We finished the quarantine theater, or at least got it ready for pictures. I’m pretty happy with how it came out, and was excited try it out last weekend. Shanda is still a little afraid to use it – you worry that we aren’t allowed to be noticed using out back yard the way other people do – but I think we can get past that with some practice. I haven’t yet successfully heisted L into attendance; the initial response was a somewhat harder “no” than I had hoped for. But I’m moderately confident I can turn that around in the coming weeks. Tricking nervous middle aged women into allowing…

There’s a pretty sad story about child murder in here, so if that’s not for you, bail. Here’s a thing I discovered after therapy and weed today – during some of the times Mother was practicing murder on me 1She was willing me to suffocate but not yet able to complete the act, or torturing me until I lost consciousness I learned several things. One was how to render myself unresponsive to escape such situations, as I discussed in Self-Induced Loss of Control. Another is the fear that I would, after this pain, not be dead and instead merely be disabled and even more trapped under her authority 2I didn’t…

I spent most of the day today yelling at the day job about injustice. It’s unlikely to be effective but it was a good break from real work, and makes me seem engaged, something I often have to fake. It started with my boss reviewing our employee surveys, which are lower on my team than most others because of our security (read: cynical) focus. The results are aggregated by team but there are only 8 people in my team, and I know how I answered, so it’s easy to see where I’m the one giving the most negative answers. It makes me boss worry but I like it. In any…

I’m starting an SSRI today 1Escitalopram, if anyone is interested. I’m am not very hopeful that it will do anything I like, even beyond the scope of my usual distaste for human medical care. I don’t have generalized anxiety disorder and have atypical symptoms with respect to anxiety of any sort, which has and continues to be a problem with all treatments I have tried – they just don’t apply to me 2My body is not tense. I am breathing normally. I am sufficiently grounded. I learned to be physically calm despite being in serious distress when I was still a toddler (or maybe even an infant) because it helped…

I’ve been working on a quarantine infrastructure project in the backyard, and I think it’s getting close to done. I tried to get to going during HA4H but it was pretty rainy by Seattle standards – actual drops – and so I’ll have to delay yet another day. I want to get it finished so I can use it as a prop for other heists. And so I can show it off. I had a cool plan for video sharing today but continued to be stymied by Discord 1I have in the past prided myself on running independent comms systems for a variety of popular protocols. That all fell away…

We are again at the stage in my life where eczema makes my fingerprints disappear, and I cannot use devices that require them. It’s better now with swiped infrared sensors – they are much more sensitive to live tissue – but it still is a 1/10 success rate. This is better than the life stage where I can not operate capacitive touch devices (like phones or other stiff surface touch screens), but it’s still not great. Dog had lots of appointments yesterday but didn’t get an MRI. They didn’t have an appropriate radiologist on staff this week due to the global death, so we have to go back again next…

Did LI about regaining consciousness. It was provoking in the way LI is supposed to be. It was fairly intense for me therapist too, based on their reactions at the end. But it gave me some useful insight. One of the main ways I feel trapped by recovery from other-than-normal consciousness is in fearing that I have allowed myself to recover before I stopped needing the protection of being completely checked out. Sometimes being genuinely unresponsive was the best way for me to endure a situation, and so I long ago learned how to fully detach and lose control of my body – sort of like fainting, but via self-induced…

One of you told me that you don’t know how to share your life with someone you don’t live with. I can understand that. There are definitely parts of distance that make sharing harder, and some things that it makes impossible. But I suspect you don’t really know how to do it in person either. The experience (many of) you have is mostly forced interactions with people who did not treat you well, did not respect your boundaries or set their own, who were not reliably supportive, who demanded that you conform to be accepted even when it hurt you to do so. Even the people you picked had to…

Maggie Mae Fish, in addition to being great in general, has a particularly good Cats video. In it she reads us poetry from the perspective of a human-cat hybrid who is for some reason is relentlessly thirsty and more than a little queer, just like Cats. But mostly she talks about fascism, which matches my mood. Give it 3 minutes and I suspect you’ll be interested in the rest: https://youtu.be/6tYcPuVYDHw We got caught back up on Killjoys and are watching new (to us) episodes. They’ve given us several new costumes, including a sweater dress and boot that make me yell “Lana!”. Later episodes fake it with a slightly more practical…

Dog is medicated and significantly less lathargic than he has become. It’s good to see him in less pain. I hope it helps him heal a little though, because he can only be on it for like 10 days. It’s frustrating though, because he feels good enough that he wants to run around again, but he should walk as little as possible. Rest will give him the best chance at recovery, or at least the best available during the global death. It’s likely we could do something else if it was safe to see a specialist. And it’s not great for household tension to have the fucking dog be restless…