"Presses a little too hard"

[omnia_mutantur]

 It's been a minute or two, but the only way to start again is by starting again. 

 

Highlights: More tattoo, so now I'm up to a half sleeve. A sealion put its head on my head. I graduated from PT and walked the Fells a bunch for a couple months, then aggravated my knee and knee braces in excessive heat suck. I had a bunch of dental woes, they're partially resolved but woe-like enough that when I went in for a cleaning and the hygienist told my dentist it looks good, my dentist response "Us Irish ladies don't like to make that sort of comment" or something to that effect mentioning irishness and luck.    

 

Our dogs are a delight and a trial.  Nonsense continues to have one of those faces that looks perpetually reproachful or sad and I worry about disappointing her or negatively impacting her life so much.  Noodle continues to be a trial to her sister Nonsense as well as the snuggliest creature I have ever met (and that's saying a lot).  I wake up most mornings with her having inserted herself as the little spoon some time over the night.   

Light's D&D game has started up in person and Abundance has been discovering the joys of local camping/kayaking.  I have new furniture inside and outside, and a lovely new deck that I think I anticipated using more. Still haven't talked to my parents, still feeling really good about it, still sometimes worried about being a person who feels good about it.  I have read a lot and probably cooked even more than that.  We've been watching a lot of live-plays, marching through Dimension 20 content and really anything else Brennan Lee Mulligan touches, and Abundance and I do jigsaw puzzles and Light and I build Legos.   Frye the elderly cat is elderly and I'm struggling bunches with that, I refer to giving her fluids as "it's time to stab the cat" and that sort of grim humor helps but doesn't de-age her.

 

I've had my first  close covid exposure (that I was aware of), my tattoo artist emailed me the next morning to tell me that they'd tested positive.  No one in the house popped positive at any point, but I'm having a bunch of deep feelings about having done an ostensibly unnecessary thing and that having consequences.  I realize calculated risks are still risks, but somehow also want to be rewarded for being so careful the rest of the time.  Sometimes I feel like everyone I know also feels like the rest of the world is moving on in a way we're not, sometimes everything feels like it's still getting lonelier as practices diverge.
 

Someone recently mentioned something about reinventing themselves again/finding new/additional identities and my first impulse was to say "well, you can't have depressed housewife, that one's mine" so that's a thing. I do need a something next, I'm not sure how to find it.   I've been thinking a lot about the jobs that made me happiest, and both examples come from my early to mid twenties and they somehow feel like that kind of job a) doesn't exist and b) isn't something I should want to do.  One was combing EOBs to try to find discrepancies in data entry/write off calculations when we knew something was off but not why, the other was shelf-reading a college library, which involved quickly but methodically reading numbers off of spines and reordering books.  Niche repetitive things.  Apparently if I can't get my dream job of sorting small objects or untangling yarn, I'd like to be able to compare one thing to another thing professionally.

 

I guess this is true of everyone, but I feel like there are a couple things I'm excellent at, given the right context and sufficient support and I don't know how to find corners of the world to go do those things.  The poly group setup felt good sometimes, I could be hypervigilant as fuck, pull out all the moments that pinged my "this could go badly" sense and present them to other people who I felt could be relied upon to be able to sort out the actually problematic right now.   And it's mostly a shittily acquired skill learned from living with volatile people, but it certainly has its uses.  But also as much as I want to immediately retract this statement (and have deleted it and then re-added it) there was some kernel of it that I was good at.  

 

I used to point out every bird I saw to a small person I hung out with, wanting to figure out how to expand their field of vision without the trauma.  I also used to drive in a perpetual state of terror, because everything that moved and something that didn't were a potential but preventable accidents, if I could just predict for every possible way any other vehicle or independently moving (and some not) thing might move.    But maybe there's a way to turn that into a superpower yet.

 

 

Better posted than perfect, I think. For now, at least.  

Comments

[sabotabby]

Yay tattoo! And PT graduation! And just coping in general.

[which_chick]

I recently discovered Dimension 20 and yeah. BLM is a treasure and the sound of him and his assorted peeps rolling die and whatnot has been the soundtrack for a lot of my evenings here of late. I gave up and handed Dropout my money because yeah, I can totally use that sort of positive and affirming world-building and role play in my life right now.

[kitchen_kink]

It's really good to hear from you here.