chickentimeschickenways

I was rereading my entries here from just after Tumblr almost mangled itself to death, and things that I have noticed:

1. good God I was having a hard time in 2019!
2. a lot of the things I was hoping to sort out at that moment, I have sorted out.
3. I've always had at least one semi-public online space which I use for external processing.
4. I'm not sure how I feel about that, these days. It feels a lot like I am putting too much weight on other people and too much of the worst parts of myself out in public. (It's true that I haven't sorted myself out altogether, but I feel much more empowered to distract myself until the badness in my heart diminishes to a manageable level. It's not perfect, but it's an improvement.)

Twitter has been sort of an experiment for me, these last two years and change. I was using it in the same combative way as other social media, and then I made a conscious decision that I was going to only use it to connect with other people and talk about things I cared about -- i.e. cheese and gardens. That hasn't totally removed the mental burden of the place, or the addictive issues I have with social media, but it has dramatically upped the level of positive interaction I have on that website. I could list 20 or 30 people I have regular pleasant conversations with over there.

One of my key tactics is trying to up the amount of time I spend talking about "things I have learned" and diminish the amount of time dedicated to "here are my opinions," and when I do have those opinions, making a careful point to hedge them round as "things that I, a fallible human being with limited experience, believe, and which are not universally applicable." I think the internet is glorious when it shares information and less so glorious when it's a place to whip around one's ego like a deadly skip-it.

I've picked cheese as my load-bearing informational dump because it seems like I naturally accumulate cheesy information, because I have a backlog of cheesy stories and experiences, and because. . . people like cheese.

Possibly more cheese to come. We shall see.

I have purchased, wrapped, and mailed all of my Christmas presents except for two (which are fancy almond pastries that have to be overnighted). I have about fifteen more holiday cards to send, but I've sent about ten. 

ETA: also, my dad is up walking about on his new knee. Today is his first full day of work since the surgery. I am mildly surprised that everything seems to be going well, but also terribly relieved. 

how does one make a quiche without snacking on the ingredients for the quiche throughout the process?(??)

(It is bacon-onion-potato.)  

 I went off journaling for a few days (well, a few weeks), and it's hard to jump back into it when you have feelings you don't particularly want to look at. I've been feeling deeply mediocre -- well, largely that's just physical: I had some sort of virus helpfully providing muscle fatigue; it's dark outside and darker inside in my stupid basement room; I think I've gone and developed a caffeine addiction again (not as bad as was once the case -- we're talking 1-2 servings of coffee or pop a day, which is most likely in the 60-300 mg range; but it's still not great); and then there's the whole cycling-while-cold thing. 

. . . who can I justify mailing 4.6 lbs of Walker's shortbread to, is the question.

1. Move your space heater into the icy bathroom during your shower, so you don't find yourself avoiding basic hygiene as a way to conserve body heat.

2. Aluminum-based deodorant will stain your clothing! Discover this after every shirt you own is already gray around the pits. Buy expensive coconut oil-based deodorant and pray that this helps. Google "sweat stains" instead of "deodorant stains" for ways to fix this, because peeps are in denial.**

3. If you only have five dishes, the sink can never be that full.*

4. Cookies are acceptable breakfast. Cookies are acceptable dinner. Look, you just have to get through the winter, okay?

5. Trader Joe's sells lots of holiday food in tins. You can USE these tins, friendo. Mice are your enemy! Prepare!

6. Don't bother trying to kill the silverfish; they were here first, and they'll be here after you too.


* This is a slight exaggeration. I have two mugs, two glasses, two plates, a frying pan, a cutting board, a saucepan, and tupperware.

** If sweat stained your clothes, the entire back of every single one of my t-shirts would be gray. We had a hot summer, folks. Shrug.

Finding it rather painfully difficult to get out the door today, and I do have laundry to do. Ah, the curse of cold weather! I can't run my space heater at night because it makes me too hot, but I will be damned if I'm going to crawl out of my warm comfy bed into a frigid room.

Today someone on Twitter posted a grim little picture from the Battle of Visby, which sent me into a flurry because I, too, have a grim little image of a skull in chain mail from the Battle of Visby. Observe:




I took this in January of 2015, during a very odd three-week trip I took to do my final exam for my master's. The trip went Omaha -> New York -> Stockholm -> Milan -> Lausanne -> Milan -> Dusseldorf (well, the Ryanair "Dusseldorf" airport, which isn't actually by Dusseldorf at all) -> Stockholm -> New York -> Omaha. The "Lausanne" bit was the part where I was taking my exam, and the rest was. . . well. . . for my own benefit. It was very snowy in Sweden, as one might expect, and I wandered a lot around Stockholm in the dark.

The thing it makes me wonder is about some sort of different future -- well --

Right now the extremely vague idea I have is that I am going to try to get on doing volunteer research at the MIT Building Tech lab again, maybe ten or fifteen hours a week. I want to be in the same place until the 2020 elections, so that means that I'll be in Somerville until August 2021; that gives me two years and eight months to work up enough research to apply for a PhD. Right.

I mean, that was the idea. The extremely vague idea.

At [large box store] work they've put up a sign saying that "as in previous years, employees with more than one year at the company may take a four-week unpaid leave after the holiday season has ended."

I read that, and almost immediately another version of the future came up in the mind, based on that January trip three years ago: maybe I'd be less tetchy and panicky about how fast I can move on to the next thing if I knew I could take six weeks to travel a year. Saving the money is tricky -- saving the money is always tricky -- but [large box store] does regular $0.50/hour raises. After two years they have two weeks paid vacation, and after five years, it's three. If I could get to the point where I was supporting myself just on that job, I'd have a lot more brain space to apply to doing other stuff. Living a life, I guess.

I still want to do the research -- sure -- but it's easier to imagine having something that I could use to argue my way into a PhD program in five years, or eight. I don't know that many forty-year-olds starting PhD programs, but . . . well . . . whatever. I don't really know anyone who's doing the same sloppy job about life that I am doing.

Everything I can dream is pretty lonely, but for some reason the version of the dream where I can go mope about in Europe for most of January seems less lonely. Or at least less disappointing.

(And now, because I'm dreadful, a few more images from that January trip:)

A thought I had:

A lot, if not all, of my rumination boils down to "I HAVE EXTREMELY LIMITED ABILITY TO SELF-COMFORT OR SELF-VALIDATE. PLZ HALP"

Soooo. . . does working out how I feel and why I feel that way in detail have much value? Should I just skip to "hey, I feel bad, can someone tell me something kind?"

I do not know the answer to this thing.

A thing I am working on:

How can I crystallize my self-comfort fantasies into a form that is reusable and sturdy?

Some of the difficulty is that part of the pleasure of an escape dream is its infinite, fuzzy potential. It can contain within it all beautiful things, even those which are geometrically impossible or geographically unlikely. 

But that fuzziness is itself somewhat dangerous, because Treachery Shit Brain can warp even the nicest dream into a story about how I am a crap human and do not deserve good things.

I am considering. 

The dream of the day, which I have not quite tacked down, is what it would be like to be the sort of person who had a Proper Reason to buy a lot of nice things from [large box store where I work] (instead of being me, who buys 1 bag salad or 1 box of 900 cookies at a time).

Example: what might a person do with a big box of pears??? Maybe make a fancy tart. Maybe make TWO fancy tarts, for a PARTY. What about a massive bag of coffee beans? Perhaps this mythical person has a transient espresso machine that travels from closet to closet throughout the city. Maybe they have dozens of international guests every year, and they make each one of them a breakfast cappucino. 

(There's only one real Proper Reason, isn't it, and that's because one belongs to a whole network of people who need nourishing -- )

I just checked out TWELVE Ursula Vernon children's books (I returned eight books, so it's fine! IT'S FINE!)