hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

This infection has been kicking my ass, I'm glad I finally feel a bit better today. I picked up my lumber order and am planning to make a raised bed tomorrow. Carrots (because idk I just always wanted to grow carrots and had clay soil that didn't allow it) and greens (because nutritious and likely to have supply problems this year) are my main targets. I also picked up some pole bean seeds, because I'm all about growing food right now aaaand we have an ongoing problem with too much sun making the upstairs into an oven. Rather than spend more money on awning ideas that we're not really happy with, I decided to try and replicate the huge cone o' bean plants that my university used to grow every year. We'll see how this solution goes.

Here, have a week of reading notes!
( Fiction )

( Politics/COVID-19 )

Sentimental Reasons by Frostfire
Sam/Rick never occurred to me when watching Casablanca, but I liked this a lot.

Love Stories from the Jungle by Patrick Samphire
Response while reading: disappointment in the lack of specific place or identity
Response after reading: wow, fuck you
(It's a massive downer and feels weirdly condescending.) The language is lovely, but I hated it.
Bounced off two other free stories by the same author.

A Threadbare Carpet by Kate Heartfield
It's a little spare, I seem to want more immersive stories these days, but I liked the magic and the women characters.

Old Souls by Fonda Lee
I liked this a lot better than the Green Bone books; still pretty violent, but more relatable characters. It has a really remarkable search-and-replace error for Kegan/Mark, though, wow. I emailed the site about it, because of course I did.

The Beast and the Hummingbirds by Madison McSweeney
A good creepy little fairy tale.

Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Elvish Lembas by adspexi
:)

Other news:
Substituted a video chat for our monthly brunch with my half-sister. I wish we could have talked about anything but the news, but with everyone housebound, it was hard to find other topics. We had some good laughs, though.

I started making boiled chocolate cookies before checking that we had enough oats, and I was really down about it, but Emily happened to have a whole canister of Spare Oat. What a good girlfriend.

I'd love to say I'm okay after my long-ass hiatus, but, well. What I am is (1) stably employed in a job that was always performed remotely, which is both great and annoying, since I feel I'm missing out on the true social distancing experience, and (2) reading a lot. Most recently, M.C.A. Hogarth's Dreamhealers series for hard-core comfort purposes and a free novel called Widdershins that is definitely someone's adorable gay Call of Cthulhu campaign in novel format. (Too gross in places, but amusing overall. I appreciated the badass academic woman.) Lots and LOTS of free stories are being posted (one source is here), so hopefully I will keep from feeling quite as bonkers by writing about the ones I read.

So I think I might have explained my sensory/social issues to my mom almost completely earlier tonight.

I had what should've been a good day, but anxiety bit me pretty hard this afternoon, and there was no way I was going to be up for family game night. While stubbornly driving to get a Blizzard because a formerly preferred burger place where I went for lunch had decided not to have milkshakes any more (then perish), I came up with a really good analogy.

When Mom came home, I deployed it. I said, imagine if, every time you were around people, even one, your clothes started to turn to sandpaper.

And she was like OH, even before I fully explained. "It's like that for you?!"

I said, yeah, that's just how my brain is. If it's only one or two people that I know well, it's like, one cuff, and a fine grain. I can ignore that! Twenty people including screamy children at family game night is ALL MY CLOTHES AND UNDERWEAR and SUPER SANDY GRIT.

Mom is also an introvert, but "family" is somehow a different category for her, and her tolerance is higher overall, so I've struggled to really explain my deal. We talked some more about it, and sure, she was raised around a bunch of people, so part of it is training, but we also just have different capacities. We agreed that she should totally convey this explanation to the fam, and she will also help facilitate my hanging out with them one at a time, which I would actually enjoy.

The epiphany might not stick; I'm expecting to have to remind her. But it went so well this time that I think any reminders should be pretty painless and effective. Behold the power of metaphor!

1. astolat's Transformers fic.

2. Lots of useful errands today.

3. Planting things in the big dirt.

As I'm still not doing well (health-wise or trauma-wise) in the Boston area, I'm planning to move back to the Seattle area in a couple of months. Squeak and I are landing at my mom's place initially, and the long-term plan is to look for some inexpensive land in an appropriate biome and eventually build a house. The medium term remains undetermined; there might be a cheaper apartment than my current one to facilitate savings, or I might stay at Mom's for longer -- I am hardened to roommates now, after all, and there are fewer annoyances with Mom's housekeeping than with most, since she's the one who trained me.

The exact move date is not yet determined; I'm trying to stay a bit flexible for now, in case the person taking my room (also not yet determined) needs something in particular. I'll definitely be here throughout March, though, and my health is not so bad that I can't go out once in a while, so let me know if you want to see Black Panther again do something!

And cat care. These are the themes of my working at home so far.

I have had a non-patchy tongue for the first time since I can remember. I'm eating my vegetables. The cats can yell for fresh food when they need it and will actually eat, so they're seeming much stronger. I have enough money to buy clothes I've been needing and enough energy to do the shopping with.

Not everything is perfect -- I need to sort out better ergonomics and more exercise, COBRA is an asshole, and my allergies are still present enough to have given me a mild sinus infection -- but this feels like progress and like recovery. I nearly went dancing this past weekend, which I haven't felt up for in ages.

And I have a paper on DNA barcoding of wild kiwifruit to read and edit next! (This morning I carefully edited a paper on hysterectomies for trans men to avoid calling the patients "woman" or "she"; they had only messed up a little and their language doesn't use pronouns, but it's important.) I'm learning how to edit to a specific standard, I'm building stamina and speed, it's effort, but this is fun.

I'm still sad and afraid and lonely, but I have something really good to do while I keep working on recovering.

Harvard stopped paying me on May 31, and my new job didn't start until the following Monday, so I took the chance to finally go to NYC with grad friend A the way we'd been talking about for months! It was perfect weather, sunny and cool, and we had an excellent time.

Thursday
We agreed that getting there early wasn't worth getting up super early, so we met at the bus station at 9. It's nice to be comfortable enough with someone that you can just read and listen to music together for a few hours.

First New York meal: a corned beef reuben at the Starlight Diner. It's near the bus wasteland, and we needed food. A had gyros, and both our dishes were good but extremely large! I ate the other half of mine for dinner.

First activity: the Met! They were having a Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons fashion exhibit, which was amazing. We only had an hour and a half, story of my life when it comes to the Met, but honestly that's about all my joints can take of museum time without being able to sit and rest a lot. The fashion exhibit was glorious and made me even more disappointed in the basic bitches who went to the Met gala without even touching on the theme. There were plenty of ways to look sexy and interesting while still being avant-garde in Kawakubo's collections.

A kept trying to stop and look at paintings. No, if we don't go directly to the thing we want, we will be looking at everything else forever. We look at permanent-collection paintings after the limited exhibit!

She did have a brilliant idea afterward, though. We needed to eat New York cheesecake. Two Little Red Hens had good reviews and was reasonably nearby, and turned out to have excellent cheesecake, plus somehow 100% perfect lemonade. We didn't try the cupcakes, but they looked good too.

We checked out our hostel after that, which was a weird one -- there had been a deal on hotels.com, so we'd booked a king-size private room. In a hostel. Well, it did turn out to be a private room with its own bathroom, and rather nice though entirely without appliances, but the mattress was very clearly a full size. Good thing neither of us is a wild sleeper.

A went out for a walk to admire the sunset, I rested and took aspirin and read a Courtney Milan novel. (Books on my phone, so much easier to carry around all day.)

Friday
In the morning, A's tamagotchi woke me up at 7. Thanks for that. More reading time! A got up at 8 and we headed off to find breakfast at Bagels & Co. I had a sesame bagel with cream cheese and fresh orange juice, and it became very clear why they charge so much for cream cheese: sheer volume. We also each got a rainbow-colored egg bagel (pride-related?) to take home; mine is in the freezer awaiting suitable toppings.

We had thought of going up to NYBG, but it's pretty far really and A can probably get sent there for work at some point, so we stayed in Manhattan instead. First stop: the Natural History Museum. We looked at very many dinosaur and mammal remains, and near the cool drawings of animals whole/muscled/bones-only we met a security guard. He complimented my spaceship shirt (based on this design) and asked if I was a pilot. No, I said, a scientist. He asked where we were based, and when we said Harvard he asked if we knew Neil deGrasse Tyson. We do not! But he does. He, in fact, gets into a Michael Jackson dance-off with him every year. Sadly, it didn't happen while we were there.

Next we took a walk along the High Line, which was much longer than last time I was in New York, absolutely hipster-saturated but a really lovely aerial park. We got pretty hungry during this but failed to find actual food in the area, so we headed off toward the Strand. My phone had run out of data (Twitter autoplay, RIP) so A was navigating, and she found that at our bus transfer point there was a Sushirrito. This is apparently a Bay Area chain, and it was highly amusing and delicious. They have a machine that makes the nori-and-rice wrapping, which is really clever, then the humans apply fish or whatever (A had chicken katsu, I had yellowtail), plus veggies and other good things. They are very tasty but less well thought out than burritos as to what happens at the ends of the cylinder.

We went to the Strand, which was actually the first time I'd been. A good bookstore. I got The Star-Touched Queen and a souvenir magnet. We left in good order with just enough time to get the obligatory Jamba Juice, which has considerately moved to be more convenient, at Penn Station, and dash to the bus.

The last adventure was at the Burger King at the bus rest stop in CT. A got not only chicken fries, which cost twice as much as chicken nuggets for being long and skinny and better spiced, but also... mac n' Cheetos. The latter is horrifying and hilarious, it's Cheeto-shaped deep-fried Kraft dinner, I do not understand who came up with this.

I made it home by midnight and then my knee hurt for four days, but oh well, it was a very good trip. :)