Updates 1: the week in bullet points

[drwex]

Is too complicated, sum up:

--- Snow. I think someone tried to order a giant-size can of whoop-ass and got giant-sized winter instead. Starts with 'w', you can see how someone would make that mistake. The likelihood that it is going to snow more or less continuously from Saturday night until Tuesday morning depresses me severely.

-- People in the snow. Look, folks, everyone is feeling it. Your horn does not melt the ice, nor does it make my stopping distance any shorter. Plus there is no goddamn place to park so of course I'm circling slowly. I'm told that Somervillians can dial 311 to ask the city to clear parking spaces on their streets which is an awesome idea and more towns should do that.

+- Work people. It's interesting watching this culture try to pivot from insanity to "oops" to maybe sanity? We had another person's final day today, which makes 7 people I work with in some capacity who've left the company since the move in November. I'll probably blog more about work in a separate post.

++ Back pain is less. There's a lot bad you can say about Western medicine, but if what you have is fixable with a pill then boy howdy do they have some nice pills for you. I got some good ones and it's made a world of difference. There will be a back blog update at some point.

--- Brain. Someone dumped a 55-gallon drum of black sludge into my brain and it's damned hard to get anything done. Like, you know, sleep well.

++ Mindfulness. Must again give props to mzrowan who is the first person to point me at mindfulness in a way that made it click in my brain. Some of it is so counter-intuitive to the way I think that I still struggle with it. But it helps.

++ My people. You are good and helpful and see below.

+ Asking for what I need. This is still incredibly hard for me. It should be simple, and shame-free, and it is not. Whole essay here elided; maybe I'll write it some day, if only to help my own male children understand how we've tried to make growing-up-male in the early 21st century very different from growing-up-male in the second half of the 20th.

++eleventybajillion sweetmmeblue who continues to be the bestest, most awesome partner beyond what I'd ever imagined.

Comments

Awwwww BLUSH

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

SCHMOOP

[dcltdw]

Hoo boy I hear you about asking for help. Props to you for dealing with that process rather than avoiding it.

Best of luck with brain stuff. For me, a very helpful thing I learned last year was from a description about a videogame about depression: your avatar lets you select choices to make at points, but when depressed, some choices are greyed out. Those options are often the ones you'd like to do, but nope, depression says NOT AVAILABLE. Of course, I may be projecting here: to me, "black sludge" = "depression", and maybe you meant something completely different, like, I dunno, too much rabbit fuzz in your living room.

...

Not that I have any experience with that. :D

---

Yay for awesome partners! :)

[unseelie.livejournal.com]

hooray for good things.
boo for bad things.
hooray for Sweetmmeblue; she is amazing - I am so happy for you and for her; that you found each other. from 3000 miles away, I glow in happiness.
Hooray for Mzrowan's skill with words. It's a wonder when someone finds the right words to make a thing that previously did not click ->click.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear your back pain is less!

I hear you on asking for what you need, and this isn't limited to men, though my family history with this issue may be ... special. I got a crash course in asking for what I needed when I was in a car accident that put me in a wheelchair for ten months, and several of those months coinciding with moving alone to a tiny town in southern Illinois to start my internship as a clinical psychologist. I hated every minute of those lessons in asking for what I needed, but they were ones I needed to learn. I hope your learning will be as painless as possible, given the subject. *hug*

You are a valuable person, and your needs are as valid as anyone else's. (I don't know if you need to hear that, but since it was what *I* needed to hear -- since I got exactly the opposite message in childhood -- I pass it along.)

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

...a giant-sized can of winter.

*giggles*

I think I need a giant-sized can of sterno to cut it down to size...

[mizarchivist]

Glad the pain is getting under control. That's a scary thing.