I spent the weekend relaxing. I did my chores, listened to podcasts, played more Baldur’s Gate 3 (I’m currently hopping between a few alternate save files as the mood strikes me), and enjoying the chilly weather. I got to sleep underneath my comforter for the first time in more than five months, maybe six, and I feel like I slept super well both nights I got to sleep past sunrise. I had a few weird dreams both nights, none of which I remember at this point beyond a few vague impressions (well, now that I’m really digging into those impressions, I remember most of one of them), but I slept like a rock. Both mornings, when I woke up, I had to carefully stagger my way to the bathroom because my body was so dead to the world that I could barely keep myself upright until I’d had a chance to go back to bed and lay around for a while, waking up slowly as I luxuriated in the comfortable sensation of being beneath a big pile of blankets and not being so warm that I was sweating through them. I’ve always appreciate a good, weighty blanket pile, but my past couple years of plastic-covered windows and desperate attempts to keep my apartment warm enough that my pipes don’t freeze and my pet bird doesn’t die meant that I couldn’t do my usual thing of opening the windows in my bedroom at night in the winter and burrowing under as many blankets as I could comfortably fit on my bed.
Continue readingReflection
Fall Has Finally Fallen Over Wisconsin
After what felt like a never-ending summer (I’ve been wearing shorts and flipflops non-stop since I-don’t-even-know-when last spring, but it was easily five months ago since I made the change before my friends’ wedding), fall has finally arrived. It feels odd to see the leaves already making substantial progress give most nights haven’t dropped below the mid-sixties until very recently, but there have been enough cooler days that they maybe got the program. Or maybe they’re trying to provide an example since it feels like the temperature is following the leaves rather than the other way around. I mean, it is actually fall now, on the calendar, so it’s been weird seeing summer stick around as long as it has (with a significant resurgence in the last days of September and first days of October). Normally we’d have had a week or two of cooler days and many cooler nights by this point, but the day I’m writing this is the first time I’ve thought about leaving my windows open all day since it won’t get warm enough to wish I’d turned the AC on at any point in the next few days. Sure, it might wind up warmer inside than I keep the AC at, but I only keep it there so my home is cool at night and so my bedroom is cool enough for me to sleep easily when I go to bed rather than knowing I’ll have to resign myself to a sweaty hour or two before it finishes cooling down since I turned the air on after I got home from work.
Continue readingTrying To Break Free From Identity Defined In Opposition To The World I Live In
While I was mulling over my identity and coming to reflect on the decision I’d made years ago (largely out of self-defense, given how absolutely locked-in I was to my parents’ vision of who they wanted me to be), I was listening to a lot of Friends at the Table. A lot of stuff they said there informed the way I think about my place in contemporary society and the way my identity fits into the world I inhabt. Not because I was entirely unfamiliar with those ideas, but because the thinking they explored as a part of their science-fiction themed seasons (especially Twilight Mirage, their fourth season) helped build on what I’d learned in some of the classes I took in college, in the research I’d done on my own, and the helpful things I’d coincidentally read along the way. One the things that stuck with me the most was the GM, Austin Walker, talking about how he wanted to push the boundaries with their fourth season. I don’t remember the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of “we need to imagine the most radical thing we can and then take it one step further.” The idea being, he explained, that all of us are limited by the world we live in, by the society we’re used to, and that a civilization that had progressed to the very edges of what we could conceptualize would be able to imagine modes of being/ways of life/etc that we couldn’t even conceive of because we are so anchored by the world we know, and that the society he wanted the group to attempt to represent in this season should have progressed beyond even that.
Continue readingAction and Consequence in Pursuit of Mourning
My grandmother’s funeral was on Friday morning [here’s a periodic reminder that I write these a week ahead of them getting posted]. It was at half past eleven in the morning at a church I’d never heard of before, despite driving past it many times as a child. My extended family, in a series of decisions inscrutible and unknowable to an estranged member like myself, scheduled every part of the process of saying goodbye, wake to funeral to post-funeral lunch, all in one day. A long twelvish hours for everyone involved, from time they had to rise to prepare until they all arrived home or at least had finished going their separate ways for the day. I rose at six, following a night of poor sleep–my waking hours filled with anxieties about what being spotted at the funeral could mean and my sleeping hours filled with frenetic, fragmented nightmares about what going unseen at the funeral could mean–and shuffled my way through my morning routine. I left fifteen minutes late, pushed to almost half an hour by the time I finished getting gas and enough caffeine to keep my tired mind awake for the drive, but arrived five minutes early by only taking a single bathroom break during the two and a half hour drive, and that only when I’d gotten within quick driving range of my destination. Also speeding. Lots of pushing the speed limit during the empty mid-morning hours of my inter-state travel.
Continue readingThe Difference Between Mourning And Closure
Content warning for discussions of death, grief, and childhood trauma.
I wrote about some family-related stress a couple weeks back. I spent my therapy appointment between then and now working through my feelings on the matter and what I’d do in the future, which turns out to have been particularly prescient of me (and seems even more so when I add that my therapist was ready to cancel our usual every-other-Monday appointment for the week I wrote this since it was a federal holiday and I instead suggested we reschedule for a few days later that week, which turned out to be the day after I wrote this). My grandmother began to fade earlier this week and passed away today. I’m, of course, still processing this. All of the emotional preparation and complex feelings of relief and grief intermingled don’t make this any easier. Even my complex feelings about my family and how I have processed my feelings for them don’t really help since, ultimately, this moment is when it all goes from being abstract and self-enforced to being incredibly concrete and real. No matter how else I feel about her, my grandmother was a major part of my life for my entire childhood. She is in many of my oldest memories, even if they’ve taken on a more bitter than bittersweet cast as I’ve come to better appreciate the horrors of my childhood and the way my grandmother served as a source and focal point for much of the generational trauma in that side of my family.
Continue readingToday’s A Pretty Normal Thursday
Today is my birthday. I have no plans for today other than maybe watching an episode of Jujutsu Kaisen. I might go grocery shopping and pick up a cake, but I might do that a different day [I did that yesterday, so I could keep tonight clear in case my Thursday D&D game actually happens] since I’m planning to gather with some friends this weekend and will probably need to go at a better time of day for grocery shopping than seven or eight in the evening. Sure, there’s fewer people present and I can usually move through the store more quickly, but the selection is also worse. Most of the restocking happens overnight, so I usually need to get in during the morning or early afternoon if I want to avoid being greeted by an empty shelf instead of one or more of the items I want. Other than that, I have no plans. It’s a Thursday, after all, and it’s not like I’m taking time off of work. Next week is already going to be a lower income week as it is, thanks to the holiday and my unwillingness to force myself to work the longer days I’d need to make up for it (I can do ten hour days with too much of a problem, but if I go over that more than a couple minutes, it immediately throws me off and I start to rapidly get exhausted and burned out). My financial position isn’t super dire or anything, but it’s kinda dire what with my federal loan payments returning in October. That’s another pile of cash that’ll just vanish down the deep, dark hole that is debt repayment every month. Too bad my parents outright lied to me about student loans and how paying them off would go back when I was still naive enough to believe them.
Continue readingThe Reasons I Love Playing Host
I finally had the opportunity to host people at my new apartment. One of my friends had put together a one-shot game of Pathfinder Second Edition, in hopes of giving me a way to experience the game with people who are more fun to play with than the group I’d first started with (who now haven’t met in almost six weeks, thanks to two sequential skips in our every-other-week schedule). Since we first discussed this, I wound up joining an every-other-week game this friend runs, but everyone was excited for the one-shot, so we proceeded with it anyway. I wasn’t going to suggest we cancel, after all, since I was excited to finally have people over for an event. I was planning to go all out, after all, with frozen pizzas, plenty of snacks, and a pitcher of my special, super-sour lemonade (the point of it being that you need to let it sit in your glass and melt the ice a bit to dilute it, which also means it is a great lemonade to drink slowly). I may have been a little behind schedule the day of the session, but it was still really fun to have people over since it has been so long since I’ve gotten a chance to play host for something like this.
Continue readingA Lot Of Good Things Have Happened This Year
I have written fairly extensively about the unfortunate, frustrating, and bad things that have happened to me this year. I have also written about some of the good things, but much less extensively. While I’m definitely not recovered yet and have enough other BS going on that my recovery is going slowly [I even had stuff that happened the day after writing this that set me back a couple weeks], I wanted to take a little time to focus on one of the best things that has happened this year. As I’ve mentioned, the exhaustion and burnout I’ve been recovering from hasn’t been a result of constant unfortunate events, but because so much stuff has happened. Once you hit your emotional capacity, you’re just as overwhelmed and unable to cope whether the thing that tipped you over was good or bad. The bad stuff just tends to seem more prevalent and constant because part of my emotional processing involves writing about it here. Good stuff doesn’t really require that kind of emotional processing, but I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned three of my top four things scattered throughout the last four months. Number one is being a part of my friends’ wedding. Number three was the trip to Spain I went on with those friends and the entire wedding party. Number four is definitely moving into my current apartment/out of my old apartment. Today’s post, to formally write about my number two thing that I’ve only mentioned in passing (if I’ve mentioned it at all), is about the surprising, powerful, out-of-nowhere friendship I’ve developed with one of the people I met on my trip to Spain.
Continue readingExploring Identity As I Search For Community
For most of my life, I was content to accept that I’d never really find an answer to the question that is my identity. I mean, I’ve had thoughts and feelings about my identity (gender, sexual, and otherwise) for as long as I’ve been capable of the abstract thought required to understand that the self is separate from the physical being that other people see and interact with. I just didn’t realize that those thoughts and feelings were not the way that other people felt about themselves until I was in high school. I hadn’t really had much of an opportunity to have conversations about the self with other people, after all, given that I was home schooled and didn’t have many close friends. Plus, I was too busy surviving and protecting my younger siblings to really indulge in that kind of reflection and introspection, especially when a core element of that survival was fulfilling the expectations of my parents. They had assigned me an identity based on what they wanted and expected me to be, so I did my best to play my part. I couldn’t afford to openly ask questions that might show that I was not the person my parents demanded I be, nor did I have the language or energy to have a conversation with myself about it. It wasn’t until years later, when I was almost thirty, that I actually started this conversation with myself and then it was another six months before I even mentioned it to anyone else.
Continue readingSometimes, There’s A Little Too Much “Cult” in Midwestern “Culture”
There is a strange religiosity applied to the concept of family in US culture. I originally started writing “Midwestern US culture,” but most of the examples that come to mind aren’t confined to the Midwest. There’s an entire line of movies (The Fast and The Furious) that is all about the primacy of the family unit, though they tend to define family a bit more broadly than most. There’s entire cultural background covering the importance of The Family as it relates to organized crime. One of the most popular types of stories these days is about found family or the lengths to which one might go to return to family. Family, regardless of how it is defined, is seen as something worth everything and valuable beyond measure. What makes this somewhat more sinister and unpleasant, though, is the suggestion that anyone lacking family is a bad person. Villains are frequently loners. The philosophy of those we’re supposed to dislike is often depicted as favoring isolation and a lack of attachments. Hell, all you have to do is look at advertising and media around the parent-oriented holidays (Mother’s Day and Father’s Day) to see the subtle suggestion that choosing to ignore your biological parents, or otherwise hold the way they treated you against them, is a moral failing. It’s pervasive.
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