It's Only A Paper Rose

I'm sorry. I really want to do a proper writeup of how the Bike MS ride went down, and my trip to Jersey, and thoughts on my new job (did I mention I was taking a new job?), but between travel and work and new employee orientation and financial stress and job change stress and dealing with a sick cat and dealing with the various emotions surrounding the sick cat I frankly don't have a lot in me right now. This week has literally been:

--drive for seven hours, stay in hotel
--drive for five and a half hours (and get snipped at by a hotel manager while on the turnpike for 'destroying' their towel because apparently they're incapable of washing out a little hair-dye rub-off, despite my home washer and literally every other hotel's doing it just fine?)
--unpack and go to guitar lesson that evening, then try to get some sleep because next morning is
--new employee orientation and headshot photos for the gym I'll be working at
--new private client in the evening (who was lovely)
--two hour callout next morning that turns into three; I'm not sad about the extra money but it means
--biking home in a thunderstorm, grabbing the car, and probably getting a ticket from a red light camera rushing to my next appointment (so much for the extra money)
--second new private client (who was also lovely)

which brings us to this morning, when I have another callout (woo for hauling my table down four floors of stairs!).

Interspersed with all of this has been trying to keep up with paperwork for the new job and the new clients, trying to get antibiotics and food into a cat who's increasingly hostile towards both, as well as two separate arguments with Brian in two days. (He's facing down some stress at work as well as (bless his Japanese heart) taking on basically all the mental responsibility for increased expenses, and he's never been good with the prospect of loss (but then, who is?). We're working through it, but given how rarely we usually argue it's been a distinct sign of how Much everything is getting to be.)

It's also occurred to me that, since I've quit CorePower for real, one of my primary coping mechanisms is gone. So that's rough.

Obviously this is all temporary. I'll start and settle into the new job and be bringing in some extra cash. Brian's work stress and Dexter's eating disorder will eventually shake out one way or another. Pretty soon my complimentary gym membership should kick in and I'll get back to working out regularly. And for all that Brian and I are arguing, we're still communicating, which is the important thing in the long term.

Just, if I seem a little more absent/stressed out than usual, this is what's up, and I'm sorry.

(On the upside, I at least posted some pictures from the ride to Tumblr. It was a beautiful day and I had an amazing time. Thank you again to everyone for your support.)

How I found the queer Christian experience in Good Omens

Aziraphale’s position looks very familiar to those of us clinging to non-affirming churches. He represses and is reluctant to act upon desires that he believes to be inconsistent with his identity as one of the ‘good ones’ {...} But he wants to think the best of a heaven that doesn’t really understand or accept him, because surely, by definition, they are in the right? He wants to keep his hands clean and fit in, he can’t allow himself to whole-heartedly pursue a relationship he feels is forbidden to him {...} Crowley’s story, on the other hand, speaks to those of us who fall away from the church entirely — he falls not so much out of wanting to, but because it was the only way to be honestly himself. Forced out of a heaven that didn’t like him questioning things, he ends up hanging out with the crowd hostile towards it simply by default, and is expected to agree that nothing he left behind was worth keeping. {...} And yet he still feels a profound connection to his pre-Fall past...

It’s been a long time since I identified as Christian, but this speaks strongly to my experience in large groups/organizations. I tend to carefully think through assumptions and rules and ethics, which makes me a bad candidate to join any group, because I’m unlikely to just sit and accept whatever tenets create the group identity (whether explicit or implicit)—I’m the one who always pokes at things and asks uncomfortable questions.

It's a useful skill, but it makes me feel more than a little guilty sometimes, because people tend to be quite welcoming in these groups, and I always feel like I’m accepting their hospitality under false pretenses—like, hi, my name is Ambrosia and I’m almost certainly going to openly disagree with you at some point, I hope it doesn’t end up being over something that means we can’t be friends anymore?

And when I do leave a group, especially one that’s been a big part of my life, I still carry a huge chunk of their values with me. Often, I miss the sense of clarity and purpose that membership in that group brings.

I wonder if this is something everyone goes through.

There’s probably something ironic in having a date set with your not-quite-partner to say “I feel like you don’t have room for a relationship in your life right now”, only to have them cancel on you (again) and send a very nice email saying “I don’t feel like I have room for a relationship in my life right now.”

empathy win, I guess.

For the first time in months (if not years), I'm looking at my schedule for this week and it's...empty. I have my three yoga classes, I have a couple low-key social engagements this weekend, a haircut tomorrow, and...that's it. No massage bookings, no anatomy classes, no outstanding commitments.

It feels strange as heck.

I suspect my calendar will fill up as the week goes on—often people book massages in the same week if they can, for instance. But in the meantime, it's the sort of grey rainy gloomy day that's perfect for some hot tea and some reading and a little introspection.

Hello, Dreamwidth! This is mostly a flyby check-in to wave hi, and let everyone know I'm still alive; it has been A Week, my dudes. Some highlights (and lowlights):

• I had my quarterly assessment with my yoga studio manager, and she said many nice things about my teaching and how it's improved, as well as giving me some useful and on occasion thought-provoking feedback on both my skills and my role in the community.
• Teacher training has begun, and I'm getting a feel for how this group interacts.  So far things seem to be going well, although after holding Extended Side Angle pose for several minutes at a time during posture clinics, man was I sore.
• I've been participating in some 1k1h writing sprints (a scheduled time when you try to write 1000 words in an hour) on Tumblr, as well as holding a couple of my own, and have managed to write over 9000 words so far on my holiday exchange fic.  Assuming I stick to the vague outline I have in my head, I'd say I'm about two-thirds done with the rough draft.  (Given that the minimum is 1000 words, somebody's getting a heck of a Christmas present, haha.)  It's been interesting—the person I was matched with has very different general preferences from mine, so finding the areas of overlap and ways to mesh the two is turning out to be a helpful writing exercise, I think.
• Concurrently, I have been falling off on my guitar practice—frustratingly, it seems like I only have room for one of the two in my life right now.  I'm hoping that now that yoga is slowing a bit (TT is only one evening a week rather than three, and after this week one of my classes is dropping off the schedule) I'll be able to devote more time to it.  I heard an acoustic cover of "When Doves Cry" in class yesterday that gave me Ideas.
• I managed to drop my Apple Watch on the tile floor of the studio locker room and smash the face.  Augh!  I have very mixed feelings about whether or not I want to replace it—I can get a replacement for $229, or get the shiny new model for $400.  But it's technically a luxury item—one that I use regularly in my line of work, but hardly a necessity.  And an expensive one to boot. 
• And probably the biggest news: Yesterday I got my new tattoo!  I am so incredibly thrilled with how it came out—totally worth the three-plus hours of work (even the last twenty or thirty minutes of teeth-gritting).  Here's hoping the aftercare works as well as last time and it heals just as beautifully.

Life continues apace, let us all get out there and seize it!  And wrestle that sucker to the ground so we can have a moment's rest before the next challenge.  We hope.

Today I wore wings in my ears for flight
And Dragon Girl lipstick: war paint, warning.
My hair combed careful, plumage dyéd bright
A warmth against the chill air of morning.

Today I took the train and saw imbued
The anger borne of centuries of compliance.
Our feathers ruffled even as we brood
Preparing for the heat of our defiance.

Today our cageless life does not suffice;
We struggle upward, jesses taut and strained.
The twisting twinge of freedom, froze in ice
But stokes within us fire long sustained.

Be warned: beneath fine feathers, bright-bead eyes
Our dragons’ claws drip scarlet from the skies.

After years of assiduously avoiding it (not out of any prejudice, just, I already felt like I spent enough time on social media), I've finally started using Tumblr. I'm still figuring out the interface (hot tips welcome!), and I'm kind of amused that I've apparently started using it just in time for a good chunk of the userbase to get fed up and start actively looking for other options, but so it goes.

I don't know if anyone here's on Tumblr, but if you want to follow me, I'd love to have you. Fair warning, though, I'm basically using it as an idea board for various creative endeavors, so you can expect to see a lot of The Lost Boys content on there for the foreseeable future. Though possibly also some more general writing- and music-related stuff, too...

As for my many and varied creative endeavors, they're continuing. I've been keeping up guitar practice more consistently than I have at any time since coming to Chicago. I'm about 25K words into the Giant Fanfic Project of Doom, which feels like Not Very Much given how long I've been plugging away at it (life has a tendency to get in the way), but at the same time it's more than I've ever done on any non-NaNo project and it feels more coherent than any of my NaNo projects, so I'm pleased overall. I'm also, now, revising a 4K word side story that might also be a birthday/thank-you/I-really-like-you present for Sky, my writer-friend. It takes place in the same universe as the main story and informs some of the events, so I'm calling it background development and totally not a distraction, heh. Plus, it's given me the opportunity to play around with a more lyrical voice; I went to see a couple of truly amazing author friends read at a fiction salon when they were in town and came away inspired, even if I'm light-years away from their level. I also have an invite from the folks running the salon to come back each month, which I may well do—they have open mic slots after their featured readers, and more than one person there told me how helpful it was with motivation to have that community expecting something new. Which sounds very much like what I need to keep going consistently...though regular attendance may need to wait for after teacher training.

Related, I've been coming to terms with the fact that my spare time in my current life is much more limited than it used to be. In a lot of ways, that's a net positive—I find I'm much more focused when I have something I want to accomplish in a small amount of time, rather than finding the days stretching before me with plenty of time to faff about on Facebook or what have you. But it also means that the number of plates I can spin at once is...limited. Last week Brian was out of town, and after several days on a creative binge doing very little but working and writing and playing guitar, I was beginning to feel a little depressed. I spent some time folding laundry and listening to a Billy Joel record, and when I flipped it over, "Vienna" came on, and man, I swear it was like Billy was singing straight to my soul. "Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true..." I was legit crying.

There's something about creativity that's more than a bit druglike. From the outside, it's more than a little puzzling, but the more you do it, the more you want to do, and the more frustrated you get with your limitations. (Or I do, anyway.) As I was saying to Sky, it's a good thing I have a partner who's willing to say "hey, I need you to clean the kitchen and run these errands that're piling up"...otherwise I'd probably turn into one of those Parisian expatriate authors who lives in a garret and spends weeks subsisting on absinthe and cocaine and the occasional croissant from the coffeeshop downstairs, heh. (Which would probably have me in a blood sugar coma within a couple of days, so, best that I don't!) So I'm working on life balance, too...which is probably going to be a lifetime's work.

I have very little to contribute on the topic of the news right now. But I get the feeling we could all use some cheering-up, so here's a mildly embarrassing anecdote:

( Off-color content ahead. )

On the upside, I can attest that Lelo's toys are supremely well-designed both inside and out, so...if you're looking to invest, I highly recommend them!

Closing went without a hitch, although goddamn that was a lot of signatures. Directly afterward, Brian and I went to Abt (a local home electronics superstore, like Best Buy if they had competent salespeople) and bought a stove hood and a new washer and dryer. (I am ridiculously thrilled about this, which I think means I'm officially an adult now, heh.) It's not like there's been anything wrong with the ones we've had in this place, but with the amount of laundry I do on a regular basis, having a set of high-efficiency front-loading machines is going to be amazing. Quieter, less water/energy use, less wear and tear on clothes and sheets. Plus, they had the electric dryer for the set I was looking at on the "display/return" rack for something like $300 off. Score!

This morning I went over and picked up the truly staggering number of keys we'd been left (the building was built in 1920 and there are a lot of doors in the common areas), and let the flooring guys in to begin the process of refinishing the floors. I also chatted with our nearest neighbors who have the balcony next to ours; they were thrilled to hear about the new washer/dryer, since the one that's currently there looks like it dates to the late 1970s and is apparently one of the few things they can hear from their unit. We'd met them before when we did the walkthrough, and I'm happy to report that they seem like sensible people; condo associations are always a crapshoot, and I suspect I sensed no small relief on their part after we chatted a bit and set off no immediate "oh man these people are crazy" alarms. (Which, given Brian's job, is something of a surprise...although one of them is a special agent for the FBI, so maybe somewhat less of one than might be otherwise, haha. We've already agreed that we need to have dinner some night so she and Brian can compare NDAs.) They've dropped some hints that other members of the association are perhaps slightly less sane, but we'll see if it's the kind of crazy we can work with. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, we've taken the past couple of days to recuperate, but packing is definitely looming. It feels so strange; we've lived here in our little rental for over four and a half years, which makes it the longest we've stayed in any place ever. It's been our first home in Chicago, and a damn good one to boot...and in exactly one week we're going to be moving to a whole other place, where we intend to stay a good decade or longer. It doesn't quite yet feel real, despite the thousands of signatures we've written promising to pay for it, heh.

I'm going to miss this place. But that's why I wanted to wait until we found a new one that I wasn't just okay with, but thrilled about—as much as I'm sad to leave this one, I can't wait to see how our new home comes out.

To continue from last night's post: after years of admiring, I finally broke down and purchased a Kindle Oasis; not only are the ergonomics, faster processor, and higher-density screen meaningful upgrades over my several-years-old Paperwhite, it's waterproof for bath time! I have proceeded to name it Champagne Supernova. (There's a bit of Big Data I'd love to have: how many people have registered their Oases with Amazon under the name "Wonderwall".)

Project Keepon Reading is proceeding in fits and starts. It's weird to realize that something I usually think of as a pleasurable activity actually takes a certain amount of mental focus; usually it's low enough that I don't even notice it, but between home-buying and the Giant Writing Project of Doom, my mental spoons have been almost entirely spoken for lately. I'll open a book, read a couple of pages, and realize I don't remember any of it because my brain is entirely elsewhere. The time I usually spend listening to audiobooks is almost entirely taken up by music and character-playlist-making, both to keep up enthusiasm for writing and because it helps keep me from obsessing over budgets and HOA documents and closing procedures. I haven't even sat down at the piano in a week. I'm hoping that once home-buying and moving are done with (a week and a half to closing, two and a half until we start moving in), that'll return some mental spoons, but for now I think I'm more focused on what's directly in front of me.

As to the GWPoD, I spent a couple of weeks on the outlining/character sketches/scrapbooking phase, then realized I was putting off the actual writing part; perfectionism strikes again! I think writing (and re-writing, and re-re-writing) the slashfic that sparked this whole thing was a good preparatory experience. For so much of my life I've felt like my writing was a failure if it didn't come out perfectly (or near enough to only need minor edits) on the first go, so of course I had to have everything envisioned perfectly in my head before I could even start putting words down. No wonder I only ever wrote short stories. I'm at 4600 words now, almost all of which are likely to be cut, and I'm actually okay with that. I've been taking a cue from Chuck Wendig and thinking of my words as building material. (Using Scrivener helps with this, since each scene is a separate document with attached notes that can be moved around at will.) Once I have enough bricks to start building a structure, then I can worry about things like arc and theme and tone; maybe the final structure will look way different than I'm envisioning it now, and that's okay.

I've never tried writing this way before, and it's oddly freeing, even if I do occasionally freak out about how much time and effort I'm 'wasting'. We'll see how it goes long-term...some part of me is curious as to whether I'll still be this enthusiastic about it in a couple of months, or whether my enthusiasm is a coping mechanism to deal with the house-buying stress.