Words are inadequate

Practicum complete. It hit me harder than expected at the end of last week. Plenty of possible reasons. Biggest, I think, was "this was supposed to be a pathway to a Real Job and it was instead a dead end," and there's not anything I can do about that. So that set off ... not really a full-blown depressive episode, I don't think. A sort of low-key moodiness. Days later I'm still sad that it couldn't work out but not overwhelmingly so.

On Friday I returned to Whistler for the fifth(!) and final round on my tattoo. I'm quite happy with it. It's larger and brighter than I'd expected it to be, but I'm okay with that. And it does look good. Red maple on the outside of the calf, aspen on the inside, both in full fall foliage, with a kudzu vine twining around the leg. This last session finished up the maple and a couple of last kudzu leaves. It hurt like hell for a couple of days; now it's just itchy. And a bit startling, whenever I look down.

After some thought I'm anxious about going to Niagara, but I'm not, for the most part, scared. I'm angry, and it's easy for that to sink into, well, depressive fatalism, because there's not anything I can do about it. I try to talk to folks who can keep my perspective grounded in reality. That seems to help somewhat.

I feel like the horrific ICE news stories are radicalizing me in a similar fashion to Abu Ghraib twenty-one years ago. I'm mostly okay with that. Just need to figure out a useful way to point it this time.

There's a bit in The Good Place where Chidi tells Eleanor about the idea that toddler-mentality is (I'm paraphrasing, probably badly) "me not you" and a more mature line of thought is "us not them". I feel like the great lefty/progressive project is to move beyond even that, to break down the divide of 'them'.

Six years ago a fellow named Frank Wilhoit coined a phrase that's been called Wilhoit's Law: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. This pithy expression wasn't the point of his comment; that was a later bit, that I've been thinking on a lot lately. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Tomorrow I wrap up a homework assignment, do a bunch of dishes, pack, and then head out for nearly two weeks. I'm gonna miss Mr Tuppert. He's been mostly friendly and affectionate the past couple of days.

Perhaps I'll have some answers when I come back.

Yay half a new tattoo, boo sick, up at Erin's where there's snow and that is very much yay. I think that covers it.

Sick: Monday I woke up with a quite sore throat any time I swallowed. I chalked it up to sinus drain. Tuesday morning the sore throat was lessened but my sinuses had gotten a bit clogged. And so it increased incrementally. Today when I woke up and sat upright I had a ten-minute coughing fit. No brain-fogginess, which is a usual component of any sinus illness for me; minimal tiredness / out-of-breath, no more than usual when I'm at Erin's and climbing a bunch of stairs; smell and taste remain intact. Bah. I am taking expired Tylenol sinus drugs purchased at the start of the plague and they seem to do well enough while they last.

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At some point after my last tattoo I started conceiving of it as one of a set, loosely inspired by the four classical elements and/or the suits in my tarot deck. And there it sat for several years, and then this summer ideas started poking at me. In September I went out and sat under some trees for awhile, and when I came back I had the concept more or less.

The artist I'd used last time is no longer tattooing, so I got in touch with another friend of Erin's and said "this is generally what i want." And she said "cool, can you give me more specifics and/or reference photos?" and then it was November and I had no extra brainpower to spend on optional things. In early December I got back to her with more detail, and we scheduled a first session for Tuesday.

She's up in Whistler, a significant drive from Van. Luckily there's a bus that runs up there. I brought Mya along for emotional and physical support (also making sure I could find the bus home again afterwards) and we made a day of it.

So now I have a kudzu vine twining around my left leg, with an electrical ground symbol at the base. In a couple of weeks I'll go back and get an aspen and maple put in, one on either side, in fall foliage. I'm looking forward to it.

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The snow up here this time is wet and unpleasant and the temp is hovering right around freezing. Despite that it's been beautiful out, and not too unpleasantly cold/damp. I've missed having a good proper wintry winter. The snow is far and away the thing I miss most about the north. That and the winter sun, which there hasn't been much of this time.

There are a great many friendly cats and a number of friendly Large Dogs, all of whom have their own distinct personalities and interactions. There's snowblowing and firewood and cooking. And it's been good to just be in the same place as Erin for awhile, in spite of stupid sick.

Happy solstice.

Erin's staying with me for the week, which is lovely. She got in on Friday afternoon, and we've spent the extended-weekend snuggling and cooking and talking and running errands. It's been well over a decade since I've had a partner come to stay with me for longer than an afternoon, excepting Emily for the couple of years we were in DC and not living together. (And this past Xmas, I guess, though that was its own kettle of awkwardfish.) It's worked out rather well.

We went and got most of the Cargo furniture on Saturday, and it fits into the space pretty well though not quite as easily as I'd hoped. Gonna take a bit more rearranging to get it the way I want. Also, I'd like to get some art hung up sooner than later, in the hope that that'll help it feel more ... more real, more mine, something. I'm really good at getting my space about 80% of the way there, and then just not bothering with that last 20%.

Trips to the old condo are now most definitely Difficult, emotionally. Emily's solidly settled in and she's made the space her own. It's good to see her doing well. It's also rough to surround myself with... with how effectively I've been removed from something that used to be shared. There are still a couple more things that I need to do there: sorting artwork, for one. Maybe if I know / admit in advance that it's gonna be rough it'll be easier. Maybe.

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I said "extended weekend" and I meant it. I took yesterday off work to get my second tattoo.

I've gone into extended detail about my first. This one took much less dithering and deliberating. A couple of weeks ago I went in and spoke with Rachel Lige, an artist that Erin recommended, and tried to describe the idea I'd had in my head. She made approving noises and asked a few questions and used words like "negative space" that I hadn't had the vocabulary to put into my description and quickly sketched something that looked like it might conceivably approximate what I was thinking of. I put down a deposit and made a tentative appointment for, well, yesterday, and emailed her some reference material that afternoon (a few silhouettes, plus the Le Guin and the Richard Siken poems), and tried to think no more about it.

Until last week when she sent me a preliminary design, and it was just about perfect. As an added bonus, seeing it, rather than trying to visualise, gave me the ability to describe it. "On my left pec, a silhouette of a hawk in flight, dark purple and filled with stars, over a dark grey sketched-in landscape." I wrote back to her with a couple of minor suggestions and confirmed Tuesday.

The whole experience was markedly more pleasant than the previous one. Some of that's having Erin there for much of the time (she ducked out for an hour or so to run a few errands), some of it's feeling more comfortable with Rachel than with Gilda, some of it's just having been here before and knowing a bit better what to expect. It took, mm, somewhere between three and four hours. Much of it was painful but not so bad: bits directly over ribs or sternum pinched unpleasantly, and the area down towards my armpit was just plain more sensitive. Then the last half-hour to forty-five minutes, in a combination of 'going over parts that have already been poked raw two or three times' and 'body is just Done', were sheer unpleasant agony. So we got most of it done, and I'll be back in a month or so for touchup and to finish some of the outside bits.

It looks lovely, though right now it's more red than I'd like. One expects that that will improve as it heals. The landscape's more detailed than I'd expected, and maybe darker, but I'm happy with it. I'm particularly pleased with how the stars in the hawk came out.

I was distinctly lightheaded when I sat up: not just a standard low-blood-pressure thing, but a very specific floatiness and absence of conscious thought. It's neat. I'm glad Erin was there: she fed me half a litre of chocolate milk and guided me to the Ethiopian place on the Drive where we ate raw cow and spicy lentils, and then took me home and generally kept track of me. So that was lovely, too.

I've already got vague ideas for next/additional pieces. The first tattoo I ever considered, back when I was still in engineering, was an electrical ground symbol on my Achilles tendon, and I still (or maybe again?) think that's relevant. I've recently kicked around the idea of a tiny orange, though that might be a passing fancy. And I've a mental image of a larger, brighter, piece on my right shoulder and upper arm. No sense of what it is, just that it... ought to be there, somehow.

In the meantime, I can focus on healing up from this one.

Resolved: Stop Blaming the Pancake: "I'll go further and say that the repeated compulsion to resolve and resolve and resolve is actually a terrific marker that you're not really ready to change anything in a grownup and sustainable way. You probably just want another magic wand." Ow. (Metaphor quibble: for me the first pancake is no better or worse than the rest of the batch. The first crepe is consistently awful and has to be scraped off into the sink, though.)

Chip Delany, Part 2: The Miracle of Dhalgren. Pohl's whole blog is worth reading if you've any interest in the history of US SF in the twentieth century; this particular post is noteworthy for the people that show up in the comments.

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Wednesday already. Where does the time go.

(Recap: on Friday I got a tattoo or two, depending on how one counts. It's a taijitu, empty half on the inside left wrist/forearm, dark half on the inside right wrist/forearm. Inspiration from UKL's "Light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light," among other things.)

I spent all weekend in the apartment, cleaning and doing chores and writing and generally Not Doing A Damn Thing unless I felt like it. There was de-Xmasing and vacuuming and cooking, but mostly there was lying on the couch reading or talking or mucking with the computer. Very pleasant.

Monday was my first day in public, and hence the day of regrets: how could I do this? It's Unprofessional. I'll be looked at funny, or given a Talking To, or fired. I made it through mostly by reminding myself that a) I'll get used to it, and b) there's no going back, in any case, so I may as well get used to it. The only person who actually said anything was a complimentary coworker: we chatted briefly on the way back from a meeting.

I guess that was enough to get used to it, because yesterday was the day of I Screwed This Up Somehow. The left side looks fine. It's the right that's causing me all the grief. As the dead skin flakes off, it's revealing a tattoo that's exceedingly patchy and not nearly as dark as I'd wanted. Did I do something wrong? Not moisturize it enough, moisturize it too much, leave it wrapped too long, not wrap it well enough? I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM DOING AND THEREFORE MUST BE DOING IT WRONG.

Today I'm a bit calmer about the whole thing. The studio offers free touch-ups (as they bloody well should, at their prices) so once it's done healing I'll go back in and have it repaired. And maybe more of the ink will stay in place this time: I started noticing the 'patchy' on Satyrday, but was hoping it was just an artifact of the healing process.

At this point I'm reasonably happy with how it will eventually turn out. And with the technicolor cloud cover out my window.

So there's this thing going around DW/LJ, where you post what you'd like for Winter and then check around and see if anyone you know wants something you can provide. It seems like a fine and nifty thing to do, on both counts.

WHISTLER: I want peace on earth and goodwill towards men.

ABBOTT: We're the United States government. We don't do that sort of thing.

I don't need or want much in the way of Stuff: first, if I want something I can and generally do buy it for myself; and second, if I get Stuff I'll just have to move it, or rather pay to have someone else move it. Hence, roughly ordered by likelihood:

The possible

1) Something you think I ought to have.

2) Physical letters, or postcards, or packages, or whatnot. (My address.)

3) Ongoing encouragement to Keep Writing.

4) Recommendations for a good (preferably local) tattoo artist.

The unlikely

5) Kisses.

6) A GM. More specifically, a GM and two or three other players for a game every Tuesday or Wednesday night, one high in characterization and intrigue and low in number-crunching and die-rattling. (I expect I shall have to provide this myself. Oh well.)

7) Awesome Vancouverites.

The nigh-impossible

8) Criterion Collection DVDs of John Woo's The Killer or Carol Reed's The Third Man.

9) Kink.

10) Aspects: A Novel with Sorcery. (Though I'd be just as happy with The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities.)

What do you want?

ETA: failed xpost last night. stupid lj maintenance.