hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

Well. It turns out that the friend who set off my libido avalanche recently is totally up for experimenting together. And it is experimenting, on both sides -- I've thought for a while that I needed a close friend who was up for messing around rather than an unknown person, because there's just too much to deal with otherwise. I have a lot of shiny new goddamn hangups about consent and my own desirability, and I haven't been managing to juggle that even with people I've otherwise felt cautiously interested in. Plus, I still haven't had penetrative sex with anyone since the hysterectomy, which maybe shouldn't matter so much but does. (She has her reasons for going slowly too.)

It's going very well, and we figured out a good edible/dose that helps with anxiety and isn't disorienting, which I've used at other times since.* It's really exciting and great?

It's also frustrating and difficult, because she lives far away and is not easily substitutable with other people. Especially since I technically could move anywhere I wanted now! But it's a bad idea. (Right? Bad idea. Even though there are a number of good things about the idea that are not directly related to sexy times. Too soon. World might explode again if move for girl again. Let's not.)

Having this awareness of a physical connection with another person is wonderful, though. Distracting at times, obviously, but it's something that I've missed and am really enjoying. Flirtation is great.

I'm still not physically well, and I feel anxious a lot, but this one thing is pretty unalloyed good, and I'm happy about it.

* The danger of using this is that you might get obsessed with the texture of a family member's shirt and demand to pet it. I'm sure she's not onto me at all, though.

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. :)

Last night:

• Tried and failed to nap, because I kept having interesting creative thoughts, first about work and then about ceramics. Dang it, brain. I eventually had to get up and write them down before I forgot them, so that was the end of that.


• Met up with genarti and skygiants at a very noisy, very ironic tavern in Davis. Attempted to convey to Beth the full glory of the dragon-game drama currently transpiring. Had tasty potato tacos (but they could have cut the avocado up a lot smaller than that) and some glorified chicken strips with glorified ranch dressing, plus an Original Sin cider from NY that was dry and pretty tasty.


• Went to Apple Cinema, pointed out the ice cream flavors, and saw a shadowcast Princess Bride production at midnight. The movie remains really fun to watch, especially in a theater full of people enjoying it, and the shadowcast had some good moments (though the movie was more compelling). Shrieking eel as pool noodle was especially amusing.


• Found out the MOST AWESOME THING: in two weeks there will be a chiptune/retro-video-game-inspired Rocky Horror, with songs covered and animations made and OMFG. I am surprised I'm not standing in line for this already, I don't know how anything could possibly be more appealing to me.

Today:

• Got up without enough sleep and went to pottery. Sat outside in the sun when I was too early, very nice day. Trimmed two big bowls successfully and went through the bottom of one so proceeded to convert it into an orchid pot with cutouts in the shape of the Light Flight emblem. Shut up. :)


• Hung around after pottery for an extra half hour talking to my teacher about pottery ideas and employment and random stuff. I need to bring snacks if I'm going to hang around after class, I get too hungry!


• Goofing off.


• Successful napping.


• Bubble bath. (Lush Ultraviolet. I'm excited about some of their Mother's Day releases coming up, but I should maybe use more of the Easter stuff first.)

Weekending successful so far!

1. Home from work today. Good thing I got a specialist appointment for Friday: this sinus thing is definitely swinging toward super shitty again.

2. Music mix for friend has consented to be cut down to three CDs' worth but no more. It is possible that I have some feelings of my own that I'm working through here.

3. Came up with a fun minigame for dragon game tomorrow. It's Applejack day of a My Little Pony-themed money-making event, so: profitbucking! Inspired by my teammate's amazing gif magic.

4. I really hate it when I feel too crappy to do things that are fun. I tried to play Necrodancer today but was not smart enough to make decisions in rhythm.

Actually, I also hate it when I feel too crappy to do things that aren't fun. Still badly need to shop for jeans and bras. Can I just stop feeling crappy in general, please?

5. At least the cats are happy, or they would be if there were at least one of me per cat who didn't want to do anything other than sit in the one position they find the most useful and gaze at them lovingly.

Ate many sushi for heavenscalyx's birthday, which she quite incorrectly paid for, and then amazing hot chocolate at Burdick's. A good time was had by all despite the singular lack of available booze, and the promise of punitive bowls will be fulfilled at a future date.

Despite being pretty tired from getting up early, doing work all day, and talking about the worst thing that ever happened to me in therapy, I went down to Boston Common tonight with ryfkah and genarti and J and L to have dinner and skate upon the Frog Pond. The rental skates were tricky on my narrow feet, but once I got them warmed up and cinched down I managed some reasonably competent forward motion. No actual falling! It was lots of fun, the new people were lovely to meet, and I am expecting to be very sore tomorrow. Here's hoping I make it down my third-floor apartment's stairs in the morning without losing my feet entirely.

There will be other posts about the so-called steampunk Snow Queen, I am completely certain, and I will link them here when there are. It was certainly a thing that happened. Theatrical choices were made.

And, since those choices were the most interesting thing about the production, I have decided that what I really want to see is a musical about the making of The Snow Queen.

Selected musical numbers include:

"To Cast a Balding Man"

DIRECTOR: Or how will they know?
That Kai... is really... me?

"This Actress is a Flower"

"Uncomfortable Racial Dynamics"

CAST (staccato whispering): Uncomfortable! Racial! Dynamics!
DIRECTOR (in descant): TO-tally IN-nocent! The man has a talent for daaaaance!

"Accents Make Everything Better"

and the triumphant anthem that pulled the whole cast together to make the production work, "Math is Evil and Snow is Bees".

I joined Flight Rising a year ago today, and I've had a lot of fun and accomplished things I could be proud of even when things in my life were really hard. And it turns out my friends there like me a lot. Here's the anniversary card they made me.

Weird, obvious dreams: Taking care of an entire colony of ~bats that kept being different and I didn't know what to do; the cockatiel ones, the kangaroo rat ones, the ones with so many fleas. Actual Bat cat's front legs giving out and him being distressed. :(

Bat's slight jaundice is visible even to me now. I couldn't see it even when I looked for it on Monday, though the doctor could, but since Tuesday I've been able to. I talked to the vet on the phone yesterday, and he says that the meds are doing their thing in that Bat can eat and drink, but the jaundice getting worse is not at all a good sign. His diagnosis has been upgraded to "malignant tumor" for sure rather than just an extensive one, though we did think lymphoma already. I am to call in a week or if anything changes dramatically. Bat seems more like both his old self and a cat who is obviously feeling low on energy. I don't know how long it will be.

rushthatspeaks has been hugging me a lot at some personal inconvenience (though partial compensation was received in the form of hamburgers), and I am doing okayish thanks mostly to them. I also got to see grad friend C yesterday and take her to Shake Shack while she was in town -- she's defending in a week and a half, and we were as comfortable with each other as ever despite the year apart. She hasn't had the best year either, but I realized that our dynamic (which I've summarized as complaining before) feels very affirming. Sure, we bitch about how terrible things are, but look at us being there and unbroken talking about them disrespectfully.

[ETA: argh and now Bat chewed his pill this morning so it tasted terrible and he got freaked out and I have a cat bite injury ;_; ]