Dream with Our Eyes Open

1.
The guy in my cohort who I work with (which is an excessively long way to frame who this is, but whatever) was talking to me this afternoon and then was like, "Hey, can I ask you a question? It might be uncomfortable." and proceeded to just be like "Uh. It's kind of personal? It's about you?" when I was like "idk, what's it about?" until I was like "Just ask already", at which point.

"So I was thinking about this the other day, and I was looking at your chest, and"—at this point I figure out what he's trying to ask—"I'm pretty sure you don't have boobs?"

I tell him that yeah, I had top surgery, and then am like "So, this would have been a lot easier if you started out by telling me you had a question about what I've done to medically transition." and he's like "wow you're so smart you have such good words about this" when it's more like "I have been immersed in this culture for nearly half my life, I'd better know how to talk about it in a way that's both clear and polite".

He's nice, and wants to know things because he's curious, and mostly I'm like "yeah I have zero problem talking about this, I do not worry about people overhearing, I know some people are stealth (for good reason!) but mostly I don't talk about it because there's no reason to."

anyway this conversation included: (a) me telling him what a binder would look like under clothing, (b) me explaining that "how far are you in the process of transitioning" is a meaningless question because everyone's path is different, (c) him going "yeah everyone thinks you're a man" while not knowing what I mean when I was like "yeah everyone thinks I'm a cis dude", and (d) saying "the polite way to ask if someone has further transition stuff planned is to ask that and not say so are you planning on having bottom surgery". (apparently he follows some trans guy on tiktok who's been chronicling his bottom surgery process? which is cool, and I'm glad that's a thing the trans dude is comfortable doing and that my cohortmate was comfortable asking, but also, my guy, this is such a personal thing and it's more polite to ask generally...)


2.
A friend on discord was like "oh god pushing myself to work consistently with full focus at my full-time job is hard and I'm getting home exhausted and how do I deal with this, ahhhhh", and I ended up going "...okay I have Thoughts", because, well.

Welcome to what I've been working out ways to deal with for the last year? The kind of drain is different (I know they do a more academic/mentally stressful job), but the effect is often the same.

copied text of the thoughts I put on discord

- knowing that when I get home I will not be capable of doing anything until I (a) shower [necessity of physical job, but also just nice transition/feels-good thing], (b) eat [again, needful, gotta fuel the body], and (c) pet my cat who missed me very much and is going to demand to sit on me for a good 10-15min as soon as I sit down [this is why these things must happen in this order]
- accepting that there's going to be some time before I want to do anything again. for me this means not expecting anything of myself until like 4pm, when I've been home for about an hour
- knowing that I will probably only get One Major Thing done in the evening, and using that knowledge to prioritise. (sometimes this One Thing is like, required evening classes. or therapy. or aikido. sometimes this One Thing is working on a writing project. sometimes it's Friend Time. depends on the day.)
- I am deeply fortunate in that I enjoy cooking, but I also know that I do not have energy to cook every day of the week. this means that when I do cook, I make sure I make meals that generate leftovers not just for work lunches but for workday dinners, hopefully with enough variety that I am not eating the same thing for five meals in a row or the like. (I'm fine eating the same thing for every work lunch in a week so long as dinner is something else.) regardless, make sure you have plans for weekday dinners (takeout, leftovers, making food, frozen meals) and that you know what days you'll be capable of preparing for the days when you'll have less energy.
- accepting that some days you just... won't do anything other than poke around the internet reading fanfic and talking to friends?
- that said, if you know what you want to do and can scaffold that (like, having a friend to body-double with while you're doing chores/bookbinding/writing/whatever), making sure you know your limits is important. maybe don't expect more than an hour of "productive" time an evening right now, especially mental energy, since you're using a lot of that at work right now.
- if you know what you find restorative (showers, listening to music, reading books, petting your cat, etc), then explicitly scheduling time to do that after getting home and before doing something "productive" might also help, since then you can do something enjoyable before asking more of yourself.
- because I know my body will always wake me up at 4:30am (an hour before alarm), I require myself to be in bed around 10pm. so I'll get offline between 9-9:30pm so that I can get everything together for the morning, brush my teeth, do all my other bedtime routine stuff, etc. I'm usually tired by that time anyway! I am not doing anything useful! I still whine about it because I wish I could stay up later, but I've found that having a regular bedtime helps immensely with having the ability to cope with the next day. (sleep in general does, and for me that means enforcing my own bedtime, since my body enforces the other end.)

idk, sometimes I'm like "wow I feel so young and not great at adulting" but then friends who I know are older than me and who I think of as better at adulting were like "nah that was good advice <3" and I'm just. dunno. One of those things where it's really easy to see where you want to improve, all the places where you let stuff fall down, but that doesn't mean you're doing poorly overall?

Like, yeah, I would love to have a cleaner apartment. That'd be so nice. I do not have the spoons to do that all at once, and I sort of barely maintain the level of "this doesn't mortally offend me" cleanliness that I do. But it's something where if I really cared I could do something about it, I know how, it's just... prioritization. The only creature I share this space with is my cat. I almost never have friends over (partially because of feeling like the space is too much of a mess to host visitors, partially because it is my space and I don't want anyone else here).

...most of the conversation that spawned from me saying all that up there was about food and how much thought it takes to cook food, which: mood. so glad that my brain accepts variations of the same stuff pretty much all the time as being sufficient. (Doing other things would be fun too! But it isn't needful to me.)


3.
did I have other things.

a.
It's been COLD. It should hit highs of 32F-ish for a few days next week, though! That's very exciting and I'll be like "wow so warm" even though the likely lows on those days are forecast for uh ~10F. So, you know, warmth is relative. At least the storm predicted for this weekend seems more likely to swing out to sea than dump more snow on us?

b.
I've seen this song/music video linked a few place (re-found it most easily from donutsweeper), and it's very good: Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Minneapolis (which is about exactly what you'd expect, and contains video clips of said streets)

c.
Having a teacher go "the only reason I'm letting it slide that you're drawing in class is because you get good grades; don't let other students think you're getting away with something" is baffling to me. Like. Tell me to stop drawing on the school-assigned tablet during class and I will draw on paper instead. Nothing will change about how I keep myself from being bored during lectures that are 90% "I am reading text off powerpoint slides". (Also this is the only way I will focus, anyway.)

d.
As motivation to myself to write enough more of this to have something more fun to share by the end of the weekend, a tiny bit from the opening of That Novel I Want To Write:

[The letter] was, by Ames’ estimate, blunt to the point of being rude. He set the note down delicately on his desk and glared at it, as if that would grant him insight into the writer’s intentions. His skill with objects was in crafting them, asking wood and metal and stone to come alive in his hands and hold magic in their shapes, not in looking at what already existed and finding meaning in it like the Inquisitives of Tal-Tamorn did.