Words are inadequate

Been a minute. Have a ramble.

I spent last week up north with Erin, which was ... it's good to see Erin, and the critters, but the weather was mostly grey above and rainy and muddy, which all makes it hard for me to, well, function. In my own space that manifests as just kind of zoning out a lot. Around someone else or not at home, that's less of an option, so it was hard. But there was tasty food, and snuggling, and talking, and overall it was much better than not.

Now I'm back and have a bunch of classwork to get through in the next week and a half: four lectures, three assignments, two quizzes for stupid Rob, and a video presentation and a practicum proposal for the other class. Doable but I'll be busy.

Canada Post workers are on strike. I'm planning to go out and support a picket location on probably Wednesday, will be good to get out for a bit anyway.

The strike, and the fact that the union and management are apparently pretty far apart so it will either last for awhile, or they'll get ordered back to work, is colliding in my head with the recent elections (etc) and the way that lots of folks I know are having a particularly hard time the last while. No particular coherent thoughts, and certainly nothing actionable. Just noting that civilisation, society, is in fact slowly crumbling as all the money concentrates at the top.

I read David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks a couple of weeks ago (on William Gibson's recommendation, whenever I heard him speak at the one VCon I went to), and it was quite good. The part that stuck with me is the last section, 2045, set in a rural community in Ireland where the civil government is collapsing and pulling back, and people are struggling to Make Do as the twilight deepens. It's sort of hopeful, I guess, overall, on a longer timeframe, for other people. Felt real and immediate, though.

My passport has made it to the passport office in Philadelphia. An acquaintance observed in passing that there's a good chance that passport renewals with X-gender that aren't processed before mid-January could be held indefinitely, so maybe that was an error. Guess we'll see.

I did bring a big jar back from Erin's with me, so this weekend I was able to put up my cinnamon to make into extract. That'll finish out, mm, four to six weeks, so either just before or just after solstice. (Cinnamon extract is supposedly good in anything you'd use cinnamon in, but especially in things where it's nice for the cinnamon to dissolve, like french toast.) The vanilla from June is still going; decided to let it keep soaking. I'll decant it this spring and make up sugar then, and it can be 2025 xmas presents or something.

Right. Lunch, and then back to presentation work. I hope you're doing well, and keeping warm physically and emotionally as best you can.

The core, perhaps, is that I used to arrange my life in such a way that I knew what was coming: not just "tuesday is dinner-and-rpg, wednesday is counseling, one saturday a month is a big boardgaming day" but ... the feel of it. There was a rhythm to my life that I knew and understood and felt, bone-deep and everywhere. And within that rhythm I had plenty of time and space to break out of it: there's an interesting thing to go do this weekend, or this evening I want to write about a particular book, or I should get xmas presents for folks near and far.

For whatever reason, when I am entwined with Erin (probably "with anyone") I lose that rhythm. I enjoy, sometimes more sometimes less, the time I spend with her; that's not the issue. It's that it becomes difficult to impossible to live in the rhythm of my own life. I've been trying to push through, to find the rhythm again around and within that, for three or five years now, with scant success.

Case in point: I have no year-end roundup for 2019 or 2020, to refer back to and see how things compared. Some of that's cowardice and depression, knowing I was doing poorly and not being willing to face up to it. Some of it's the plague year and the malaise it brings. And some of it's that reflection takes time and energy, and finding those when my rhythm is disrupted is hard, sometimes impossible.

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So. 2021. The Plague Year Part 2.

I did travel last year, unexpectedly enough: I squeezed in an August run to Niagara and the Gathering before (or more accurately, in the midst of the rise of) the Delta variant. And I went down to Vancouver several times, mostly for gaming with Holly, Zee, and James. I'd like for more travel this year: I'm signed up for both the Gathering in early April and Beach Week with my DC ex-gaming-group in late May. We shall see whether the plague cooperates with these plans. To the left, I have no particular desire to play tourist. There are places I'd like to visit, for various reasons: Wales, Rome, Santorini... but I'm more interested in exploring where I land, rather than going somewhere specifically to explore. Like, oh, Farthing Party was a good excuse to wander around Montreal. That sort of thing.

My financial situation is dire enough that I will most likely be taking out a short-term loan from a friend to cover moving expenses. On the bright side, I didn't have to dip into my RSP to fund the condo purchase. I have no idea what my finances will look like in a year. At least the potential trips to the US are paid for: there's money waiting in a USD-denominated account to cover everything except airfare.

There's a sense in which I tried to fill up the void of the rhythm of my life with Things: fancy books, boardgames and RPGs I won't play, that sort of thing. One hopes that there'll be less need for that this year. But that will also take some return to specific discipline, telling myself "no." Which it's about time for anyway. An advantage of having a tiny condo, perhaps.

The other thing about money is that I did drop down to 80% time and pay back in April. The pay cut didn't matter as long as I was living here and not going much of anywhere, but, well. I'm expecting to ramp up my job search in the coming months, and I expect that a new job will be at full-time and for more money than I'm making now, so it'll be a more than 20% pay bump. Which will help. I don't know whether going back to full-time will be a mistake or not but there's really only one way to find out. (Run a blind A/B test cycle.)

My physical condition has consistently deteriorated over the last three years. Exercise for the sake of exercise seems to be nigh-impossible for me; yoga worked because it was a Thing that I went to do and someone else told me what to do there. Again, hopefully this will change when things become within walking distance and there is not a large hill (and a poorly-sidewalked highway) between me and groceries-on-foot. I suspect, though I do not know, that my body will still adapt relatively quickly to being moved and used again, and that my lungs will re-develop basic functionality. With any luck at all this will also aid in sleeping and maybe even in my basic self-image.

My social network has likewise deteriorated, which, again, no surprise. I played in an online RPG run by Joe in DC, which mostly served to reinforce that multi-person videochats are really not a good social milieu for me. I spent a lot of time with Erin, which was quite good except for the rhythm-breaking per above. I saw Sarah once for a few days in August, and djinn not at all. I've still got a handful of Vancouver connections for when I'm in person, and a handful of people to talk to online when I'm feeling up to that. Turns out the isolation is rougher on me than I would have thought. Oh well. One learns.

So what have I done, with my plague years, my northern years? I survived, mostly. I started learning to play the bass guitar, and then put that on hold while I'm playing viola for Sound of Music with the high school down the road. I read a bunch. I bought a condo. I became a little more bold about publicly adopting labels like 'autistic' or 'nonbinary.' I learned some things about who I'm not, and maybe about who I am.

I didn't learn how to talk to people, or how to want things in such a way that I can express it, even to myself, without putting fire to what's around me. I didn't learn how to negotiate or compromise or even fight. Three (!) years ago I thought that At this rate I might be a functioning human being in another decade or two. Ha, well. I suppose there's still time for that.

i'll walk home with snow falling
deep on frozen lawns
and i'll leave
all those others celebrating
all the things that they have done