NPD

I had this interaction with Jessica Marzipan¹“All right Milky White – let’s do this.” I’d link the video for context but it’s been pulled so it only exists in my archive. Maybe I’ll throw it up somewhere. https://twitter.com/JessicaMarzipan/status/1091421033645596672

I like that I am able to guess at nothing to name someone’s emotion and its cause, because sometimes that lets me help with a very important thing from a great distance. Even at Twitter folk I don’t really know, but more often with people I do. I wish I had any idea what the intermediate steps were after that first one, because repeating the same trick doesn’t bridge the gap. There’s a reciprocity required that I don’t know yet how to inspire.

Finally got back to some reading. None of your books yet but back to Joe Abercrombie. I really appreciate the way he uses the violence of war to point out the violence of daily life. He talks about the way war hurts people but also the way people hurt themselves and each other, even absent the motivations of large scale power structures. About how the petty violence is no different for the people it happens to. And about how trauma makes you sensitive to future attacks, for better and worse. “A sword is a shitty thing to give a man. Shitty for him and shitty for everyone around him.”

Shanda still doesn’t quite want me home. Mostly you do. Often it’s great. But sometimes you want me to live someplace else. And you’re not yet capable of protecting me from the way you’re thinking about it. Which is tough. I have confidence you will resolve your mixed feelings but it’s not easy to have to push you to do it. Nor was waiting weeks for you to do it on your own, after it first came up. It’s a space you keep between us that asks me to believe that leaving would be better. You know, that exact deepest abandonment fear I have. So it would be great if we could stop this real soon.

The snow from yesterday stuck around, which in Seattle means not leaving the house. The transit maintenance plan is “wait for it to be warmer”; the hills and near freezing temperatures are a bad combination. So canceled school and bus routes and general disruption. Let me not go into meetings today but E was less excited by that same change.

It was suggested that I attach a glasses wiper to my eyebrow. That was my first idea too, though I’m not sure it’s terribly practical. It would be cool. What I really want though is not a blade to push water around but real cleaning to remove oil and debris and other glasses gunk. I could probably use my glasses to route a wire to a lighted eyebrow ornament. Being able to waggle my eyebrows to make them flash or change colors sounds real dramatic.

Got my SRs done today, so tomorrow I can do – well Medicaid first, but then hopefully a minute of firewall work. Which also isn’t my current priority but will be an emergency later and so is worth doing now anyway. I’m doing okay with work. The travel in March is still happening because they hate me and want me to hate myself. I assume.

Got all of the old The Screeds up at https://vodak.vodka/ I wrote a lot more of them before I moved to Cleveland. It’s not a surprise that I did less – travel days alone often made me write 4 one day and none for a week – but I do think they’re better when all the pieces are fresh. It’s always less useful tomorrow, once life has had a chance to muddle my revelations with inconvenient facts.

I was thinking about my life as a cult leader, and why I find building social organizations easier than joining them. I often feel I am doing the most good at the precise time that societal rules tell me I’m most transgressive. I do something hard because no one else can or will, and get directly accused of great harm for that action. It can make me feel very seperate from society. I could be smug about it and become the narcissist I fear, beyond all social regulation because I know the Truth. Or I could be convinced that I am crazy and dangerous just like Mother²I am Pete’s denial of responsibility, when he decides to identify me as an emotionless being and then immediately asks for reassurance about his role in that state of affairs. always said, unable to trust even myself. Probably something in the middle would be better, but I don’t have it yet. I still fear that any consideration for myself is an unacceptable level of narcissism.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.