hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

Snowflake Challenge #5

Talk about what has improved in your life thanks to fandom.

1. Fandom taught me to interrogate a text. I can now to some extent see whose voices and perspectives are missing from a piece of media, which is a real skill for an autist. With some thought, I can pick out what writers are bullshitting themselves about being accepting of.
2. Fandom introduced me to more fannish people, who tend to be LGBTQ-accepting -accepting of me- and skew autistic. I would possibly still not know I’m autistic without maeritrae and those like her.
3. Fandom skews writerly and disabled, a thing which I also am. My ableism, internalized and otherwise, used to be way worse and I might not have survived the fibromyalgia diagnosis and chronic pain if I hadn’t already known folks who had similar stuff going on, who led by example how to accept yourself when your body is being a pile of fail.
4. I met my Boston Spouse through fandom, and so many friends I’ve kept up with through the decades. (My fannishness is now old enough to drink, zomg)
5. I have written fics and researched things for them that changed how I deal with people, with life, with my family.
6. I have read fics so profound that I had to reorganize parts of my life around different ethical lines.
7. Collectively, years worth of time reading fics and listening to podficcing and looking at fanart. Y’all are amazing!
8. You’re here. That’s got to mean something, too. 😉



Helpful reminder, if you’re looking to spread joy and make friends: Check out the comments on snowflake_challenge for all the awesome participants and visit their journals/challenge responses to comment on their posts and cheer them on.

( complaining )

In other news I went to the Scarborough Renaissance Festival on Saturday, and walked all over the place. I stretched after and massaged my quads but forgot to massage my calves, so those were hurting yesterday but are better today. Yay for small mercies.

I am at work today, and wondering how I’m going to do this if my eyes get worse. But I don’t have a client in my first appointment time slot today, so I may do some therapy journaling later concerning childhood and family stuff, since I have no craft projects with me.

[Edit to Add: the eye ache did not get worse and is actually slightly better. Let’s hope this is not just the beginning of these attacks the way it was last time.]

a how-to guide

1. Small talk and vibe checks

I learned from my friend Jenn as a teenager that I can’t just trauma dump at strangers and have that go well, bc since they haven’t earned my story, trusting them before they show who they are means they might take advantage of vulnerability. And even if they don’t, they might think that it’s breaking the social contract in the form of demanding reciprocal disclosures which I hadn’t earned yet. And they’d be kinda right. That’s not ( buddies )

As I understand it, these are the basics building blocks of making friends as an adult. There are plenty more though, so leave your secrets in a comment, because I’d like to be a better friend to you.

so: I like to feed my people, and touch my people, and take care of (some of) their physical and mental needs. Their emotional needs I am not great with yet, but maybe someday.

My offers to spoil people are usually things like: buying or making food (of either their favorite type or a type that is something they haven’t had before if they need stimulation), giving massages/head scratches/foot rubs, scrubbing people down in the tub/shower or washing their hair, making them smellgoods, and petting them/rubbing them with soft things/brushing their hair. I like to snuggle my people and lay over them when they’re anxious, and take naps with them. Whatever I think will work for them and for me.

I also sometimes like to craft useful or beautiful things for people, collate lists of paintings or make mixtapes or link them to things in their special interests, or, on the rare occasion I find such: link them to things adjacent to the intersection of our interests that might stimulate their attention and give us stuff to talk about. I love those conversations, where we both get to be really enthusiastic and engaged.

I don’t really know if I do this stuff on a scale? I have been trying to think of stuff and the only caveat or metric that I’ve got is that I need to be pretty close to folks before I will bring up the co-bathing thing, but mostly that is bc I expect _them_ to have problems with it. Body shame, etc. are really common. 😢

A friend did a meme, and sometimes I like to be a meme-sheep. Have a thing!

1. When I was little I used to write letters to the Greek Pantheon of gods, and also sometimes to the Roman philosopher Seneca (who I wished could have been my uncle or other not-insane relative). I was a weird, lonely little kid who lived in books more than the real world, and someone was foolish enough to give me Bullfinch's Mythology and access to my aunt's college textbooks.

( long post is long )

This was the first year I can remember where nobody bought me a single book, so of course I bought a couple for myself with holiday money. I only bought two, which is an entirely reasonable number of books, okay subconscious? Shush. That is as many print books as I read in the second half of last year, so really I have almost reached a book equilibrium, I just need to work on the "sell old books back to the secondhand bookstore" part of the equation, especially now that I am reading more library books on Libby.

I am currently trying to find a good, free, text-to-speech reader that will do PDFs so I can listen to the reading for my qualitative research design coursework while knitting. But! I just turned in my first week's assignment, and so consider myself Officially A Student again, just in time for the old year to depart.

So let me lift my small glass of tawny port and toast the changing of the years:
May we be better people, people we love to be and make each other happier for it.
May we embody the kindness and accountability we need the world to reflect.
May we live, laugh, and love unironically, and be the kind of basic that mediocre white men secretly envy.
May we celebrate the lives of those who came before us, those whose lives ended this year, and those whose existence is a fragile reflection of the systems we have been forced into - and may we take a half-brick in a sock to those systems.

I love my friends. 😊😌☺️

Least favorite cryptid:
Gays for Trump. The man held a pride flag upside down, unironically. His department of justice pushed for ruling against same-gender loving people being safe from employment discrimination. But some white gays (in my community, even!) still put their racial identity and privilege ahead of everyone’s safety. There may not be a lot of them, but they do exist, and they are my least favorite.

Make up a sentient furniture adventure: The wormhole in the washing machine that eats socks causes sentience, and the washing machine decides to get its socks back from the far flung worlds that they have landed on. Sock Rescue!

A Very Special episode of _____ that never made it on air: Blossom's anticapitalist catgirl episode.
We 80's kids have needed help with internalizing capitalism's toxicity, and we could really have used a young, bat-weilding TV heroine with anarcho-communist leanings and cat ears to lead our personal revolution.

Weird food you want to eat:
Korean corn dogs sound like a thing I want to try some day, on a day when i am going to be willing to pay for the aches later.

Favorite weird animal mating rituals:
Opossum was suggested, (twice, weirdly enough) but my favorite is probably gender fluid cuttlefish. Sneaky and gender diverse, gotta love it.

The tale of the second desk chair in a cat-containing household: a tale of triumph, loss, and betrayal!
The chair across from my desk next to the window is a site of great competition. Batman and Sage like to sit in it and lean on the window sill with their paws, and watch the neighborhood birds and people walking their pets. It is the most interesting spot in the house, and there is a lot of cat politics about who gets to sit there, including aggressive negotiations.

Dungeons and Dragons creature you wish were real:
Ki-rin. They grant wishes to the good of heart, and we could use more of that in the world.

Because of the LJ data breach, I am unfriending old accounts that are not currently posting, therefore probably have not updated their passwords. If you want me to friend you again, smash that comment button!

Hello friends! I have been reminded that Dreamwidth has private messaging, so I can ask you questions that you may not feel like answering in public! Huzzah!

Do any of you have pinterest boards, trello board, del.icio.us lists, pinboard etc. that I can go wandering through? I am about to change another medication in about a week here, and I need new fluffy things for my brain to chew on during the inevitable mental wobble and headache.

Let me see the insides of your head? I don't judge.

Someone tell me that I dont need to go trawling through the Sixteen92 Ressurection for 2019 for more perfumes than I even need. [I have oils! I can make perfumes for my damn self! I just don't because I'm hella lazy and uninspired right now. Maybe I need a muse.]

They aren't going to have Supercell in there! I know that! And yet!

I cant believe it's four days til I get to steal all of my friends away from the evils of the world for a nice wholesome pyjama party. That I am entirely unprepared for. I should just go watch Last Week Lolita News and hide from my impending failure ... except that will bring about my impending failure. Boo.

The living room looks better now that a crapton of stuff is hidden in my closet. So I might be going to chalk this party up to the glory that is half-assing a project just enough that it succeeds but not enough that people think I tried too hard.