Category Archives: adult-only

Published in the adult-only category

Working up to the letter

Cross posted from FB where my MIL can see it.

I feel deeply conflicted about the type of writing I have traditionally done now that I live in a place that has far less encouragement of navel gazing and public introspection. Yet, here I am. Continuing to exist and needing to type out my feelings in order to make progress. This is how I have made all of my progress in this life.

When it comes to “stop sniveling and go work” very few people have me beat. I do a lot of manual labor and I go hard. It delights me to no end when a large man says “Oh let me take that for you; it looks heavy” then they stagger under the weight of the load I was carrying with only a little visible strain. But there is a cost. I do not have a body that is built for hard labor. What I have is a soul with a little extra energy from all the stardust so I push through long past when I should stop.

I understand to the tips of my toes that a lot of what I self-assign is not “necessary” in the sense of it being part of the base levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy. I’m an educated bitch. Instead what I have is a tremendous sense of obligation and purpose. The work I self assign is part of self actualisation. Is it “necessary”? Well… it depends on how well your other needs are being met…

This is what having privilege means to me. I have the space in my life to care about making and creating things because I do not have to worry about having food or shelter or safety ever again. And thus it moves up the triage list. It becomes urgent. It becomes intense and drowning and necessary for being able to cope with other aspects of being alive.

The overwhelming urge to self actualise takes over the same set of energy that used to go into making sure I could earn enough money to have food–a roof wasn’t going to happen on the amount of money I was making so that didn’t even feel like an important worry. I had a car; I was blessed.

I know how crazy it sounds that this set of urges feels equally intense.

But this set of urges is what gives me the deep well of patience to stand there and say for the 8,235,108 time with a level tone and no frustration, “Ok. Let’s talk again about what restaurant manners are and why they matter.” I have a whole house full of neurodiverse kids who do not copy and blend in and conform like a similar group of neurotypical children will. If I want them to learn a thing then me doing it is not even close to enough to influence their behavior. I have to tell them what I want, when I want it, why I want it, and what will happen if I don’t get it.

I can do that because A) I care very much about doing it and B) I have an intensely separate self that is allowed to have goals and plans and things that I make that I can point at and say “See, I am not just boring and shitty and doing something that no one cares about.”

I know I am dancing on a razor’s edge with fucking up my body until it hurts like this. Howdy repetitive stress injuries, howyadoin? I know that upping my exercise substantially is always courting injury. I know that having tremendous social anxiety and not sleeping well for a week and more and continuing to work like I need the money is bad for my health.

I get that. Everyone has to figure out what they need from quality of life vs. quantity of life.

I know that a lot of the work I am doing right now is not going to “work out” in the way that someone else would care about such work lasting in the long run. I am an intensely kinesthetic person and I don’t tend to learn things well until I learn it with my whole body. I like to read and I can absorb a lot from books but I don’t *know* a topic until I have done it with my body enough times to learn the rhythm.

I never really watched a plant go through a full life cycle before I had kids. I mean, I’m sure I did a bean sprouting lesson in class but I didn’t live in a place and have a set routine where I passed by given plants over and over through their life cycle. I then worked hard at learning the California biome I lived in (there are so many others in California that I’m careful with my claim) and now I have a lot more to learn. But I don’t have as many years at the end to enjoy the fruit of my understanding so I want to compact about 15 years of learning (what I did in California) into 5 years.

This year is my fuck around and find out year. I am putting an absolute avalanche of plants into my garden. I’m exploring guild combinations. I’m thinking about ways to intermix perennials and annuals. I’m trying to figure out how I will rotate through the kinds of annuals that have to move from spot to spot.

I feel like menopause is hitting my body with fervor and reminding me that if I want to get to enjoy the Witch Garden of my dreams all the way through my crone years I’d better hurry the fork up because the time in my life where my body is devoted to the Mother phase is counting down with grains of sand that feel like boulders on my head.

I don’t have time to waste. Which is kind of funny because I have so very much time. I am incredibly fortunate. I haven’t had to be afraid of not being able to get food in about 17 years. My cells do not yet really fully understand that I will never be hungry again. And part of how this manifests in my behavior is that I *must* learn how to grow enough food that I can pass on a way to ensure that my children will never have that feeling. Sure, we teach them ways to make money too. Money is a necessary thing and all.

My family had a permanent address when I was born–they had been in that home for a long time. My mom lost the house when I was three and I did not have a second permanent address until I moved in with my spouse. I very much hope that I will never leave this house. I’m building a retirement apartment downstairs. When the tenants move and everything needs fixing I’m setting it up more fully for wheelchair access.

And I’m going to have a garden I can move around and putter at and hire someone to do the individual jobs too big for me. But I’ll spend a lot of time puttering so I won’t need *much* help.

If I don’t build it now I won’t have it then.

If I push myself too hard I will not be able to maintain it as well in the long run.

Basically, this is how I meditate. This is how I sort my thoughts so I can evaluate when to pause, when to stop, when to rest. The more I allow myself to feel electrically uncomfortable and overwhelmed and drowning in the words in my head the harder it is to compartmentalise when pushing too hard on long-term projects. Other short or medium term tasks appear (in person socialising, written communication, dealing with the water company, oh the kid wet the bed) and they feel enormous and out of proportion and impossibly hard.

Unless I take just a bit of time to set things down and look at them and see the shape of all the pieces better. It’s hard to put the puzzle together if you don’t have your glasses on because you can’t see the outlines of the shapes well enough.

This process is my glasses.

Understanding masculinity

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I have been thinking about social dynamics I’m seeing as I manage to be around real-live people in Scotland more often and as a weirdo autistic person a lot of how I figure out what I know and make it coherent in my brain is by writing it out. But that gets super socially tricky! So how can I check if my assumptions/understandings are even vaguely close to reality? Can’t ask people directly because they will lie ~75%* of the time. So I like a long ramble about stuff that is associated in my brain. Is it kink related? Sometimes and often in a challenging to perceive way without a great deal of context. It’s part of why I am so long-winded. In order to understand A you have to hear about B and C and in order to understand B you have to know about D and E and F and… I’m like a Star Trek language.

I moved a lot of times as a child and young person but I often reference the aunt and uncle who raised me. It gives the shape of the relationship a casual reference frame that other people will understand but it’s also misleading. They didn’t get to raise me, not really. Sometimes my mother and I lived with them and sometimes I lived there alone in between other housing. I rarely was in their house for longer than a few months and when I was my mom was there.

I think of them as the people who raised me in large part because they both had incredibly strong personalities and they were the most frequent cultural touchstones of my early life. Until I was in high school they were the people I had spent the most time with including school peers because I changed schools so often. I didn’t watch people go through phases and change and grow and develop.

I watched my auntie and my uncle. And the two of them are very interesting models for me as I go on through my life and I deal with other people. Before I describe them in more detail I am going to say that I love them very deeply. I know that they were often the only reason I was not in a violent or dangerous situation. When I describe them I will use words that are very blunt and will be read as denigrating and negatively judging them. I’m not trying to be hateful. I am talking about my people and where I come from. I am honest about what it was. I am reporting what I was told. I am repeating what I was told to believe. I am just not using the same words they used because people lie all the fucking time.

My uncle was basically a walking stereotype. He was a redneck with a bad temper and a giant entitlement complex. He never got enough to feel satisfied with his life. Not in his work life, not in his children, not in his marriage, not in his house, not in his hobbies, not in his electronics, not in the travel he did, not in the vehicles he bought.

Fuck, this is the best place for my favorite uncle story. So, he really liked camper vans and RVs. He is why I will never buy one. So, once he had a medium-sized camper van so I guess it was around 30′? He decided to buy… something I was unclear on what but he wanted to drive to go buy something and it wouldn’t fit in any of his current vehicles. It couldn’t be attached to the top/back and it wouldn’t fit inside.

So he used a fucking chainsaw to take off the top, sides, and back down to a level where it looked like a child’s crayon drawing of a “truck”.

I wish I had pictures.

Guess what he learned REALLY FUCKING QUICKLY? The right angles at the top angle of the RV are kinda important for the structural integrity of the entire awkward rolling box. Yeah. He held it together with rope. Rope. He tied the fucking thing closed. He managed to get whatever it was home. That RV sat off on a corner of the property until his next open heart surgery when his sons kidnapped it and took it to the dump. I can’t remember if that was the same time when it was a total of 16 giant dumpster truck loads to take away most of his hoard. There was still a lot of shit.

He had a whole bunch of heart surgeries. He tried every kind of heart implant. Single, double, triple, quadruple bypass surgeries. I think he went under the knife six times? They started taking loads away during the second surgery. This war went on for almost 40 years. I think the 16 truck load surgery was number four or five? He retaliated every time and acquired more stuff. He financed his shopping by repeatedly refinancing the house and taking out equity. They bought a $40,000 house in the 1960’s and the last time I spoke with them about their financial life auntie was working full time in her late 70’s because someone has to pay the mortgage and all three of her kids live with her and are disabled.

There was no such thing as enough for him. No one ever respected him enough. No one deferred to him the way he wanted. No one stopped what they were doing to give his words weight when he spoke. He wanted to be deeply respected and obeyed because his edicts were simply right. Because tradition says so. Because the Bible says so. He stopped using the Bible against me when I read the entire fucking thing when I was 13 so I could debate every.single.reference and explain to him why he was fucking wrong.

I was his favorite kid until my niece moved in with them because my sister is a fucking loser. My niece was three and much more susceptible to bribery and being bought so he put all his positive energy into her after that. He had a hierarchy of how he treated people.

1: Princess
2: Himself
3: Women he was flirting with and he wanted the positive attention
4: Men he thought of as high status and he was sucking up to them
5: Men he had no particular use for
6: His wife
7: Most girls
8: Women he had no particular use for
9: Men he actively disliked
10: Women he actively disliked
11: Girls he actively disliked
12: Boys

Let me tell you it was interesting gathering data for that set of understanding as a child. This is all I know of calculus.

That is to say once I was demoted from Princess we had a very different relationship and we showed one another a lot more sharp edges. He wasn’t mean to me most of the time and in terms of how he treated boys he was incredibly gentle and affectionate with me most of the time–definitely while I was Princess. I will absolutely admit that my draw to barrel chested men with a slightly Elvis twist in the front of their hair and strong side burns comes with the equally strong understanding that it is going to be an interaction stuffed full of conflict.

Is this where I am going to be called a man hater? Hey you can’t say I hate men… I married a man! Enh, see what I did there? Yeah. Uncle was absolutely full of ways to weasel out of labels. He wasn’t a racist! There is (name) down the road and he has never called him a (bad word). He really wished I would stop reading so damn many books.

I feel some regret that I didn’t get to thank him one last time for raising me right at the end, but I told him many times before that. He is one more brick in the wall of why I have intense feelings around displays of gratitude.

Relationships are not always simple. They are not “good” or “bad”. People are not “good” or “bad”. I think people do good things and shitty things and striking the balance is hard. I think that there are ways that men have a tough time in the world and I’ve watched some pieces of that pain right up close. I also have a carefully cultivated and culled group of men I am close with–people who have all done their therapy homework before I got there. People who understand their own damage and can figure out how to not be shitty at other people because of their own pain.

Yeah, that pain matters. That pain needs attention and care and support and you need to understand that the focus of attention has to move around a group and it won’t always be you. Not because of a statement about you being less worthy than other people. That’s not the point.

Life is hard all over. Sometimes I am not going to preen and serve the man in the room. Put your big kid panties on and deal with your problem for yourself.

I say this with more flow and force at this point in my life because I have bounced off this dynamic with an awful lot of men who I don’t happen to love deeply and feel enormous gratitude to them for saving my life. Yeah. Conflict. Because even with that deep well of gratitude and love I also said, “You have legs. Why are you asking a woman to go get you a drink? Have you become paralysed since I last stayed in the house?”

Yeah. I didn’t stay the Princess. I was thirteen when my niece moved in. I was not an easy person for a deeply ignorant, bigoted, racist, misogynistic, lazy hoarder person to love.

But holy shit can you see a whole string of hoarders in my friends circle for the rest of my life. I keep some of the traits and challenges. I just can’t handle the whole package anymore.

Cause it’s not about any of these one things. Cause any one of those labels diminishes the person he was very much. He showed up in emergencies and helped neighbors. He was giving and loving in his way. He was often fun. He got me to memorise the lyrics of every song he had on 8-track tapes. We had us some times. He snuck me treats and he cuddled me. He is the only man I have had a completely non-sexual highly tactile relationship with.

Like, that’s a weird thing for me every time I think of it. I have never had another non-sexual highly tactile relationship with a man. Outside of uncle men have fallen into four categories for me: sexual or just some serious flirting relationship of some sort, someone I am assuming is not interested in sex with me so I am tentative and awkward in my interactions and I almost never feel comfortable because I don’t even know what to say, someone I have to actively reject because they are assertive with their interest and I do not feel we are compatible, and rapists.

This is why I have traditionally slept with most of my friends. Now we are in a whole new life phase and I can’t do what worked in the past. I need to learn how to have a different set of categories because the primary way to be in a positive relationship with me historically is no longer available and that is going to be difficult. I know that Scottish men have a whole lot of major differences with the American men I have historically had big conflicts with but that’s ok we will just find slightly refined versions anyway. It’ll be close enough that a hand wave will explain the differences.

Sometimes there are platonic friendships with heavy flirting and there is a “dang can’t because x” exchange every so often and that much engagement lets me feel like I am in the “Ok I am not being problematic in this relationship.”

Uncle was the only person I ever brought my whole ass difficult personality to at the most extreme points in my development through a highly traumatic childhood who was a man who never sexualised me in any way.

Please do not come at me for how clearly I don’t love this man because I am so intolerant. Love is a complicated emotion. Feeling it does not mean that you agree with or share the same views as another person. Loving someone does not mean you have to act like them or justify their behavior. I mean, I could tell you about uncle’s hurts but frankly that’s not the point.

The point is the pattern. The point is the template. The point is the broad strokes. The point is caricature.

I feel like this might turn into a series because it is not as if uncle is the only man who lives larger than life in my brain. Understanding these people is how I have understood masculinity in my life. I am not saying that any one of them represent that whole of mankind or that they have had life trajectories like every other man. I am saying I knew this man. This is what I knew about him. This is how I saw him. This is what I heard from him. This is what I took away from the culmination of our conversations over multiple decades. I put in the time. I did listen.

I don’t even remember which bullshit thing he told me I had to do “because the Bible” that overlapped with my one brief overture into the 7th Day Adventist Church that happened not long after I was demoted from Princess. I took it hard. I tried to find a rule book that would agree with some of his weird extremist views and this was the option I had to immediate hand.

I really did not come out of that year and a half in the church with the set of beliefs that they all wanted me to have. And that was when I completely lost my shit and I tried to kill myself. Uncle did not come when the family visited me in the hospital. He didn’t even look at me for several months after it happened.

He was my one good man I didn’t have to have sex with. And to him I was now a ghost. Yeah. That was tied in with why we moved down to Bakersfield then my dad propositioned me again and I prosecuted and we ended up back in uncle’s house.

He barely spoke to me for the rest of my life. I mean, let’s be clear there were a few little girls and all boys that he was actively more hostile and nasty towards than he was with me because he was a petty, pathetic, loser. I scared him more. I would argue him down about absolutely every stupid thing he said to me so he just stopped talking.

I did love him. I tried to talk to him about neutral things. I would bring up songs. He would derail into his conspiracy theory. I would refuse to listen to the topic and ask him to talk about something else. It would turn into a racist rant. I would opt out of that one too. It went into a misogynistic screed about how I act like this because the feminists ruined me.

Yeah. It was awkward.

I mean, he was never my primary financial provider. My aunt earned more money the whole time I lived there. That’s how she got to over rule him and say that when someone needed a place to go she would always take them in. Because she was the one paying the mortgage. She bought the food.

So he refinanced the house and the hoard grew.

I am not saying I have a definitive view of masculinity but when I think of toxic masculinity I think of uncle. I think of the rage and frustration that was twisted into really toxic places because he didn’t get what he felt entitled to get in life. He was promised more. Who promised? This was not a conversation that ended well any time I pushed. I suspect I would do better now at getting him to admit out loud that he is sad because it turns out life was a trick and he never got rich. He was Willy Fucking Loman. And I lived in his house. And he always snuck me ice cream and treats even when he wasn’t speaking to me.

That’s the thing about the last few years. Our relationship changed. We were no longer able to have conversations but we did spend time in the same room. There would be these eye contact interactions that felt intensely emotional and bonding. One time around when I got married but before I had kids when I was over at the house for a visit. We had one of these moments where I was sitting on the couch as far away from him as I could get because we both didn’t know what to say. Sitting in that spot means you get blasted at top volume because you are right next to the tv. It means we can’t hear each other very well so we can pretend that is the reason we aren’t speaking. We looked at each other for 10-15 minutes while some stupid show played loudly in my ear. He crooked his finger at me like he has done since I was a very little girl. I came over and sat across the arms of his lazy boy like I have done since I was a teenager and I got heavy enough that he couldn’t really handle the pressure on his legs.

He pulled me in and he leaned his head on my shoulder and he put a hand on my back and he gave me a pat. I had this intense full body sob rock through me. I didn’t keep crying. Then he patted me on the back more intensely and nodded his head a few times. He said, “Yeah. I know.” I’m not sure we said more than hello or goodbye after that.

Moving is super fucking weird. When you move around an area you shift your web of people but you don’t entirely destroy it and rebuild from scratch. Changing countries has been a complete rebuild. Under different constraints and with different rules for the whole experience from start to finish.

Lately I have been noticing how hard it is to actively interact some days because my understanding of people and patterns and behaviour expectations are all based on a life lived under circumstances that would seem pretty alien to folks here in many ways. I don’t know the scripts. Learning is a slow and laborious process and it’s intimidating knowing that I have as many mistakes ahead of me as I have behind me and I have absolutely mere remnents and shadows of my history in my head as I try to figure out how I should be acting now.

Sometimes when someone says a thing or makes a hand movement like uncle with the same physical build it feels like I’m looking at a grainy 1980’s Polaroid. But that’s not what is happening. This is a different person and a different time. This person has completely different experiences and views of the world. Maybe? I don’t know. It always feels so difficult to find out. I don’t get the upside anymore. It’s harder to put in the work.

On I trudge. One more day. One more navel gazing.

Number made up out of thin air. I have no fucking idea what the percentage is but it’s a very tricky dynamic and will often create massive problems.

Where is the balance?

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I am having a whole lot of feelings. I am feeling out of sorts and off balance. I feel like I usually struggle with the intensity of spring–that’s a whole thing. But I have additional things weighing in. I am still in my feelings about my mother in law. I need to figure out how to word a deeply emotional appeal to her that is about shaping our relationship going forward. We have been in a much better spot for a while and I want to continue that but I also need some boundaries. The past couple of months have involved a flurry of advice. I’m not great at advice. This is going to be hard. I have to describe myself in a way that has weight and intensity without sounding overly controlling or fierce because this is all stuff I need her to want to do and it is a departure from her normal wants and that’s a big sell.

I am struggling with some friend dynamics. I have put a ton of energy into out of town stuff that has since fallen through and that is causing a major crash emotionally. I have different energy for starting, middling, or ending projects. I used a lot of start energy only to have it fizzle out, which is deeply demoralising. It makes it really hard to push forward on starting energy in other parts of my life. I have so much that I need to be starting that it is creating a really terrible loop in my head. I just don’t want to. It feels pointless and stupid and demoralising and like I can’t force myself–it’s too hard. Hell, I don’t know how much is going to turn into middling energy projects and I don’t know how big the load is going to be.

It makes me feel really timid about agreeing to anything in the medium term. Even more timid about the long term. My energy level for long term projects is very close to capacity. Yet I can’t help but feel like I am missing a really big important track of thought if I don’t think about the long term because most of my long term at this point is less long term than I have truly internalised.

Pam, I just finished watching the entirety of Fresh Off the Boat; I had only watched one and two before this. It appealed to me so deeply I cannot even give it justice. I feel like I had to immigrate because that way I get to have an opportunity to live up to the standards of my parenting role model: Jessica Huang. When white parents think that I am intense/odd/overly forceful I have a whole montage of parenting. To be fair, before the last few weeks it was mostly a combination of the Hispanic and Black mothers I knew as a young child but man I want Jessica’s vanity. I do. I want to love myself with that bone deep conviction. And I am now an immigrant mom so I am allowed a lot of leeway. I win.

But, as Jessica wisely says, you retire when you die so you should master a set of skills then move on to your next big focus. I may have 13 more years of active parenting ahead of me but that’s… not the long term. That’s a lot marathon of endurance but I’ll be 55. It doesn’t give me the lead time on a next thing that finishing at 47 would have given me, but life choices have consequences. I’m really glad to have her.

Five really is my favorite age. I am coming down like a hammer on some behaviors I have problems with. I am having intense internal conflict around the fact that I need to be honest with myself that it is not the same thing as formal ABA therapy… but it’s a similar dynamic. I have some substantial needs around behavior interactions. This is where it gets really fucking tricky living in a house with a bunch of neurodiverse people. It would be really easy for us to have a negative set of interactions a lot of the time because we are all kinda jerks. Five is a magnificent opportunity to work on code switching behaviors. Five year olds think mommy is the most magical, god-like figure on the planet and they are simultaneously food avoidant, intensely individuating, and really fucking sure they are the boss of the universe.

It’s a lot of goddamn work.

In many ways it is much easier this time around because I am living with the product of my hard work. Like Jessica, I feel validated. Sure, my measure of success is very different and I have different goals for my kids but that’s ok! I’m a Californian mother moving to Scotland not a Chinese mother moving to the US; there are going to be differences.

I relish this challenge. It is time to introduce code switching. I did it earlier with the other kids and it was a more gentle on-ramp but the pandemic has changed my timetable. I now get to do in a year what I usually do in four years. Well hey, part of the point of home educating is you get to do things on your own schedule and adapt to life as it happens.

We need a baseline of “this is what it feels like to live and move in a body that is being given what it needs.” We have been in survival mode for a very long time. It’s time to slow that all the way down and teach this five year old what it needs to be like.

And now I am out of time after being interrupted three times. Sigh. I did not complete the thought.

I never have to worry again about looking for that.

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One of the things that I have always found myself doing is latching onto a certain song and repeating it in my head for weeks. Sometimes it is surprising that I casually catch just a phrase from a song and then I am completely obsessed. Right now it is Taylor Swift’s [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KpKc3C9V3w](The Archer). My maiden name was Archer so that adds a layer to me, but I only started listening to this song in the past couple of weeks even though the album came out a few years ago.

I’ve been thinking about jaye saying he doesn’t like the capitalist association with “success” when it comes to evaluating the value of a life. It has really lodged in my mind. My story arc is sometimes hard for me to keep perspective on. So like, when I was a kid I played with household budgeting as a hobby. I knew I was going to get an accident settlement monthly starting when I turned 18 and I’d have it till I was 30 to get done what I could. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to not live with my family. I wanted to not need to have anyone say that I owed them for the support they gave me.

I wrote out millions of possible life plans. How I was going to get a teaching degree and buy a house and by the time I hit 65 I would have a paid off house and $250,000 in investments outside my teaching pension. That was my plan. That was what “success” was going to look like for me financially. Well, that and I had to have kids by the time I was 30 or I wasn’t going to bother with the rest of the story arc. My life was rather unpleasant by any measure and if I didn’t find a way to completely change the focus and mandate that I have no choice but to stay so I’d better learn how to be a stable provider.

I know that a lot of people who deal with wanting to die do not manage to make deals with themselves that allow them to stay. I’m not judging that. Everyone writes their own deals with themselves. I could not live up to the deals that other people make–I don’t have their internal resources. I’m different.

I knew what I wanted my arc to look like very young. It was find a way to be part of a family or quit.

Noah and I were talking the other day in our morbid way about the various signs of our mortality that pop up. We’ve had this conversation in an ongoing way for the last 18 years. Oh, and he has this browser extension that shows him the current expected lifespan left for a man who has lived to his current age in a countdown. So every fucking time he opens a new tab he sees that number. We really focus on time.

We have spoken for years about what we would do if we lost one another sometime soon, meaning in five-ish years or less. Obviously it changes as time goes by, as we have different experiences and levels of development together. Do you know why he got his first vasectomy? Because he decided that he was done creating children and I said flat out that if he died in the next five years I would probably see if I could find a different partner and have one more child.

The funny thing is, by the time he had the vasectomy reversal I would not have been willing to add a third child with a different partner at that point. I was too old. I wouldn’t have wanted that kind of gap with a half-sibling. The reality of dating as a single parent is step-kids would probably have been part of the story and I didn’t want yours-mine-ours. I would not want to make anyone feel “left” for a “new family”.

And one of my very deepest core kinks is forced impregnation. So him changing his mind and deciding to have a third kid once I had already accepted it as an impossibility and I’d mostly moved my life onward… he put a choke chain on me. And that’s fucking hot. I could be five years away from being an independent adult instead of taking care of children. Instead it’s thirteen years.

It changes a lot of my story arc going forward. I am grateful for his decision. It deepened our bond in a way I can’t fully express. Combine that with the fact that he has put in thousands of hours asking me deep, probing questions about every facet of my life mean that he has seen me go through deep and massive changes. He has pushed me to grow and change and he has not accepted half-hearted attempts. We are fairly brutal with each other in our gentle way.

So this week we were talking about a mutual friend and how things are going in their life. They are going through a breakup and they are sad about feeling like they have to start over again trying to find someone to be their person. Noah nodded when I was telling him. He said that given that neither of us are likely to die anytime soon and there is absolutely no sign of us wanting to split… and even if we did split up… we have that person. If one of us dies that will not change the fact that in this story of our lives we found that person already. It’s not that we would be celibate for the rest of our lives but they would be temporary companions. We would be kind to them. We would probably love them. But it would be different.

I get to be part of a family. I get to live in a house I own. I have more than $250,000 in the bank. I earned my credential and I taught. I live two miles from my best friend from childhood. I regularly speak to dozens of other friends who have known me for well over 20 years.

Where to go for future success?

Oh, there we come back to all that insecurity and the knowledge that good friendships come out of missteps and corrections and second and third and fourth and fifth chances. But I’m so old and tired and I am really out of fucks. I’m listening to this fucking song over and over and I’m thinking about how many relationships have to have tension and sideways nudges as you figure out how to settle in next to each other on the friend-bench.

Something I’ve learned is that people really like it when they get to do you a favor. But I’ve reached such a place in life where accepting favors feels mixed and complicated and bad. I don’t feel like I deserve help. I have money to hire somebody and I should just be fine with that being good enough. But that’s not how you make friends.

Making friends with new people as an adult with children is hard. Mostly it means leaving the kids at home and going out alone. That feels so exhausting and pointless because 80-90% of the effort won’t lead to a friend. That’s just how the numbers work for me. I’ve played this game a long time. Although the pool is smaller here. I might get a much different percentage since I can’t fuck anyone. It’s a very low percentage of my old friend group that I haven’t fucked. Mostly the straight women and gay men.

It’s not that easy learning how to make friends without using sex. I’ve been doing it since I was a small child. Yes, I realize that it was unhealthy and problematic. I’ve had all the therapy on that topic, thanks for your concern. I’ve had a few years to practice making friends without sex through parenting but that’s a mixed bag. I don’t want all of my friends to be the parents of people my kids hang out with.

So when I say that I know that 80-90% of the effort that goes into making friends is waste its because I have always been someone who earns a fair bit of negative feedback. I don’t always agree with the group consensus and I put forth my view and I am more willing to walk away than compromise a whole lot of the time. I know how I create my own problems. But the thing is: I have limited spoons in my drawer. The biggest thing I can’t get back is time. Time I could have been putting into the projects that are closer to my own heart and my own self-actualisation efforts. I’m a vain asshole. I don’t have to earn money so I build the space that I want to live in. Before I die there won’t be a thing on the house that will need replacing in the next 30 years. I listen Sam Vines and I’m careful about what boots I buy.

I don’t remember if I mentioned this here. But I’m planning to have a 60th birthday party. It will be my first party since 30. Some of my friends will be in their 90’s. I hope that there will be a sizeable number of people from around town who want to come. But I have to earn that. I have to figure out how to create relationships with people such that they are interested in coming and meeting the wonderful cast and characters from all of the stories I’ve told. They will be able to say, “So what happened after that?” I want to have relationships with people that are deep enough for them to care about backstory for one another. I want to meet their families and friends too. I will go first!

Because when I introduce the two of you at the party I want to be able to say, “You two are going to get along like a house on fire. Person A you need to tell how ‘x’ happened and Person B you need to tell how ‘y’ happened. You’ll figure it out from there.” In order to get to know people you have to spend time. Knowing that the vast majority of it will turn into a loose, distant tie, or even an enemy–not a friend.

It’s not all bad. Studies say that we get the best referrals from our loose tie network.

It matters to put the time and energy in. It matters to create the opportunities and follow through. That is the absolute bedrock of friendship.

Dude, I slept 11 hours last night. Then this morning I burst into tears because I could not figure out what I could eat fast enough because my brain was moving so slowly. So today I am recognising that I restarted exercise a little fast after the last two weeks of illness. I am resting because otherwise I’ll just bloody hurt myself again and then I’ll fuck up the trip.

Getting older has helped me see these kinds of consequences coming before they punch me in the face.

Life likes to remind me that the countdown is always happening. I don’t know anyone else with my full constellation of physical problems who can be as active as I can. It is a very delicate dance of pushing myself very consistently but with a lot of respect paid to rest.

I have far more than 10 days of reasonable working hours for chores to get done in 5 days. Where do I get this chore list?

Part of it comes from seeing in my mind what I want to look out my windows and doors and see in exactly 18 years, 5 months, and 1 day. I know how long it will take to get a lot of those pieces to look how I want them to look. It is better if I get the manure and compost and munch spread now so I can get back and immediately put out all the seeds right as we hit the average last frost date.

I am not interested in spending a ton of money to have a shiny penny new “thing I bought” to show off. Is it stupid? Sure. Is it not what other people care about? Oh absolutely. I have a whole bunch of other goals tied up with it. Including finding ways to make my not very private garden into a place where kinky motherfuckers can go do fun things outside so long as they are quiet. I will have extra gags if you forgot to bring one.

I live along a public walking path and I am not supposed to build a taller fence but I can grow whatever the fork I want. My neighbors said they wouldn’t mind bamboo (I asked because apparently a lot of lawsuits come up when people plant bamboo and I am a scaredy cat) and I have a bunch of trees already starting that are going to be the perfect height to block view into the garden. I really enjoy playing outside in a bower of flowers. My kids had better fucking move out someday.

I want to have a good spot for 1st of May outdoor fucking even if there is snow on the ground. I want to have completely deniable furniture that can be used for restraining people and times of year when they cannot be seen unless someone comes quite close inside the garden. I have plans.

But it will also be set up so someone can just sit there and find actual quiet away from the steady noise. I want enough of a noise buffer in the physical environment to make it feel actually secluded. This kind of thing takes planning. I will have even more neighbors by then. If I want quiet I have to create it.

If I want relationships I have to create them. I have to spend time. And that’s when I hear FUCKING TAYLOR SWIFT SING “WHO COULD STAY? I’M READY FOR COMBAT” AND JUST UGHGHEW;HADSFK;HSADF;KJSDF;HLDFSjkln;

Kids for 13 years, only 18 years till the party. If I want friends, like people I have an actual deep and complex relationship with, realistically I should be putting in the most effort in the next 8 years. Because to really get to friends it takes 2-5 years of doing things with someone frequently. In my experience.

Time is ticking away. If I don’t need someone to be My Person that is a very specific freeing point. I want to know people. I want to be able to see through them. I want them to be able to see through me. I want shenanigans. I want silliness and doing things.

Did I mention that I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open? Walking around feels like I am wearing a weighted body suit. I usually spend 3 days of my period hanging out horizontally as much as possible because I’m wiped out. I skipped what should have been day one of that. So today on day two I am drowsy and weary and I want to talk to myself. Because I should not try hard to work on reading right now. I love to learn, but if I want to see right through me and do what I want to do in this life it takes having the strength to do it. If I fuck up my body worse I won’t hit my goals and I will hate myself.

Success is walking the tightrope that is my ability to be a fit and active human. If I were willing to spend 40% of my waking hours resting doctors would be happy with me. They have been telling me to for years. Instead I push and I work when I can barely open my eyes. Sometimes I crawl when I’m doing chores because I do not have the ability to walk.

Does it even fucking matter? Probably not most of it. But some of it does and almost all of it is related to me being able to say what I have done in and with my life and I know I did it to my absolute limit as long as I could. Is it petty and stupid? I don’t know. I hear “Who could stay” and she means who could stay in her life because she is always fighting with everyone.

I need to be able to hold my head up high and say that no matter where I started or what has happened to me, this is what I have done. I did it no matter how many people told me I couldn’t or I shouldn’t or they didn’t agree or they thought I was stupid. I did it because I said I would and I keep my word. It doesn’t matter how I feel while I do it, it matters what I do.

When you are trying to make friends you don’t tell all the stories right up front. You need to leave just a smattering, leaving bread crumbs for the next one but not telling it this time. You can’t do all the talking or you don’t get to know them and it’s not a friendship, it’s a performance. There are all these fucking rules. I’ll figure them out. But probably not today. I think it is time to go to bed. Even though I’ve only been up for eight hours. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day.

I need to fertilise the soil so the trees can grow up so I can have privacy fucking out there. It’s a need to activity.

Deck

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This property is a mixed bag. I keep telling myself that once I get everything repaired to a better standard that it can finally stop being so expensive to live here.

Also known as, time to replace the deck before the 2 year old in the apartment gets hurt playing outside her door. I am consciously choosing the most expensive/longest lasting materials at every stage of repair. I know about Sam Vines’ boots.

Being challenged is good.

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I’m trying to convince myself so please forgive me for protesting a bit too much right now.

I don’t know how people balance all the roles they play in life. I really struggle with the constant triage of priorities. There is no way for me to have a set list of what order I handle tasks in. My life is too complex.

This week became more complicated because we found out that Noah’s surgery wasn’t just to get the weird screw thing out of his arm it turned out that he had almost completely severed his tendon. Whoops. He can’t use his dominant hand at all for weeks. He is also having a gout outbreak in his left foot and he can barely walk and he can’t stand for long at all. So he literally must be in bed for a lot of the day or in a chair with his foot elevated. The last time he didn’t rest enough the attack went on for four months.

I mean, his job is having to just deal with him going on temporary leave but he also does a fuck ton in the house. Most of it he can’t do… indefinitely. Most of the time he does a lot of covering for my disabled ass. He does a solid half of the cooking. He cleans. He helps with kid-things.

Oh, and I had already scheduled going on a trip with one of my kids through some of the biggest art galleries in Western Europe starting nine days from now. We’ll be gone two weeks. At the end of the trip Noah has to bring our 5 year old to London to meet me because we could not get a passport appointment in Edinburgh in the last 5 months of trying. Yeah. That’s gonna be a fun trip.

My sexy life is really not in my top 10 list of priorities right now. I am tracking so many lists in my brain I feel like I am about to go mad.

I’m also trying to help my friend set up a retreat. She’s had a bunch of health complications and other life frustrations so the process is going slowly and I have to keep circling back around. It is taking up a lot of room in my brain.

The garden work I need to do right now is such a long list that my hands couldn’t sustain the typing. IT’S SPRING, DAMNIT. I can fill absolutely as many hours out there as I am willing to spend. (And all of them make me SO HAPPY.) I think about it so many hours of the day that it is definitely more than a 40 hour/week gig. I have learned so much more about soil biology and now I want to spend all my time figuring out companion groupings for plants. Thinking about other things feels like a serious imposition.

I’m just starting to feel enough better after being sick twice in two weeks that I can re-start running. I haven’t done it yet though. Today has really been the first day when it might have been at all reasonable and I’ve been working since my eyes opened.

The more things I have to do the more I want to type at myself to list it all so I can try to figure out what to do first. But not just a to do list. I need to reflect all the way down on why something is more or less important.

I have been maintaining excellent self discipline about continuing to plow through books. I’m really happy about that. I’m managing about two a week and that feels like a good thing right now since I’m mostly reading books about permaculture and I need to finalise my design layout for this year like yesterday. I’m also working on a couple of other non-fiction topics that I’m happy about. And I have a couple of kink books I have never read that I picked up recently cause they sound neat.

Cause I have a lot of time to think about sex. I drift pass this space mostly so I can be happy that at least someone is out there doing the fun stuff.

In the next week I need to do some batch cooking for the time when I am gone since they are going to be on pure survival mode. I need to write down organised lists of all the stuff that needs to happen. Once I write the list I need to put them in the specific order of most important to least important and I need to just hope that the top 3 things happen without being allowed to be cranky about stuff that is missed. I need to leave everyone with a full drawer of clean pants. It’s fine if their other clothes get gross but everyone needs clean pants for the whole two weeks. Hell, I bought Noah a whole extra week worth today because he will not be up for dealing with the laundry.

Triage, triage, triage.

As much as I like to do celebration cooking I absolutely loathe day-to-day home cooking. It’s boring as shit. I feel stabby. I have to just STFU and do it. So much of it.

I also need to finish the tax paperwork he was supposed to finish because that’s due when I’m leaving anyway. Fun. Paying taxes in two countries is kinda annoying but I’m happy to be here so I’ll keep it up.

Oh yeah–do I have friends? I think I have friends. I suppose I should see people sometimes? Luckily T talks to me every week by video call so it helps me feel less isolated. Which is mixed–I might have to work a lot harder at cultivating local relationships if I couldn’t still cling like a limpet to my Californians.

New people are scary. I’m a lot. I am definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. I am neurotically particular about a great many things. I get RSD like whoa. I was a professional new kid (was a student in 33 schools preschool-grad school) so I’ve met a lot of new people. Most of them just don’t have enough bandwidth in their brain for new people. Some will throw rocks. A few will like me. And then every very very small percentage of the time… I make a friend. I am a lucky woman because I have more than two close friends. That is not promised to anyone in this life. I should not be greedy. Maybe my luck is running out. Who knows. New people are scary. But you can’t get to yes without risking no.

It is hard absorbing the opportunity cost in terms of time and energy lost through connections that are briefly explored before I move on.

Even though I don’t live out in the countryside I act like I do. I live and work on my property most of the time. We are homebodies in a way I never expected. My life has not worked like this in the past. In California there were always so many strong ties, higher ranked priorities, and the fact that getting places in a car is just less effort than riding around so we didn’t stay home much.

I was really enjoying the constant fucking we were doing a few weeks ago. Now it seems like just a dream. Ah well. I’m old enough to know that whatever is happening now will not always happen.

This is a little weird

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Ok, so I think I am starting to have a better relationship with my mother in law. Apparently she finally decided that she couldn’t get rid of me and she now has affection for me? She said it in a really awkward sort of way. She said that her sons don’t think she will love the people they have sex with–it’s their modesty. That’s why we had such a rough introduction to one another on the phone when he had his motorcycle accident back in the day. Or something? It was confusing.

But the last visit was frankly pretty dang positive. I get the impression that my understanding and supportive words and manner for how difficult her mother was to deal was taken well. I did my judgy thing and this time it didn’t blow up. Woo. I told her that I completely understand why she has simply thrown away her mother’s hoard and it was incredibly kind and giving of her to do so much for the woman who abused her so badly. I do not have it in me to do such a thing. That takes an intense level of character to fucking do your duty as a daughter. She didn’t let her mom shit all over her–she had boundaries. But she made sure the taxes got filed. She made sure the bills got paid. She cleaned up the disgusting, nasty, health hazard hoards that her mother accumulated many times in her life. Holy shit I can understand what that means.

I’ve cleaned up a lot of hoards. Including some that required gloves and masks because the air was not fit to breathe.

I saw her mother’s house. I know that I saw the house not long after she moved in and the hoard had been entirely disposed of for the last place she lived. The woman did not deal with rubbish. Including food that was completely and totally inedible and it might hurt someone.

I had a shockingly polite relationship with Great Grandma. We spoke as judgy bitch teachers about methodology and pedagogy. We got along. She was effusively in favor of me homeschooling the kids–but I had to win her over first. When we first met she did that attacking thing she does with fucking everyone and I was able to throw off the names of most of the important academic theorists of the last 100 years and explain exactly which pieces of what research I lean on for the decisions I make. She talked to my kids. Then she went back to the nursery school where she was volunteering to teach gardening to the children. She later told me I should definitely not send my kids to school because I had far more to give them that was of value than all of the teachers in her school put together.

Great Grandma was not a nice person. She was a bitch. She was severely abusive to her children to a degree I have never even nodded at. But she was a single mother to four children in the 1950’s. She parentified the shit out of her kids. She beat them when they didn’t take care of themselves. She beat them whenever she didn’t like a decision they made. She threw them out of the house in night clothes when they tried to take independent action as 18 year olds.

She was also incredibly intelligent and super well educated. She did a graduate degree in geology I think in the 1960’s. She babysat at night so she could help younger single mothers get higher education. She worked in very hard schools. After half a century of teaching she retired… to volunteer in preschools teaching underprivileged children how to garden.

No one is one thing or another. No one is black or white. People are complicated. People have a lot going on and mostly they don’t even know what all it is. It is hard for people to learn how to introspect. It doesn’t absolutely require professional help but it does require time. Time to sit and think and figure out why you are doing stuff. It’s not easy.

Great Grandma put a lot of good into the world. She did a lot of things that were really unusual for someone of her generation and poverty level.

I can look at her and see how I would make similar choices in a similar situation. She had no room for a personal self in her life. She was a tool and she was ground to a bloody fucking nub and shit rolls down hill. I mean tool in my personal usage. The way I see myself. Not like in the P!nk song.

I think I have it in me to be horrible and I am very very lucky that I have been able to construct a life in which I no longer vibrate with so much rage that I scream at my kids.

I understand that she was a bitch. She was a bad ass motherfucker and she was nice when she could be until she had to be effective. There I go but for the grace of the g-d I don’t believe in.

But yeah, I can see how being her daughter was a nightmare. I have a lot of empathy for how much pain my mother in law went through. She was abused and it was wrong and there is no justification for how much pain her mother put her through.

I see both sides of this so very clearly. Given everything I know about both of their lives I do not know how either of them could have done much better than they did. They did the best they could under very hard circumstances. It is so awful when our best results in that much pain for the people we love. I have absolutely no doubt that there was love on both sides–love and pain and misery and duty. I have very different feelings about to whom I owe duty and that’s appropriate given the very different life I have led.

But yeah. Things with my mother in law have improved dramatically and I feel sorta bewildered about that. She is being friendly and encouraging and telling me she loves all of us–which isn’t a direct “I love you” but is so strongly implied I would have to willfully knock it to the side.

Noah’s mom was very rough on him as a little kid. She was still deep in the throes of her own trauma. She did not have more or better to give. She did not have experience with therapy yet. She has come a very long way in Noah’s life. She has done a tremendous amount of work on herself. Heck, in the approaching 20 years that I’ve had experience with her she has come a very long way. She’s not an easy woman and I doubt she ever will be. She doesn’t owe anyone ease and I can appreciate that on a great many levels.

I suspect she has noticed that I talk about how I cannot have a relationship with my mother because the trauma is too great and I have deep respect for how she has managed to do what she did. That took great strength and fortitude. Whether or not we ever get to the point of feeling comfortable with one another in a casual way there is a level of mutual respect.

She tells me often that she appreciates how I care for her son and our children. She sends my son cards addressed to “grandson”. She is usually really careful with my kid about how to be respectful of whatever name or pronoun is working at the current point. (She’s a little muddled on transition stuff and not perfect about pronouns 100% of the time but she also has sewn beautiful skirts for her daughter’s transgender girlfriends. She does the work to be supportive even while being a little sloppy in speech sometimes. I can live with that. It seems like it is good enough to the kids.)

There is a part of me that believes that we had to have over a decade of bristling and holding our own separate castles lined with booby traps. We are both extremely wounded people.

But even stunted trees reach for the light.

The Reckoning

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I knew it would come. The time when my children no longer believe that I am God and whatever I happen to do is Right and Just and Appropriate. It was honestly really weird being in that zone with them and this discomfort and tension is preferable. What I mean to say is last night my big kids and I cried together and talked about how hard it was when they were really small and I would scream at them for hours for stupid things that little kids do. They talked about how much I hurt them and why it wasn’t ok.

I said that it is true that I did these things. And I did hurt them. And I am sorry. I do not excuse my behavior. There isn’t a justification that makes it “ok”. We both just have to live with it being true. You get to decide how many more years of knowing me you can handle given how I treated you.

EC said he remembers one time when MC was screaming at him and I interrupted and told MC off and said it was entirely inappropriate for them to talk to him like that. He said he remembers asking me why it was ok for me to do that when it wasn’t ok for MC to do. I didn’t say anything. I walked away. He could hear that I went in another room and cried. He was confused and he couldn’t figure out what he had done wrong.

Last night I told him I was embarrassed. It’s pathetic for a grown ass woman to need to get called out by a child that small for her inappropriate behavior. I knew I was I was fucking up. I knew that my behavior was wrong. I also didn’t have much of a support network and I had very high needs children and I was still deep in the mess of my own trauma. I told him, “That’s why I went to therapy even though you told me you didn’t want me to go. Because you were showing me every single day how I did not have the skills to be the mother you deserved.” Last night I told him a little bit more about what I was going through at the time and why I was fucking up the ways I was. I told him that I could not talk to him about it way back then or I would have made him my confidant and I would have leaned on him for emotional support. He would have completely believed that it was his job to do whatever he had to do to “fix” me.

He said I was probably right and he was very glad I hadn’t told him any of it at the time. But it was hard.

I know.

I mean, I’m still not telling them everything about what I went through. But like: when the older kids talk about remembering me completely fucking freaking out about food waste… when I married their dad I was 2 years out from being food insecure. By the time EC remembers my earliest paranoia and panic and overly extreme reactions I was something like 5 years out from food insecurity? I am more calm about food now. It’s also been over 18 years. I feel in my bones that it’s ok now if we don’t eat every piece of food because there will definitely be more.

I told him that what he remembers and the ways that I hurt him are part of what I mean when I say that he has an ACE point because having a mentally ill parent is a heavy burden. It is hard on your body and I deeply regret the ways I have hurt my kids.

I know that there were people at the time who expressed concern about the level of screaming that I wrote about. I didn’t respond in the moment in the ways that you might have preferred, but I have done the work to change. I don’t do that anymore. It was very hard. I have hope that my third child will not have the need for such intense conversations about my fuck ups. I certainly don’t think I have been as hard on her.

EC told me he hates how in stories there is always this big deal made of the person in his position forgiving the person who hurt them. I told him that it’s partly because people in my position have nothing to forgive. We only have regret and guilt and shame and self recrimination and that doesn’t make for as interesting of a story. I told him that in the stories the character isn’t forgiving for the sake of the person who hurt them–they are forgiving so they can set this experience down and stop carrying it around in their head and in their heart. I told him that I cycle in and out of forgiving my mother and I expect he will have a similar experience.

I told him that I am not asking for his forgiveness. That is not something I deserve and it isn’t something he should feel compelled to give. I told him that if he wants to talk about this more over the years I will and I will explain more so that he can see a fuller picture of what was going on and I do not offer that as a justification. It’s not a justification.

There is a part of me that struggles with trying to figure out the intensity of my own self recrimination here. I didn’t call him names. I wasn’t hitting him. I wasn’t using inappropriate language. I was using inappropriate volume. I ranted for hours and at least a few times for days about stupid fucking shit because I did not have better coping tools for my emotions.

These days when I can feel that starting I walk away until I am calm enough to come back and say, “I am not ok with this for x, y, and z reasons. I need you to do a, b, or c to make amends because that was not acceptable.” I’m still really freaking not ok with active lying. You can tell me to my face that you are not going to obey some restriction I have put in place and have far fewer issues than you will if you tell me “Ok I won’t do it” and then you do.

In the birthday book that Noah and Pam put together years ago there is a quote from Jenny: “When you look at yourself you see how far you have to go. I see how far you have come.” Ok, I’m paraphrasing. I haven’t looked it up in a bit. I think I’m right +/-3ish words. I am a lot closer to being who I want to be in this world. I have dealt with a lot of my shit.

Hell, I wonder how much Andrew telling me off and telling me that I was addicted to my rage spurred me on. There have been a lot of things and a lot of pushes from people who love me.

I am not the parent I was and mostly I think that is good. If you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and think “Wow, I really sucked” you aren’t trying hard enough. I’m looking back 10 years ago. I really really really sucked. It is hard to feel that I deserve to have a relationship with my children as adults. And that’s one of those tricky self-fulfilling prophecies. If I feel that way I will act shitty and I will push them away.

I mean, even with telling me that sometimes the way I handled shit wasn’t ok he still comes into my room for snuggles on a regular basis. He still radiates confidence and self-assurance and happiness most of the time. He now says that he can foresee a future when he will probably want to move out but he’ll be surprised if it happens much before 30.

He looks back on the arc of his life and thinks I want to double this amount of time with my parents.

I agree that when I screamed like that it was abusive. Maybe it is kind of an ordinary level of abusive where if you knock it off people won’t reject you permanently. I don’t know. I don’t get to decide. I just need to keep on walking and keep on trying to be less of a prick.

The trouble with willpower

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I am trying to plow through a lot of work. Between gardening and running there are a lot of tasks that are time sensitive and I have to execute the plan with precision in order to manage to get the end result. We have slid out of cleaning the house again. I literally can’t enforce a clean house and get a lot of other stuff done. For the past few years we have maintained a shockingly clean house and it has come at the cost of many other activities.

I will not choose a clean house over actually completing important work I care about.

The thing about running is it doesn’t just take up the time it takes to go run. It means I have to be rigid about my sleep schedule. It means I have to be careful what I eat because I need proper fuel in the tank. I can’t eat shitty or I will hurt myself. I can’t miss sleep or I will hurt myself. If I hurt myself my ability to hit my targets will slip and I won’t reach my goals.

It is not easy for me to maintain rigid consistency. I can feel the internal fight. This is where I have found it fascinating to research PDA over the past few years. I am the only person making these demands upon myself but I can feel my anxiety spiking. I am not having an easy time with the constant need to refocus and align my attention with a narrow set of goals. It feels controlling and subjugating and it makes me want to completely zone out and go on “vacation” (when I keep the kids alive but zone out and don’t get anything done for a while).

Mostly I shift back and forth in between what pulls my attention and interest most on a given day. I suspect that my obsession with keeping the house clean over the past few years has partially been because I have been in the house all the time and I didn’t have that much else that could pull my attention harder. Now, there’s a lot.

I am going through a really intense period of cross training, too. I don’t think I have ever done this much exercise as an adult and maybe never in my life. I ride my bike a lot. Running is still early days–I haven’t had longer than 5 miles yet and most of the runs are 2-3 miles. But I run straight uphill as I get started and it feels fucking brutal. It is forcing my lungs to be very sad and learn how to control my breathing with a much higher heart rate. I’m seeing improvement in my lap swimming that I do while Shorty has class. My shoulder joints are clicking less and I can make it down the lane nearly twice as fast as I could a few weeks ago. That’s pretty cool. I am really enjoying starting yoga again. I need the overall strength building quite badly. It does so much to improve the pain in my arms and my shoulders and my back.

But it’s a lot. I feel worn to the bone. It’s using up all of my self discipline. It’s making it tougher to continue reading all of the permaculture books. Mostly because I have finished the ones that are most relevant to garden-level work and now I’m struggling my way through textbooks that focus on major installations, city, or true forest level designs. I have a very low likelihood of ever needing to design the layout for a 10+ acre piece of land. It’s hard using willpower to force myself through reading something that is never going to be fully relevant. But some of the details and the philosophy can be applied and is relevant so I really should finish them. Ugh.

I would much rather continue my binge of The West Wing, thanks. I’m already 48 episodes in. (Sure, I’m mostly watching them so I can detect defects…. right….)

I have not been keeping up with budget tracking. I am keeping up with laundry.

Holy crap. In the past 24 hours my polytunnel has had a minimum of 5C and a maximum of 32.7C. That means the soil temperature is staying way over 5C. Time to plant all these boxes! (I love a new way to get data. Yay thermometer!)

And I’m super sick, again. Last week it was an intestinal bug and this week it is a head cold. Ugh. Missing all the first Saturday stuff is annoying because it means no trip to the farmers market and we miss Kidical Mass.

Gardening progress

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Yesterday was fun. I feel like I am getting closer every day to the set up I am aiming for.

Yesterday I made tomato cages out of trees cut in my garden. I put some early, hopeful seeds in the beds. I need to add hay to discourage cats. I am set for the next few weeks of starting succession plants before anything can go outside. The ones going in the house are outgrowing my floor and I should get some shelving that I can keep up temporarily then store when I don’t need them.

I am looking forward to this summer so much. Friends are coming in June, July, and August. I want to be able to feed all of them from the garden. So hurry up, Krissy! In plant timing you have to have stuff ready way in advance!

Lay out the plan then follow it.

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Today I ran 2 miles to start the day. Noah came with me even though he has been having a gout attack over the past week. So far it seems like he is doing better and he’s not in extra pain from the run and that’s fabulous. I tore open an adhesion between my butt and my thigh and it’s absolutely marvelous. It only hurt for a short time and now I can lift my leg higher and I’m thrilled. This will make it easier to get on and off my bike; it’s been a struggle to raise my leg high enough for quite a while.

I took a shower and washed my hair and did all the greasing for my body head to toe. I fixed my pocket/belt doohickey because it wasn’t done perfectly on the first go-round. That’s going to be ok.

I need to tidy up my room some, do some processing of food that is in deep storage out into the glass jars for usage. It’s important. I might even unload and reload the dishwasher because MC didn’t do it before taking off on their walk and I don’t want them staying up super late to finish dishes later.

I need to catch up on budget stuff. I’ve been not getting that done. I have a whole stack of books I want to get through. I have a lot of seeds that need to be started in the next day or two because it is *time*. This is hilarious because I am running out of floor in my bedroom and bathroom.

I have a meeting at 2 with a construction dude who is going to help with the rotting deck outside the apartment. That’s a good thing. Shorty has badminton at 4 and I have to ride her over there. If I have time I probably should go get some slate tiles before we do badminton so I can bring them home with me. I are tired. Then I eat dinner quickly and head right back out to a yoga class in town. All told I am going to be riding at least 11 miles today but it might be more. I get a little fuzzy on some of the exact distances.

It’s a good day.

I did a lot of seed planting yesterday, my bathroom floor is almost entirely covered in plants and the heat is high. I have about three more weeks of needing that room to be super warm and I am deeply ready for the temperature to go down. I think that next year I am going to try harder to figure out how to have a small enclosed space that I heat without heating that whole room. This is oppressive. Also I could really use a place to start plants where the cats don’t try to sleep on them. The cats are unhappy about their current ban from my room.

I continue to have struggles in many ways as a parent. Figuring out how to teach things, how to model healthy behavior, and how to get a kid to give a shit about something that I find important is… hard. Very hard. I am not feeling good at this. I will keep trying though.

Shorty is spending a lot of time on learn-to-read apps and she’s made a fairly shocking amount of progress. I told her she couldn’t have Roblox till she was 10 because that’s about when my older kids were able to read/write well enough to be safe on the platform. She is absolutely determined to get there sooner. We’ll see!

I am by no measure a perfect person. I will keep reaching for the light even though I am stunted.

Fuck your measurements

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I have now finished all of the “soft” entrance to permaculture books and I am on to the textbooks that are deeply impervious to dilatantes like me. No, I am not going to buy a bunch of surveying equipment. I am not making a topographical map. I already know how water flows through my garden. I don’t need a map. I do think I know where I would do well to dig a small trench down the side of the garden that I will line with rocks and mulch with hay. That will ensure that a lot more of the rain that strikes the garden will land in the tree roots near that fence instead of washing into the burn immediately. Of course there will have to be an easy drain area down just before the water would otherwise hit the bike shed as that could become severely problematic.

I am realising I really do need to paint the wall white as that will do a lot to reflect light and create a hotter microclimate. That’s hilarious because ordinarily I strongly prefer not having white walls, c’est la vie.

I need to build a permanent structure for the grapes to grow up. One of the grapes was yanked out of the ground and left on the ground, I presume by Shorty. Building a garden means having to cope with all the other uses the garden has for other people. I feel like I am going to have to get over my fear of drilling into the wall.

I have decided that I need to start making scale drawings between now and the 1st of April (no foolin) because I am going to start putting some seeds in the ground and I need a plan. My property is laid out so that the boundary lines are pretty close to exactly a square with north on the top but my house is laid out so that I have the corners of the house almost perfectly hitting each direction. (Slightly more left as the “north” corner of the house is probably at 10:30 on a clock.) I want to refer to the sections as A/B/C/D starting with A in the NE corner and then going around the clock. The studio is in C block and it takes up a lot of space. D is the bike shed, chicken coop, and a bunch of driveway. A has a fair bit of driveway and the polytunnel. For my sake I am only plotting the parts with dirt I can grow in. I know I “should” have an overall property map, and I think I will, but I’m thinking of my layout in terms of the quadrants.

Around 2/3 of A gets good sun up until around 1pm and the other 1/3 is in total shade all the time.

Ack. Need to just hit send and give up on getting this whole thing written out in one go.

The gurus

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They don’t all call themselves gurus, some use teacher, Owner, shaman, tantrika, daka, coach, guide, and memorably one just went by Dragon. That is outside the not-short list of Daddies I have acquired through my time as an adult. They were all men who were absolutely convinced that they knew what I should do to be happier/healthier/sluttier/less slutty/more attractive/more intelligent/less emotional/less crazy… in short what they all had in common was viewing me as a piece of clay that could be molded into their ideal woman.

If I’m at all honest I totally fucking have a type and it definitely extends to people who like having a massive reality distortion bubble around them that intrudes into other people’s sense of self so they could direct the people.

For the purpose of this writing I am going to assume that the controlling person is primarily male, mostly because I have yet to have an enby try to establish this sort of dynamic with me (not saying they never do at all) and very few women try to influence me in the same manner. I have a number of women I look to for advice and guidance and they are all people with extremely strong opinions (FUCKING HAWT 😍) who will tell me what they think then drop the topic and move on. I will listen or not and that isn’t their problem.

The men come back to check if I am obeying. They chastise me. They tell me “you have to ____”. They tell me that if I keep doing x that I will never (whatever they want me to do). They threaten dire outcomes if I don’t fall in line with their direction.

Before you try to go all “Oh look, just another feminist bitch hating on men” I need to point out that I married one of these dudes and many are still in my extended harem (the people I am deeply emotionally attached to who I have fucked or played with in the past), and I even talked to one about how to write this post. Clearly I don’t just hate all these men. I signed on for sucking one of their cocks for the rest of my days. He has no problem at all with my harem of much loved and adored friends. My husband knows that he has a biological family he may not adore but who would show up to rescue him with money and resources if something went sideways in his life. I have my harem, my triad of best friends, and the loose ties I have extending through communities in cities in many countries. He does not begrudge me the only safety net I have in this life. Mommy boards say that I have a lot of emotional affairs. I’m ok with that description.

So when I talk about the feelings I have about my relationships with men who share this personality trait it is not a purely negative topic. When I say that I would not be who I am without these men I’m really not kidding. I’ve done a lot of hypnosis, NLP, conditioning training, improvement plans, slave contracts, affirmation work, and even a fair bit of strait up corporal punishment when I failed to do as I was ordered.

Every time someone gushes about how confident I am about myself I mentally see that meme of an autistic woman accepting her Oscar for how well she masks.

I have a great deal of self doubt, well less than I used to. I have a great deal of suspicion about my own motives and why I am taking the actions that I am taking. I believe that the self I have constructed amongst my friends, mainly through the writing I have done for decades (it all went private when I moved to the UK but once I have citizenship locked down, finger guns I’m sure it will revive) is a binding contract. Old friends tell me that when they are doing things in their life they stop and consciously think about the delineated way I think through why to act the way I want to act when they are evaluating what they need to do in a situation. I feel kind of stunned when they say this. Then I laugh because immediately after they almost 100% feel the need to follow up with “I know what you would do and it would be ____ (sometimes they are right in that guess and sometimes not) but I am just using the PROCESS and I have different values so what I decided was ____.” There is usually this little bit of a funny energy about this exchange that is now emerging with my kids as they get older.

I do the teacher shit fucking hard too. I’m not just dissing on people who like to influence other people.

When you model how to think through a problem without giving a strong “the right answer will always be ‘x'” people can generalise from that into many cases you never considered initially and often there seems to be this little almost foot stamping response of, “Just because you are right about one part of this process that doesn’t make you right about everything! So THERE!“

I think this is pretty subconscious for folks most of the time but when I see it over and over and over and over it gets a little hard to keep the smirk off my face. After this many years of parenting, I am getting particularly obnoxious about keeping a serious, slightly concerned face and leaning in a little to say, “So you are saying I win?”

I’ve now said this to a few friends in situ and they are people who have known me long enough to throw their heads back howling in laughter. Just like last night my coach said at the end of the conversation “So you are telling me that after this conversation you feel a lot more comfortable about the fact that you are clear in your purpose and you don’t think there is underlying inappropriate feelings driving your actions? Now you figured out what you are going to do going forward? So what you are really saying is, I win?“

But do you know what I am honest with myself about? An awful lot of these men are uhm not people I can wholeheartedly endorse as upstanding gentlemen. Many of them have pushed far too hard and have raped women who did not use a firm enough “no”. I have supported communities in enacting blacklists that blocked these men from attending. I have spoken to the men in question and told them point blank that I was going to reach out to people in the community they just moved to and I am going to tell those people about your history. They usually sigh very deeply and nod. They know that it is not worth a single minute of their time to try and talk me out of it.

Someone recently mentioned the concept of being in an accountability circle with someone. I spent a little bit of time on DuckDuckGo and thought about that concept more specifically. Ok, that’s my husband and my triad and harem and my sisters and mothers in leather. Those are the people who keep me on the path I want to be on. They tell me when I’m an asshole. They tell me when I fucked up. They help me figure out how to fuck up less. Harm Reduction is the goal. They see me clearly in all of my layers of machinations and mixed feelings and need to learn what “healthy” responses are and they are really good at asking me the right questions.

Over and over I say that the purpose of working with a therapist is so that you can have access to someone who will ask you the questions you need to think about in order to figure out the answer. Therapists aren’t magicians and they aren’t priests: they don’t have all the answers. You have the answers for you and I have the answers for me.

I rode out most of the first couple years of the pandemic not talking much with most of my harem, my triad mostly went silent, and most of my sisters and mothers in leather were far too overwhelmed to have much ability to interact regularly. I did make more tentative connections with new people here in Scotland but frankly it is still early days. Bailey taught me that friends come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime and you don’t know who is who until the end.

Over the past year there has been a slow wave building in my life, the ocean is just starting to send the tide in. The people who are still in my life and who reach out daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or just when they happen to see something that makes them think of me remind me of just how far the road has been. I have not sat still with just a couple of people, needing them to fill all of my needs. I have been privileged to be a comet in a great many lives.

It’s not that I still know everyone I have slept or played with. Many threads have frayed.

Do you know who stayed? The fucking gurus.

But not even all of them. I have kicked a few out of the harem. People who consistently showed me that they did not understand the agreement between us about which parts of my life and selfhood were up for attack.

I mean, I did marry the grand motherfucking prize winner of the game “What is wrong with Krissy.” I’m not opposed to being attacked on a great many fronts. These people I am speaking about get to stay because they have been able to shift their understanding of me over time with great nuance. They understand that the opening gambit of our relationship was not to be indicative of how we would get along forever. They can usually understand that they have crossed a line just by seeing me narrow my eyes.

I might be into providing service, I may be an absolute workaholic if I am given a project that will please someone in that group of people, I might be fully willing to be an owned possession who has limits about what they are allowed to do in big parts of my life, I might fucking live for the opportunity worship people and grovel as I appreciate the opportunity to please them…

That is always within a strong framework of you have to learn my idiosyncratic, difficult to track, highly specific to my life boundaries and not encroach on them. There are limits. I will comment when you have crossed them. I will retreat from you rapidly if you respond inappropriately. There are lots of kinds of inappropriate.

The only real appropriate response is, “I just said something that was not good. May I ask how that went wrong?” I train my people like I train my plants. To be clear I do not expect the appropriate response from anyone early in a relationship. Casual acquaintances and folks I know randomly/socially are absolutely going to 100% of the time have an inappropriate response. That’s totally fine. I get that. I am not mad. But whatever inappropriate response results in some level of gentle correction. I evaluate how gentle to be on a case by case basis.

If you laugh at my correction you are now out of the running for ever making it past “yeah I know that guy”. And you know what? I’m not mad about that. Really, it’s ok. I may feel lonely in a lot of ways because I have a lot of touch hunger for the specific people who have the right to touch my body because we are deep enough and close enough in our relationship. The people who have survived hundreds or thousands of little course corrections after inappropriate responses.

When I get word of them having fucked up in their community I figure out what went wrong and I proceed to talk to them about where and how that went off the rails. I am not gentle or kind but I am forgiving. I am just as fucked up as they are and they forgive me too.

I have gotten much better with practice about understanding when and how someone can be my prey.

I am pretty wordy about figuring it out though. Typing is my native language and I have been sitting on everything I’ve thought over the last few years. Necessary time to hibernate and slow down. You have to close some doors in order to open other doors.

When someone tells me that they are desperately holding on to a person in their life because they feel like they are afraid of the pain of the loss I can’t help but think of all the times when creating an empty space in my life lead to me being able to create a different connection that nurtured me deeply but wouldn’t ultimately be as all consuming. Sometimes the person I thought completely lost turns out to be a comet who can show up for chats every few years. Every time I have that happen I say a blessing for Past Me having the wisdom to smile brightly and wish my friend joy as they severed the tie to run off and grow somewhere else.

It’s funny how much this all feels more and more like a cross between gardening metaphors. Oy. That’s yet another detour.

The point, and the reason I haven’t hurried off the dang computer yet is that I know that if I am writing a contract in my head around my behavior and what I should be doing to continue the arc I have been on for quite some time I might have to say pieces of that out loud again. I can’t get to backstory yet but I will. This stretch of writing is a long time coming and most everyone has even told me it is fine if I just use their names. A few asked for pseudonyms and I go with that.

They are each of them a whole fabulous thread of interactions and course corrections and fucking opportunities for growth. Other people don’t need to care about any of this at all. I write it down simply because that is how I learn what I need to learn. I ask myself the question and then I write until I figure out the answer. I’ve made many of my closest friends through writing. We have arguments and debates and always come again and again to the same end result: we each have our own different right answer and it won’t be the same. This is part of how they taught me to think and I miss it deeply.

I miss letting them in.

Finding space for that writing is hard with running and gardening. There’s this whole web to weave. I don’t know how much of it will end up here, probably just most of the slutty or kinky stuff. But I have to start writing again. I am getting off course. As I was told several times yesterday: I am always at my finest when I am saying what I am thinking so that I don’t get cocky or shitty because I would have to admit that too.

I think fuck ups should be very publicly discussed and analysed. I’m not just saying “boundary crossings” or assaults or anything extreme. I find out who is going to end up closer in or farther out on the extended web with every time I talk about them doing something I don’t like.

I’m not talking about a big deal. I’m talking about noticing “Hey, x thing sucks and it isn’t cool”. There is a lot to be learned when people react to that. A whole lot of people will pick up their football and go home and will speak about me with scathing words. Cool. I’m used to that.

But the people who stay all wiggle into the right place for them. It takes time. Seasonal changes sometimes make waves in that group of folks who are around for reasons that might not be so needed anymore. And some of them fade out except for the occasional fond smile or grimace depending on why they faded out.

But the ones who stay. Well, chef’s kiss they are my kind of predators and I am very happy to recognise that my loving them means that I am choosing to do whatever is in my power to help them only go after prey instead of finding victims. I hope not in a codependent way? I really don’t have time for that much involvement with fucking anyone’s life outside of people I live with. Good grief.

I can only ask questions and hope they are the right ones. I can only tell them where they are fucking up and how. I can ask them to consider why they want to do a thing. I absofuckinglutely will do something to deplatform them as much as possible. Fine. Learn how to be a member of a community who is known as someone to keep an eye on. You don’t get to be the leader. You know how you are wanting to go do x, y, and z? How about if instead of you doing that you look around at who could be doing that even better than you can but they need some kind of support to make that happen. Don’t take the stage.

Cause with these specific predators we have agreements between us. I will call you what you are. You will never in your whole life have to worry if I am just sucking up to you. I will tell you what I think without reservation or softening my tone in any way. You get to find out what the inside of my brain instinctively produces in response to you doing that. And we will talk about this until you motherfucking understand how and why you done wrong and how you are fucking going to make amends.

Maybe not in that same city because you fucked up so bad you have to leave. (Ironic that I say that here. To the best of my knowledge I did not leave the bay area because I fucked up and was driven out of any communities. If anyone disagrees with my assessment feel free to comment below.) So maybe my level of intervention is going to be a bit messy and ridiculous. But I know what you are. I know what you have done. And you can have a redemption arc–that’s great. It will require you not doing the same ol’ same ol’. You have to choose to change. You have to figure out what your answers are. Where is the enlightened self interest in your need to change? What should you change to get what you are currently fucking yourself out of in your impulsive dipshit move?

The people who stay are messy and complicated and I hold no illusions about them. As a deeply flawed person I want to be seen and accepted for the totality of myself. And that has involved a lot of agreements about what had to change.

How in the fuck would someone new just know all that bullshit? For fucks sake. That’s ridiculous and unfair.

I know.

I can never really write it all down but it moves the conversation along by so much when I at least try.

So yeah. I suppose this is my personal ad. This is how I have always hunted. My prey is different for so many reasons but if you are patient with me I will be as explicit as I can. You don’t have to come for the whole ride. You are welcome to come in and out whenever you need.

Cause I’m a wordy bitch.

Jot down some notes then get up

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I am thinking about how I am going to make a place for bamboo without spending much money. I will start with digging a trench deep enough to put about 16″ deep rhizome barrier and I will build the raised bed around that going up about 12″ above ground. I don’t want a tall raised bed there but I think that something shorter would be risking a jump over the barrier. Bamboo is super aggressive.

I want it for a few reasons. It would provide evergreen visual privacy along a whole stretch of wall that is usually in full view of everyone who walks by; we are all a little uncomfortable about the fishbowl. Over time I will be able to harvest canes and use them (and share them with neighbors.) They provide a good source of habitat for birds who are currently being ousted by the gorse removal on our road. (Insert big sad face here). It will also deflect the north wind and trap the southern wind thus dramatically impacting the microclimate of my garden into a much warmer environment. Like, that’s pretty brilliant.

I don’t want an absolute solid wall, and thus keeping them in planters rather than letting them fill the whole area by the road with just a barrier between the road/driveways/wall. I have planted a lot of fruit trees very close to the wall so they will grow big enough to be harvested from the road (and so they are close enough to the wall to catch as much extra heat as possible.

It occurs to me that I should paint that wall white. It would dramatically increase how warm the plants got.

Little Monster, Big Monster

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I have been thinking about this guy who was around the San Francisco scene years ago. I’m going to call him Deep Tissue Dude because one of the ways he made friends was by giving free massages to people, mostly women. He did have professional training and he was extremely technically skilled. It wasn’t his primary job (most folks struggle to survive in the Bay Area on just a massage therapist wage) but when he was in between tech gigs he would take on some clients to fill in the gap.

I met him after I left my Owner. I was 23 and I was going to Burning Man events with folks who were slightly overlapping with the kink community in part because I was trying to find a different community group where I wouldn’t have to see my ex and partly because I was in a weird place with my self harming behavior. I don’t think that extreme promiscuity is always done from a place of self harm but I can say that my own promiscuity is sometimes done from a place of love and connection and sometimes it is based on the fact that I had a sociopathic pedophile as a father who told me I existed in the world because men need a place to put their dicks. I had been in therapy on and off for 20 years at that point but I had not yet met the therapist who really rocked my whole world and made me really make leaps and bounds of progress with my trauma.

I met this guy and he seemed pretty cool. He talked a lot about his parenting and he talked a lot about boundaries and safety and consent and just generally he was good at giving off all the “I’m a good guy–really” signals. I feel it is important to say that he was an incredibly large man; like Samoan large. He was very tall–maybe 6’3″? (That’ll be around 190cm for the rest of you.) He had a gigantic barrel chest; he was fat but that wasn’t the dominant impression he gave. He was just massive. He was careful and deliberate about how he used his size when he interacted with women, and of course he mostly interacted with women. He hung out with men approximately how much he had to in order to pass the “Oh I know him; he’s alright” bar.

He did that thing where he walked and moved with authority so people tended to knee jerk assume that he really knew what he was talking about. He would talk about bodies and anatomy to perverts and sexually adventurous people in a way that established his authority. He was trying hard to be an important someone without actually being in a position of responsibility. He talked constantly about accountability

I’ll be frank and say that at that period of time most of the people I was hanging out with were doing a lot of drugs. MDMA was the big favorite, but GHB, nitrous, and coke were around too. I got the impression that other folks were using additional drugs but I didn’t know as much about that.

So Deep Tissue Dude never explicitly said “If you have sex with me I will give you drugs” and he never said “I will give you free massages if you have sex with me”. He was super careful to never ever be blunt about things. But he would ensure a plentiful supply of drugs for people who chose to hang around him when he was at an event. Much later I talked to other women and he crossed sexual lines during the massages quite frequently and none of us ever felt like we could bring it up. He always had a “Oh I am so sorry, I was misinterpreting your signals. I thought you wanted me to.”

I feel very required to stop at this point and explicitly say that even though I am aware that what he did was sexual assault I do not carry him in my head and in my heart as someone who assaulted me. I mean, he did but it wasn’t a big assault and it never went very far. He put his finger in my cunt once. He leaned over and licked my cunt once. Those happened several months apart and after the second time I never came back for another massage.

Why did I hang out with him at all? Why didn’t I ghost him after the first “slip”? Well, frankly, because I was fucking poor and I have chronic pain issues and he gave me help to ease the pain I was in.

I’ve been thinking about him because I think about the way that he gave me very minor uncomfortable feelings fairly quickly. I noticed that his big talk about how important his kids were in his life… was accompanied by him rarely actually seeing his kids and constantly pleading poverty for why he couldn’t afford to send child support to his “evil” ex. I noticed that he had a revolving door of “super close friends” who were always women, usually women who were under 25 and coming from backgrounds of extreme trauma. I noticed that he would always loudly, verbally set boundaries in really conservative places but then he would cross them regularly and say that he didn’t actually need the boundaries to be so conservative because actually I wasn’t taking advantage of him the way “other people” did.

He did a lot of talking about all the things he was going to do, all the ways he could do cool things for people, all the classes he could teach… and in reality outside of providing drugs he wasn’t stable or consistent or a good source of anything.

For me he was a Little Monster. He did shit he shouldn’t do; things that are literally illegal and he was messy and inappropriate. I don’t feel violated and I don’t feel like a victim.

But there were women for whom he was a Big Monster. There was one girl in particular where he gave her drugs and then he raped her. She went to the police and it was a whole shit show. I don’t know if I am remembering this completely correctly (it has been almost 20 years) but I believe it didn’t get to trial. She was slut shamed into infinity and beyond and she couldn’t handle pushing hard enough to make him pay.

I actually think of that woman, who was more of a girl at the time, quite often. Sometimes people will ask me why I am as conservative as I am with some of my boundaries in my parenting and I think of this girl. Her mother was a pro-domme and active in the scene. This girl had grown up surrounded by perverts. I met her when she was 18 and she told stories about how she had been sitting on the knees of various prominent perverts naked in hot tubs since she was 16.

I think of her every single time I tell my children how to handle nudity and adults who get close to them. (For the record my kids have been to many nudist events and I don’t think naked bodies are in any way a problem or inherently sexual.) I think of her when I tell my kids to beware of people who try really really really hard to seem trustworthy.

Why do they need to try so hard?

I think of that girl when I tell parents in the scene that it’s not a good idea to carry on with your kinky life with your children present. I think of that girl when I tell parents that I don’t think co-ops for babysitting with other kinky parents are a good idea. I mean, she isn’t even the only child of kinky parents I know who has had what seemed to me to be a very brutal entry into adulthood.

Deep Tissue Dude was blacklisted from a few events. He was no longer welcome at the Burning Man parties. Last I heard he had moved to a different city and was an integral part of the scene there.

I know he sexually assaulted at least dozens of women. I am quite certain he raped many–I have no way of guessing the number.

I think of him when I interact with people and they have messy boundaries. I think of him when I interact with people who loudly state why they are an authority and credible over and over again. I think of him when someone makes big promises about all the things they are going to do for other people.

I think of her when I watch people try to figure out how to respond to Monsters both Big and Little. There is so much silencing of discourse “don’t bring drama” and minimising the experiences of people who know something isn’t right but they aren’t sure where the line was crossed.

I know lots of people who cross a line once then they don’t cross it again. I deeply respect them. I know lots of people who cross a line then they make big protestations about how they won’t do something inappropriate again… until the next time.

When my inside voice tells me that I need to stay away from someone, when I notice that someone is inconsistent with their words versus their behavior, when I notice that someone reminds me of Monsters I used to know I listen now. I feel more emboldened to talk about stupid small things that start adding up. If I have a list of 3 or 4 small things that bother me I recognise that as meaning I will not be surprised when I find out that this person, who might be a Little Monster for me, will probably, eventually be a Big Monster for someone else.

I am grateful for the fact that I am no longer in a place in my life where the company of a Little Monster is better than being alone. I have a lot of compassion for the girl I was and the reasons that I made quite a few very poor choices in friends.

Pay attention to the integrity people have around their words. People really like to tell on themselves. When someone says “Oh, I will…” all the time but they don’t actually do it don’t be surprised when they say “Oh, I will never…” and then they do it anyway.

Another day

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I didn’t get the trees in the ground. That’s ok. Instead I got a massage and picked up my prescription swim goggles (I am really excited about these) and Shorty got her glasses fixed and I did laundry and I spent time with Shorty setting up the computer and getting her on Minecraft before cycling off to a yoga class.

I keep thinking that I am closer and closer to my goal of being blacksheep when I grow up: cycling all over, swimming, running, walking, yoga, every other opportunity for manual labor…

I also spent some time resting in the middle of the day. I read a little. I feel like I had a really good day.

I haven’t been using the day planner over the past few weeks. I am feeling super resistant to it again. I have tied my usage to the kids and that’s a stupid thing. Because then I combine it with yelling and we all feel shittier. I need to be using it though because otherwise I am going to start missing appointments and we have a lot going on.

I’m trying to track my gardening stuff, medical appointments for everyone, exercise, money, cleaning, planning for EC’s Art Tour, video chats with friends in the US, kid social life stuff, kid classes, along with how much social time I am spending with folks in town. I’m not paying attention to Noah like I was. I feel like my sex drive is kind of napping–not sleeping, exactly. Shorty has been extremely clingy and needy and that is a real buzz-kill. I take a long-term view of this. She won’t need me like this forever and I feel deep satisfaction for the way EC and MC both feel deep in their bones that I will love and support them. This is important.

It is now time to go to bed with her.

I should be talking to me more.

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I have a whole bunch of broken Wellie boots and broken luggage; I want put them up on the border wall between me and the road with plants inside. (Yes I know I will need to bolt them down if I don’t want them to wander.) Things I want to paint on them:

Not all who wander are lost; some are seeds floating on the wind searching for the right spot to sprout.
These boots were made for walking but then they got tired and put down roots.
With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding. With good compost, comes happy plants.
I would walk far more than 500 miles to get to Inverness, this lovely place where I get to build my nest.
I have seen 1,000 cities and this I must confess: the only one I want to call my home is Inverness.
When you have more than you need you should build a longer table, not a taller fence. Feel free to take clippings from any plants and if you see a fruit tree/bush heavy with fruit, come knock on the door. I’ll probably give you a bag.

I also want to make signs for all the plants in my garden explaining what they give and add to the soil and why I picked them for this spot. I would really like for people to be able to walk around my garden and get a mini-course on permaculture. By “people” I mean me because I am totally going to forget this shit if I don’t write it down and reread it a bunch of times. This is not a project that is going to get done this year, but eventually. In the meantime I am taking way better notes than I did in California.

It is really nice feeling like the time I spent in California in my garden was an absolutely fantastic beginner course in gardening. I had the time/money/sunshine/city water to make quite an oasis. Gardening here is very different in dramatic ways. I mean… for many months of the year I shouldn’t dig in the ground because the wee beasties are hibernating. I would take December off from gardening (and sometimes January) but really I was outside in the garden 10-11 months a year. There were different seasonal jobs; I didn’t have the same routine week to week. Here I really shouldn’t disturb the earth any more than absolutely necessary from November through May. Well, I’ll be honest and say there is some amount of tidying up I can do in November and December but it’s more clearing off the slippery leaves off the driveway and doing a compost turn. I also begin starting seeds in February.

Ok so maybe it is about the same.

Only it really isn’t! This is gardening on hard mode. I can start seeds in my bedroom and bathroom, which have to be kept shut from the rest of the house the whole time. I don’t have a single other place that could be warm/away from the cats. It’s pretty funny. If I got a thermometer in the polytunnel I could chance leaving some of the seedlings out there for the weeks of Fool’s Spring just to give them a little excitement with extra air movement but mostly I wouldn’t bother because it is too much work.

Mostly here in February and March I can read and research and plan. Planning is a Big McFlippin deal here. In California I could throw tomatoes on the ground and a plant would start growing in any month of the year as long as I watered it. Sometimes there would be a cold snap that would keep a specific plant runty, but I’d get a big tomato haul. Here I have barely been able to get tomatoes to ripen at all because I haven’t figured out how to keep them warm enough. This year I’m going to grow them in the polytunnel and see if that works better.

I can’t help but feel that I am keeping all these records because I have this horrible Cassandra-like feeling that my children are going to need to be able to look through my trials and failures so they can make sure they eat someday. Yes, reading blogs and books are an ideal way to start an education in the general sense but knowing your unique microclimate isn’t available unless you learn from someone who has stood in your garden.

I am sure my weird prepper shit is just a continuation of my same old, same old and yet this feeling is different in a way that is hard to define. I love my children, don’t get me wrong, but at this point I don’t see any sign that any of them are going to be a shooting star. They are bright people who will arrive at adulthood with a better than average emotional education and a lot of ability to learn new things and do jobs that interest them. I have a lot of worry around the ways they want to work earning them much money and in this late-stage-Capitalist-hellscape I have deep fear around them suffering in the future because I entirely failed to instill that motivator.

Somewhere along the way I discovered that my goal was to give them time. Time to figure out what brings them joy. Time to explore things and fail and try again. Time to become their own best friend. Time to do what they want during the day instead of what can earn them money. I recognise deeply that Noah pays for this time. He earns and we invest and maybe someday his children can have an easier burden. In many ways he has sacrificed his life on the altar of me and our children. He has taken the provider role very seriously and combined with all the advantages he started with like picking the right hobby at seven and a family that could pay for a very nice school.

Noah has given me time. Time to think about who I want to be. Time to figure out what I need to learn in order to become that person. I feel awed at the magnitude of gift he has given me in this life. I think often about how my entire life as it is now mostly exists because of Noah. I mean, I have friends I made on my own but I live where I live in the house I live in with the children I wanted so very much because of Noah.

The children who make me feel crazy and hostile and overwhelmed and like I just want to hide in the bathroom for a few years. I would not walk away from this life for all the money in the world. There is literally nothing I would rather be doing, even though I complain like it is my job.

Today I walked around my garden and thought about all the ways I am going to shift things around towards being a food forest and a playground. I started out with beds in the front lawn but most of it doesn’t really get enough sun anyay so I am going to move some plants, change around where the logs are and put playground stuff running through the middle. It’ll work. You’ll see. I measured with conservative edge allowances.

By playground equipment I mean a climbing structure and a slide and a separate swing. Both the swing and the climbing structure will be very amenable to hosting climbing plants for the guilds. It’s going to be fantastic. It’s kind of funny how much of this thought process is shaping up around my birthday party. My friends are going to be old as fuck. I am going to need to have a garden full of places to sit and admire the lovely plants. It will be good to have pretty flowers right at face height because a lot of them aren’t going to see that well anymore.

And some will climb up to hang on the climbing structure because of course they will. I will have swings that my adult friends can use. And they will get to walk through a forest of food to get there.

Trees take time. Building soil takes time. I only have 18 years to go. That means it is bloody important I get as much of the bones in place as possible this year. It takes time to fill in a forest. Buddy, I am already training branches.

How am I going to lay out walking paths so people don’t step on my damn plants? How am I going to create convenient congregation places around the garden where it would be lovely to linger and have a chat? Where will people be able to pick a snack in September? Oh bloody hell. It’s a lot to plan!

After a search it looks like apples are going to be my best and most obvious choice for the whole top side of the garden as it is literally lined in apple trees. Raspberries will hold down the bottom side. There will definitely be runner beans all over the place. Maybe I will have magically figured out tomato ripening. Courgettes, potatoes, and onions are not really snacking foods but I can cook with them. Ok. This will be good.

Hm. Unfortunately my birthday falls on a Tuesday the year I turn 60. Well I suppose it will be a week long house party. Oh wow, that’s an interesting thought. I wonder who I will still know.

Longevity in relationships is extremely important to me. I put up with some serious bullshit from my oldest friends. Because if somehow they have decided to have some appalling belief it is now my job to somehow embody a different point of view without sounding like a preachy asshole. It’s a tightrope some moments. I believe that most relationships involve some degree of masking and setting special boundaries for people in ways that create a lot of extra work for yourself. I don’t know how to “just be one thing” all of the time. I can’t. I know that large parts of me are not particularly acceptable in a great many settings. It was true in California and it is far more true here. I have to be mindful of what I say and where.

It is utterly exhausting. Every conversation goes through this at-speed filter of “acceptable topics” and I am glad I have expanded my range of special interests so that I can usually find a couple if I try a few different mannerisms and approaches. I assume it is kind of trippy for the people I go through four or five approaches with. If I feel waved off after the fifth I start treating them like furniture and I will probably never make eye contact again.

I need much more stringent filters here. It’s not that everyone is closed minded it is that the process for sussing people out takes a lot longer and I’m sure I’ve “gone too fast” a couple of times. Mostly I haven’t horrified anyone but I take very calculated risks with self exposure.

I acknowledge to myself that in my mind I need a triad of close friends that I talk to at least somewhat consistently and we have very few filters with one another. There is no such thing as a relationship without filters. Not for me, anyway. It has been three women for most of my life, not always the same three women. Now there is a man, well a demi-boy as he now understands himself and I can understand what he means when he says that. I can feel myself consciously and deliberately allowing myself to be filled in my “imaginary bucket” as I talk to the kids about emotional energy. I feel like a vampire sometimes. I feel ashamed sometimes. But I don’t stop and I know that none of them would like me to stop because the way we take and give to each other is mutually satisfying and not draining.

Sometimes I tell my children that when there are times that they don’t love themselves then they are welcome to borrow some of my regard for them because it is endless. That is really striking because it feels like such a lie. There are ways that I judge and think harsh thoughts and feel impatient in ways that are probably ableist and deeply unfair of me. I am by no means doing my job perfectly.

I’m not getting into that self-flagelation tonight. It’s too late to go down that road.

I just need to think about the fact that sometimes when I can’t love myself I allow myself to be carried forward by the force of the regard of other people. I don’t particularly go for “likes” but I have a deep and intense respect for the people I allow to judge me. For the vast majority of human beings on this planet, I don’t give a flying fuck how you judge me because you are not actually seeing what happens. You are not a reliable narrator. If you actually know me then you can judge me based on the interactions we have had, but not that many people have spent much time with me. There are just a few.

The people I have kept close for a decade and a half, or a quarter of a century are people who have enormous wells of experience with me and my family and they have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. They get to judge me and when I fuck up they call me to the carpet.

It’s kind of funny how these power dynamics and social dynamics work because it’s not as if this judgment comes without strife. I have simply decided that for whatever reason I am willing to accept that strife as a sign of love in that relationship. They would not bother to say this to me if they did not have deep love for me.

Except when they tell me that I am Borderline during fights.

If I am at all honest I am partially leaning on my triad because it allows me to fill my bucket enough for me to go deal with all of the other places where I am in some sort of position to feel like I need to share the resources I have in ways that benefit folks. A lot of the in-person stuff is hard because my life is not shaped like most folks. My time comes in different shapes and blocks than average in many ways and it makes it hard to get the requisite hours to become a friend at this age.

I do have a few young friends in town but with all of them the level of filters is still pretty high. I have talked about myself more with them than other people around here but I’m not random California neighbour casual yet. Oh my god it’s so different. I find myself struggling to be as reserved as is appropriate here.

Dude, just go to bed.

Another day in the ramping up to a race life

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22 miles of bike riding today. It’s my cross training day. That was three trips to town.

I went over first thing for a chiropractic appointment and my neck is much better. It is still fucked up and hurting but I have more like 75% of my normal rotation rather than 30%. I told him that I do not expect miracles from medical providers but rather incremental improvement over what I can do on my own. I am not interested in the sort of aggressive treatment you might expect for someone who has a sudden acute issue. This is all chronic and long-term. I am going to be in pain until I die. Sometimes it is bad/irritating enough I ask for some help. But I can’t be in there all the time looking for relief–I won’t get that much relief. It is not in the cards for me. Chasing that is futile and a waste of energy.

At least the grinding cracking isn’t still happening?

Then I went home to get Shorty and we rode over to Jenny’s and grabbed her and her daughter and we rode back over to the leisure centre and we swam for a while. (I wasn’t actually “swimming” most of the time. I was being active supervision for Shorty as she splashed around in very shallow water. Then we had lunch. Then I lost the key to my bike. I ran back and forth across the parking lot in a panic. Thankfully someone found it in the cafe. Phew. Time to ride home.

Then I went back to town and rode around with Critical Mass then went to the queer gathering for a few hours. I had a really great time. I like a lot of the folks I’m meeting. I feel very comfortable around most of them. It was kind of funny when someone said something about how it would be nice to host gatherings in people’s homes but that means it is always limited to just a couple of people because everyone lives in small houses. I sidled right in and said, “Have I mentioned that I sold a house in California for an obscene amount of money and I moved here and bought a very large house? My lounge is almost as big as the lobby of the hotel we are standing in.” A dude who has been to my house said, “She isn’t lying. I’ve seen her house.” Then the other people in the conversation just about did the Mr. Burns hands thing.

I’ve been talking to one of the organisers of this year’s Highland Pride that will happen in town. I am thinking that it would be really awesome if our family contributed a space. I would like to get a really big tent, bean bags, a whole bunch of noise cancelling head phones, a low table with drawing supplies, probably a big pile of stuffed animals, a small bookshelf with a selection of easy to pick up graphic novels and food and water. It will be the chill zone for people who are overstimulated in the main event. I mean, California hippies have to represent–don’t we?

In those brief periods at home I did two loads of laundry and read lots of books to Shorty. All things considered it is probably good that I am not going anywhere this weekend. I have a bunch of stuff I want to get done. I am going to have a very busy summer. I have three Americans coming over in the summer. In June it will involve me putting together a teaching itinerary for my buddy. I’m grateful the July/August bits will be a lot more hanging out. Pride is happening in July and that’s going to be a big burst of energy. That’s a lot of time distracted from my life. I need to put in the time really paying attention to the kids before then so they don’t feel neglected. Gotta fill those buckets.

Sobonfu told me that I was never going to find a community that I fit into. I was going to have to make my own. I’m trying.

Now I’m finally getting sleepy. Time to go to sleep.

Reasons for monogamy x-post

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I had a really funny conversation with my massage therapist. I like her quite a bit. She’s a little more than 10 years older than me and when we get to talking about parenting philosophy or health topics or general views on religion we are like two peas in a pod. I’ve been seeing her for over a year now and she’s quite skilled body worker. She keeps me from locking up too much. She also does a whole bunch of other skills like podiatry and acupuncture because she learns whatever her clients need. She absolutely wants a whole book list from me on Ehlers Danlos treatment. She just needs to finish the 18 month course she has been on the whole time I’ve known her before she can start them. She never stops learning. I really like and admire her. She could be a friend. I have a history of that with my body workers. I like people and if I’m going to spend a lot of time with them professionally I usually start crossing the border to social as well. Or I can’t stay with that professional.

I told her about the classes I am going to help my buddy with because she asked what I’ve been up to and it was a rare child-free visit. I went for it. I explained the types of classes and mostly she just nodded her head and looked mildly scandalized but whatever floats people’s boats. She has been somewhat surprisingly open and frank and detailed about how very much she has enjoyed her marital sex life. I know a lot about their sex life so I’m willing to scandalize her a bit.

She latched on to the word polyamory and she told me that her son’s roommate is like that and she is very confused by it. I told her that I was actually living with a previous partner when I met husband and he had a serious girlfriend. She said, “Ok I guess that is fine for when you are just dating but once you got married surely that all stopped–didn’t it?”

I laughed and laughed. Oh honey, no. I told her about the people we dated while married before we had kids. I told her about the swinger parties. The friends we would occasionally hook up with when it seemed fun.

“But, but, but you were married you are only supposed to want that with your husband!”

I said, “You know how when you get married that doesn’t mean you never want to go see a movie with a friend or play a game of basket ball with friends–right?”

“Yes.”

“Well I don’t really like going to the movies and I suck at basket ball so having sex with them is a lot more fun.” She almost fell over laughing. She asked me if we are doing that since we moved here and I said we are not. I explained what couples privilege is. I asked her if she saw a spot in the life we lead where no one would notice or mind if husband and I started being out the necessary number of hours a week it would take to find quality people to bang.

Once again she laughed hard enough to fall sideways and have to catch herself. I felt like I was on a roll. She asked if I thought we would ever sleep with someone else again and I said we might. Life is long.

Then she told me about one time when she was away at a conference a man tried very hard to pick her up. She was absolutely appalled and horrified that a married man would do that. Then she found out that he usually has a few people on the side at all times because why would anyone want to settle for just one partner for the rest of their lives?

I told her that the horrified feeling she gets at the idea of not being 100% monogamous is entirely absent from my life. I am as naturally monogamous as a cat in heat. I choose monogamy for strategic reasons. She then told me that she learns so very much from our conversations.

Then she asked about the scabs on my arms and I got to explain about the photo shoot we did. Once again she could not work for a bit until she got her laughing under control. She says we are all crazy.

Sure. Why not?

Every time I come in she schedules me extra far out so she can get me in on the pacing I like the best. She says she absolutely cannot wait until our next appointment every time I see her.

I don’t know that it will ever be ok to be as fully out here as I was in California but people who are going to be that close to my body frequently need to be people who can handle going from trauma to injury detail to hilarious sex stories without feeling too freaked out. If you work with my body I’m going to have to talk about my body and it has been through a lot. I can tell you which flinch comes from what thing in the past.

The old friends I would absolutely fuck again if the opportunity arose were there before I knew how to talk about my body. Many of them helped me develop the words because they cared and asked me questions. We put in years of relationship work to get to where “Wanna come over for the weekend to fuck then go home and not see each other for a decade?” feels like the continuing beat of a long ago favorite song. I don’t have the time or ability to go through that process with anyone new and I am not going to any decade soon. And I negotiated away the right to ask for it, anyway. I don’t think I’m going to explain that part to her though. That somehow seems like something that might cross the line from “Aren’t you wacky” to “Are you ok and do you need help getting away from that man?”

Y’all. I used to write about kinky shit on Facebook and my dentist would leave comments. I was out.

Here husband and I had a conversation about the fact that as long as he wants to do the work he does we should not play in public. We are not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

The closet is weird.

Emotional hangover

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My whole body aches and feels overwhelmed and dizzy and crappy because I’m having so many emotions. Emotions about lots of people and lots of situations.

The kink community up here is getting big enough/active enough that sometimes there are conflicting opinions and desires. That doesn’t mean anyone is a bad guy or that anyone is doing something that is wrong. I am trying to learn how to effectively communicate and so far I’m not great. I can pinpoint exactly where I was trying to communicate and it sails right past people. That feels bad. That feels like discounting when it isn’t.

It isn’t that someone noticed that I was trying to communicate a thing and said no. The way I was communicating was ineffective and it wasn’t understood that I was trying to say a thing so stuff went in a different direction. That’s reasonable.

But I spent like two weeks trying to figure out how to talk about a thing and I had to spin my wheels very hard and by the time I figured out how to say it the response was, “You should have said this earlier.” I tried. I can point at exactly where I tried and you didn’t hear me. Part of the reason the communication failed is because I was trying to speak as if no one has authority and we are trying to start from scratch and you are used to authority and you just went about your business making decisions without consulting.

It’s an overall apathetic group of people and if you want stuff done you need to make decisions. I get that. That is a really common dynamic. This is such a small group that I was hoping for something more leaderless. I’m not specifically gunning for being the boss. I don’t have that to give.

Our water is off and on because the construction up the hill knocked out a water pipe and it’s not going very well. It has made everything annoying and complicated in our house for two days now.

I had a thing where a friend scheduled a thing then couldn’t make it at the last minute and in this post-Sarah life of mine I am absolutely shit at handling this. T and I had a thing I don’t know how many months ago where for a little while his life got super hectic and he started being flakey about our chats and I shut down and couldn’t speak to him about it for weeks because I didn’t want to explode or completely over react and my feelings about last minute cancellation are fucking huge. I try not to have these feelings. Most of the time I can handle the fact that life has unexpected changes but it’s not easy for me. I set expectations around a thing happening and then when it doesn’t I feel a whole bunch of really overwhelming feelings in a rush and I want to go to my room and climb into bed and not come out for days.

I don’t have space for that in my life. I don’t get to check out mentally for days at a time. I don’t get a lot of undisturbed rest. I get a lot more than I used to, but these things are not easy.

It’s Tommy’s birthday this weekend and that’s bothering me more this year than it does some years. I feel really sad. He would be 47 this year. Only he never got older than 22. He’s been dead a fair bit longer than he was alive. His whole story arc is so sad and tragic and unfair.

My ADHD meds ran out and I apparently don’t get a refill until after some medical tests that aren’t scheduled till next month. So I’m going on and off amfetamines and that’s not exactly ideal for emotional regulation and getting chores done.

We tried to reassign chores. Then a few really expensive wool items of clothing got washed. I’m doing the fucking laundry again and forever after because washing my fucking wool is not ok.

I’m spotting on day 14 of my cycle and that’s not normal. It feels bothersome and emotional in a way I don’t like. I assume it is related to the increase in running lately but it’s always emotionally uncomfortable to me. Day 14 is usually way too early for the PMDD cycle of ugh and crappy to be starting but it sorta feels like I am tanking emotionally and I have no resiliency left.

I feel like shit. I feel sad and lonely and incompetent and stupid and bad at everything. I feel empty and hopeless.

I feel really good when I am out running. I feel fully in my body and alive and strong. Then I come down from the euphoria and I want to crawl under a rock.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: adult-only

Working up to the letter

Understanding masculinity

Where is the balance?

I never have to worry again about looking for that.

Deck

Being challenged is good.

This is a little weird

The Reckoning

The trouble with willpower

Gardening progress

Lay out the plan then follow it.

Fuck your measurements

The gurus

Jot down some notes then get up

Little Monster, Big Monster

Another day

I should be talking to me more.

Another day in the ramping up to a race life

Reasons for monogamy x-post

Emotional hangover