omnia_mutantur | (no subject)

I've been doing that thing where I write three longhand pages every morning. They're messy and rambly and I keep wondering if I'm somehow doing it wrong, but it also mostly feels good. They feel like a waste of time, too, but possibly since I'm not spending the time in any ways I recognize as legitimate, maybe for at least the moment, my time is also unwasteable?

State of the embodied me:

Knee's getting better every day, PT doesn't really seem to be getting me back any strength, but it probably is and yesterday I mostly successfully managed to walk up our interior stairs without wearing my brace. It involved a lot of railing-holding/hauling, and I never, ever thought I'd be relying on my upper body strength for anything (historically, unsurprisingly, my lower body has provided most of the power). It's sore all the time, I'm still struggling with finding the ever-shifting limits of a combination of soreness and activity, and trying not to just barrel through the pain because my PT said not to and because I know that too much on any one day, no matter how satisfying, takes extra days to pay for. I'm at that ugly stage of well enough to be restless and not healed enough to address the restlessness.

I teared up right, now just thinking about typing the sentence "I want to walk in the woods". But I also dream of haphazardly carrying things up and down the stairs, heavy things and breakable things and fuck, someday even a tea mug without a lid.

Dental surgery was, well, dental surgery. Results-wise, it went well, the surgeon was pleased with the outcome, and when I went in the week after, my dentist called someone else in the room to admire the outcome. Experience-wise I started to get upset when they had me sign the pre-surgery waiver because I don't remember signing one before my wisdom teeth surgery. I'm sure I did, I'm sure mid-20s me didn't read the fine print about nerve damage and being unable to open my jaw as wide afterwards, but it was so unexpected and they were so abrupt about it when I called to ask but twenty years later the lip droop still bothers me. So, I sign a waiver that details all of this again, go under conscious sedation, a thing happens to my jaw that involves a lot of torque and I wake up swollen and full of stitches and toothless. Oh, also, with a bone graft that most definitely did not come from any of my bones.

Now instead of anything that stays in my mouth, I have a "slipper" which sounds a lot more innocuous and maybe someday the sensation will match the impression the name gives, but right now it's pretty much an under-tongue retainer with a tooth on it that exerts slight outward pressure to stay in my mouth and makes me think of the beloved palate splitter of my childhood. So it hurts, and I'm wearing it so my jaw doesn't collapse before they can put a bridge in and I'm still pretty sure that as much as I want to kiss people emotionally, I'm not going to get to a place I can (emotionally) comfortably do that. Maybe in ten weeks when I've got a bridge?

Other things:

Frye has decided she always wants to be in my lap, whether or not said lap exists, and if there's a keyboard there, she considers that still my lap. It's sweet and exasperating and I'm trying to take it as a way to practice calmness. My computer randomly abandons the internet multiple times a day and usually requires a tiny bit of active intervention to reconnect and I'm taking that as another opportunity.

We wanted to buy chairs for the living room. I have this dream of the three of us all having wildly mismatched chairs in front of the fire, tailored to our specific desires. I wanted something I could sit in multiple ways, cross-legged and with my legs over the arms and maybe eventually a mismatched ottoman to put my feet up. We went to a local furniture store, though store doesn't really encompass the sheer absurdity of the amount of furniture. Light found a recliner, Abundance found a chair shaped like a third of a circle that allows for a dog to accompany him in the chair. After circling the chair part of the store, I returned to what might have been the first chair I sat in and decided it was the one coming home with me, only to discover people want chairs in very bland colors, or in this sort of nautically-themed prints (the collection is called Capri and involves a bunch of fish or seashells or palm leaves). None of these suited, I think I was committed to the mismatched part of the equation in color as well as in form, I finally found a teal fabric and it had been discontinued. I was proud of myself for not crying, I'd already walked around to pretty much the edge of my ability, and we fled the store, Light and Abundance's chairs ordered and me just out of cope.

Light has pointed out that my kinda distant second choice, a dark gray, does fit my aesthetic of living in a storm cloud, and my brain has pointed out that there's a world of absurd pillows and throws and ottomans out there, and i can still get close to the picture in my brain, but there's also part of me stomping my feet and saying I've wanted this thing for about two years now, and I want to find something that makes me actively happy. I know that the comfort is more important than the upholstery, and maybe I'll get there, and it feels like such a dumb and selfish and childish problem, and yet I'm still upset about it. I suspect it's easier than being upset about my knee or my teeth or the fact that I feel pointless and adrift at the moment.

There are things that are going well, I do get to wander around infinitesimally more every day, and a bunch of those gains do add up to just straight up walking around more. I can eat things that aren't mush. I've read so much, cross stitched so much, fucked around on the internet so much. I'm a tiny bit better at self soothing. We saw Hands and Hips for the first time since August this last weekend, even if I can't rise to my usual absurd feats of cooking, we're still having S & J over for Thanksgiving. I tried to drive yesterday, and it kind of didn't work but it kind of did.

Despite not spending much of the holidays with my parents ever, the upcoming holiday season makes me poke at the place where the absence of them might hurt (like, oh, say a dental wound?) and it doesn't. I found a new tattoo artist who agreed to help me tattoo a scene of a manta ray swimming through birch trees up the back of my leg, but we're going to do some dandelions first and I've scheduled that appointment. I've become focused on the idea of pioneer species now, plants that are the first things to grow in barren soil, or in areas that have been disrupted by some event like fire or flood or deforestation. So, birches and fireweed, but also like every other tattoo, I'm worried I'm accidentally laying claim to something I don't want to.

I'm socially stuck at the moment, I forget left and right how to talk to people, how to reach out to them and what to say or do if they respond. It might be that I'm actually just a straight up curmudgeon now, or that I've modified my ideas of friendship out of an old model without putting a new model in place. Or that I'm just rusty, or while I think I know more of what I don't want, I have no idea of what I do. Mobility and pandemic issues have let me punt on that question for a while and at least the first is starting to change enough that I'm starting to wonder if I'm lonely or bored or boring. Or if other people give me more opportunities to feel of use, and I'm still a little bit addicted to that feeling, even while learning not to embrace volunteer opportunities that don't leave me feeling fed or better than they found me. So that's a thing for which I have no current solution.. And all the songs I've been listening to are too mopey or too peppy to contribute a good lyric to the title of this.