child_of_the_air

Returning to the real world has been rough.

I think part of it is that I didn't sleep well --the whole previous week, I managed to actually get out of bed on the first alarm without hitting snooze multiple times. Today....I did not manage that. Part of the problem is waking up and it being _cold_ and part is just being tired and cranky. But I definitely spent _way_ longer in bed than I should've today.

I did make it to work, and then it took over half an hour to get my 40 copies finished, which like...fucking hell, I wish I worked for a school that had sufficient materials, etc. For all that I'm part of my union's bargaining team, this is really not something that has made it onto the list, because it's just...stupid. It's stupid that we don't have sufficient copiers in my fucking building. At least the one in my wing was even actually working today, just slow as fuck, and being behind literally one other person fucked it all up.

But it was mostly okay, just...braindead. I am burnt out and tired and really want to go back to camp and be at Pinewoods again. I do not want to be in school anymore. The children are tired and I am also tired. I liked the parts where I could do simple mindless physical labour instead of abundant emotional and mental labour.

I'm also just real tired about being _busy_ all the time. I know where my break comes --right after Scottish Sessions-- and there's a _long_ way to go before then. A lot of said way is quite good! But there's a lot of it. Union meetings, dance meetings, eventually preparing my ESCape classes.

Stuff costs energy, especially when the background radiation is _real_ bad right now. I hope I can find the energy I need to do the stuff I want, and I hope you can too.

~Sor

MOOP!

sovay

It would be facile to regard the war movies of Harry Morgan ironically in hindsight of M*A*S*H (1972–83). He was twenty-six years old when he was signed by Twentieth Century-Fox in the fall of 1941; the odds that he wouldn't play in war pictures right out of the newly non-neutral gate of 1942 were astronomically against. He made his screen debut in boot camp and could be found thereafter on submarines, aircraft carriers, small Pacific islands, and the heartstrings of the home front. He could even be found in the Allied invasion of Sicily, whence my no-contest favorite of these early, military roles, the officious little captain of MPs in A Bell for Adano (1945). He is an ornament of welcome grit to his humane yet sometimes sentimentalized story and you couldn't get me within range of his chat-up lines for all the chocolate and cigarettes in the American zone.

In fairness to Captain Purvis of the 123rd Military Police Company, he's not the nemesis of the film. As in the best military comedies and tragedies, that distinction is reserved for the brass, in this case the Patton stand-in whose high-handed prohibition of mule carts from the narrow streets of Adano—one recalcitrant beast held up a whole convoy—threatens to blockade the small and demoralized, war-battered town as disastrously as if it were still an American objective. Purvis is merely the rules and regulations rolling downhill, a sarcastically sidemouthed goldbrick who regards the sincere bridge-building of John Hodiak's Major Joppolo as wasted on "spaghetti pushers" and cares most about learning the Italian for "How's about it, toots?" His CO listens seriously to the concerns of the citizenry about fishing rights, collaborators, the seven-hundred-year-old bell melted for artillery by the Fascists, Purvis crashes around the local girls as if he's paid for them with his vino and cracks about not knowing the difference in the blackout. As much cynical off-color as he contributes to individual episodes, however, he ties the plot together when the major coolly countermands his superior's unjust order and the scandalized captain indignantly initiates the time-honored practice of CYA: "I am not going to burn for anybody!" The ensuing round-robin of red tape is Helleresque, ricocheting as far as the dead letter office of Algiers with the blameless misdirections of William Bendix and Stanley Prager's Sergeants Borth and Trapani and the mounting exasperation of the Provost Marshal at Vicinamare, snowed under every report coming out of Adano except for the one about the carts. "He must think we've got nothing to do but worry about that jerkwater town." Inevitably, ironically, by the time the other shoe drops, Purvis has completely forgotten chucking it in the first place, as loyally defensive as the next guy of the major's good works until the penny bounces and leaves him scrubbing awkwardly at his mousy hair, mumbling the deeply pissant takeback, "Gosh, I never figured anything like that would happen." Partly it's the nature of the Army, rewarding even compassionate insubordination less than adherence to the kinks of the chain of command; it's also his own damn fault. In a film which devotes a soapish amount of its screen time to picturesque sketches of Italian peasantry from such generally reliable character actors as Marcel Dalio, Monty Banks, Henry Armetta, and Eduardo Ciannelli, not to mention an unconsummated affair which not even Gene Tierney as the defiantly blonde-bleached Tina Tomasino can totally sell as a meeting of human lonelinesses as opposed to shoring romance, Purvis has an ignorantly realistic, graffiti feel, a Kilroy scrawl of a figure who could have done nothing to improve the international standing of the American G.I. He also gets the funniest scene in the picture, when he incautiously takes a call meant for the major and finds himself put so comprehensively on blast that he can't get a word in to identify himself and when he's further instructed to hand the phone off to his own person, panics a visible, receiver-juggling second before blurting up a half-octave as harassed as Shelley Berman: "Hello? This is Captain Purvis speaking?" Morgan could be a great tough actor, but he could also wind up terrifically, and I appreciate any role that gave him the chance for both. His desk is a jackstraws of untended reports in which it is more than possible to disappear a paper simply by flipping it under the stack.

Directed by Henry King from a screenplay by Lamar Trotti and Norman Reilly Raine, A Bell for Adano was the second dramatization of John Hersey's 1944 Pulitzer-winning novel of the same name, its theatrical run overlapping the Broadway adaptation which had preceded it; its author would become even more famous for the New Journalism of Hiroshima (1946), which I read decades ago in the plain-jacketed first edition inherited from my grandparents. A Bell for Adano began as nonfiction itself before branching out into something more creative, although the distance between Adano and Major Victor P. Joppolo and Licata and Major Frank E. Toscani remained so slim as to land the writer in an amicably settled libel suit over his inconsistent filing off of serial numbers. At their best, both versions resist the pull of flag-waving, their idealism about the American occupation continually complicated by a still-resonant skepticism of its ethics and effectiveness—Joppolo achieves a victory of humanitarianism on the justified level of local legend and for his pains gets relieved of command and the war, not yet won in the summer of 1943, rolls on. The film gets a documentary boost from the street-wide photography of Joseph LaShelle, but Richard Conte so neorealistically steals his one hard scene as a repatriated POW that it begs the question of what he could have done with the Bronx-born, Italian-American Joppolo. Maybe I just prefer John Hodiak when he's codependently entangled with Wendell Corey. "Listen, if that meatball already thinks the Navy's efficient, he's going to get the surprise of his life. I'll have that bell for him in a week." It came out between V-E and V-J Day and seemed a suitable candidate for Memorial Day, allowing for somewhat fuzzed-out YouTube. Not to recant my earlier point entirely, it is delightful to watch Harry Morgan playing exactly the kind of character Colonel Potter wouldn't have given two colorfully minced oaths for. This town brought to you by my can-do backers at Patreon.

Current Music: Hozier, "Nobody's Soldier"

sorcyress

Sunday of work weekend was fine (and complicated and stressful because Mice) but mostly uneventful and my brain went a little sideways for some parts of it, which was not the best. I think maybe the most satisfying part of Sunday --and a little bit of today-- was developing new skills and practicing at them some, and getting reasonably good at them.

The new skill from yesterday was sewing, and specifically doing a very fine whip stitch with almost hidden stitches to get the edge on for a quilt (basting? Is that what it was?) I was taught by Kimberly-(Lucretia's-Mom) who is entirely lovely and was calm, good at teaching, and a lovely conversationalist. I will probably never love sewing, but it's good to remember that it and I can be friends, and it's very good to have chances to learn skills with it sometimes.

The new skill from today was Ditch Digging! Elliot was in charge of doing some path-shaping to get water to travel the correct directions (off the path) and a little bit of berm shaping and the like. My first ditch was, uh, a little too extreme, but I took his good feedback and by the end of it, I think I had a pretty good sense of how to make the path go the ways I wanted it to.

In the afternoon, I did a little bit of other helpful things, and then suddenly was gifted with the truly wonderful present of a working Hobart. Well okay then, I *will* wash the last few dozen loads of dishes, since I don't have to then drag them through the sanitizer as well! Critically, this meant all the flatware, which was going to be _miserable_ to have to drop in the sanitizer and then retrieve. I also now know exactly how many trays are at camp (both the Good Kind and the shitty kind.) The margin is...a _lot_ closer than I would've expected, honestly.

It was _so pleasant_ to spend the last three hours of my work weekend in the kitchen, by myself, just me and the music cranked and the hobart humming along and round after round of dishes. Isaac even brought me some soap so that I wouldn't have to run to Dingle every time I needed to wash my hands between dirty side and clean side. It is good to learn new skills and get better at them! It is also real fucking good to just do skills that I am already competent at and feel like I have good agency for.

It was also really nice to feel like I could make Actually Useful And Sensible Decisions about how to run things through. My only concession to Amanda being the Head Of Kitchen was to send a text being all "I'm doing the rest of them and you can't stop me", I didn't need to ask her for advice because I could think through all the things that needed to happen and just...do them!

Like, there's this thing I do where I be Extremely Confident which dovetails in interesting ways with that thing I do where I be Extremely Nosy About How Everything Everywhere Works. I worry that people might not be standing up to me enough about their own expertise sometimes --like, it is cute for Seramay to defer to me on cabin opening things, he has _way_ more experience doing so than I do! But also, I do have a fair chunk of experience and I tend to be competent in general, so yeah, it's not unreasonable to be all "okay Kat, go get the clotheslines up in the Bamps and the hill, have fun".

Anyways, it felt nice to be helpful (Amanda sent me a very nice text at the end when I was finished) and it was very nice that I got to do a _lot_ of dishwashing which is my absolute favourite job at camp 5ever. I don't mind opening cabins, and digging/carrying/general grounds nonsense is fine. But this particular work weekend I got to send...gods...Okay so like, there were 16 flats of just trays to go through the Hobart and that wasn't even half of what I did today. I probably pushed well over 200 flats through on Saturday? 300 maybe? I wish I had counted, because it was _wonderful_.

*and* I got to fill four fire bins, which is close to half the ones at camp, and is my other favourite job. I loved _so much_ two years ago when I got to do the camp safety audit and I briefly knew where literally every fire extinguisher was at camp. I also love running through and checking the AEDs, although I noted that they weren't up yet for this year.

So yeah, this was a very satisfying work weekend where I did a lot of things I liked, and made some good connections because of it. (I was working with this summer's dishwasher on Saturday and gave her plenty of random advice; this year's potwasher is totally new to camp and I think I left a good impression. And the head cook for the weekend is charming and I think I have successfully charmed them in return).

I really don't want to go back to the real world. LCFD in a couple weeks, which is good, but man, there is a _lot_ of grading between here and there.

~Sor
MOOP!

nineweaving

I just got a letter from a doctoral student at the University of Pisa, working "on the sociocultural implications of fantasy literature." She very much admires my essay on "The Languages of the Fantastic" and kindly wrote to tell me so. I'm glowing.

Nine

kaberett

Reading. ( Bridget Collins, Feather (lalaietha), Jenny Lawson )

Listening. More Hidden Almanac, including First Appearance of Pastor Drom; slightly grumpy with myself for dozing through a chunk of it (to a greater extent than I realised; I did get snippets, but missed more than was apparent at the time) and am steeling myself to relisten.

Cooking. More from East: aubergine katsu curry with pickled radish (meh on my part, but A liked it), roasted carrots and cabbage with gochujang (meh on A's part, but I liked it enough to nibble at it between meals even though I'm unlikely to make it again), asparagus and mangetout with chilli peanut crumb (not actually worth spending in-season asparagus on outside the Cook Everything In This Book project, but pleasing given that context).

Eating. WILD ASPARAGUS is I think the most exciting thing I have eaten this week.

I have been Disappointed by Wagamama. Much less disappointingly, I have been plied with blueberries and yoghurt. Finished the hazel-bay-rye-and-rhubarb cake; have made some progress on the birthday cake I got sent home with.

Exploring. I am currently Away From Home. There are postbox toppers. One of them is Many Round Hedgehogs; another is Sea Creatures including Mollusc. I am sort of curious about who else I might spot in the area.

Making & mending.

Growing. ... I did not get cucumbers started. I did get some more squash into the ground (well, raised beds), and planted out a bunch of tomatoes, and at least two kinds of pea are now flowering, and I will be mildly resentful if I get home and discover all the strawberries have been eaten.

Did I mention that my established rocket remains established? I was a little concerned that I'd buried it under too much manure, and then it showed up in the next bed over.

Observing. BABY WOODPECKER.

sovay

The mail brought my contributor's copy of Weird Fiction Quarterly Winter 2025: Ghosts. It leads off with my poem "The Ghost Summer," inspired by the season I wrote it at the end of and given a gorgeously night-eyed illustration by Sarah Walker. Other contributors to its store of specters include Natasha Liora, Andy Joynes, Brandon Barrows, David Barker, Rebecca Buchanan, Maxwell I. Gold, Christopher Ropes, John Claude Smith, Lisa Morton, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Daniel Braum, Can Wiggins, Mark McLaughlin, Duane Pesice, Ngo Binh Anh Khoa, Peter Rawlik, M Ennenbach, Robert Jeschonek, Michael Thomas Ford, Adam Bolivar, Russ Parkhurst, and dozens more. Check it out! Feeling like an apparition yourself is not compulsory.

Current Music: Primitive Radio Gods, "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth"

sovay

I hate that it had to be done in memoriam instead of normal celebration, but I love that Nathaniel Parker read Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (1917) for Derek Jarman, from the first edition he was given when he played the poet in Jarman's War Requiem (1989). He made his feature debut clutching its holograph ink in his cold hand, laid out like an effigy with the mortal candle-flicker pinpointed in his dark eyes until the greatcoat he would no longer need against the slither and freeze of the trenches was flung furiously across him like a shroud: the author who has always been dead. He was perhaps more beautiful than the real-life Owen, but he had the mustache and the patent dark hair exact. I never remember him as the living man at work on his poems by the lantern-light of a dugout or kneeling beside the barbed-wire snarl of the friend he brought to his death, but on the other side of a fire-sheeted abstract of towns shelled to skeletons when the parable of the old man and the young has already killed him, his face a ghost-powder of lime and his notebooks and tin hat springing with the green turf of war cemeteries, the sacrificial Isaac himself led to a tomb of waste ground and slaughtered by a diabolical cardinal in a butcher's apron to the applause of a crowd of pantomime-rouged profiteers. The image haunted me, the poet telling his own death, writing his own ghost poem. It got into "Red Is for Soldiers" (2013), which I wrote for Armistice Day in a year the living links of memory had finally snapped. And Jarman who was already HIV-positive at the time of filming died younger than he should have, no government's hand stayed by a child-poet's angel to spare him, either. Any number of poems could have been read for his memory, from Christopher Marlowe to his own words, but this one had so many echoes. It makes me think well of Parker that he thought of it. He was not one of Jarman's muses, but he didn't forget.

Current Music: Peter Pears & Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, "It seemed that out of battle I escaped"

duskpeterson

All of the fiction below is free.

E-BOOKS (html, epub, mobi, pdf, and xhtml)

Law Links: Novel and Side Stories (The Three Lands). Few events are more thrilling in a young man's life than a blood feud between two villages. Or so Adrian thought. ¶ Torn between affection toward his traditional-minded father and worship of his peace-loving, heretical priest, Adrian finds himself caught between two incompatible visions of his duty to the gods. Then the Jackal God sends Adrian a message that will disrupt his world and send him fleeing to a new and perilous life. ¶ Mythic historical fantasy (secondary world, late antiquity). Reissued omnibus, with new front matter and back matter; no changes to the story texts.

Death Mask: Novel and Side Stories (The Three Lands). For eighteen years, he has survived in an army unit where few soldiers live more than two or three years. Now he finds himself in circumstances where his life is a living hell. Will the soldier who defied death find that life is too great a challenge? ¶ Soldiers, spies, slaves, rebels, assassins, gods, and men who set out to break him . . . The Lieutenant of the Border Mountain Patrol will learn that his greatest test is himself. ¶ Mythic historical fantasy (secondary world, late antiquity). New omnibus, with typos corrected and a new novelette:

Light and Love (Death Mask side story): In a world where two people who love each other must enter into the role of antagonists, what will preserve their love? ¶ Tryphena is a maiden. To her brother falls the responsibility of choosing her husband. ¶ Then war comes, and with it arrive a wise goddess of death and destruction, an enemy soldier of uncertain character, and a masked god who can turn evil into good. ¶ Who will rule Tryphena's heart and conscience? And how can she and her brother prevent war from breaking out between them?

BLOG FICTION

Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket. ¶ Mythic historical fantasy (secondary world, late antiquity). Latest installments:

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kaberett

Analogy of the day: car reversing sensors. Warn of impending, potential tissue damage, as distinct from actual tissue damage. Sometimes panic about A Plant, or The Bike Rack. Sometimes totally fail to miss the six-inch tall bollard that makes things go crunch in a way you don't notice until later.

Book purchase of the day: The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, recced by a friend as popsci/popmed and one I'd nearly wound up buying yesterday anyway (... and a National Trust baking book to go with it).

Book purchase of the tomorrow, probably: Fitzgerald's Clinical Neuroanatomy and Neuroscience 7^th ed (2015), recommended via a NYU med student reading list (Cambridge's all appear to be paywalled and I'm sulking).

Links for further perusal: introductions to the nervous system on Biology LibreTexts and Health LibreTexts.

Reorganisation: possibly I am going to want to rewrite the introduction again (though the words do keep being useful), but crucially while murbling at A I think I have concluded that actually the reason the structure doesn't make sense is that neuroanatomy doesn't want to be the middle section, it wants to be an appendix. But I'll want to, er, know slightly more neuroanatomy before actually settling on that...

duskpeterson

The lower floor of the royal residence is guarded at its entrances, for obvious reasons. It houses only servants these days, but in past years, it was fully as active as the upper floors.

Left to right, you will see the former bedchamber of the High Lord, the former receiving chamber of the council, a former service chamber, the former and current royal receiving chamber and dining chamber, and the royal sanctuary. The last requires extended commentary.

sovay

I did not get out of bed until after noon. Hestia was curled at the foot of it to make sure. It was the first real sleep I'd gotten all week. Outside in breezy contrast to the last couple of days of November for May, we seem to be having a kind of spring-rinsed, sunshowery day. I have eaten a peanut butter granola bar. Hestia has wrapped her tail possessively, temple-cat-fashion, around my mug.

Because the internet is hazardous to the human condition, within the same five minutes I read some evolutionary psychology on atheism and ran into a reminder of the persistence of ace discourse and experienced a similar resurgence of antipathy. Any discussion of atheism predicated on a framework of faith would always fail to find purchase on me, but even when expounded by a self-identified atheist it grinds my gears to find the state explained only in terms of lack: an inability to imagine, a disaffection with religion, a failure to be socialized to it, a decision against it, all negative paths of arrival, no neutrally variant initial condition. Basically just replicate most of that complaint for discussions of sexuality, since if there is one thing the human species does seem to be majority-wired for, it's sloppy othering. It has occurred to me before that I was shielded from a lot of damage by coming at so-called normality from such an angle that not only did it make too little sense to me to feel aspirational, I didn't recognize for years what much of it was supposed to look like. But I'm also just kind of starting to have it in for the alpha privative. Defining by not still lets the thing it isn't set the terms.

WERS has been playing Jesse Welles' "Horses" (2025) on a near-daily basis for weeks now and because I too belong to this conflicting species, I feel that generally I agree with its message of letting go of self-defeating hatreds and divisions in the bigger picture of stellar time and at the same time the government of my country is pursuing policies of active harm to just about everything which seems to limit the degree to which I should be reasonably expected to let down my guard. Now I suppose I get to worry that finding a popular folk song naive means I have just flipped into the last verse of "Love Me, I'm a Liberal."

Current Music: Sea Lemon, "Stay"

sorcyress

I am at Pinewoods!

It feels nice to write that for this, the first time in 2025. I am at Pinewoods and I am sitting somewhere quiet and alone and I am about to take my covid test.

(Where that place is? Somewhere with enough wifi to make my computer go. What are you, a cop? If you wanna find all the places at camp that have wifi, you are welcome to, but I'm not gonna make it easy for you because I am a Jerk, tm.)

Anyways, it's just me, my covid test, and a chance to write my words and this is a pattern I got into in 2022 and have never really wanted to leave: the quiet joy of enforced time _by myself_ where I can write my words in the middle of the day instead of trying to do so very _very_ late at night.

I am at Pinewoods for the first time of the year, and I am quite happy, even though it's a different set of people than I mostly know and even though the weather is very damp and kinda grey. But the place is still good. I have chased some dragonflies to try and paparazzi them, I have had good mealtime conversations with people I know and like.

And I have done work, because this is a work weekend! And because I am very good at what I do¹, I got assigned dishes, as in, "wash all of them". Or nearly all of them, we are skipping the camper dishes which don't want to have to be spread out to dry in the same way everything else does because jegus what a pain.

So I did two shifts today with Brenda, who is going to be the Dishwasher for the summer, and it's her Very First Year doing so! She's been a camper dish-helper before (I remember working with her and being pleased) and so it's gonna be a good move up. I think she has a great attitude for it, and got the hang of a lot of things very quickly.

I interspersed actual work things with various ideas and advice as I thought of them, some of which were like "this is technically potwasher advice". And I ran...golly I can't even begin to approximate how many loads through the (only sorta working) Hobart. The Hobart wasn't sanitizing, so part of her clean-side duties² was to run everything from clean-side over to the potwashing sinks, all three of which had been turned into sanitation sinks, and to constantly drop stuff into the solution, and then run it all around the kitchen and stack it...virtually _everywhere_.

It was a lot of fun and we got _so much_ done. Maybe six total hours work? And I got to listen to my music in the first half and her music in the second and that all felt great too.

Of course, having done such an impressive job today, there's hardly any dishes left for tomorrow, so I'll probably be back to normal work weekend tasks, opening cabins and the like. Which is honestly fine, I quite like doing so! Lots of dusting, and wiping things down, and SWEEPING, and if you're lucky, getting to do a windows run.

I'm not sure what the plan for the rest of the night is. I am feeling a little people'd out, which means I don't necessarily want to be SUPER SOCIAL for the entire evening. Maybe I will read a book in a corner, maybe I will draw more pictures (yesterday I drew a dog, link is to Bluesky)

Maybe I will go for a nice stroll between now and dinnertime (which is over an hour, jegus, so late!) because if there's anywhere in the world I enjoy just prowling around by myself, it's camp. Bring my camera, look for bugs, visit Kitty Alone, see the new bathrooms, check in on El Nino, there's lots and lots of good things to do at camp!

Another day and a half of this, and I'm very happy for it. I hope wherever you are, you are also happy!

~Sor

MOOP!

1: I am using this (very common Kat-phrase) as a double meaning right now. Because first I am literally quite good at washing dishes, and second, I am good at working my way into the hearts of The People In Charge in order to get to do the things *I* most want to do. I mean, it helps that the things I want to do are often things that other people don't, but dang, I get away with a lot of special privileges just by being very open about my wants, and wanting weird stuff.

2: Of course I was working dirty side, I nearly always work dirty side, my absolute single favourite job in all of camp is dirty-side at the window as a camper helper. See footnote 1.

sovay

For the eleventh anniversary of Kittening Day, Hestia was made much of with ham and petting and tomorrow when the day is less frenetic, there will be salmon. Her brother is celebrated in memory, my flower-clawed movie cat.

I will not be attending the reenactment because my plans for tomorrow all involve absolutely not getting out of bed until after noon, but it is true that despite it being the first naval battle of the American Revolution, I had never heard of the Battle of Chelsea Creek. Then again, apparently I have to find out from the internet that I transatlantically pronounce "penalize." An envelope full of lino-printed stickers arrived in the mail from

asakiyume.

Current Music: Dispatch, "Whisk Me Away"

kaberett

Pain associated with sensory hypersensitivity, e.g. light and sound: is this primarily nociceptive (i.e. nociceptors are firing at a lower threshold) or a feature of central processing (i.e. brain goes "NOPE DON'T LIKE THAT" about stimuli the peripheral nervous system isn't reporting as Harmful)? Or, slightly more comprehensibly to people who are not currently spending lots of time thinking about this particular niche area, when normal light levels cause me pain, is that the nerves that go "YOU'RE LOOKING AT THE SUN AND IT'S A BAD IDEA STOP THAT RIGHT NOW" that are initiating those signals, or a... central... processing... issue... yeah okay maybe I should go to bed instead of trying to words this. BUT a quick shakedown of the internet revealed it's only in the last decade or so that nociceptive signalling relating to Loud Noise Bad has been demonstrated so that's cool.

sovay

I seem to have spent much of this day driving in a nor'easter, when all the potholes overflowed and every other driver in between the streaming gutters drove like a hydroplaning yak. I got to see

rushthatspeaks and secured a new inhaler and an appointment with a pulmonologist. Foods of the hour look like pastrami, scones, and a Zagnut.

Last night's shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum is still going around in my head, even if I didn't have people in the Jewish professional community of D.C. I don't want to entertain a referendum on the politics of the victims any more than I want to hear it about detained students or deportees, but it feels too cheap for irony that the shooter targeted an event with a focus on humanitarian aid in Gaza: all that mattered was that it aggregated Jews. The word antisemitism should be like hot iron in the mouth of the man in the White House. What he has to offer, none of us need.

In stark contrast to the mishegos with FB, when Criterion's website refused to honor a gift certificate I had received from them in the last month, I was able to get a real live person on their customer support staff who solved the problem for me so that I could ship a DVD of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) to a relative who really needed it. Maybe I should try to bribe them for editions of my favorite films.

Current Music: Matt Berninger, "Bonnet of Pins"

kaberett

Wagamama have once again Done The Thing, by which I mean: the reliable Always Food For Alexes thing they've been doing for the last little while has rotated back off their menu.

The thing I tried instead today was sufficiently food for me to finish the rice but not sufficiently food for me to finish all of the toppings; I am suspicious of pho in "a clear yuzu broth" (which is not the same thing as "I won't try it").

(This is a Thing they have now done Twice, the first time about 15 years ago, and YES I AM HOLDING A GRUDGE.)

sovay

Despite spending rather more of the afternoon at the doctor's than planned, I do not consider the day a total loss because it contained an unexpectedly successful nebulizer treatment, the acquisition of bagels and chopped liver, a cinnamon cake donut, and

ashlyme introducing me to Idris the Dragon. I have now seen what a gas station looks like when the fire suppression system has been deployed. Fell over in the evening and went down a rabbit hole of Boston vintage radio. Read some film criticism by Graham Greene. Am still not really watching movies myself. My brain could come back online any time.

Current Music: Pulp, "Spike Island"

kaberett

... have I done the "oh no, why has my pen stopped working, did I break it :(" dance only to realise that in fact, no, THE PEN IS EMPTY. (Once because my first attempt at filling it was apparently fairly inept unless I have massively misjudged how much ink it lays down, which given that it's a Pelikan is not totally implausible, but would still be... surprising.)

On the upside I think I might have worked out why a different pen seems particularly prone to evaporation and drying out. I am not sure how fixable it is, but I do at least have a workaround! (I think the inner cap is a bit reluctant to settle into place; it shouldn't be, but wiggling the pen a bit once capped seems to be helping...)

(This is such a ridiculous hobby.)

sorcyress

Content Warning: non-detailed allusions to my shitty abusive ex and the shitty relationship we had

I have been working on the Inbox0 project, which sorta has two modalities:

First, the banality of daily life. Unsubscribing from things I don't care about, and mass deleting the bulks they have sent in the past. Meeting notes and invitations and preperatory emails that can safely be labeled ("highland ball" got a workout today, from when I ran it in 2017) and archived. Going through the 50 most recent emails in the inbox and trying to at least first pass all of what's happened lately.

Second, the weight of history. I have had the same email address since 2005, so that sure is, uh, twenty years since January 15th. It's not everything I've ever gotten (see above about bulk-deleting bullshit) and I do have like, a more professionally wallet-named account, but even that sends its email into the main box.

And the weight of history can be _exhausting_. That's part of what makes this game difficult, trying to motivate myself to be exposed fully to some of my worst ADHD sins, or the parts of my personal history where the Big D went on the word depression. Have I mentioned lately I went through an abusive relationship for most of the year 2007? Yeah, uh. That still has bits and pieces lying around it sure does.

But mannnnn one of the benefits of hindsight and being an actual friggin' grown-up and stuff is the ability to look at some of those bits and pieces and see just how much I have grown and improved and gotten better. I can have a lot of grace for myself (I do genuinely like myself, regardless of how much I whine I am a really spectacularly awesome person) and part of the reason is that recognition of the work I have done to reach better and better heights as time goes on.

Or, like, to read an email in which this guy I was totally into was basically breaking up with me, in part because he was not interested in being in a polycule with my shitty boyfriend. Boo hiss, this should be real sad. But it's _not_ because it's been twenty freaking years, that guy I was totally into has developed a lovely sounding life for himself on the other side of the world and I've made a polycule that has an absolute dearth of shitty boyfriends anywhere in it. And so I can read stuff like this...

However, I talked to ksatyr....he is *way* over-reacting. You think you're not ready for a relationship? I'm sorry, but this is a demonstration of not being ready for a relationship.

...and scream lovely modern "YASS QUEEN SLAY¹" because BOY HOWDY it is good to remember that there were people who were willing to say to my face "yeah, your boyfriend ain't shit because shit at least provides fertilizer and causes growth²". I mean, I didn't listen sufficiently at the time, but it turns out it never gets old to listen to folks drag my shitty partners, even if I didn't necessarily realize it at the time.

So yeah. The history is rough but it's also nice to see the growth that goes alongside it. And it's nice to get reminders that however fucked up current-right-now Kat is, they're not (correctly) getting dragged by a twenty year old for acting like a sixteen year old³.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: This is almost certainly ironic as it's not language that has actually gotten into my lexicon yet.

2: Okay sure, I suppose you could argue that kSatyr caused growth _in me_. As a different shitty ex once said "-99 points for everything, +1 for making a better Kat for the rest of us". But just because it causes growth doesn't mean I particularly want to be covered in shit. :P

3: September party! I will finally be the age my abusive ex was when he dated me! WOOO!

sorcyress

Progress is being made.

I want to be very clear (and whiny) that I'm still burnt out. That hasn't gone away. Roundabouts July 15, is when I stop having Immediate Plans, and go back to comforting vagueness. I am probably going to book the entire week after Pinewoods on my calendar as "do not schedule, do not interact, this is entirely mine and I will maybe do things on an hours notice or less, but definitely not otherwise).

But progress is being made. Having Tuesday come over this past weekend and body double me while I worked on my room was a truly wonderful help. My room still has an infinite of little projects and organizations and puttings-aways, but it is SO MUCH BETTER and because it is not a series of fucking huge piles of undifferentiated stuff shutting my brain down the moment I look at it, I have actually been able to do maintenance level cleaning on a regular basis. Like, just take five minutes to put away several things where they belong instead of dropping them back into The Pile. It feels very good.

I've also returned to the Inbox0 project after basically 11 months of not touching it. I'm not yet at my lowest-ever¹, but I have archived or deleted about 2000 emails in the last two days, and most of those were unread. GOOD PROGRESS.

I didn't really do any work progress, which was partly because I had a series of Good Individual Conversations instead. One of my favourite students came for 2.5 hours in the morning (it's a testing day, so weird schedule) and I helped drag him through most of the last six weeks, getting his grade this quarter to jump from about a 20% to an 84%. It's amazing how much quizzes are weighted if you _haven't done any of them_. I also had decent planning conversation with Clayton, and saw a couple other students for brief periods. Tomorrow, I teach one class, and have to proctor the test for ninety minutes, but it should be otherwise pretty mellow.

I should probably medialog sometime soon, especially because I have actually been reading --I've actually read a fair amount, although most of that was my recent murderbot reread. It's still good! It still hits hard! I was pretty vehement that I didn't want to see the tv show (I don't want to rewire my brain in how it visualizes or thinks about different characters, this happened with That Fucking TERF's books when I watched the movies and I didn't like it) but I've seen some pretty excited reviews, so hmmmmmmmmmaybe.

Also I earned a die yesterday, and I'm on track to earn one today. I'm happy to have this ADHD-brain-game maybe working for me again? Especially because it looks the like previous reset was _November_ meaning it took nearly six months to get 31 full-score days on my daily chart. Auuuguh. Yipes.

(gee Kat, what possible reason could your brain have for going all sideways and fukt-up since November of 2024?)

So yeah, it'd be cool if I can get through this batch, uh, a little faster. I liked the version of the game where I was going through about four rounds a year, it feels reasonable to say "I will get full points on a third of the days". Heck, it's still possible for this year if ~I only believe~.

(we build habits as best we can to support ourselves when the things fall apart)

Anyways, nice to have projects in my life that are seeing progress, even if it's just small and silly number-goes-down. I hope your life is also seeing progress.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: Technically my lowest ever was the long span of time through 2019 and 2020 where I actually maintained inbox zero pretty consistently. This is possible to do! It's just hard to get back to.