Further to my last post, the friends I do want to keep close are nearly all in some sort of depressive/emotional crisis. Most of them are externalizing it too, which means they're still in the "the world is objectively terrible and so I have to be emotionally destroyed and nothing can be done" which is-- I mean, that's where it's depression and not ( Read more... )

It's cooler out than expected and breezy, every leaf shimmering with movement. We've had a relatively hot several days so the cool is welcome; it gives me time to get more water into the ground before another round of heat. Forecast temperatures of 2C above the recorded highs for the area have shown up, though they keep the same distance day by day ( Read more... )

First sunburn. I'm blaming the vaccine for this one, I've been outside the same amount of time (over work lunch) every weekday for the past couple months, there's definitely something going on with my body not renewing itself properly.

At least my hands have mostly stopped hurting.

Vaccine seems to be taking me apart piece by piece: the first day after, my vaccine arm hurt. The second day after, my other arm hurt. Now my finger joints have been really painful for the last couple days. What it mostly feels like is that my body isn't recovering when I use those muscles or joints, so they go into overuse/strain territory. ( Read more... )

Yesterday I got my first covid shot-- everyone seems to be dividing themselves by brand of shot, which is weird to me, but for my own records it was the moderna one.

I'm definitely having a response to it-- my arm hurts enough that its use is limited, and chores aren't my favourite right now -- carrying buckets of water and grain and whatnot. I'm ( Read more... )

One of the hardest thing about the pandemic has been how folks who'd previously been in the "bad social structures lead to bad outcomes for individuals" folks have turned into "these individuals are evil people choosing to hurt us all and should be hurt in turn" and "I did the thing, so everyone else should be able to".

I get that folks are scared ( Read more... )

The cold that I was sorta-hoping to avoid is coming. Weather report says down to -32C by Wednesday, and we'll approach that tonight. The outside water tap was frozen this morning, it was thawed by noon so I fixed the angle of the inside pipe (the frost-free taps require a certain angle inside and mine gets wonky sometimes) and brought in several ( Read more... )

Wrote a thing on fb. Copied here. This is a public face but still:

Ok, I can talk about mental health.

I'm an external processor: I talk to figure things out. I have been keeping a journal for almost two decades for some of this, but I also need to talk to actual people to work things out. Lately I've been trying to work out my gender stuff (while ( Read more... )

I've spent a lot of time here with the animals over the last few years. Most of my emotional or intimate contact is with them -- intimate in the sense of showing the self and being shown, intimate in the sense of shared experiences, and intimate in the sense of shared time and daily routine.

Animals know their boundaries and they communicate them. ( Read more... )

This morning I am thinking about how covid emphasizes and intensifies close connections that people already have, and de-emphasizes and prevents new connections and connections outside our existing groups.

I've heard about this in the poly community where primary or live-in relationships tend to be the ones to survive when contacts need to be cut or ( Read more... )