Symmetric Snow-laden Social Support
I’ve been having trouble writing but I shouldn’t sit on this anymore. So let’s settle for disjointed fragments and just send it.
It’s been a hard week for Shanda. And hence for the household. She’s nervous to the point of distraction because of a hundred things — her sister is here and there’s CASA stuff coming up and her shoulder hurts and the snow and me being back home. I’m trying to help her manage until things calm back down but it’s hard because even noticing out loud that she’s stressed feels like an attack or an attempt to assert control. Sometimes we can come together on it but we spend a lot of the day apart too. And it’s always my fault when the avoidance breaks. So that’s taking a lot of energy right now, trying to keep myself safe and help her.
I got more new clothes bits, though many are still not quite ready. I got a purple jacket that I really like but need in another size*. I got a skater skirt to go with my leggings (for pockets and gut coverage) but need it tailored — believe it or not they don’t make many miniskirts for enormous people. And I got a second pair of leggings. I’ll send pictures once I own bits that fit.
Did neon nails this week, symmetric across my hands [fig 1]. The brand I have is pretty rubbery, which is both good and bad. It takes forever to dry enough to not get marks in it, but it does flex decently and stay on well. And it cuts and peels nicely, which is useful for stencils.
One of the reasons I want an integrated support network is to give me insight about how other people see my relationships with my more direct friends. We can not only support our mutual friend together but we can support each other by providing perspective on our separate relationships with the same person. For example, I spend a non-trivial amount of time worrying about how I’m hurting people by just interacting with them. And my crazy brain doesn’t take direct reassurances on that fact. But I sometimes can hear the same message from a third party. It’s also use to understand not just how others see you, but how they see your indirect impact in the world. At least for me that sort of information can be a big help in crafting my own identity.
E wants to gym with me. Which sounds like a good plan, if a bit intimidating. I expect to go with Shanda sometimes but I wouldn’t mind a second partner. I did okay by myself — M and I only actually got to gym together once the whole time I lived there — but I think I’d hate it less with another person. Particularly someone like E who is very engaged with exercise in a way I am not. I haven’t actually joined a gym yet but I think I’m gonna go to Shanda’s. It would be nice if pricing matched Cleveland; M and I paid $78/month combined there, and they had a better sauna and free towels and locks.
I am really touched to hear that M likes doing her own set of care packages. It’s one of those building a social support network things I keep imagining I’m doing, and I feel like this one is actually working. I like doing mine and I think they help people feel safe and like our friendship is real and excited to get snacks delivered to their home. I like to share not only the package itself but also the experience of building and sending them. I like to get other people to contribute to the ones I make and to get other people to make them. So thanks for participating. It makes me feel like I know what I’m doing, at least a little.
Work is fine. I’m back on the queue next week but clear of SRs as of today. I’ve got a bug I need pushed through review but I’ve got the coding done so if I ever get a clean build back I should be able to make that go. And I got my March travel booked and approved, which still sounds like a punishment but at least I don’t have to think about again for a couple of weeks. I’m still working on how to make it better. I think maybe Monday gym days would help — I’ve got a standing afternoon meeting on Mondays and having a second activity afterward would make it easier to show up. And I still need my week off. I’m glad I didn’t try to make it go this past week but it still has to happen soon.
There’s still Medicaid work to do, I’m stalled until the next next step of that gets cooking, but it’s still a bunch of calls and paperwork that I can’t get off my to-do list yet. I was ready to be done with this 2 months ago. And I still want to start my new task with M, if we ever get to talking about it enough to make it start. Stuff like Medicaid makes that feel harder; makes it feel like I’m consuming our bandwidth on important but less fun or interesting things. I guess I feel like bandwidth is limited† in general; like I have to prioritize more than I really want to. I should do something about that, either in how I feel or how it works or both.
Lots of snow here, even by non-Seattle standards [fig 2 from Friday, twice as much more today]. Like, to be comfortable** walking the dog I would have needed boots to protect me from depth of the snow. The amount of time it’s making things be closed and the amount of snow on routes I need to walk is a little more region-specific. Sitting near freezing all day does makes things a little logistically complicated even if we had a snow maintenance plan, but we don’t and when it does this there’s lots of nothing happening. I feel mostly unaffected, other than that robots and D&D were canceled this weekend, but I would like the buses to start running normal routes on the hills again.
Cleaned the weed rig for the first time in a long time. It was dirty when I left for Cleveland and clearly not cleaned since††. The solvent is now pretty saturated so I’m going to try my first winterized batch. It will have terrible terpenes and taste like shit but should otherwise be a nice broad spectrum of everything we’ve had in the past ~9 months. So maybe some one-bite edibles.
I actually don’t have anything new to say about therapy than all my tangents from before. It worked like I expected, and was mostly prep to make future sessions go with the data I collected in my memory homework. Nothing strongly emotional. Lots of sharing about my childhood for context but nothing that required significant work of me.
I checked back in on the Pete thread. Probably not worth the risk in general but it worked out this time. He was butthurt about how I “read too much into” his demands. Which actually makes me feel better about it because it makes it easy to see how the boundary is protecting me. Remember when we just murdered rich old people when they got too abusive? There are problems with that system too but I feel like a few less 1%ers would do the world a lot of good, and maybe help us build one where fewer are created (or technically more as wealth equality increases, but you get the idea).
ZiB
*M just got a purple jacket too. Not the same one obviously but theirs is also great and reminds me of my own wool overcoats, which always helped me feel safe. I wore one almost continuously from like 1998 to 2003, and as my primary jacket for years afterward.
**This is a standard I still often fail to meet, like I did today. It’s really hard for me to expect to be comfortable at any time other than when I’m explicitly relaxing, and even then my standards are real low. I don’t own boots and probably don’t need to in general — I can handle snow in my shoes one day a year — but I could own long socks to at least reduce skin contact.
†That’s not a complaint. Bandwidth has actually been increasing and I really appreciate it.
††If there’s anything else that hasn’t been done since before Cleveland it really should get on our list ASAP.
