Dusting good, cooking bad, I can see through time now

[flexagon]

Kind of a messy week of stay-at-home. I did a bunch of stuff that wasn't quite routine (even New Normal routine), like the emergency vet, and walking to a fairly great outdoor market that did social distancing really carefully and had a lot of local foods. We also cleaned the house super well again, because the cleaners would have come on Wednesday -- having a checklist helps. I find dusting strangely satisfying since it's easy, fast and mindful. For me, it's ultimately about forgetting about what things actually do or are, and paying attention only to the spatial shape of a room and touching all the horizontal, hard surfaces. I imagine a hot, insubstantial rain of glowing blue droplets falling downward through every space.

Wrote a long, long email to someone who's a moderately good friend of mine and a very good, longstanding friend of Lion's. She didn't know the story of the last few months despite a few casual brushes against the edge of the storm -- so, after weeks of failing to set up a 6-feet-away walk together, I finally just wrote her the ENTIRE FUCKING STORY and then waited bleakly to see if she'd already heard a much worse version from someone else. I wanted to melt with relief when she wrote back with empathy and startlement. It turns out (less to my relief) that she felt used by her own one-time encounter with Lioness in a way that echoed my own themes of broken communication around sex. And she's now scheduled a good 1:1 catchup with Lion, which is a relief. He could use a friend, and he still doesn't want to "push it" by talking to me.

Easy to forget how fresh some of that hurt still is. Five or six weeks? And less than that since the corporate shenanigans that redefined my work role? Much of it feels like it happened in another world.

I finished reading Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor. It's a dystopian fantasy set in post-apocalypse Africa (Sudan, we learn at the very end). It's much darker than her graphic novel LaGuardia, and is pretty heavy on both rape and body mutilation. Hmm, and also inescapable destinies, which aren't necessarily good when they involve important deaths. So as far as a recommendation, this one is conditional on content and what the reader is up for. However, this is an author to watch, and I'll mention it does contain one marvelously redeeming scene that would be a happy moment for any fan of the clitoris (really, who among us is not?). I'll probably read the Binti Trilogy.

And I ordered a 30lb BodyBar from bodybar.com, despite the money. Straddle pancake flexibility has been awful to work at home with no weight, and I was literally in the middle of such a thing when apfelsingail told me about a 25% off special there (still running). I look forward to its arrival. I was also looking forward to the arrival of a kick scooter I ordered from Amazon in search of something less than a bike and more than walking, but, ugh, they claim it's been delivered! No scooter. I'll see what can be done.

The only place I think I'm cracking: feeding humans on a continuous basis is punishingly upsetting, and people keep offering me recipes and meal prep tips. Gah! No! That's a solution for a different problem than the one I have! This may be the one area that keeps getting worse for me instead of better.

Comments

[ckd]

At this point 5-6 weeks ago is basically forever. Heck, 4 weeks ago I was at FOGcon; while things were hardly normal even then, there was at least a semblance of normality available.

(One big measure of non-normality for me: I've cancelled so many trips that I have more oncall time-in-lieu than I can meaningfully use, so I switched over to having it cash out at end of month instead. I haven't taken it in cash since 2015, when I was using it to bolster my emergency savings.)

[elbren]

you're feeding yourselves by ordering delivery? any of your regular places up for a subscription service? (like, bring us dinner every tuesday, any one of these list of dishes?)