"Given that our blood is just like the Atlantic"

 Sometimes, I feel like I'm preparing to go away for a weekend the same way I would prepare to be abandoned in the wilderness for a week.

 

I've cooked mini frittatas and mac'n'cheese and chocolate chip cookies.

I have a 24 pack of my favorite seltzer.

I have tea and sugar cubes and shelf-stable milk.

I have a giant cross-stitch project and at least four books (In addition to the gazillion on my tablet).

Light will probably bring an absurdity of games (that's what I've decided the collective noun is) so I'm not counting those.  Though I'll probably bring snatch it in hopes that someone will want to play  combat boggle.

 

Realistically, I need like two changes of clothes, my tablet and charger and my cross stitch.   And maybe a bathing suit.  

 

Also I'm trying to clean enough to leave the house looking decent for the dog sitter to come stay with Nonsense.

 

There's some conflict around the event I'm going to.  It's called Relaxacon and I've never been.  It sounds like people use it for a range of purposes, though mostly talking about fandom, playing board games and drinking.   I might participate in the first, definitely in the second and not at all in the third.  

 

Recently someone mentioned they weren't sure if they should tell me they weren't sober while they were talking to me.  They knew from this I was dry.  I was deeply touched they asked.

 

I try to treat drinking the same way I treat vegetarianism.  If you don't rub meat on me or trick me into eating meat, I'm fine with you consuming whatever you want.  I find raw meat a little stomach-turning, but i'm usually capable of walking away if necessary.   if you don't spill a drink on me (intentionally, I've been pissed but forgiving about unintentional ones) or trick me into drinking something alcoholic,  I'm fine with whatever you want to do.  I might walk away, but that's true of just about every interaction, whether or not there's meat or booze involved.  I'm getting better at retreating from things that discomfit me, and getting better at retreating internally when retreating externally sends the wrong message.

 

I got the latest Stitchery catalog and despite having probably enough kits and patterns to last me the rest of my cross stitch career, I want more.  I'm out of births, I think and there's at least one wedding in the future I'd like to stitch something for, and I still have all the holiday ornaments.  (they're santas. I don't like what santas connote or denote, but they're easy to stitch and everyone likes ornaments and they're something people only have to live with for a month at most.  I won't be giving them to people I know don't put up trees and I know we're going to be careful to what kind of holiday ideology we expose Spark to.)  But now that I have my own room, I can put up whatever I want and not feel weird and like I'm somehow failing to pull of kitsch or being too impressed with myself.

 

Once upon a time I worked in the billing department of a hospital.   I was the hotshot brat of a twentysomething who occasionally showed up still drunk for work, drank alarming amounts of diet coke, smoked and wore paperclips as earrings and called it office punk.  (paperclips are bad for piercings, I'm glad the skin eventually returned to skin-color).  

 

I was also the person who shepherded the entire department from dummy terminals to individual PCs.  And I suspect I was singularly unsympathetic trying to explain the concept of folders and the pace of double-clicking.  And now I'm there, slightly too old  and needing to become fluent in things I'm not fluent in to do the thing I want to do.  I'll figure it out, I suspect, but it's still a humbling moment.  

 

There's this moment in a Todrick Hall video (Wrong Bitch) that I think about all the time, the visual equivalent of an earworm.  They're covered in black glitter and make this dismissive little hand motion.  I think there's something there that I want to have an internal equivalent to.  I don't like spirit animal or totem or patronus, but something in my internal lexicon about self-possession.

 

And right on cue, a migraine takes me out.  I'm stoned on meds now and a couple hours have passed, so it's packing time.