tricia868

The train bears

selkie southward again: we have affirmed that the important part is not the leaving, but the coming back. This visit was somewhat more flying than usual and complicated by just about everyone on both sides having run out of running on fumes some time last year if not the previous decade, but we had celebration and I was finally able to give her the shells and stones I had collected for her five months ago on Cape Cod, reminders of northern Atlantic.

spatch and I have decided never again to pay attention to his phone when driving into Brookline. Making our way home from South Station, I was so pleased to see that the superstructure of the Northern Avenue Bridge has not yet been demolished and still stands as an installation of rust-flaked trusses, permanently perpendicular to its successor's flat concrete. What I would have called the new North Washington Street Bridge has been designated the Bill Russell Bridge since I first glimpsed it in miniature of the Zakim, a parabolic stickleback of white fish bones. We parked in the lot of Bill & Bob's for the first roast beef sandwiches of the season, so early the picnic tables had not been set up, and were introduced by WERS to the total delight of They Might Be Giants' "Wu-Tang" (2026) as we wound past the un-iced Mystic. Two days after a snow that stuck to all the branches, it is short-sleeved catkin spring, drive-with-the-windows-down weather. We watched the Charles and the Fort Point Channel scatter the same reflective blue as the sky.

Current Music: Talking Heads, "Creatures of Love"

sovay

My poem "ἀγκυλοθάλασσος" has been accepted by Strange Horizons. I am indebted to

radiantfracture for his Twine prompt generator designed to produce scientific-sounding compound adjectives and nouns, in this case the irresistible "ankylothalassic" from ἀγκύλος "crooked, bent" and θάλασσα "the sea." I rendered it back into classical Greek and José Esteban Muñoz and Twelfth Night got in there along the way. It was written on New Year's Eve.

While I was out of ambit of the internet for almost all of yesterday, Reckoning: It Was Paradise hit the digital shelves. It is the special issue of the journal of environmental justice on war and conflict and contains a poem of mine which will go live on the internet in a month, or you could pick it up now with the rest of the shatteringly topical e-book if you don't feel like preordering it in print. I wrote it last summer after the—first—U.S. strikes on Iran. I taught myself a small amount of Elamite cuneiform for it. It should not have come around to such relevance again.

The designer of the Paleontological Research Institute's long-running pre-saurian Paleozoic Pals has just branched out into Pleistocene mammals with a Kickstarter for Cenozoic Snuggles. I have put in for a Glyptodon.

I may have slept nine hours. I just heard Rabbitology's "The Bog Bodies" (2026).

Current Music: Charlotte Sands, "Satellite"

sovay

selkie's birthday was duly observed with my parents and my husbands, a meal of much carnivory, and an apricot marmalade cake doused in whipped cream, strawberry sugar, and candles that burned like driftwood salts. Many deeply goofy photos were taken of various combinations of us. So much is wrong with the world and it is still true that my family for an evening is happy. A photogenic snow began to drift the streets as I drove everyone home.

Current Music: Emitt Rhodes, "With My Face on the Floor"

sorcyress

Austin is over for his usual Monday datenight, made harder by both of us being very _very_ worn out.

(the weather is not helping. the fascism definitely not)

We had a little bit of a "blaaaah what do" and then Austin asked "what do you want to do" and I paused a long while and admitted that what I wanted to do was play video games and not think. And so he pointed out that Slay the Spire 2 has just come out in early release and maybe we could try it? I hemmed a little (I don't like the idea of playing games in early release) and we read some of the literature, and I decided "sure, let's give it a shot".

(I still have steambux from my da, and certainly Slay the Spire original is one of those games that I have put a staggering number of hours into¹ so I do not at all begrudge giving the makers another round of dollarbux in thanks)

And so we went ahead and hit play and cooperated and chatted and balanced our different playstyles and charged on through. And won! We won very satisfyingly, by mostly creating a good deck vibe (all combos around casting vulnerable) and then immediately blowing that up when given a super powerful artifact at the end of act II.

It was a really lovely balance between "this is extremely familiar" and "this is new and exciting". It's very funny playing my obsessive games with other people, because like, I don't think of myself as being an expert in this game or anything, but I suppose yes, I do immediately know what the cards do or which cards are new. There's definitely some intriguing new options popping up and I look forward to doing some replay.

The timeline is going to be absolutely lovely to find out more about --I like me a little bit of explicit lore sometimes! I mean, I do enjoy the scraps and fragments of the story that you get in the first game, but it's _so_ barebones sometimes that there's nothing really to hang onto.

And it's nice that being cozy and silly and collaborative was able to really turn my mood around at least, and hopefully Austin's as well. Now I can go to sleep feeling a little bit better about my universe (in which my last two workdays were 9.5(today) and 12.5(Fri) hours of active work, and the rest of the week is not looking milder.)

The world is bad but sometimes escapism can be quite nice! Especially when done in good company! I hope you are finding some of that too.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: According to a quick skim of my steam library:

1st place: Crypt of the Necrodancer, 631.5 hours
2nd place: Slay the Spire, 416.8 hours
3rd place: Stardew Valley, 388.9 hours²
4th place: Heroes of Might and Magic III, 324.8 hours³
5th place: Rogue Legacy - 293 hours

In summation, I am not a _broad_ video game player, I am a _deep_ video game player. This is why I am still running through the steambux from my da from two years ago, I just don't buy games very much.

2: Please do not observe that the first time I played this game was like, end of May 2025. The rest of these times are on much longer timeframes (like, multiple years apiece).

3: Heroes should be much higher, there's been lots of times where I've owned this through GoG and emulators not through steam, and I should get that set up again because I miss having phoenixes (and the Steam version doesn't have the expansions, sigh.) It's basically been incomplete playing since I switched away from my mac, so like, since 2019 since I've played it "proper".

sovay

I must have slept ten hours. Hestia appears to be watching the rain with almost as much interest as the birds sheltering from it. May it and the recent snowmelt amend the drought. Tomorrow, of course, it is forecast to snow again.

selkie was safely collected from the Penn Station-alike that South Station has done its best to inhume itself into since her last visit, provided with an appropriate quantity of local barbecue for an obligate carnivore, and even successfully checked in to her hotel despite the mishegos attending every stage of her conference even before it started. At no point in this process did we apparently remember to take any pictures of ourselves.

My dreams seem to be branching out in terms of media, since last night's featured a youngish Alec McCowen starring in the radio version of a Tey-like crime novel as the ambiguously poor relation of an upper-class family who is not actually Kind Hearts and Coronets-ing his way through them, but needs to figure out who is before he's so handily scapegoated for the accidents escalating to murder ever since his arrival; he is, naturally, keeping a secret from the family, the authorities, and even the inattentive reader, but it isn't that. I was very pleased to find that a recording had survived, because the original novel had just been reprinted by the British Library Crime Classics. There were images mixed up in it in the way of dreams, but it was definitely on the Internet Archive.

Outside my head, I have been recently listening to Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn (2020), Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin's symbiont (2024), and Huw Marc Bennett's Heol Las (2026), which I found through its ghost-boxish "Cân Gwasael (Wassail Song)." I like that I do not have to dream their remixes of folk and futurism and time.

Current Music: Arlo Parks, "Weightless"

sovay

The afternoon's mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #86, containing my poem "Northern Comfort." I wrote it out of my discoveries of the ghost-ground that has been directly underfoot all my life and longer, from King Philip's War to Pomp's Wall, and this administration and its murderous terror of history. It shares a page and an issue of emptiness with a precisely targeted incantation by Gwynne Garfinkle as well the equally hollowing fiction and poetry of Kris Schokrowsky, Penny Durham, Carsten Cheung, Jennifer Crow, and more. I almost referred to the covert art by John and Flo Stanton, obscured by shattered webs of negative space or the rust-light of abandoned industries. Subscribe! Contribute! Make the right kind of strangeness in this world. I am off to South Station to collect one north-traveling seal.

Current Music: Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin, "The Green Road"

sovay

On the way back from the MRI, in accordance with the local observance of the hundred and twelfth birthday of Wendell Corey, I found and talked to a dry stone wall.

Current Music: The Electric St. Lucy, "Harlem Roulette"

sovay

How has this month been going? I woke up to spring and didn't even realize. It looks the part: the occasional crocus, a faint fluff of clouds in a harebell sky. Hestia is absorbing the sun-flood from my desk. I will be celebrating the equinox with an MRI. My major accomplishment of yesterday was successfully wresting a permit from the Parking Department. I am filing a request for an intercalary year.

Current Music: Boyracer, "Unknown Frequencies"

sovay

I can't believe I dreamed an entire opera whose closing performance by a small local outfit I was all set to attend before it was canceled at the last unavoidable minute. It was a Gian Carlo Menotti from 1948 and had never before received a Boston premiere. I had read its libretto for years because it was full of sand and sea-haunting: No body that presses its mouth to the shore closer than your mouth to mine. No eye that fades into the haze of the sun more fixed than your eye to mine. No ship of a letter that crosses the seas faster than my hand to yours, unless it has foundered, unless it has torn on the black rocks of the heart. It had one of his terse, enigmatic titles, The Visitor. The company that had put it up was called Marmalade and Gold, an allusion whose meaning did not escape the event horizon of waking, and specialized in bare-bones, slightly more than concert performances of oddities or undeserved obscurities of the twentieth-century opera world: I remember perusing the catalogue of previous seasons on their website and approving of their choices, all of which I suspect of not existing outside of the hour or so I was asleep. Erich Wolfgang Korngold did write a bunch of operas, mostly before—very popular choice—leaving Germany, but I do not believe a 1932 Der lahme König was among them. I am having a terrible week for which the external world offers nothing in the way of respite and even if I didn't get to hear any of its music, I appreciate the inside of my head attempting to furnish a break of art.

Current Music: The National, "Don't Swallow the Cap"

sorcyress

I slept like garbage and it has given all of today a weird vibe.

Okay, actually today was reasonable decent in the actual day of it all. My classes seemed to go well! Students were doing mostly working at their own paces, but also they were actually doing that! I spent my prep knitting, which is not like 100% most effective work choice, but felt good to be doing and is scads better than playing phone games.

And then we had our geometry team meeting with our department head to review our midterm data and talk about things for the future and I got as close as I ever have to crying in front of my boss. Frustration, mostly. It was normal levels of annoying work bullshit until we got to the point where it was like "maybe next year we have a hard deadline of end of q2 [instead of doing the midterm in q3 like we have the last couple years]". And so I ask "would my [SpEd] inclusion classes be expected to take the exact same midterm?" and boss is all "obvs yes" at which point like.......

...I literally cannot teach the Inclusion classes the exact same curriculum at the exact same pace as the mainstream Geometry classes. We are "only" about a week behind right now, but that's because me and my co-teacher have been extremely thoughtful about what we can cut out of each unit and then doing so. The classes just pace slower in general, compounded by needing to spend more time reviewing algebra skills, compounded by needing to spend more time on classroom management and norm-setting and behavior stuff.

So like. Either I give them a midterm where they do piss because they haven't learned some of the stuff being covered, or I give them a midterm where they all do piss because I've rushed everything so fast they can't actually learn it. "oh but you should have high standards of rigor for your students" _yes that's the problem_. If I didn't give a shit if my kids actually learned the material I could get through this stuff snaps easy.

It's just another step on a whole fuck of bullshit we've been having all year(s). Somehow I will make it work, I'm sure. (but first I must...¹).

So the end of my work day had me all verklempt and off-kilter, and unfortunately equity team did not really fix the problem (some weeks it is the best meeting I attend, some weeks it's more focused on the depressing business of dragging the rest of the school kicking and screaming into being anti-racist. The work is always good, but sometimes it's more draining than others.)

Played a bunch of phone games. Did not adequetely prep for tomorrow, by which I mean, did fuck_all_ at the school. Gave up at 6 and came home and did manage to bully myself into a PowerHour which helped. I reread the Adventures of Blue Avenger and did a wee bit more knitting and then ate dinner. Played some Stardew after. Now I'm writing these so I can go off to bed in a maybe-timely manner.

I hope you are well and that tomorrow is better for us all (I always hope this second part). I love you.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: It occurs to me that this essay might actually be worth opening up in the tab next to Good Girls Aren't Here and just having both of them permanent features of my computer. I certainly reference it often enough.

sovay

For Saint Patrick's Day, I had a foreign body removed from my eye and was immunologically shot in the shoulder. Who needs booze?

Current Music: Molly Donnery & The Ciderhouse Rebellion, "The Town of Ballybay"

sorcyress

wriiiiite the words

I am very tired and don't wanna write the words.

Work today was pretty good but also hella unsatisfying because there was Serious Bullshit with classroom assignments and needing to last-minute move the classroom. I had like......fifteen minutes of warning in order to pack up my everything I would need for class five and move down to a computer lab. It was awfullllll and I'm not happy about it. Blah.

But focusing on the good stuff...uh....the kids seem to grok the Pythagorean Theorem? That's nice. Tomorrow we're moving into our special rights triangles and it's not totally rubbish as a lesson --we did good work last year! I had a good long talk with my mentee last week about his future (and need to send some networking emails on their behalf). Even though the kids are being forced into super dysregulating situations, they were mostly fine?

And yesterday I got a bunch of things done and also had a nice evening with a friend/comet. I didn't sleep enough, but that's Unfortunately Normal, and at least all my sleep hours were in a bed with the lights off, which is Unfortunately Abnormal right now. I'm working on it?

Went to demo team on Sunday, which was fine, and then dance tonight which was...like...it was pretty decent, both Keira and Beth pick good dances and stuff. But for one of them I was dancing on the larks side with my buddy DJ on the Robin's side. And one of the other dancers made some comment about how we had "switched sides just to confuse her". Which like. Fuck off. Fuck off fuck off fuck offfffff.

I understand that I need to be gracious and kind and help people slowly understand in a non-threatening way but also fuck offff. I know I don't pass. I know I will never pass. I know you don't see me as anything as a woman. But you're wrong and you will never know how absolutely hurtful it is to be told that there is an obvious gender box you think I should be in and therefore if I'm on the lark's side it's "wrong".

It was intermission after, so I didn't have to dissociate for that long, and I could go and sit with my knitting and talk to all the various people who came and sat by me and then Sharon asked me to dance. But it still feels bad. I appreciate that the teachers here are trying to normalize larks and robins¹. But the class does not actually get it, and as long as the dancers as a whole are just treating this as "weird names for men and women" nothing is actually going to change.

There's no wrong side to dance on. There is especially no wrong side for me, a nonbinary person to dance on. There is especially no wrong side for anyone to dance on when the role terms are Lark and Robin and have nothing the fuck to do with anyone's gender.

Oh hey, I figured out why I am so tired and draggy and don't wanna write the words. :/

Anyways, I will continue to quietly dance when and where I can with people who are willing to ignore conventions based on what genitals a doctor thought you had when you were born and instead take into consideration, like, who's taller if the dance has an allemande in it. And even that is negotiable.

I'm gonna snuggle Austin and go to bed.

~Sor (they/them)
MOOP!

1: (I am _genuinely thrilled_ that Beth is restating the terms every evening, and also that she is doing a much-better-than-average job of not using gendered pronouns with ungendered role names. Unfortunately, better-than-average means "occasionally says "their partner" instead of "her partner"" but baby steps!)

sorcyress

We're bad at everything. Let's write down the things we've done today:

Brushed hair

Braided hair

Ate Breakfast, also caught up on comics and even read a bit of Dreamwidth finally (I miss y'all, it's another symptom of the same Problem that is my brain right now.)

Unloaded dishwasher, reloaded dishwasher

Brought the load of laundry that's been in the dryer for three days upstairs finally (thanks Rey for basketing it, sorry to have left it)

Brought a bunch of laundry downstairs, started it (load two is just in the washer now, and load one in the dryer)

Switched my stuffies from their hamper into a steralite bin, eventually this will turn into like...one of those ottomans that opens up and you can store blankets (or stuffed animals) in but then it has a surface instead of being an amorphous blob sticking out of the top of a hamper, bonus, was able to use the hamper for my spare quilts/heavy blankets, double bonus, went through the stuffies a little and have some I can maybe give away.

Folded most of the laundry from that old load, while putting it away, successfully went through underwear drawer and pulled out the "good enough to keep but I'm not going to wear it regularly" stuff to put in the "save for Pinewoods" box

(At Pinewoods I would like to have approximately three pairs of underwear a day. If I do something absolutely batshit crazy this year, that will change, but I want to have the option to be able to wear clean underwear always.)

Also socks, pulled out a handful of pairs I don't like so I stop wearing them by accident and being all :/ about it, also pulled out all the pairs that I know have big holes (they're currently due for the trash, but I may put some into my scraps bag instead)

Got stuck in a serious yak shaving rabbit hole but I think I have finally managed to put the additional music I wanted onto my phone, and also I have taken off last year's photos, which is important because now my phone should run smoother? Anyways, that took forever but now I can listen to music while I do additional chores? Seems fake. I'm into it!

I also reset the "accessories" boxen, which technically go with socks --long stockings, tights, kilt hose and accessories, suspenders and belts, scarves/pashminas. It's been a while, so that was good.

I'm now sitting down to eat lunch. Laundry load two is on my bed upstairs to put away, load three is in the dryer, four in the washer. (I'm aiming for like...six? It wouldn't be so high, but a) I have been slipping on the "own more than one set of sheets so that you don't get trapped with an unmade bed by having all your sheets dirty at once" and so I need to catch up there *and* there's been some sort of funky smell in my t-shirts boxen for a couple months and I'm not sure what's up with that, but I think step one is probably just wash _all_ my t-shirts.

On the plus side, that latter problem doesn't seem to be anywhere in my dresser except my shirts, so that's a good sign? I guess? I mean, mostly it just means there's probably not, like, a dead mouse behind my dresser or something (a thing I would not be able to rationally deal with)).

***

I wrote all of the above earlier. I've since finished all the laundry --it appears that the shirts no longer smell, so success-- and gone to demo team and hung out with Maia some, so all of that is quite good.

I couldn't maintain GOGOGO the entire day, but also like, I shouldn't have to? I shouldn't in general? It is important to do mindless fuckoff stuff as well as Srs Useful Stuff? Yeah.

I hope you are well. <3

~Sor
MOOP!

sovay

The wall-to-wall crowd of the memorial from which I have just returned testifies to the love poured out and returned by the guest of honor, but I would still rather have been in the worldline where they were present to be celebrated in more than memory.

Current Music: Jack Johnson, "Better Together"

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

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Am I one of those human beings?

I'm yours in the day and the dead of night

Just took time to say, I'll drop you a line

(no subject)

Re-reading our texts from the strawberry days

You are just the fingertips of something

And four hours north of Portland, the radio flips on

Shaking off the echoes of yesterday

Everything I love is on the table, everything I love is out to sea

(no subject)

He tried to run away, well, she hit him with a hammer

Little about my day, more about being sad about dance and gender

(no subject)

There's no combination of words I could put on the back of a postcard

Performing some traffic maintenance today

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May 2014

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