Menagerie of Dickmonsters

I'm back from the writing convention. It was fun. I learned a lot. One of my friends brought homemade mead and shared it. (It tastes like beeswax candles turned into a drink--in a good way.) It was absolutely surreal to be treated with respect while still being a queer person and being open about writing erotica. Frankly, this has made me resolve to avoid tumblr. Sure, I'll turn on notifications for the people I actually care about seeing (more than I already have done), I'll queue some cats, I'll make hot takes on the SJ blog, and I'll check the activity pages, but at this point I'm actively avoiding the dashboard unless I have literally nothing else to do. I haven't gone in tags except from misclicks in months. It's not just the sexual harassment from bigots--it's also that the app loses your place on the dashboard at the slightest whim--using a browser, sometimes when loading a link inside the app, queuing a post instead of reblogging it--and the desktop site slows down horribly after a couple dozen posts when endless scrolling is turned on and takes forever to load each new page when it isn't. If I could set the posts per dashboard page to 100 instead of 20, I would mind less. Maybe there's an xkit extension I could make for that?

But, you know, it's also that I don't like being called a pedophile just for being a queer person who writes erotica and supports others' right to do so. (At least they've mostly stopped calling me an antisemite and a Nazi--to be fair, most of these people can't possibly have even guessed my heritage, without a last name--but only because calling me a child molester is more powerful, and more of a homophobic stereotype.) No matter how many people I block, I keep seeing it happen to my friends, too. I don't want to give these people up, simply because they use the same blogs for politics as for personal stuff. Fortunately, most of those are on a Discord server that I usually check frequently. (Not the last few days, because con.)

I mostly lost touch with a good friend a couple years ago, because they left tumblr, in much the same manner as I slowly am now. It was the ace discourse that did it. I don't blame them for not putting up with it. I just searched their username on Twitter, but all that's coming up is posts shared from tumblr. I'm trying to message them on Pidgin now (I figured an email or a public fic comment would be too awkward). And then I thought I got a ping, but then it turn out to be F-List, because I'd forgot to set my tentacle monster character's status as "do not disturb." (RPing as that character takes a lot of work, and I'm doing other things right now. Like this post.) I'm just also worried that I'll lose people if I leave tumblr. And then I worry I should take up WordPress again, but then I remember that I didn't interact with many people there and only lost one person I actually cared about when I stopped posting--there were a couple others, but they had tumblrs. I still follow one of them. And I could log back in and read my feed; I was mostly just a reader, not interacting in a "mutuals" sort of way. I wonder if I could somehow get that WP feed in my DW feed. I need to find more people to follow, here.

It's just...six years. I've had tumblr for going on six years. My current account is only 2 years old, but the other one was made in January 2013. I was there before the site had rebloggable asks and when it still auto-shortened links. And its interface was always trash, but after Yahoo bought it, after monetization became a thing, I watched it turn into a harassment hellfire. I got a reprieve of a year by being too burnt out for discourse for most of 2015, but it's just gone down the shitslide, and I know it won't come back. This always happens. It will happen to Amino, too, and that and the NBphobia in its queer spaces and the fact that everyone is in high school and its stupid all-or-nothing login incentives are why I haven't gotten into it. (Plus, it doesn't allow adult content. That puts a crimp in my usual style.) Sure, it's good now, but eventually they'll run out of startup funding and start adding banner ads. Collectivization of websites is the only way to prevent them from going to shit, and that's why I'm posting here and not on WordPress. Even though I liked WordPress. Maybe I can set it to autopost from DW to there? (And clean up my theme, while I'm at it. I made it sometime in the 12-13 school year and I'm pretty sure it's hideous.) I'm just mad at seeing the site die, at watching user experience be sidelined in the name of money, with execs never knowing when to stop before it kills the site, and of course having golden parachutes and myths of obsolescence ready for when it does crash. Oh, it'll carry on for a few years yet, but it will stop being central, especially to fandom and queerness. Twitter is clearly the politics platform, as ill-equipped as it is to be; the Orange Menace is not on tumblr. It is also usable as a shallow fandom platform, and with the rise of Discord and the existence of AO3, tumblr simply isn't necessary for fandom clusters. DeviantArt and Pixiv are for imagesharing and hosting, and DW is another place for fics and social interaction. I'll still miss tumblr, though, when it finally becomes irrelevant. It could have been good. The dashboard was genius. But privacy and interface always sucked, and the only reason it got so popular in the first place was the lack of similar alternatives--and Twitter's (then) 140 character limit and lack of image prioritization.

I've heard about these kind of site deaths before, and expected more of them, but I've never seen one. And now Tumblr and Facebook (which at least I rarely used) are on the verge of decline. Already the "mom platform," FB is not going to weather the privacy scandals now. Older users will hang on, but teens and young adults, at least in the US, will be reluctant to get on board. If you need a virtual phonebook to keep tabs on an acquaintance from college, there's LinkedIn, which nobody uses as an actual social platform anyway, just to apply for jobs. I'll miss some things, but I can't say that any of what I miss will be from after 2014, honestly. And tumblr was toxic then, I just didn't know it yet, and verbal abuse is a slow poison.

God, what was I originally going to talk about? The writing convention. I speed-wrote a piece for a workshop I hadn't realized I could attend, fleshed out a response to Innsmouth on the fly more than I'd ever done in the past (still don't know when I'll be ready to write it, but it'll probably be a novella), and then the next day I went to a workshop on how to break into traditional publishing markets. I don't actually remember much about most of the panels, except for the one where a white woman my mom's age was appallingly white and self-centered when the topic was supposed to be about the dehumanization of "killable bodies" as racial coding. No one cares if your ancestors are Nazis, Lisa--why are you so strongly identified with said Nazis, anyway? I can't dare ask my grandpa why he assimilated, but I suspect it's because of people like that, hmm? She got banned from the con, though. And there was also a workshop on silicone molding, with a focus on dildos, though it didn't involve any actual crafting. And I suggested that the con's methods of feeding large numbers of people involve an always-available pot of white rice next year, which the organizers thought was genius (and I thought was obvious, because damn, I've cooked and worked in catering for how long?). But yeah, mostly people were just nice and non-judgemental. I was safe, for a few days, if very far from home and dependent on a shitty bus company to get back. And I still don't have a job, except on paper, and I need to formally quit that one because I'm moving. But I think the con went well. Hopefully next year I'll be able to go again, and maybe I'll have learned to drive and obtained a vehicle and will be able to get there my own self. (Or like, to Iowa by myself, to bother my friends' cats, and carpool the rest of the way there. That is, if I don't make enough writer friends in Texas to split a hotel room with.) And I found out that cheese curds are good--they're like really salty cheesesticks but not individually wrapped, so they don't get all weird--and I wish I'd been able to bring some back. I hope I get to go next year. Money willing.

I'm going to a writing convention at the end of the month. That means I need a name. The sort that doesn't sound ridiculously pretentious when you write it on a name tag. "Sanguinifex" won't do, because it's just too edgy (rather by accident) and difficult to pronounce. "Periegesis" is similarly pretentious and hard for anyone but me to spell and pronounce, and it doesn't abbreviate well. I can't use "Chris" anymore; it's too, well, Christian for me to be comfortable with it, for several months now. (I chose it because it was gender neutral, originally, but it doesn't have a long form, which was always a problem, and then there's the etymology.) I don't really want people calling me by my birthname, because I don't want them to think I'm cis and also nobody pronounces it right; also, what if there are photos?

So I need to find another name. I've got two weeks.

1. It needs to be visibly gender-neutral.
2. It needs to be the right color, because synesthesia is a pain in the ass. Raspberry-jello red. That means probably starting with A, C, K, (M), R, or S. Whether any of those will work will depend on the other letters in the word, particularly vowels.
3. It needs to go with my last name, which I am proud of and won't change.
4. It needs to be fairly short--definitely no more than 3 syllables--or easily abbreviate to such.
5. It needs to be not particularly religious, nor one of Those Names That 90% Of Trans Dudes Have. (You know the kind.)

And I need to do this, and also get my registration in order. And then I have to tell the people I'm going with what to call me. (I also need to ask one of them whether they prefer their given name or their AO3 handle, actually.) I don't really want to have to pick anything, but I've been putting this off for months.

What galls me is I've known I was trans for years, at this point. I should be past this whole picking out names thing by now--I'm not the type to switch names a lot. There's this sort of "your chosen name is your real name/is valid" sort of thing that goes around in mainstream trans communities, and there's nothing that addresses "what if you're wrong about what your name is, and it takes you several years to figure out"? It's weird that I feel guilty about this, because I never have about similar things, it's just that I felt so certain, once--and indeed, it suited pretty much all my current criteria except point 5, and also the minor problem of only being neutral as a diminutive, unless I spelled it in a way that looked wrong. I just feel like a should have known. And I feel even worse for being glad that financial circumstances meant that I couldn't really transition, because of the name thing, because of it eventually turning out that masculinity actually wasn't going to be the "better" option for me, because of all the reasons that cis people would use to justify mandatory gatekeeping. And I don't want to be the sort of person who has new pronouns every week or whatever, because if that persists past a few months you're just a flighty jerk, really; at a certain point one should settle on something just for decency's sake. (The idea that pronouns are supposed to be a perfect encapsulation of one's gender as opposed to merely a common placeholder that isn't wrong really irks me. I'll use what people want, because I'm not a dick, but it's linguistically stupid to try to make the language have much more than three animate pronouns. "They" for "both/neither" should be plenty, and much else is a strain on reading comprehension. I just recognize that most people with superfluous pronouns unfortunately have more gender feelings than linguistic awareness, or than a sense of looking out for nonbinary people as a whole in the long term. I don't judge unless I think someone has the linguistic education and foresight to know better, which is very seldom.)

This thing of "oh I thought it was this for five years; I was actually wrong." It's also that it will confuse all my friends (and it's hard enough to keep track of who's who on tumblr), and that some of the more ungenerous people will accuse me of accountability dodging for "being a pedophile"--aka, being a queer person who's unashamed of the word and thinks gatekeeping is suicidal and doesn't believe in censoring erotica. The Junior Log Cabin Republicans of tumblr are more than happy to take all the old libels and paint rainbow stripes on them, just to get an edge in a pointless argument or for a minor grudge, or because you wrote something and they didn't like it. It's completely fake, and they know it, but they do it because it doesn't matter if you're homophobic against a bad person, you see. And then, whatever I choose will likely become my literary name, so I'm likely to be stuck with it in some form or another, meaning it's a big choice.

But also, what if I'm wrong, again? The only thing I know about myself at this point is that nothing is certain. If there's a space between a binary, I"m probably there. I wish I didn't have to have a name, something bound to the core of my concept-self, because it eludes that, by nature. "Sanguinifex" is a mask, which is why I like it. It's also stupidly edgy (I just wanted a Dragon Age reference!) and doesn't and most people can't pronounce or spell it. It doesn't go with my last name at all. So I can't use it offline!

I was in Starbucks today, and this random dude said, "Hey, I noticed you have a cane, do you mind if I pray for you?" This kind of thing has happened to me before, only it was some kind of church scavenger hunt (in the B&N, for some reason) a couple years ago, so I knew he meant "kneel and pray right now." In the middle of a Starbucks. Which is exactly what their version of God says not to do--"When you pray, pray in secret," and all that. I also don't really want that version of God paying attention to me, if he exists, because I'm a licentious crossdressing bisexual homosexual and a "loose woman," to him. (Not that any of this would have stopped Actual Jesus, but it's Saint Paul who wrote over half the Epistles, and he was a massive jerk. Fuck you, Saint Paul.) Anyway, I told him it was fine if he wanted to try praying for me later at home (since God probably doesn't exist, so I'm willing to risk that much), but making a scene about it wasn't my style.

But like, holy shit, that's approximately the worst way to approach disabled people in public. Short of like, yelling straight up that I was a faker or something, which I fortunately haven't encountered yet, but probably will because I'm getting better and can walk almost normally without the damn crutch, for a little. (Enough to cook a simple meal, at home. Enough to take a shower or go to the bathroom, from my bedroom. Enough to make my bed. It still takes several times the effort it should. Even with the crutch I only get about 1000 feet before something in my heel spazzes up.) But I still need it for things like distances and stairs (which include curbs). But still, y'all Bible randos just approach anyone with an assistive device and put them on the spot like that, or is it only the ones who look under 50? Like, come on. That's just rude. And then you make it sound like I'm the rude one if I say no, or get pissed off. Makes me wish I could use Magic Gay Pheromones to repel Christians, Straight People, and other dangers to society, or to my latte.

But anyway, due to Starbucks' new data-gathering fuckery with their wifi, my computer couldn't connect to it (even after restarting; the redirect simply wouldn't load), I went to the other Starbucks in the B&N (again! also there are 3 Starbucks in this town within 1/4 mile of each other, and only one other coffee shop at all), which uses attwifi as its connect portal. I then proceeded to write bad neoclassical sex poetry, which required absolutely no internet. I probably could have walked all the way back home, too, but it was raining--not very heavily, but I'd be soaked through within a couple blocks. So I waited for my mom, and ate dinner.

It wasn't entirely a bad day.

On Tuesday, I got discharged from the rehab facility! I also can take pills instead of IVs now! No more IV port! (It didn't even look like Lieutenants Stammetts' on Star Trek. I was so disappointed by that.)

Of course, between having a doctor's appointment on the same day and packing up everything there, I crashed basically as soon as we got home. Yesterday, though, I made bean soup and a loaf of bread. It was fun to cook again. Almost nothing was seasoned quite the way I liked it at the rehab facility (I was there nearly 4 weeks!), and the bread there was terrible. The worst store brand wonderbread, and sometimes the whole wheat variety. Bread with actual texture is amazing. It's so simple, too. Difficult to hold the mixing fork, a bit, because nerve damage in that hand from crutches that assume everyone's thumbs work the same way, but I managed. ("Mixing fork?" It's a no-knead recipe, but one that actually rises in the same amount of time as normal bread. You mix it up like biscuits, but less gently. A large dinner fork with a thick handle is best; if you want to make bread like this but all your forks have thin handles, find a thrift store and buy a stocky fork of fuck-all.)

Today, I want to take a walk, but it's raining, and I'm not sure I can make it 3/4 of a mile (or a full mile, to go where I really want; I need some things from 5 Below) on one crutch. Or both crutches. Let alone back. I'm not sure where the ankle brace the injury clinic originally gave me is; I'd want that. (I have an idea, but who the hell knows if I'm right.) There are also things I need to do, that should be done during business hours, which is to say the next 3-4. But I feel like I can't focus on that without some exercise first. If I take my laptop, I will need to clean out my backpack (which I need to do anyway at somepoint, tbh) and it will be heavier. But then I could rest at the Starbucks (either on the corner or the one in the B&N) after shopping. But I could do that anyway. And the most urgent thing is just a phone call; the other is a thing that has to be emailed and what difference will one day make, it probably won't be handled by the recipient this week since it's already Thursday. Maybe best to see how far I can go with a lighter bag and just my phone, and of course the one crutch (as a cane; it's a forearm crutch) and an umbrella.

I'll have to get out of the house eventually. Except for the specific localization of the pain, I'm no worse off than I was this time in 2016. Definitely no weaker. I got myself strong again that time; I used Pokemon Go to motivate myself to walk places. I could do that today, if it weren't raining (one hand for the crutch, one hand for the umbrella; none for the phone), but honestly I just want a reliable charger cord and some fruit soda. Perhaps another pack of chapsticks. A sense of not being imprisoned. Little things I haven't had, since the end of February. It's been nearly two months.

I have an ankle brace to look for.

Edit: Found the ankle brace! Exactly where I thought it would be, too. Also all the clothes I was missing; I have laundry to do, later. This...might actually work.

I'd really hoped that almost dying would mean I'd skip my period, but nope, blood on the toilet paper. One day short of seven weeks from my last one, which is not out of normal range, for me. At most, it pushed it back a week or two--and the latter tracks perfectly with me being admitted to the hospital. It's five weeks, almost to the hour, since I came out of the first surgery and stopped dying and started getting better. Bodies are strange.

The real problem is I'm still on blood thinners, so it's probably going to last ten days or something. Ugh. And this is going to make physical therapy twice as hard (except maybe for stretching my Achilles back to normal), because teh uber-bendy dialed up to eleven. And I'm a black hole for calories and just had to ask the nurses for snacks at a quarter past three in the morning, because beef jerky and pretzels wasn't cutting it. (Not sure yogurt and chips will be much better, but at least it's different.) Breakfast is in four hours. I hope I'll sleep. I hope I'll wake up in time to eat it, too.

So, I did sprain my ankle. The sprain got infected. (Yes, that's possible.) There was a medical screwup that I'm not talking about too much because we're probably suing, but I had the infection for over a week before I finally got sent to the hospital. I had two surgeries. I'm on a shit-ton of antibiotics. I got digestive complications from the antibiotics and had to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops to get Pepto-Bismol and to get the hospital to stop trying to give me stool softeners. I got out of the hospital and into orthopedic rehab. I'm finally strong enough to sit up without support for more than about an hour, the last few days, and finally acquired an extension cord so I could actually use the laptop at the desk in my room. Spent yesterday doing lots of various kinds of paperwork. (May have to get a tax extension. Also need to appeal the workers' comp decision, because screw you, all your belief that the world doesn't work that way doesn't change what actually happened to me and that sort of thinking nearly killed me, also I did, in fact, sprain that at work.) Finally have time to post today. Everything hurts but I'm not dead! Not dead is currently a major achievement. Also feeling weirdly guilty that I can't go to a Seder, despite never having formally converted and having almost no religious education from that side of the family growing up. (It's basically because I've Had It with the Church.) And OhShit I have to write a recipe for someone on Patreon. I haven't been able to actually cook for a month. *headdesks internally, because externally there's too many sharp edges and also laptop.*

"I'm going to post regularly," I say, and then don't post for a month. It's a bad sign, as a writer, when a full keyboard feels strange under your fingers compared to a phone. Nothing more wrong with my computer than usual (it seems to think that its battery life is approximately five seconds), just too much happening. I haven't used it much except for games, in the last month. I should be applying to jobs. I'm moving to Texas in a month.

Wait, what? Yeah. My mom is, at the end of the school year, so I won't have this house, and she's fed up with me anyway. Keeps "forgetting" my allergies, and I don't know if it's deliberate or not, but anyway, it's a bad sign. So I need to get a job there, so I can be free of her. Maybe I can find a managerial job, this time. I don't know if I'm strictly *qualified,* but I fucking well can do it. What I can't do is survive warehouse (or retail, or food service) jobs much longer, because apparently part of having a normal hormonal cycle, for me, is tearing up all my joints one week out of five. Maybe if I go on birth control that'll fix it, but idk. But fast distance walking is inadvisable when your ankles supinate uncontrollably and your hips don't quite slot and your spine tries to bend in half backwards, and then I have to use my shoulders for this, too. This happened last month, too--about the same time my vitamin D levels finally got into the realms of normal, which apparently affects things. Because all this shit happened on a lesser basis before, but this is probably the first time in my life I've had anything resembling a normal adult female endocrine profile, especially while simultaneously doing high-impact physical activity. Four weeks out of five, I'm fine, but the fifth, I tear up all my joints and standing hurts after like ten minutes. I can feel it starting over a week ahead, a feeling like the difference between metal and green wood as I bend, but it doesn't really get bad until the bleeding starts. I simply can't take that much time off work and still pay bills. So I need to 1) get my fucking meds changed, since this is obviously tied to an exact point in my cycle, and 2) find a job which doesn't involve this much walking, which would probably be a good idea anyway. I can be kind of normal when I'm not actively bleeding out of my crotch, but I'm still a little extra bendy and injure things stupidly easily.

And my lungs are *finally* mostly over the incense from a month ago, now that the weather's finally *above freezing*. Still need to talk to my doctor about those meds, too, because obviously I have to go outside sometimes, and god is albuterol expensive. A steroid inhaler would probably be less expensive with my insurance and would mean I wouldn't have to use the other one as much.

I just hate existing as a flesh body sometimes? It's so much work. And it hurts most of the time. And my life is like grinding in a videogame constantly, only you never seem to level up and as soon as you get any loot, your equipment breaks and you need to replace it. My work pants are wearing out again. Bills are due next week. I very much want to and intend to stay alive, but this manner of existence sucks so much. How the fuck do I fucking get out of this?

I really don't like being scheduled for shifts less than 12 hours apart. I do like walking that mile between at night. Tonight, especially: it's 28 degrees out, warmer than it's been in two weeks, just into the range where I can breathe easily and the crunch of snow under my workboots is not so annoying. Everything is ambient streetlights and the moon and no brighter. I get to be really alone for once, and perhaps that's why I'm writing about it here, where likely no one will read it.

And...yep, sleepy now. I'll get four and a half hours of rest, if I want to be on time in the morning. Fuck capitalism.

(I told my youngest brother to cook instead of me, tomorrow, sp I could nap, and wrote him a recipe for ham and bean soup. Hopefully he'll remember to do that and manage to make it edible. You'd think it's pretty much impossible to fuck up something like that, but this kid's a goofball. Well, night.)

I guess I need positive reinforcement to bother loading a site or opening an app? like I only started using twitter regularly once I had a close friend on there? anyway today I just...followed a link to someone's page and remembered I had an account and hadn't posted in forever.

I'M ALIVE, GUYS

I've also written dickloads of monster fic and discovered the magic of sweatpants with pockets. Tumblr is still a shithive of teenage bigots who want a "woke" reason to beat people up (hint: it's never woke), and yet I continue to use it for some reason anyway. (Current URL: Sanguinifex.) It's cold as balls outside right now. That's pretty much it since last time!

So I got the import to work. It was like 3 posts lmao. Aaaand is anyone I know even active here? Guess I'll find out.