things of interest, short form
Sep. 10th, 2019 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfish*squints at textfile of half-finished entries*
I don't know if this is a stress response or what, but: lately I'm getting plot-anxious when reading books I've not read before. I've only consciously noticed it recently, with Fonda Lee's Green Bone trilogy (which is /great/ for lots of reasons). There came a bit, maybe a third of the way through the first book, where it looked like a major character might die, and I caught myself flipping towards the back of the book looking for dialog tags with their name. (They did /not/ die, which I ascertained quickly. It's an open question what I would have done if they had died, since that's not something that can be trivially established with a random sample.) It's weird.
I'm managing it by alternating new-book with reread, which is also good in that I retain books that I've read twice substantially better than books I've only read once. (This leads to the problem of "I remember disliking that book but I no longer remember why.")
This past weekend Erin and I saw a Canadian-themed boylesque performance, including a suggestive Newfie (the people not the dog) and a very raunchy rendition of what I am told is a French-Canadian children's classic. The show was not precisely sexy, but then the only other burlesque I've seen wasn't exactly sexy either. It /was/, both were, an awful lot of fun, and I got to smile a lot and laugh out loud a few times.
Also on Sunday I sliced open the back of my left ring-knuckle on a tin roof. This was exceptionally interesting for about twenty seconds because it didn't really hurt and wasn't bleeding. I seem to have cut entirely through the skin but not into the pale-bright white muscle beneath. The neat part was that I could move the skin (and the slice) around on top of the muscle, like looking through a window to another layer of my body. Then it started bleeding and hurting, and I went inside and ran a lot of water over it and yelled a lot. It didn't want to seal up all day, which was concerning, but after sleeping on it it finally decided to actually scab over and stop weeping through the band-aid. Now my ring finger is just stiff and sore. Hoping it will heal up soon so I can break out the viola again.
Last weekend (Labour Day) I went to Sarah K's household housewarming-versary party in Pittsburgh, from which I am now mostly recovered. Getting out there wasn't so bad. I took a redeye that ran me through Atlanta, because Delta, which gave me a bit more sleep than I might have gotten otherwise. Have determined that I don't particularly like the Atlanta airport: it sprawls and doesn't have good signage or slidewalks, but it's not awful as such. By which I guess I mean "it's not ORD or YYZ or *spit* LAX."
And then I got to Pittsburgh, and rode two city buses for an hour and a half, and walked straight into several days of chaos. Lots of people I didn't know, most of whom knew each other pretty well, some of whom were children of various ages, in a cluttered space I didn't know. This, to be honest, is frequently a recipe for A Bad Time.
It turned out not to be, in the end. Partly this is because they were all geekish folks, so some amount of masking wasn't necessary and I could relax a bit from the get-go. Partly because I could spend a substantial amount of time on the porch with my book, occasionally in company. Partly because by Monday most of them had left, but I wasn't flying out til Tuesday because it was way cheaper, so I got to spend the day recuperating in a much smaller group and getting to know those folks.
And partly because Sunday night Sarah, who I've known for two decades and counting, suggested that she might like to kiss me, and I allowed as how that seemed alright to me. And in the course of that we discovered/realised/admitted that we'd had some growing amount of mutual interest/trust/love for much of those two decades. So that's pretty great. Distance is stupid, but we've both got our own lives, so this is ... it feels like something clicking into place, like a right and good continuation / extension of the relationship that was already there, waxing and waning over time. (I do not have a good way to talk about this sort of relationship, but it's what I want, have wanted for ages I think, and only recently do I have the mental wherewithal to engage in. That definitely wants its own post.)
I flew out through Toronto, which remains my least favourite airport that I won't spend money to avoid. This time it was large, and annoying to walk from one end to the other, but a) at least I didn't have to go back through security and b) my connection was delayed, so I had time to eat lunch. Worked out alright. And then I got to see Erin that night in Prince George (last airport before the two-hour drive home), since she needed to be out that way for work the next day. So /that/ worked out well too.
I used to get annoyed at my counselor for being of the sit-with-it-and-see-what-comes-up school of sorting through difficult brain-stuff. And it's entirely possible that a more proactive approach might have gotten me somewhere faster: I am really good at avoiding thinking about / being aware of things that might be difficult to process. However, I will admit that when this method works, it's a) effective and b) non-traumatic, both of which are nice. I may even be getting towards some sort of resolution / accommodation for some of my increasingly misnamed abandonment stuff.
I don't know if this is a stress response or what, but: lately I'm getting plot-anxious when reading books I've not read before. I've only consciously noticed it recently, with Fonda Lee's Green Bone trilogy (which is /great/ for lots of reasons). There came a bit, maybe a third of the way through the first book, where it looked like a major character might die, and I caught myself flipping towards the back of the book looking for dialog tags with their name. (They did /not/ die, which I ascertained quickly. It's an open question what I would have done if they had died, since that's not something that can be trivially established with a random sample.) It's weird.
I'm managing it by alternating new-book with reread, which is also good in that I retain books that I've read twice substantially better than books I've only read once. (This leads to the problem of "I remember disliking that book but I no longer remember why.")
This past weekend Erin and I saw a Canadian-themed boylesque performance, including a suggestive Newfie (the people not the dog) and a very raunchy rendition of what I am told is a French-Canadian children's classic. The show was not precisely sexy, but then the only other burlesque I've seen wasn't exactly sexy either. It /was/, both were, an awful lot of fun, and I got to smile a lot and laugh out loud a few times.
Also on Sunday I sliced open the back of my left ring-knuckle on a tin roof. This was exceptionally interesting for about twenty seconds because it didn't really hurt and wasn't bleeding. I seem to have cut entirely through the skin but not into the pale-bright white muscle beneath. The neat part was that I could move the skin (and the slice) around on top of the muscle, like looking through a window to another layer of my body. Then it started bleeding and hurting, and I went inside and ran a lot of water over it and yelled a lot. It didn't want to seal up all day, which was concerning, but after sleeping on it it finally decided to actually scab over and stop weeping through the band-aid. Now my ring finger is just stiff and sore. Hoping it will heal up soon so I can break out the viola again.
Last weekend (Labour Day) I went to Sarah K's household housewarming-versary party in Pittsburgh, from which I am now mostly recovered. Getting out there wasn't so bad. I took a redeye that ran me through Atlanta, because Delta, which gave me a bit more sleep than I might have gotten otherwise. Have determined that I don't particularly like the Atlanta airport: it sprawls and doesn't have good signage or slidewalks, but it's not awful as such. By which I guess I mean "it's not ORD or YYZ or *spit* LAX."
And then I got to Pittsburgh, and rode two city buses for an hour and a half, and walked straight into several days of chaos. Lots of people I didn't know, most of whom knew each other pretty well, some of whom were children of various ages, in a cluttered space I didn't know. This, to be honest, is frequently a recipe for A Bad Time.
It turned out not to be, in the end. Partly this is because they were all geekish folks, so some amount of masking wasn't necessary and I could relax a bit from the get-go. Partly because I could spend a substantial amount of time on the porch with my book, occasionally in company. Partly because by Monday most of them had left, but I wasn't flying out til Tuesday because it was way cheaper, so I got to spend the day recuperating in a much smaller group and getting to know those folks.
And partly because Sunday night Sarah, who I've known for two decades and counting, suggested that she might like to kiss me, and I allowed as how that seemed alright to me. And in the course of that we discovered/realised/admitted that we'd had some growing amount of mutual interest/trust/love for much of those two decades. So that's pretty great. Distance is stupid, but we've both got our own lives, so this is ... it feels like something clicking into place, like a right and good continuation / extension of the relationship that was already there, waxing and waning over time. (I do not have a good way to talk about this sort of relationship, but it's what I want, have wanted for ages I think, and only recently do I have the mental wherewithal to engage in. That definitely wants its own post.)
I flew out through Toronto, which remains my least favourite airport that I won't spend money to avoid. This time it was large, and annoying to walk from one end to the other, but a) at least I didn't have to go back through security and b) my connection was delayed, so I had time to eat lunch. Worked out alright. And then I got to see Erin that night in Prince George (last airport before the two-hour drive home), since she needed to be out that way for work the next day. So /that/ worked out well too.
I used to get annoyed at my counselor for being of the sit-with-it-and-see-what-comes-up school of sorting through difficult brain-stuff. And it's entirely possible that a more proactive approach might have gotten me somewhere faster: I am really good at avoiding thinking about / being aware of things that might be difficult to process. However, I will admit that when this method works, it's a) effective and b) non-traumatic, both of which are nice. I may even be getting towards some sort of resolution / accommodation for some of my increasingly misnamed abandonment stuff.