dragonlady7

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So in late May when I was going to come to the farm finally I was pondering how unlikely it was that I was going to get a tiny house of any kind built to replace the yurt, and in that moment someone linked me to a sale on canvas bell tents that was happening, and I was like, ah! a solution! and bought one.

And then it never arrived, and I sort of gave up, and since then it was suggested I should find a shitty camper or something and try to get that set up out there, so i’ve been low-key pondering that and yet don’t have any money so have made no strides to see it happen.

Well, the canvas tent is going to be arriving, Tuesday. (I am going back to Buffalo… today.) 

So now I’m trying to think about what on earth I should do with this tent. It’s mid-July, I’m in a much different place than I was in late May. 

I don’t have any furniture that would particularly suit in the tent. I have a camping cot but it’s sort of weirdly tall, and the tent slopes in on the sides so I might wind up having to put that in the middle, only there’s a pole, so it might not fit in there at all, and the walls might slope in too much. But I don’t know! What’s going to happen is I’m going to have to set it up and then find out. 

Anyway. I’ve been okay staying in the guest room, it’s just that in the heat you have to keep the door open and so there’s no privacy at all, the door is right by the top of the stairs so anyone going up or down the stairs just looks straight in at the bed where I am, so like. I mean, whatever, but. The other thing that makes the guest room unsuitable is that there’s only one, so when BIL’s out of state family comes to visit I have to get turfed out of the room and find other digs somewhere. And that’s not happening, with the pandemic, so. 

I have a gift card at amazon loaded up from some work thing, so I can buy a few things on there at least without having any money. I miss sleeping out in the woods a little bit– I don’t see the sunrise or sunset if I’m sleeping indoors, and I don’t appreciate the rain in the same way, and I miss that time to myself, but it’s also a lot of worry and hassle out there. So IDK if I really want to bother with the tent??? But I also really do. So. I mean. There’s that. 

Anyway, I’m struggling to conceptualize it; it means I have to really accept that the yurt’s gone and I didn’t just not set it up for some reason this year. The nice wooden platform for the yurt also burned, so I have to set the tent on the ground, which means really I need to go level a spot. I’m not going to put it in the ash circle, no thanks; I need to clear up the scrap metal my dad carefully collected and then left there (I swear he said he was going to do something with it, but obviously he did not, and obviously it is my job, but since he had indicated he’d handle it I had been not thinking about it, and now I have to), and I also need to figure out what to do with all the burnt ends of the timbers of the platform that he carefully collected into a pile– I guess those should be taken up to the burn pile, if they’re going!– and I guess I just need to think about a lot of things which I just haven’t been. 

I have a feeling I need to actually physically see the thing first, I just can’t make myself think it through. 

Anyhow I’m going back to Buffalo. I don’t know if I mentioned here, last time I was in Buffalo I stopped by my workplace. Now, i’d been texting with my supervisor there, and he’d said “well, we’re reopening part-time, but I’d thought you should probably wait to come back until later” so I was like okay then. So I went in and he was there and he was like “oh my god are you coming back ever? do you even want this job anymore?” and I was like… “you said come back later and then never texted me again, I sort of figured it was in your court?” and he was like “no I’ve been waiting to hear from you” …. buddy this communication is in writing which you could have reviewed at any time?? and I was like well I’m headed to the farm this week because those are the plans I made in the absence of having heard anything else, so we’ll talk about it when I get back, and he was like i haven’t had a day off in seven months  and I was like it has not been seven months? but anyway. (also. our bosses. don’t pay you much, man. if you were like. i need to take a day off. and no one can cover me. they would have to figure something out. please stop putting this on me. but anyway.)

then he was like “oh but i can’t wear masks for long periods of time” and I’m like this office is ten feet by ten feet, you are asking me to become your co-isolation buddy and you won’t even friend me on facebook, this is a lot, but I had to go and we did not address it.

So I am going to talk to him this week and maybe start going back to work. but i don’t want to, that job sort of sucks and pays me shit. but. i need something, all our bills are going to come due and the fact that UI hasn’t actually paid out is going to become a problem (and even if UI *does* pay out, it won’t do so indefinitely going forward) and i’m not prepared to start looking for anything else in this economy. and i’d been thinking the farm didn’t need me now that they have a better employee infrastructure, but then i’ve been indispensable again and every time i leave they’re like “when are u coming back”. so like. idk. i d k and there’s no right answer of what to do. of course. 

(One of these years I was hoping I’d be able to get a paid position on the farm but as it turns out, I’m indispensable but not good at any farming tasks, so that’s not going to work out– and if it did, well, I have this house in Buffalo containing this dude who absolutely will not move, and also my actual personal life, and I don’t want to just meld into the farm because I find the work meaningful but don’t really *have* a personal life here, and can’t even work on writing very much, which is like, the only hobby I have that I care deeply about, so. Some work I could do remotely would be ideal, and that’s been teased at the job I have, but I also feel like it won’t really happen so it’s sort of dumb to get excited about it.) 

Maybe I just don’t believe in reality thoroughly enough. it’s really hard to make decisions when none of it seems really real, even when you’re living through it… 

I guess it's good that I'm so skilled at running my mouth without provocation because I am literally incapable of answering a challenge or prompt in any way. I just-- like-- I can't read and follow directions, it turns out, in my advancing age, and I just can't figure out what the fuck y'all are talking about until it's over already.
So I'm not doing any Challenges or taking prompts or whatever because I am apparently just not built that way. I love reading all'y'all's meme responses and such, and I just can't get myself together to do it correctly, and that's just how it is.
Why is that literally all i post about lately? the ways in which I don't fit any of the world's standard interfaces? i dunno. i guess that's my throughline, my theme through all this journal. *jazz hands* I have no idea what the fuck is going on out there but y'all have fun with that! */jazz hands*
wait can you close a... tag... like that... never mind.

This morning as I was preparing to leave the house, Dude was having a solemn conversation with Chita the cat in the kitchen. "Are you ready for the morning stand-up?" he asked. (They call their teleconferences stand-ups, and I don't know why, since everyone seems to be sitting down.) "MEOW," she answered. "What are you working on? Do you have any blockers?" "MEOW," she insisted.
I had to interrogate him about "blockers" instead of just "blocks". A writer would say, "I'm blocked on this project." But his team says, "I have a blocker," to indicate they can't progress-- usually it's not a lack of inspiration, but rather that they need to wait for a result from someone else before they can proceed. But that seemed odd to me. Maybe because I spent so long playing the position of 'blocker' in roller derby, which means 'bitch who puts her ass in people's chests so they can't get past', mostly, in my case.

I tried to fix my Instagram, which used to crosspost to Tumblr (and thence here) but when I had to uninstall and reinstall the program in Istanbul because the slow Internet broke the uploader, I lost my Tumblr password, and it turns out the password in my password manager for Tumblr is incorrect, so if I ever get accidentally logged-out, I'm fucked. I should probably fix that but I hate that sort of shit, it always gets fucked-up and I wreck everything. (Wow that functionality's been broken since August, I guess I'm kind of bad at keeping up on stuff.)
I don't think I can make it crosspost here, though, because the image hosting on here is still so fucked-up. Specifically my account. If I want to post images here I have to upload them to Flickr first, and for some reason I'm hesitant to do that? I should, though, and do a manual archiving of my Instagram posts that way. Because who knows about anything on social media anymore.

Well that's a long post and I didn't have a point, so I'm going to stop now. TGIF I guess; I'm going to spend one entire day this weekend doing absolutely fucking nothing except what I want, because I squandered my whole sick day yesterday grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning. And going to the grocery store with vertigo was a terrible idea. (It was only bad for a few minutes.)

Knock on wood, I'm fine today, and the walk in was nice because fresh snow is sticky instead of slippery like ice.

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miscellany:

* my sister and her husband and baby came thru on their way back from new years’ with the in-laws in the midwest, and it was lovely to hang with them as usual. Baby’s latest thing is that her mother told her “Pause!” during play, at one point, and she’d never heard the word used that way before, and thought her mother was nicknaming her “Paws”, which she has now decided is an excellent alter ego name, and sometimes Paws is a dog and sometimes Paws is a cat, depending on her whim.

* woke up an hour before I normally get up and had bled enough to overflow the menstrual cup I wear. managed not to get any blood on the sheets, but I got into the bathroom and thought, man fuck trying to clean this up, and just got into the shower. because holy fuck. how i didn’t get that all over the sheets i don’t know. this trash fucking body, i stg

* turbo yeast: tends to produce ethyl acetate? we think we over-nourished this batch and it produced ammonia, actually. distilled it yesterday, which was dramatic as we went from 50 degrees and rainy to 23 degrees and violently snowing during the time the still was running. considering solutions, probably citric acid, etcetera. first candidate for a second distillation! excellent experiments to make with cheap ingredients. 

* I did not mean to get sucked into it but I have now suddenly written almost 18k of Poe-POV Finn/Poe and it is absolutely not what I meant it to be nor is it particularly headed where I wanted, although technically I am following the outline I made, and up until a couple hours ago I was super into what I was writing, but I’m suddenly feeling very shitty about basically everything so I am going to attribute this to brainweasels and not do anything rash. I wanted to post an excerpt because I rely on attention to feed my creative beast but the reasonable 2k segment I composed wound up on such a horrifyingly sad note that I couldn’t bear the thought of posting it without the 3k resolution. So. I guess I won’t be posting a snippet here. Not of this, anyway. 

* on a high note! I consulted with @kiwisson about alternative pronouns for droids, as I disliked my draft where BB-8 was “it” (ugh!) and did not want to flip/flop he and she as the script does, and definitely didn’t want to use “he” like the novel apparently does, and they suggested spivak pronouns which I had never heard of before (or, well, I had, but I had no idea what they were called!) and I LOVE THEM and that is where I am going so thank you ever so much! BB-8 is about a thousand times more adorable as ey/em/eir. 

* the overarching theme of this story I am writing seems to be that Poe is surely indeed the dashing hero of the Resistance and all but in his downtime has a lot of anxiety about these ducklings who seem to want him to lead them around, and is pretty convinced that actually Finn is the dashing hero of the Resistance now and honestly people should be paying more attention to the new kid, and BB-8 is apparently fomenting some sort of droid revolution on top of all of that and he’s just got a lot to do and wishes people would stop taking surreptitious snapchats of his ass okay? 

* actually the snippet I wrote that got too long is all about an introductory holovid that the Resistance shows to new recruits, called “Dealing With Your Inevitable Crush On Poe Dameron”. I wish I could somehow make this be a real thing because in my head it’s hilarious. Ohhh, I am a one-trick pony; all my MCU stuff features descriptions of videos sort of compulsively, and now here I go. Oh well. The more prolific my output the more I can point out that I basically write the same shit over and over. 

*I will say this: the one thing I am really enjoying about dabbling in SW:TFA fic is that there’s literally no reason to ever bother with homophobia even existing, so that’s nice. Like, I don’t even have to acknowledge that it’s a thing. It’s really refreshing. I’m super jazzed to never encounter “period-typical homophobia” again. Or like, the concept of a same-sex relationship being “less real” than an opposite-sex one. Or like, someone not being a “real” bisexual. Fuck all of that noise, I can just pretend it’s never been a thing, because in this ‘verse, that’s totally plausible and fine. Kiiiiiinda loving it! Didn’t expect that! Super bummed to have no pop music though! Didn’t expect I’d care about that! Weird things you learn.

Okay everybody it has helped me a lot to talk through this. I feel less shitty. Thanks, and sorry that’s long.