Words are inadequate

Last summer I got my eyes checked for the first time since the plague. They gave me a new glasses prescription and a new set of contacts. The contacts need to be readjusted and I've had no bandwidth for dealing with things that aren't Urgent so I've just been wearing my old (2018) glasses instead. I've been vaguely planning to go in and get the contacts redone and pick up a new pair of glasses while I'm at it.

Today at lunch, working from work, I was cleaning my glasses and they snapped literally in half.

I tried fixing them with scotch tape, which ... sort of worked, for a little while. But clearly I was done with work for the day. So I went and got new glasses.

Bad news: they do "picking out new glasses" by appointment. I got to hang around Mount Pleasant with no eyes for two hours.

Good news: the appointment involved talking to a guy who actually had a sense of what frames would look less bad on my face.

Expected bad news: I am blind enough that lenses have to be special-ordered and it'll be at least a week and probably more like two before they get here.

In the meantime I am wearing my previous pair of glasses, which are at least seven years old. It's no great surprise that distant things look kind of fuzzy, or that I have something of a headache.

I have no idea whether I'm going to be able to do a full day of work at this point. Guess we'll see tomorrow.

Bah.

*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.

( description of injury )

( par-tay / sarah )

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 am currently running on about fifteen hours' sleep over the last four days, which is not ideal. Expect I will be sleeping a lot over the next week.

I landed at YUL having only slept for a couple of hours on the flight from YVR, got to the hotel, ditched my bags because I was way too early to check in, and stumbled over towards a chair, whereupon I was greeted by someone who clearly recognised me. It took me a good ten seconds to realise that this was Jonathan, who I'd met at the last Farthing Party five years ago. He pointed me at a Chinese bakery around the corner which sold me tea and sweetbuns for breakfast/lunch, and I sat on a bench in the fall sun and watched little sparrows hopping around, and it was good.

Scintillation was quite good. As at Farthing Party before it: I met some interesting people and said hi to some folks I'd not seen in years, some of who even remembered me; I had some good conversations; I went to some lovely panels. Including Why You Should Be Reading John M. Ford, which started with moderator Marissa Lingen saying "How many people in the audience have read Mike's work? All of you? Okay, in that case this can be the Mike's Work Is Awesome panel." And it was, and that was pretty great. Other highlights included, startlingly to me, a panel on why people keep reimagining Lovecraft, and circulating and being actively social at the afterparty. Including finally saying hi to Sherwood again, which, yay, and one hopes it will not be another seven years this time.

I didn't see much of Montreal at all this time. I'd still like to come back and see more of the city somewhen. The con was in Chinatown, which was somewhat bittersweet: Vancouver's Chinatown (the downtown one) is my favourite area of the city, but/and Chinatowns for me are indelibly associated with urban wandering Emily.

Also I seem to have popped my jaw something fierce yesterday, and it's still a bit sore today. I guess if it's not better in a couple of days I'll call my dentist.

Last week my boss Clare was in town (she's normally in London), and Wednesday turned out to be Team Outing Day. Dim sum at Kirin downtown (fancy, tasty, not the best dim sum I've had but quite good), followed by an escape room at which we did not embarrass ourselves even though we didn't make it out, followed by drinks.

That turned out to be Too Much Social for me, so instead of going to a stranger-ful munch like I'd planned I just went home. Unquestionably the right decision, even if I regret having had to miss meeting new people.

---

Meanwhile, on Friday I got a gum graft.

( cut for potential squick )

---

On Sunday I caught what will probably be my only VIFF movie of the year, Bad Genius. It's a Thai film about cheating on exams, and it was fun and tense and enjoyable to watch. I'm not super fond of the redemptionist ending but I'm not sure what sort of ending I would have preferred, so there's that.

I miss complex movies. This one wasn't super complex but it kept me entertained and kept me thinking. Maybe I'll try to make it out to another VIFF movie tomorrow, or more likely Thursday.

And I'm still here.

---

Way back in the mists of time my then-girlfriend Steph made me a mix tape with, among other things, David Mallett's sublime folksong "Arthur". And Arthur, where are you now, we need you / We've been much too long without a leader. It took me an unconscionably long time to get around to picking up anything more by him.

I always thought of "Inches and Miles" as the quintessential Dave Mallett breakup song, and I guess it still is. And all things have endings, and beggars have their pride. For my money, though, "Fire" captures the end of a long relationship perfectly. But time here is frozen, the clock ticks no more / Just the ashes and cinders and smell.

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Still biking, still getting out to yoga between four and six mornings a week when I'm in town. Prayer-twists are now absolute hell on my upper thighs, likely as a result of biking uphill to yoga. On the bright side I'm enough of a regular now that the teachers think it's worth their time to offer corrections. My flows and backbends seem to be working better. (It's hard to think of it as "worth correcting" when my traitor brain insists on interpreting it as "having been noticed doing something wrong." Always more internal work to be done, I expect.)

I'm still enjoying biking. I'm slower than most of the cyclists I encounter, which is okay with me, and I'm nervous on busy roads. But I like the wind on my face and I like getting where I want to go faster than waiting for a bus and faster than walking. I don't like overheating and feeling like I'm swimming in my shirt. July and more so August are going to be awful for that, I expect. But then it'll be fall again and things will be better.

I went to see a physiotherapist about my weird hip problem while biking. It seems to be a natural consequence of having favoured my right leg for ages, due to a long-standing hip ... "injury" isn't really right, but it's close enough, I guess. So I'm finally getting that taken care of, all manner of fun stretches and pokings and proddings and foldings.

---

Been starting to think more seriously about tattoos, again. Two data points doth not a trend make but this does seem to towards the end of a significant relationship. I think this time it's more to do with seeing all the gorgeously inked folks at yoga every day.

I can't remember how old I was when I visited Grandmother Taylor's old hometown, and the house on top of Crow Mountain where she grew up and, more relevantly, the cemetary. Must have been high school, but I remember it as being summer weather, which doesn't track with any time in high school. Maybe it was just winter in the south being as bright and warm as it is. Anyway, I've got a distinct memory of looking at gravestones of people I'm distantly related to and deciding simultaneously: that I wanted to be cremated and not left behind; and if I was going to have a markerstone I wanted it to have the epitaph from Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea on it:

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.

That and bits of Richard Siken's Love Song of the Square Root of Minus One (especially blackbird over the dark field but I am invisible) have been rattling around in my head for months. I suspect they signify. I've got what might be an image in my mind, but no ability to describe it yet. Contacted one highly-recommended local artist; not yet heard back from her.

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Taking a look at a potential place this evening. It's a shared basement, but it's in a great location (Cambie and King Ed), and it's cheap-ish and supposedly big-ish. The roommate seems alright if a bit more social/talkative than I like. She's also connected with several of the local communities that I'd like to tap into. It is possible that this will be exactly what I need and have been looking for.

It's much more likely that it will drive me nuts and I'll desperately need to find my own place in short order, but this will give me a couple of months to catch my breath anyhow. Not that there's likely to be anything findable. This fucken town.

As of yesterday I've developed a sore spot on the inside/back of my right hip, at a contact point for the bike seat. Excuse me, saddle. I'm not sure whether it's a bruise or a stretched muscle. I'd been thinking "bruise" but this morning it started out sore and felt much more neutral after a five-minute walk. I can't figure out a work-appropriate way to stretch it, unfortunately. Ibuprofen it is. I'm not sure whether the saddle needs adjusting, or if I just need to adjust to it.

I'm taking the bike in tomorrow anyway to get a rear fender attached. I rode home yesterday through a pretty good rain. That's still a surprisingly pleasant experience: the rain keeps me from overheating, and not having glasses means I can see in the rain, which is neat. But the pannier and the back of my jacket are both mildly mudspattered, and I'm told a fender will help with the worst of that.

The other thing about biking in rush hour in the rain is that it feels ... unsafe? Unpredictable? Impossible? I get a sense that there's no way I can possibly be sufficiently alert to account for all the cars and the pavement and the weather conditions and whatever else. That it's only a matter of time before something unpleasant inevitably happens. That part is less thrilling.

So, on Monday my quickly formulated plan to "get up and answer the phone to let a package in" changed abruptly to "get up and slam my toe into the ottoman, then jump around and yell 'OW' a lot." For the record, the original plan was the better one.

Monday evening the bruise covered about half of my little toe. By Tuesday it had spread to the whole toe and down onto the foot a bit. The dark red / black hue was kind of pretty, actually, even if from a distance of a few feet it looked like it's going to fall off any minute.

Today it mostly just looks like I banged it up good. There's a black spot on the bottom of the toe and the whole thing is dark and red and angry. It hurts a lot less. That might be because I'm popping ibuprofen like candy in an effort to keep the swelling down.

I'm pretty sure it's not broken, just badly bruised. I'm icing it when I remember, and keeping it taped to the other one thanks to uilos (seriously, it is ridiculously hard to tape your two smallest toes together and not end up with a wad of tape covering half your foot), and mostly not poking at it too much. I'm waffling on whether to see a doctor. I mean, what's he going to say: "yep, it's broken. ice it and take ibuprofen and keep it taped to the other one." I guess if the black blob under the nail gets too bad I should have it looked at.

In all: not particularly recommended.