persis | Reading

Tuesday visited this weekend!

I've been deeply burnt out (have I mentioned that here? Have I mentioned that thirty times here? I'm really not sure!) and so I was upfront when we started talking about a potential hang this weekend, and straight-up said "the most useful thing for me would be if you came over and hung out in my room while I got things done (nagging optional)". And so late late Friday night (when I was dead-to-the-world asleep, because I forgot my ADHD meds on Friday and crashed _hard_, like, nine PM out cold on the couch) Tuesday showed up and kissed my head and we went upstairs where I made the bed vaguely livable.

Saturday was really quite productive, and I'm pleased with what I got done! Sunday was much lessso productive, but it was a nice chance to hang out with Tues and kinda do nothing. Here's some highlights, in no particular order:

*Saturmorn I made eggs. They turned out pretty well! We ate them with toast and it was a very satisfying breakfast.

*Satureve, Ezri decreed it their annual birthday-sushi night, and so Tues and I walked to Davis to pick up a pah-tee-plah-tah¹ with approximately eight hundred sushi on it. It was too much for the four of us to eat in one go, so I had a bit of leftover sushi this evening which was pretty great. All of it was great!

*I did three entire loads of laundry, which is, uh. Yeah. It's apparently been a hot second since I last did laundry. I had been observing that I was starting to run out of underwear, which like, because it's me means I only had like six clean pairs left or something. But they weren't the _optimal_ pairs anymore, that's the problem!

(the related problem is that I don't know where I will get more underwear when I need, because last I checked, Target is still being bootlicking fuckasses, and I have no interest in giving them my business until they make it right. So I will have to like, find a new company that sells fairly basic cotton boxer briefs in good colours, and I hate this.)

*I had done a rough clean of my desk on Tuesday night when Austin visited, but today I gave it another shakedown, and made some better progress. I found so many gift cards! Things still feel dire, but less so, and I found a box to put all the ADHD games and scrap paper, which seems good.

*Tuesday helped me hang up all the hanging laundry, and that was really _really_ nice of her. It's one of the parts I hate by far the most, and am worst at. So I really did finish all the laundry.

*I wrote heaps, including figuring out my spreadsheets for dance (where I got all the data I was posting about) and writing a bit of "?!" for having a thousand days of words.

*We started to do some LEGO, and then stopped, so I have some partially finished models that I will hopefully work on over the next few days. They're bugs!

*Today involved a long walk and some errands. I picked up a copy of Overgrowth from PSB, and we got Panera Bread (because aforementioned gift cards). It was fun!

*I showed Tuesday a little bit of Rogue Legacy, because my brain has been _very_ video game lately. This is a problem with being burnt out, I think, that I want to wrap myself in high dopamine low-effort things.

*And lots of snuggling and holding hands and basking in each other and stuff like that. This is my favourite part of kem visiting!

~Sor

MOOP!

1: If you're not reading this like a clone high reference, you're not doing it right!

minoanmiss

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sorcyress

Numbers are all meaningless. I'm a mathematician so you can trust me when I say there's nothing more significant or special about one-thousand over nine-hundred-ninety-nine. Or one-thousand-one. In the grand scheme of things, they're all "approximately that much". (in the grand scheme of things, every number you can name is in the same bucket. That's just peanuts to numbers, etc.)

So yeah. 1000. It is just a number and there is nothing special about it.

I'm a mathematician, so you can trust me when I say that there is something special and significant and glorious about every number. One thousand is the first of the four digit numbers! It's 8 in binary! It's 10^3! It's very nicely round appearing, with all the zeros, and it's pretty fun to say. "thousand" is a great number to throw in if you're exaggerating something or engaging in pleasant hyperbole.

It is the number of days, inclusive, since August 22nd, 2022. Meaning, if we call that particular date, arbitrarily chosen, "day 1" then today, May 17th, 2025, is day 1000.

***

I have been thinking a lot lately about secrets and privacy and the ways in which I talk around things when they're too big or complicated or different or weird for me to state outright.

This has been extremely relevant lately because several months ago the choir director at my school sent around an email to all-staff saying "hey, the students are going to do Vivaldi's Gloria as a masterwork, and I'd love to have some adults join in" which means I performed in my very first concert _ever_ on Thursday. As of 48 hours before the concert, I had told exactly the following people I was doing this: my mother. At therapy, I mentioned it fast-casual-offhand and it did become the entire focus of that session. Called mom and talked to her about it for over an hour more. Did manage to tell Austin about it that evening, which was hard, told Maia the next day, have started to vaguely mention it in general through the actual day of the concert. Why didn't I tell anyone in February when I started rehearsals? Because things that my brain decides as secrets are big and complicated and different and weird and I struggle to say things aloud about them sometimes.

Anyways, the concert went well! It was nice! There's no reason anyone can figure out why I didn't talk about it earlier (there are actually several, if anyone cares ping me and I'll make it a separate post). It's not like the other thing I haven't been talking a ton about, there's a _reason_ I'm not talking about that one, and it's fear of This Country. Remind me in late August if you want to know.

But yeah. This is apparently a thing in my heart and brain, that sometimes I decide to keep things secret, and then I am just fucking weird about them for no good reason.

***

The last day I missed writing 750words was August 21st, 2022. 1000 days ago.

It's just a number and it doesn't mean anything at all. It's just a number and it means everything.

~Sor
MOOP!

sorcyress

Okay, went a bit sideways from room cleaning into data collation for my GenderFree SCD class. I now know that the class has made a profit of: $137 after 16 classes. That is *not counting* the fact that I've still committed to putting myself 1k into the hole for this project, so like, the fact that we have actually made money is _great_ and means we're still well above the threshold for "should I consider shutting this down".

tbf, we don't pay me when I MC, and like, that's fine, that's part of what this project is, but it does mean I can't consider ourselves fully self-sufficient until we can't afford to regularly pay MCs. But I think as things currently stand, I still feel a lot more strongly about "I want people to come dance regardless of paying (AND STUDENTS SHOULD NOT GIVE ME MONEY)" than reaching a form of self-sufficiency that doesn't rely on a lot of unpaid labour from *me specifically*, because like, I am _so happy_ to deliver this labour.

I am actually being paid for my role in this class, and the way I am being paid is in "holy shit, I like my hobby and feel positive about it again". This is especially evident in the fact that this month I'm back teaching at Cambridge Class for the first time in over two years, and man, the vibes are not the same. I like teaching at Cambridge, I can have real good feelings and moments there. But I've been saying for a while "I love my hobby but it doesn't love me back".

Some of it is covid bullshit. It was _exhausting_ trying to be the only person to remind an entire group of adults that actually this dangerous communicable disease exists and we should try to protect each other from it. With my class, I could actually set a rule! And then I could set an example and say "look, masks are always recommended" and honestly, mostly people wear masks most of the time even when the wastewater levels are low enough that they're not required. Fuuuuck yes!

And so much of it is gender bullshit. Both Monday's I've taught, one person has specifically come up to me to complain about the use of "bird terms". Like. I can't deal with this. I can't deal with the clear vitriol at me using the gender-neutral terminology that seemingly every other dance form has been comfortable in for years. I really am tired of dealing with all the casual transphobia that comes alongside callers who are trying to call neutrally but not actually thinking about it¹. And I just fucking can't handle being a polite little "good trans" when someone loudly asks if I'm dancing on the wrong side of the dance and then gets mad at _me_ for being confused by what they were asking.

It's not just that my hobby doesn't love me back. It's that parts of my hobby, some people in my hobby, are _loudly_ making it clear that I don't belong inside it. And I didn't realize how much I missed just easy enjoyable Scottish dancing until I started my own class, where that...doesn't happen. Coming back to Cambridge Class occasionally this spring has made me realize just how close I was to leaving the dance form entirely^1.5. I can sustain being only kinda welcome in the main spaces when I know I also have my safer space to retreat to.

And my safer space is WORKING. I have 13² people who have attended at least 4/16 classes so far. I have 37 more people who have attended any classes at all. I'm averaging about 9 people a week, which is a full set plus a caller. I've had two weeks with only six of us present (both of which genuinely kicked ass) but never fewer, which means I've never had to horribly cancel, embarrassed as hell towards the four people there or whatever. I'm horrible at advertising and reminding people to come, but it's still happening anyways and that's really cool.

I start every Thursday morning internally screaming, because oh god, in addition to everything else I have to set a damn program and prepare some extra dances for if we have a weird number of dancers and aaah. And then I come home every Thursday floating, because people came and danced and tried things and learned things and seemed to have fun. And sometimes they even come back for more. It's the best thing I've done this year, and that's not even close. I mean, okay, fine, MGH emails me when they use my blood to save someone's life and that is also extremely satisfying³, but seriously. Creating a community feels very very good and makes me very happy to have done.

So yay, glad to have run some data and seen that it looks like I'll be able to keep going. Maybe for a while even!

~Sor
MOOP!

(odd Thursdays, either 7pm-9 or 7:30pm-9:30, 504 Medford St in Somerville (the NESFA clubhouse). Come join anytime!)

1: I got a comment after the welcome dance by someone thanking me for being one of two callers they've ever heard call both with gender-neutral terms *and* pronouns. If you say "first robin cast to her left, while her partner casts to his right" you are not actually accomplishing what you set out to do, and may actually be making things worse.

1.5: Yes, I am arrogant enough to point out that any member of RSCDS reading that should've gotten a chill down their spine. Not to be egotistical on main, but I am a huge boon to this branch. I am a good teacher, I am a regular member serving various committees and co-chairing various events, and I am a joyous and enthusiastic participant who loves dancing with newer dancers and enthusiastically trying to drag other people in. The hobby dies if you lose the people who make things happen and who bring in others. Just. Fucking. Saying.

2: And 7 of those have attended at least half the classes so far. No one has attended all 16, myself included (I'm at 15, which should really be "14.5" but I don't differentiate how long people were at class, Alex is also 15, Keira's 14.)

3: THIS IS A REAL THING AND IT IS THE ABSOLUTE BEST EMAIL YOU CAN EVER GET. I'm just fucking around going about my day and glance at my phone and it's a subject line "you just saved lives!" and because it's literally from the blood donor center, I know they actually mean it. So fucking cool. Cannot overstate how great that feels to get.

minoanmiss

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vvalkyri

after calling a Patient Care Advocate to tell her about why I've been explaining for the last 5 months that I never plan to return to that provider.

minoanmiss

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vvalkyri

It's taken me most of a month to still not clear my Gmail of this same handle, which has been full since April 17th.

I should probably just give up and pay Google but then that would mean attaching a payment to this handle.

Ugh.

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sorcyress

I am le tired.

But I think I am happier when I actually write my words, all artisinal like, and I also think I simply have not been doing that lately --I've been getting wordcount, but it's been a lot of collections of notes from meetings, or emails home to parents, or significant bits of chatlog, or comments to other people. I'm not really...writing, mostly.

I think I think "Blues Clues" is twee, but also jegus fuck, what else am I supposed to call the repeated mounting evidence that I'm only just surviving right now, and nothing close to thriving. I am so tired, and so burnt out, all the time. It sucks, and yes there's a light at the end of the tunnel when which I get to recover, but it's called summer vacation, and I have a huge amount of stuff to get done Before Then.

(And as summer approaches I need to be Making Summer Plans, like visiting my mom in June (and maybe going on an adventure to NY with Tues's family?) and visiting MD again in late July/early August, and that thing I'm doing in mid-August, and also HELLO I HAVE WRITTEN MY PINEWOODS PROGRAMS BUT I AM NOWHERE NEAR READY TO TEACH MY CLASSES YET.)

So here's some assorted updates on assorted aspects of my life:

*Dance is obviously busy as hell. (I say obvious, but like, I'm not posting here so who is supposed to know anything?). I am teaching at Cambridge Class this month, which is...fine. It's nice to have a big crowd, and I'm very good at what I do, but it's disheartening that last week basically the first thing that happened was someone crankily requesting that I not use "bird words". I told them "nope, I'm gonna try and call mostly positional, but if I need role terms, that's what we use" and then found something else to do with my energy, but it still set the month to be emotionally costly.

I called the Highland Ball welcome dance this past Friday, and that went surprisingly well --I say surprising because it was a hell of a program, written by not-me, and I was very anxious it would be Too Complicated. Certainly it was a lot of words. But the words disguised dances that all flowed very very well, and I think I felt good about things ultimately. I got some compliments, and that was good, I think.

And I'm still running my class. Oh, I need to write a program for our party in June, crap. And I need to email exec to ask for a music subsidy. And at some point I need to write a report for the AGM. Huzzah.

*Work is also busy as hell, as we approach the MCAS tests and the end of the year. I am very very burnt out, which is making me a less good teacher. This turns out not to matter very much, because all the children are also very burnt out, which is making them less good students. We are all trying to be patient with each other and it's mostly working.

I got my assignment for next year today. Similar to what I've been doing, all Geometry again, but now I will be co-teaching the inclusion 10th grade geo, for students who require higher-than-usual numbers of supports. I am actually looking forward to this, which might be a horrible mistake. We'll see. At least all Geometry again means I shouldn't have any (many) repeat students.

*Separate from work is union stuff, and jegus, that has been _busy_ as hell. I shouldn't say a lot more in a public post, because I continue to pretend that it's a secret which district I work in, but yeah, I'm on the bargaining team, and that's been 3-5 hours of work every week since December. We're part of a whole little coalition with a bunch of the other local districts, which is keen, but our particular city is ~not interested in funding education~ which is significantly less keen. Ping me if you wanna hear more specific cussing.

*I have lost absolutely all motivation for general life maintenance, which is bad and just going to continue to be bad. My room is a fucking catastrophe and I don't know how to make it not be, because any time I go to be in it, the general malaise and burn-out from the rest of my life slam against the freeze-in-place overwhelm of looking around at my disaster area, and nothing gets done.

I have finally started reading dreamwidth again? For like, three days in a row now, over breakfast, like I'm supposed to. So that's nice, it's nice to find out what y'all are up to, a thing I haven't actually known since mid-April or so.

*Partners are good and I love them, but I don't feel like I'm doing a good job at being present for any of them because busy and _fucking busy_ and burnt out. I am maybe seeing Tuesday this upcoming weekend, but we haven't made proper plans yet. Austin and I are trying to do weekly dates, but teaching dance is throwing it all off, and this week I have a TMC meeting and blahahhhhhhh. mek and I have like seven episodes of OFMD to watch.

And then like, I completely slept through my weekly taskmaster-watch with Tailsteak last week. Like, was asleep, woke up at 9:15 to be all "shit, sorry I'm running late, lemme log on", immediately fell back asleep. Woke up at 10 at least to be able to be like "yeah, I'm not dead, and I am so sorry". Sigh.

***

I dunno, there's maybe other things too, but they're mostly video games. Gonna post this and go put my dance shoes on so I can teach a class and stuff.

~Sor
MOOP!

vvalkyri

Yesterday after the bat mitzvah, Becca and Bill and I went to a nearby nature center and then later walked around a tiny Lake and there were some geese that were advancing on us and hissing. And I sent a friend a video. And he sent back, they are known to be assholes, and how are you doing today.

Well my aspiration for the day was that I would go up to the mall and help maydaymovement take their tents down, then get to Acro, then get to the party part of yesterday's bat mitzva, then get to Fusion.

As it is, I've been up for a couple of hours and haven't really wasted it but haven't gotten out and I'm still not moving quickly.

And I'm finding that I wake up and just everything hurts. Not much, but enough that it's like oh was I doing some sort of interesting exercise and the answer is no.

And I'm finding that kind of frightening. It may well just be perimenopause or the fact that I really desperately need a new mattress but I'm really not sure what to make of it.

I'm flying to Missouri on the 29th and I feel bad cuz that means I'm going to miss covert 30 years in government thing, and I'm realizing that I now have appointments this week and next week and the week after which means obviously I'm not driving to Cleveland and I can't go to Cleveland when I get back from Missouri because part of my timing for Missouri being what it is so I have time to do the last minute oh my God on the apartment.

And I'd like to write something about the movie I saw the other day, join or die, which turns out to be a documentary on bowling alone

And I realized I haven't told my building about hey we had a whole SUV worth of stuff we sent to Martha's table

And so now I'm torn between sitting at the computer and trying to write something or trying to get myself out the door to be helpful and then off to Acro and of course I also need to figure out what I'd be wearing for the kids K-pop party that hopefully I can get out of earlier but maybe I won't mind and then the question is do I still get to fusion.

And I'm feeling more and more isolated. And I know it's all my fault. It's a happy thing that Ken is with someone and they will probably marry but that means he's a lot more time in Pennsylvania and will eventually move their entirely, and it's a happy thing that Covert and Kerry more back together but for a lot of years any travel I've done has been tagging along with Covert.

Etc.

But yesterday was a good day and I'll get to see a lot of the same people again today.

I'm probably feeling some after-effects from having to get up a lot earlier than one would want in order to make it to the bot mitzvah on time

There's a ton of additional context I could be adding to just about all of this. Like conversations yesterday with different fed friends, more about what they're trying to do to retirement, a conversation with someone who does Thai massage out in Idaho in some incredibly expensive ski resort where it was impressive just how many names he dropped in a couple of minutes, and he explained that he hasn't read news in years and I think I may have shook him a little bit with my relatively short summary that didn't even include anything about due process.

There's the bit where I guess I was salting the vibes. I was for a little bit the one person wearing a mask (I had it first walked in and figured it was a high ceiling and not all that many people, but of course I was at the very beginning of services and in short order several different people around me started coughing or sniffling so I did put my already chosen to go with the outfit mask on. And when I walked up to do my reading, I very deliberately did not take it off until I was in front of the lectern, and on video. I know some people would argue on that one, but near versus far field is indeed relevant, and for me some of all this is a benefit calculation. I don't see a ton of benefit to not masking while I'm just sitting there for several hours.). My friend Becca ended up adding a mask later on in the service as it turns out. I was highly amused that my realization she was there was first recognizing her voice then thinking she looked familiar and then looking at the program. Which tells you just about everything you need to know about how faceblind I am.

One of the things I really want to get back to about Join or Die, the Putnam biopic ( Which is fun, impressively so, much the way The Big Short takes what could be a very dry topic and intersperses images and vignettes that make it not so) . Is the early part, about italy. Now when I saw the blurb about the movie night at glow house, I later ended up saying to someone I'm about to watch a movie that's kind of like bowling alone but isn't. I had no idea that in fact I was about to match watch a movie about bowling alone, but it's not only about bowling alone and I actually haven't read bowling alone

So I don't know whether bowling alone spends a lot of time on how interpersonal engagement (Social Capital) is predictive of government effectiveness. But that's what they first started seeing when they were watching Italy when Italy suddenly created like 20 identical regional governments, and some of them turned into dumpster fires and some of them people liked and seem to be effective.

Some of that seems to be a matter of trust and just connection, and some of it is also that if you've got a bunch of people who have had to run their choir or their book club or their rotary they are also getting training and how to do something useful for more of a formal government.

. I've got a lot more I'm thinking about around all these, including some stuff I was listening to from some book whose name I have now forgotten unfortunately, where we especially started losing third spaces and nowadays very few people have to ever deal with anybody they disagree with except for family.

And here I am lamenting not having gotten out to be useful for the mayday move, but instead I'm dictating to dream with.

And I owe someone a text, but it was a long text I want to reply to which makes it harder to reply and one of the things that still needs to happen is why does my main computer not really want to talk to the internet and I bought a new tiny keyboard and I still haven't connected it to the phone. And the phone is absolutely full and I downloaded a lot of stuff yesterday so that I could unfull it. And then I took more pictures so I have to do it again.

And I kind of want to nap. Which helps nothing of my day. And I should not need more sleep.

Oh.
And one more thing: I'm realizing that if I was kind of sort of conflating due process and habeas corpus a whole lot more people might be: Michael Cohen had an essay that made me realize my brain had been shorthanding: https://bsky.app/profile/vvalkyri.bsky.social/post/3lovq4ykwl22x

All right. Somehow I need to work out when I'm wearing later tonight and put something on for acro and I guess I can change in an undress, and I guess I can wander over to Union Station first to see whether they need any help.

There's also additional context about why it's kind of frightening to be wondering why I'm stiff, but that's definitely for some other time.