatly into the roles demanded by the patriarchy. About the politics of Halloween costumes*** and the way social expectation constrains choice well before individual expression becomes relevant. About the glory of acting anyway — constrained or otherwise — to satisfy yourself, and ways to minimize the costs when you do.
This is the sort of gardening I want to do [fig 2] — the kind that happens just by keeping things wet and refusing to kill natural growth for the sake of infrastructure. I recently had to cut down one of the better bushes along my house because the handyman “repaired” my side entrance by expanding the deck into the bush (the stem is maybe 4” from the bottom stair) and making it so wide that you can’t go between it and the fence without touching at least one side∆. So I’m happy to see nature trying to reclaim the driveway I don’t drive on, to turn it into a patch of green I can actually use.
I get real salty when I miss the bus home while waiting for the light on Elliott to change. The stop is only half a block down from my building, but northbound it’s on the far side of the street and during heavy traffic it can be more than 3 minutes between when you get to the road and when you can cross (even if you’re willing to brave right right-on-red turns from my coworkers). There’s a pedestrian bridge down a couple of blocks but the lack of stairs on the east side means that’s more than half a click of walking — about 6 times as far — and therefore it’s rarely faster even after you climb up 4 flights of stairs on the west side. The whole thing makes me want to throw spikes in the road and reclaim the area for humans, but what I actually do is take a car home and make this problem worse for everyone else.
More homework submissions now that M should have them [fig 1], this time in physical form. I got a sealed envelope from one of our subscribers and an “I’m a Superior lover” pin from someone who presumably visited Superior, WI. Neither arrived with any commentary, but once I was thinking pins I decided to include my 2/5th full Book It pin — at once it’s a shinny hologram, a token of the way recognition was used to hurt me when I was young**, and the physical manifestation of corporations marketing directly to 9-year-olds as part of state-mandated education. Plus if you read 3 more books and travel back to the 1900s you can get a free personal pan pizza.
Today we’re gonna call The Screed done at 6 PM — I’ve been typing at it since I woke up so that’s probably plenty — and see if that helps me get to sleep on time. I fired off last night’s well before I actually got to sleep, but it still might help to have it done before Shanda goes to bed. Then I’ll be able to stay up working on robots and M’s project instead of my daily Doogie Hauser routine.
ZiB
*Which is a good way for me to feel like I can help people again, when I start to believe that my best option is just to minimize pain and find my solace in isolation. And it helps relieve my stress about one-way communication, because the context and the quantity both make me more likely to get replies. But the stories are always the worst, full of people blaming themselves for their abuse, and the ways I can help are mostly “not at all” or “attempting to communicate about enduring torture”. Occasionally I get to help by knowing a specific actionable fact, but that’s not common. I want to help by forming an organization that smuggles young people away from terrible situations but that’s not only illegal its societally subversive so I’m not even allowed to talk about it let alone organize with others to do it.
**For example, I could only go to Pizza Hut to use this if I could afford to buy food for the rest of my family, which of course 9-year-old me could not readily accomplish. Or if we went during the day maybe Mother would get the salad bar and her 3 children could split the 600 calorie pizza. Which is why the last one of these only got 2/5th done.
***They actually have a great costume picture to go with their politics, but I didn’t want to visually de-anonymize them so you’ll have to take my word for it.
∑Which is uncomfortably close to imagining how I’m going to scam money from Father to keep Ben alive. But S at least wants to believe, which is a big improvement compared to the “I’m not sure racism exists” level of interest I usually get. I guess Ben and I are both working on choosing better targets for our unresolved feelings of not always being able to make the powerful people around us better humans; he’s working on his 1%er landlord, who is sad and lonely enough to want things to be different but pretty clueless about how that might work†.
ßThis is a thing I want to do, that fits with many of my goals and for which I am better qualified than many. But the hard parts align with my belief that my role in life is to push others up to something better, something that I can’t ever have for myself, and to be left behind if I ever succeed†. So when things are tough — when I’m being pushed away — this can feel like proof that the best I can hope for is saving the people I care about from me. You have to be realistic about these things.
∆Shanda points out that if the stairs faced the right direction you would never have to pass them for any reason other than tree trimming, but that’s a mistake this house and its neighbors have been making for almost 60 years so it’s not a surprise that the shoddy repair work didn’t address that issue.
†Several of these feel relevant with respect to The Good Place (NBC) S3E4 “Jeremy Bearimy”, which I just watched last night. That show isn’t funny in the same framework as Casual (Hulu) but the level of carefully explained professional jokes is unparalleled. This last episode in particular got me, though I’m not sure if it plays without the last 2 seasons of context. Like The First Law series (Joe Ambercrombie) it spends a lot of time imagining not what ingredients good contains and how to exclude or rework things that aren’t good, but about the way good can be extracted from the shit life actually provides us without excluding anything, and about how creating good is a thing that happens collectively not individually.
// Slashies
