I’m gonna try one of these where I film in the dark and speak with a breathy voice and broken rhythm about how I’m in too much pain to do anything else. My head hurts. It’s been getting worse for 4 hours. Even after I’ve laid in the dark, and had some ice water, and relaxed in the cool air, and medicated the pain. I hope that tomorrow will find me in better condition, but sleep is hard to find while my skull thrums and pulses. It’s better in the dark though, so I’ll go back there. I’ll listen to Dog and Shanda snore next to me, fading in and…

Yet another early departure for the Screed. It’s still my intent to have these default to going instead if default to stopping, but I am a little annoyed I didn’t get to pick a title. I did need a break though, since I was just about to write about Dog barking less and he was currently barking at me. Getting up to deal with him is why I hit send. One of the changes I got out of my recent diverted attention was more engagement with taking care if Dog. It has been a challenge for Shanda to work with me on this, particularly since I went to Cleveland. Not…

Finished S4 of Better Call Saul. In theory there’s a S5 coming next year. For just a minute KW and Jimmy are on the same page about heists and they are glorious together. But then he hits a spot where people around him claim to want sincerity but actually want him to lie, where he is punished for following the rules. And so he decides to tell them the lie they want. To be the person they insist he should be. That Chuck always was, though he couldn’t admit it. KW goes for the lie too. She wants it to be true. She sees how there was a point where…

Therapy this week was mostly a rapid fire series of LI exercises 1We also talked for a minute about about the concept of feeling safe. Which I continue to not understand. They kept saying something about how safety was internal, but that makes no sense to me. I know for a fact that I will die without external help. And I feel pretty safe about my ability to manage the bits of myself that I can do alone. Even a … Continue reading. Just going through from birth to present trying to line up all the feels from the different events in my prompts. Skipping the bit about explicitly tying a…

Went to the Solstice parade on Saturday [fig 1]. Brought Dog. It went fairly well. Dog did great, other than stealing a whole snootful of fries [fig 2, recreation] as we shifted seating positions. But mostly he layed or stood nearby while we sat in the curb. He was at pulling level 14 afterward but he did better waiting around in a crowd than I expected. Better than I often do.The sun wasn’t bodily oppressive, a relief for a parade about how it’s daylight for like 143 hours this week, though I sure missed my sunglasses 1Remember back before you were injured and traveling when you were going to help…

Did LI about fear today in therapy. I have a lot of fear in my life – I don’t really know how to feel safe – but I also don’t allow myself to do or not do things just because I am afraid. Which is a great skill in dire survival situations and a terrible thing all the rest of the time. In theory it’s useful to be able to do things even when you’re afraid but I suspect it would be much more useful to simply feel safe once in a while. I can reconstruct lots of fearful scenarios from my childhood. Situations where my options were to do…

On a note from the weekend, fucking Father’s Day. Isn’t a day explicitly for the fundamental basis of patriarchy a bit much? I know that’s not how everyone feels about it, but “that’s not how I feel about it” is the same thing people organizing a straight pride parade say — we don’t have to care about systematic oppression because we think we like the way it impacts us individually (and are intimidated by alternatives). I’m not much for calendar-based celebrations in general, but parent-related days make me extra salty. We could celebrate providing care without tying it to the assignment of exactly one or two (mostly) gender-serrated legal owners.…

One of the things I like doing with weed – a thing I imagine is pro-social – is use it to think about other people. I’ve thought quite a bit about the state of mind weed can put me for that purpose, and how to obtain it reliably. Today I figured out that a lot of it is just being less ashamed to think about you. Weed can help me believe that my attention doesn’t cause you harm. That I can like thinking about you without being a monster. It’s pretty hard for me to believe that my attention can be pro-social. It’s why I imagine I can be useful…

I submitted some WIP for my BZ report to my boss. They liked it but also misunderstands how it works. They asked for interface changes that are just not technically possible. I do still intend to pretty it up a bit – like I said maybe some javascript will give it the round corners or whatever people are hoping for – but it does internal analysis and I can’t just slap the existing BZ data set into tableau. Still, I’m glad they were mostly satisfied. And I think it actually does what they want, if they can get past their dreams of animated graphs. Honestly I liked it better as…

In therapy I did LI about the feeling of being ashamed to want or to give care, and in particular to feel good about giving or receiving care. My default reaction is to imagine that I’m hurting people if I’m involved in caring and it feels good. Even when I walk Dog, my brain is pretty sure that it would be better if I did mine seperately and hated his, because me liking the walk means that he didn’t get what he needed, or even that I somehow stole from him good feelings he might otherwise have. And the idea that I should have care from others is right out.…