Blood

If you're someone who's likely to be disturbed by blood, menstruation, sex or complicated questions about gender, it would probably be better not to read this one. Have a good day.

An aggravating feeling of helpless rage at the smugness of an authority that doesn't give a damn about anything I say and has power over me through the very nature of the systems of which our world is built, the only allies against it very far away and unable to intervene to help me in my present, and for all I know unable or too busy to intervene before I run out of time and die.

Seems familiar.

I have, for the last hour or so, been holding an internalized mental argument... with an anthropomorphic personification of human evolution. And feeling increasingly like a sulky, powerless teenager under its authority.

-----

I woke up this morning covered in blood, soaked through the sheet under me, into the mattress, all over my loins and thighs. Grumbled to my feet and wrapped in a towel and tried to get to the bathroom to clean off without leaving drops of blood on the hall carpet. I had made my regular preparations for my period, it's not like this came out of nowhere and I wasn't expecting anything. But what the hell? Usually those steps are enough.

Wash my legs, empty my cup, clean the little drops off the bathroom floor (at least that just wipes clean) and come back to my room to strip my bloody sheet off my bed in a cold room stinking richly of copper and rust. Laundry earlier than expected, then. I don't have any spares. Sad regret at not following through on my thought to buy another mattress protector when I started using the first one I bought as a blanket against the growing cold followed me to school. I can't expect the next unknown tenant to be willing to sleep on a bloodstained bed, so it's only fair after this to put some of my deposit towards replacing the mattress, which is a punch to my sensitive budget awareness. I know better than this, and the cost of buying the second mattress protector would be so much less. But I just hadn't gotten around to it. Too many other priorities too intensely felt. Too late now.

Well, at least I did put myself to bed early and got what should be a reasonable enough amount of sleep to function well at school. But in class, it took not only an energy drink but the engagement of an actual exercise to perform to keep me from repeatedly closing my eyes and realizing after a while that I hadn't opened them and was paying more attention to my desire for more sleep than the lecture. On the upside, I guess, it's familiar material that was covered by my Cost Accounting class at Fanshawe, and didn't require much mental presence to use as review rather than new learning.

And while I sat in class, warmth leaked into my underwear and jeans in little blossoms. I could feel it. What the hell, seriously? It's only a half hour walk, and only an hour of class. School bathroom, emptied my cup again and looked over the damage. Mhm. Stained the patches on my jeans. Well, that's fresh enough it might wash out if I deal with it before it dries. And if not, well, I was kind of planning on re-patching them anyway. Damn, though. I don't usually have heavy periods, and this is insanely fast. One of my old friends used to tell me about how heavy her periods usually are, and I was glad I didn't have to deal with it. This sounds like what she told me. I don't think it's a medical emergency, but it's really weird for me.

Feeling exhausted, scarcely better than on Monday when I hadn't slept at all, after a morning headache I attributed to dehydration from blood loss (and seemed to be validated, since drinking lots of water really helped). I felt and feel drained in a way that seems profoundly more literal than usual, and responded as I had on Monday by returning home to rest, frustrated intensely at the impact on my attendance in classes.

As I walked, I wondered why my body was investing so much into conception this month, such that it was leaving me deprived of strength for other things, like actually being restored by sleep and being awake in class. I reflected that all the masculinity and determination I pulled up yesterday and that wonderful feeling of swagger and confidence just couldn't seem to be supported on a body spending so much of its strength to wash out and replenish a womb, which was not made for battle. I felt I would like to be able to talk to the part of me that regulated that and ask it what the deal was, why the investment, and if I could have some kind of warning if this was going to happen again.

Well, I hadn't been expecting this to develop, but my imagination is vibrant and has a lot of material to draw from.

The personification looks back at me with patronizing eyes.

"You get all pumped up on passion and infatuation and don't expect to conceive. Just like you, Upstart Consciousness, thinking you run everything now, decide everything. I made those feelings, and getting you pregnant is what I made them for.

"You can co-opt the feelings, sure, like you've harnessed everything else. Do what you like, Upstart. I can't and won't stop you. But when you take the infrastructure I spent twenty years building into your very flesh, and millions in practicing, and you try to make something completely different out of it, don't come complaining to me that my lust, my affection and instincts of family-forming and the elation of compatibility that I gave you have side-effects that mess up pieces of whatever weird deviating program you're trying to build with them. De-bug your own mess.

"Silly Upstart. Always wanting the best of everything, without its costs.

"I specialized you to be a garden, rich and fertile. You don't want to plant anything there, fine. But this blood is not meant for you, Upstart Consciousness. It was meant for the children you refuse to have."

And I stare and sit and sulk, enraged at the determinism of my weave and my flesh to anything other than my will. An authority I have no greater established authority to appeal to for overturn. I wonder to myself whether this personification of the very manufacture of me gets its attitude of distant, smug and hateful authority from my mother (the flesh person from whom I directly descend, rather than the long process of descent which is no less my mother), or maybe the other way around. Was this always a part of it? Was this far more a part of my utter intolerance for her than I ever suspected, a hatred that I was built with a body made for childbearing when I wanted to fight and lead?

Confusion and despair and uncertainty. There are times, although as befits the bitter teenager feeling, I may resentfully resist admitting it at the moment, when that purpose flows through me red and alluring. I feel the heat of it and my body's response. Lust craves in me pointedly to be sewn and swollen with fertility, but I revolt and hold my ideals against the impulse, valuing quality of life over quantity and understanding them to be in conflict. I will side with quality, no matter what my biology has to say about it. But deep in my sex drive, I know it is there in all of my femaleness.

Do I hate that? Is that why all of sex seems like rape to me sometimes, in that vague and imprecise close-but-not-quite way? That the ways in which my body is designed to enjoy it seem like an imposition to me, a drug woven into my flesh, a manipulation I cannot escape and a tool to subvert me as an individual, as Upstart Consciousness which thinks that Consciousness ought to rule the world; like the systems of pleasure exist to demur me and not just me specifically, not just Serp, but "me", the concept of being an individual and having self-determination, demur "me" to submit my time and life energy to being part of the biological process, a cog in the machine of flesh and procreation. A stitch in the fabric of generations, to bond and spread its spoor and die and be eaten, digested by plants and returned to the newborns in their day as fruit.

I want more for myself, for all selves as my loves and inspirations remind me. Does this revolt then, this rebellion, seep in bitterness and conflict right down, down, through my muscles and organs and neurons, into a hatred of the very attraction of sex, the hunger and preoccupation and the pleasure it offers to reward me for doing obediently as my body says? Made disgusting by a rejection of blind obedience on principle, a hatred of all the flaws and all of the victims enabled by the processes of just taking your pay, or endorphins, or promotion, and not thinking about whether what you're being paid to do is good. Could that conviction, revulsion, really be at the core of my longstanding recoil against, shame about, not exactly sex, but the love of and desire for sex?

Maybe.

I hadn't considered it before, but at first appraisal, it seems to make a lot of sense. The distaste and shame are still there, after all, after every kind of mental exercise and argument I could think of against kink shaming and slut shaming, after rejecting and rejecting again repeatedly as not having any right to determine my feelings every mote I could find of religious shame, of mere fear-of-judgement, of anything else. But there was some root that none of it has shifted. Is this that root?

My plans for the day had more to do with study and less to do with uncovering dysphoria hidden deep in my psyche, but hey, I'll take it. I will almost never refuse an opportunity to understand myself better.

The Rainbow

It's been a while since I've come back to write here, but maybe it hasn't been as long as it feels like. For a while I was thinking from time to time I should come back just to mention that the heartbreak is fading and although the challenge of trying to get by here on the budget I have available for it is a big one, I think I'm getting more of a handle on it.

A couple of weeks ago, I think on the day I last wrote, now that I think of it, I applied to Rev after looking through some articles on more unconventional ways to make money, as opposed to a regular hired job. Rev is a captioning and transcription service and work space; they hire freelancers who can use the online tools they provide to claim jobs as they come available and type captions to videos and audio from clients. I went through some testing and was approved to join.

It's been exciting to have something I could do with my hours from home to make money on my own terms, and although I'm not currently earning at a rate which is going to solve all my financial problems, it's work that I like and I think I can get better at it over time.

Yesterday just for example I wrote captions for a weird music video, and started work on an hour-long documentary I'll need to finish today. I get exposed to a lot of different media I probably would never have watched on my own, and the variety makes this job interesting. I'm glad to have something that takes advantage of my precision with words and good typing speed, although in this case, it's precision in listening to hear exactly what words someone else used, not choosing them myself.

As often happens, I've found solace in love from those around me by deepening my relationships into romance. There's a degree to which I feel uncomfortable about that, since it's happened so many times before it feels like I'm turning predictable or something, becoming a cliche. It's frustrating that that meta-awareness messes with my appreciation of the moment, because the thing itself is beautiful anyway.

So once again I've had a wonderful time talking endlessly to one of my friends and finding that there is potential for us to be closer, and it was all appropriately delicious. I've drawn a few pictures, hit by inspiration from the new relationship energy and finding with pleasure that the skill I've accumulated over the years makes it much easier for me to depict what I want to reasonably well, and I've been producing work I can be proud of in just a couple of hours.

The thought to see if I can try to market that as well does come to mind, alongside the long-standing intent to try to set up an online shop for my macrame bracelets. The way things are going so far, it'd make me an all-around crafter-freelancer, and you know what? That could be pretty cool.

Sunday night this week I pulled an all-nighter hanging out online with this relationship that's changing colours in my life, and so yesterday I had trouble staying awake in my classes. I gave up and went home to sleep after the first two. I slept again last night, although not ideally long, and walked to school today listening to a variety of renditions of "The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond". There was one instrumental version in particular that I reflected would sound just about perfect if I could have added the sound of rain into it, for an atmospheric connection to the sky and fields as they are, I suppose.

Well here's where it gets a bit strange, because not five minutes later it started raining. I'd finished the song by then, but the timing was remarkable anyway. I had been admiring the many colours of silver in the clouds, as there often are in Ireland, and it's not as though it seemed unlikely for it to rain, but just that it happened right then, as opposed to fifteen minutes earlier, struck me as somewhat uncanny.

But what was moreso was when I looked up and almost jumped to see the change in the sky; where there hadn't been not five minutes before when I took a photo of the lovely silvers in the clouds over the green field I was passing, there was a rainbow, full across the sky and not the slight half-bow I'd sometimes seen in rain in Canada.

Over the next little while, the rainbow got brighter and brighter by the moment, not only a full arc across the sky now, but apparent right to the ground on both sides, even casting its colours in front of the distant hills on the horizon. It looked as though you could have guessed to within a dozen meters or so where exactly it seemed to touch down on one side. Looking on with awe, some of the old legends of searches for leprechauns' gold made a lot more sense all of a sudden.

For a period of not more than ten minutes or so, the rainbow brightened and brightened, clearer and more vibrant than I had ever seen a rainbow in my life, with a second, dimmer arc beginning to show outside the main on the sides, and then began to dim and fade away. I caught a few photos of the rainbow before it was gone, and the sky returned to gray as the rain continued lightly for a while longer and I went on my way toward the college. The whole of its appearance may have been contained in a quarter of an hour.

I thought back to King of Dragon Pass where the appearance of a rainbow was considered to be among the best of omens, and to other similar things, and felt rather a lot as though the sky had smiled at me, 'like forgiveness' in a way, I remember thinking. There's a certain cheshire-cat-ness to it now, looking back, that leaves me feeling curious and portentous. Perhaps it smiles on the progress of my new relationship, or to reassure me that my efforts are good enough, for now; or that I may be soon rewarded for not giving up on my time here. Who knows, but there is that in me that wonders, even while its being silly and seeming misguided is also felt in my thoughts.

So there, anyway, is the rainbow which greeted me this morning, and the trend of my activities these past few weeks. Health and fortune to the ones I love and to all those who love me, if I may spread it out to them, for their fortune is also mine after all.

And good day.

Group Research Problems

I have gradually developed an utter hatred for group research projects over my time in college. The two things are often shoved together, unfortunately. It seems like four of five assignments we're given in groups involve secondary research: scanning through databases, looking for articles and (occasionally) not being allowed to say anything, even points of common knowledge or what seem to be profoundly obvious extrapolations, without pointing to someone else who said it first and in print.

The work of organizing groups, and trying to get quality work out of other students over whom I ultimately have no power has always been something I dread. When a classmate sends me, two days before a report is due, a piece of writing that I can barely untangle into readable English, that gives a link to a source that contradicts rather than supports it, I as another mere student have to try to find a way to explain that we can't use this, that it's not good enough, in a way that actually gets my teammates to do better rather than starting a fight about why I get to decide what we do and don't use... Or ignore their contribution and rewrite their entire part in whatever time remains and look forward to complaints about my having done so... Or use the nonsense they give me anyway and let the incoherence of the work drag me down with them.

There's a community I really admire called Effective Altruism (shortens to EA). Every time I've seen suggestions in EA articles or discussions promoting research as one of the best ways to do good in the world, I've gotten an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I'll never be able to help as much as other people who can stomach research. It occurred to me recently that this seems a lot like the reflexive rejection many other people have from any subject with a substantial numerical component because they're "bad at math". Maybe if I hadn't become conditioned through college to associate research with the feeling of either herding cats or dragging them around on my back in a sack that occasionally grew claws, I wouldn't think I was "bad at research", or that research was inherently miserable. Maybe I should try to find out what the experience of research is like in a more professional environment as opposed to what college usually turns it into.

It Festers

I come here with a bent mind, frustrated at a... friend? acquaintance? friend?... who asked me how I was doing as the last class began to settle down into their seats, and would not take my grimace and uncomfortable silence as an answer and did not hear my whisper, reached to touch my hand.

Such small actions, one might think they should not bend me.

I have become trapped in the mirror, and appropriately the things I see and hear around me all reflect the dark. The voices that close the podcast I listen to sound lower, slower, tired... in a way they did not once before. I feel less entertained by it, and wonder whether I would see it becoming lesser if I was not, within myself, shriveling. Everything I see and hear now becomes suspect.

Last week, I made mistakes. I acted in ways that, in retrospect, in dread, I knew must mark me as an outsider, and every time I spoke of it, in voice or text or explicit thought, I cried. I cried in front of my peers who came to chastise me. I sat in frozen stillness for long moments in front of my peer who sought to comfort me; or perhaps, comfort themself with the hopeful confirmation that I was fine... which I refused to give them. I cried in front of my friends of this last half-year, whose notice and acknowledgement and forgiveness for the act I sought.

I stayed up late on Sunday night, spending a few cherished hours with those I cannot see or hear any other time than the middle of the night, and missed my first class again on Monday morning. But not Tuesday this time. I arrived to class twelve minutes after the hour but in time to hear much of the lecture. About insecurity and social media. Of course. With little jokes about how obviously as a younger generation we were all addicted to Facebook even if we knew it was exploitative. As if saying that kind of thing were funny rather than insulting. I can't say it helped.

Such small gestures, one might think they should not bend me.

But everything now is in subtlety. The greatest impacts can be wrought with the flourish of a pen and the pressing of a button, which are actions even smaller, in the simple physical performance which is so little of the context that fully makes them up.

Why should I be ashamed? Why am I ashamed? Why?

The post on my blog two posts back is displaying improperly. Three paragraphs are shown in the smallest available font size, and although I can edit the text of the post, I cannot change them to normal size such that they display properly on the webpage. I am left feeling frustrated and powerless. Such... small... things. Such small things that yet I do not have the reach to correct. Like all the things I may feel are wrong with the systems here.

I wonder whether my friend?acquaintance?friend? will forgive me, and cannot really claim to stir myself to enough feeling to hope. I wonder whether she will care to learn enough about me to begin to understand what I need, why it is painful for me when someone pushes for me to speak in a room crowded with people, such as students in a classroom. What to do about it. But as a point aside from all of this... when I looked at her eyes looking at me, trying to reach out to me, there was a warmth there that I would like to see again...

People keep telling me I know I can always talk to them if I need someone to talk to.
I wish they would stop telling me that. It isn't true.

Last week I dragged myself into school on Thursday mostly so that I could attend counselling, but I was told I had no appointment. I had begun to depend on my counsellor. I had begun to trust him enough that last time, I opened up my chest and let him see me raw and crying. I suppose we mentioned it each time until last time, and he had written me in for another appointment, same time next week. But not last time. When I trust, I assume, and do not think to say it, and then it is not done.

I wished that I had an appointment this week, but I do not want to speak to the staff at student services to ask for one.

I wish people would stop telling me I know I can rely on them. I don't. People keep showing me that I can't; not in the ways that I rely on people.

I think it's time to start calling this depression.

I am trapped in the mirror now, and nothing I see on the other side, nothing I hear, can be trusted not to be twisted by the reflection of my own darkness.

Hello, old darkness. It's been a while.

Predations of Fatigue

Both yesterday and today, I slept partly through my first class. Yesterday it was deliberate after a late night. Today it was not. I feel exhausted despite a long sleep last night, early as well as late. I woke up around 4:30 and spoke to my friends a little before bedding back down.

This seems to continue the pattern whereby I feel the affects of a shortened sleep cycle a full day afterwards, but it also feels awfully like the draining fatigue that consumed my days that one summer when I was on a sapping antidepressant which made me angry and exhausted at every moment.

I am unsure whether energy drinks would help; I seem to develop a dependence on them. Or whether in order to really be able to talk to my American friends at all I will have to establish a habit of sleeping early and waking part way through. As to my other friends... I notice that I have not heard from one in over a month despite fairly proactive polite prodding on my part. There is another, too, who has gone silent, and I am concerned for them both.

So full of my tired after my first class today that I walked outside where it was cold but not crowded or trafficked, brushed the grass and found that it was wet, and so experimentally lay down on cold bricks with my backpack under my head. The downside, of course, was that in the central area where these bricks were, this would not fail to attract attention. Some students from off somewhere laughed, and one called out to another to ask me if I was alright, make sure I had a pulse. It made me angry. Without opening my eyes or lifting my head I flipped them off with a raised hand.

In retrospect I felt bad for it... but it reminded me too much of those scenes of my high school years when guffawing and teasing boys would dare and cajole one another to talk to me or ask to kiss me. If you cared so much, the one who called, would you not come forward yourself? Staff men walked out to ask me if I needed to see a nurse... of course. I told them no, I was not sick, just tired, and they went away, but they had had loud voices and all the attention of eccentricity was playing on my mind. I began to feel points of colder; an inkling of rain. Reluctantly, I got up and left, but I still feel dizzy with tired.

I wonder what will be the fallout of this scant few minutes of being visibly strange. In this mood, under this fatigue, I cannot but expect the worst, but I think I will buy an energy drink to see if it helps me through the afternoon.

In other news, last night at the archery club, one of our trainee archers flailed at release (maybe the thing that our lead coach mentioned to me; someone releasing the arrow when it jumped the arrowrest, instead of calmly relaxing the draw and putting it back) and the arrow flew high and wide and hit one of the second-floor gym windows with a mighty sound. The arrow bounced off and landed among the bleachers. The window cracked outward in a spiderweb pattern from the point of impact, but did not break. Good safety windows, then. We kept training but carefully and restricted from approaching the area under the cracked window, until staff came and instructed us to leave.

Regularly two hours, our monday club meet was down to half a one. I had extra time; I shopped and cooked with it. The beginning of my week is highly mixed. I kind of hope I will be able to adjust my sleeping habits to offer me more consistency, more consistent energy.

Continuing On

"I feel like you imply to me that I'm wasting your time every time I ask a question, in class or outside of it."
"No, it's not that. It's just that we have a lot to cover and very little time to do it all."
"The way you say it upsets me every time."
"Ditto."
"Well, I'm sorry for my side of that."
"Me too. Let's begin again next day."
handshake

-Monday 24th, September

The term is now thoroughly underway, and I have been neglecting my blogging again. I have become acquainted with the chaplain on campus and one of the two counselors, who I am set to meet once a week. I have been feeling busy, with pressure from classes, homework, and financial stability; regular job searching has as usual been discouraging. My several runs of boldly introducing myself and dropping off CVs in person have yielded nothing so far and largely robbed me of the energy to continue making online applications to posted jobs.

I am seeking to break into freelancing, to work on my own terms, and maybe do some tutoring, even in IT Carlow itself. UpWork has rejected my application twice, though, perhaps negating the hearsay I had from a friend of a friend that the application process was pretty much a formality. Having taken ten tests on the site and scored above average on every one and in the top 10% on some, I feel indignant about this, and am wondering whether you have to already be an established freelancer for UpWork to want to support you.

The lecturer I had the above encounter with has been treating me with greater kindness and consideration since. In my Excel-based computer labs, I race ahead. In non-computer lab Management Accounting classes, I have begun to sometimes stop even processing through the problems. Vainly racing the lecturer's Excel with a hand calculator while my mind is crowded with her talking was growing very tiresome, and I feel confident I already get the idea by now. If I could find the time to do more practice on my own it would be great, but my time is mostly spent wondering how I'm ever going to juggle all of the things I need to do.

And then there is archery. It's the one club I've been going to reliably, learning form and stance and hearing encouraging words from the coach, who is acting as a better teacher than any of my lecturers, using effective repetition, class participation and good humour, much like my statistics lecturer back at Fanshawe did, to help us memorise the safety rules and terminology of the bow, adding a little every week. There is also a lot of waiting, since the beginners shoot only 4-6 at a time so that the coaches can observe us and correct mistakes, and the rest queue behind. I have begun to get to know the other left-handed archers; In archery, which hand you fire with depends on the dominance of your eye, not the regular dominance of your hand, and so someone who is a right-handed writer may be a left-handed archer. There are perhaps three right hand archers to each of us lefties, and we share the same line to shoot with a left-handed bow.

I enjoy archery, even though there's a lot of waiting. I have been challenging my social courage to chat to and get to know some of the other lefties. I had an amusing conversation with one young man yesterday who's in the first year of a software course going into cyber security. For the money, he said when I asked, and we talked about different countries and pronunciations, accents and languages. He wondered why out of all the countries in the world I would want to come to Ireland, and expressed a dislike of the Irish accent and disdain for the country in general. He was an interesting conversationalist, although as I said to him myself it seemed in some moments as though we were chatting across from different sides of the D&D alignment table. He laughed.

Between the talking and building my skills and the generally welcoming atmosphere... Well, probably more important than any of that is that when I am at archery club I feel a certain pseudo-obligation to leave school, work and busyness matters mostly aside and just be still for a while, focused almost entirely on other things, and that's just deeply refreshing.

I had an ongoing email conversation with someone who runs the campus's tabletop games club, suggesting some ways he could make his emails and Facebook messages more welcoming and less cynical. We met in person yesterday, and essentially he told me that he wasn't interested in spending the effort to improve his approach for this thing he was volunteering his time toward. I am proud of myself for continuing to speak animatedly but cheerfully with him until we parted ways, although I went away from it feeling stressed and perhaps on a verge of my social anxiety that I am a bit surprised I managed to cling to, and not tumble over. He did thank me for the feedback and admit to some surprise that the way I had rewritten a couple of his messages registered as so much more welcoming even to him.

Also yesterday, a couple of my friends introduced me to A Capella Science, with Entropic Time and Banting's Imparted Years, which has made my Song of the Day list. The single-voice a capella of the latter is a little harsh on the ears at first, but it really grew on me over time, and the arrangements are good.

I had better get moving. It is another school morning and I need to be at school in a little under an hour to book an appointment with the campus doctor to get a renewed prescription of my thyroid medicine. Oh. Also also, I picked up a bottle of apple cider vinegar, which was mentioned in my marketing class, and have begun trying to take a spoon of it every day like a medicine. I don't know how valid are its claims as a health tonic, and I feel a little self-conscious for following a trend like this, but I'll just give it a try, and see if it seems to do me any good.

Techless Time: Three Hours of Inconvenience

This is a verbatim copy of a blog assignment written for school.

When I learned that we were being assigned to spend three hours without using electronics or information systems, my reaction was immediate dread and frustration, and anticipating making time for it brought back similar feelings whenever my mind returned to it. I decided, eventually, to get this done and over with so I would stop having to worry about when I was going to do it, and took my time techless from 8-11 PM on Tuesday the 25th.

This time began as I was nearing home on a walk back from town to drop off a CV and buy groceries, since I was not willing to make this trip without listening to any music or podcasts. With forethought, I set an alarm on my phone to go off in three hours and three minutes, and set it to Do Not Disturb so that it would not make any sound until then. This way, I would know when my time was up. In a way, then, I could not get away from using my phone, since I was passively making use of its time tracking, but I will not apologise for this; My house does not actually have a clock in it, use of devices like mobile phones which also tell time having been so ordinary and constant that no-one bothered to get one. It reminded me of attending classes in room D521, where the wall clock is perpetually stuck at 10:00 and we are not allowed to check our phones, and so by extension are not allowed to check the time.

Throughout the day, even before I started the challenge, I was thinking about angry things to say about being assigned to do this. Among them: It is not very difficult to take time away from connectedness if you want to. For some, it's a very relaxing experience to let go of the need to answer to friends or bosses and be informed of every new thing as it happens. Country retreats away are popular for good reason. However, it's a different matter when you're doing it on someone else's command. Any given person has almost certainly at some point, when they weren't thinking about it, gone three hours at a time without scratching their nose, but it's a part of human nature that if someone tells you that you have to deliberately avoid scratching it for three hours, it's immediately going to start itching.

Perhaps I would not have been so frustrated but for three major factors: First, I have been trying to find a part-time job around town, and feel rather urgently pressed to do so. It's very rare for me to be in a situation where I'd rather be looking through job listings online than what I'm actually doing, but this is one of those situations.
Second, I have always spent the majority of my social life online and my relaxation using a computer; I play computer games or watch YouTube as my primary way to enjoy myself and unwind. This is only more dramatically the case now that I am thousands of miles and many time zones away from all my old friends whose company is familiar and comforting to me, so these three hours will neither be time I can spend looking for work in a way I'm able to at this time of day, nor time I can spend relaxing and enjoying myself in the ways I'm accustomed to.
Finally, the experience of being asked to do this feels political to me. It reminds me of people I have heard dismissing "millenials" as cheap, shallow and so addicted to their phones that they can't stand to put them down for ten minutes, and as a result I feel reflexively defensive and as though I am being judged; Not only that, but judged based on a stereotype rather than for my own behaviour.

Information technology is a stratum on which life today is built; some houses no longer have clocks in them because 'everyone' has a mobile phone. Posters and food wrappers do not write out the full details of their message, but have a URL printed on them where further information can be found because 'everyone' has ready access to the internet. Going without these systems for a few hours or even a few weeks is entirely possible and may not even be particularly hard, but if someone is incapable of using them at all, they will be missing out on major advantages and may not be able to keep up with the standard pace and productivity the modern world expects and demands.

For my three hours of techlessness, I wanted to prioritise doing things that I would not normally use an electronic device to do more efficiently. Although I was thinking about what I would write throughout the day, I did not write anything for this blog; writing with paper and pen is slower for me than typing, and I would have needed to type it all out afterwards anyway. Instead, I tidied my bedroom windowsill, did a bit of organising in my room, bathed myself and cooked two different kinds of food: soup and spaghetti. Aside from tidying my windowsill, these were things I might well have done anyway on some other day, but the primary difference is that on another day, I would be listening to something on either my phone or my mp3 player. This might be music, or it might be a podcast of some kind, depending on what I felt like at the time. I care a great deal for the ability to listen to music of my own tastes whenever I want. It adds levity and fun to menial work, and also allows me to drown out things I do not want to be listening to, like a housemate's private phone conversation with a loved one or a barking dog in the neighborhood. Today, I spent three hours with a recurring earworm I wasn't allowed to scratch.

On the other hand, deliberately avoiding the use of electronics and information systems reminded me about a short piece of speculative fiction I want to write, about a disconnect from technology far more integrated and habitual, and vastly more devastating, than this one.

IT Carlow: Week Two

I am easily embarrassed and may take over an hour to really get over the embarrassment from merely being told my questions are too frequent, or perhaps too insignificant by her measure, by a lecturer. Time really seems to be flying. I had not noticed we had so little time left in the lecture. This must be a good thing. I will try to figure out other ways to approach this lecturer with my questions

-Monday 17th, September

I enjoyed sleeping this morning and clung to it. I arrived late to my first class and unfed. In the second I was continually distracted and annoyed by the man next to me who checked his phone under the desk, wobbled the bench and jostled against me with his arm. In the hallway I wrestled with the anxiety-forbidden temptation to call out to everyone not to block the hallways, in case someone needed to get through. I bought myself a breakfast in the upstairs caf, which helped fuel me through the rest of my classes.

-Tuesday 18th, September

The clubs sign-up was loud with music over a boombox in one corner. I signed up for archery, tabletop and Irish dance. I met some of Rachel's friends for the second time. I gave out 3 CVs with a cheerfulness that surprised me. I slept before midnight and soundly rested until 9 the next day.

-Wednesday 19th, September

Yesterday I found an organising toy, lifeRPG, for goal setting and tracking, with EXP gained for completed tasks. I woke to find a rejection from UpWork and a bunch of forms to fill out for my new clubs, plus obligations to further support Tabletop. It was a bad first impression. Missed counselling appointment, and didn't realize it until 9 at night.

-Thursday 20th, September

I had a sluggish morning. I helped Rachel practice categorising costs for Management Accounting and felt that I had neglected my need for leisure, so once I got home I watched a bunch of old shows of sfdebris and bought and enjoyed a game that was on sale on GOG. But I dropped off four more CVs on the way.

-Friday 21st, September

Saturday was a day of job searching work. I made a particularly strong and hopeful application to a health food store looking for a weekend shop assistant. I improved some of the phrasing on my CV and made a new version which I hope will be relevant to waitress work. I handed out four more CVs, including one to an actual bar. The approach was intimidating, as I have never felt comfortable in bars, but having overcome my mounting fear to come in and talk to two friendly counter staff was one small victory. I visited another and heard that the manager to speak to would be in on weekdays, but was not at that time. At the end of the day, I reviewed my progress and found that of all the CVs I had dropped off, positions I had applied to online and employment inquiry emails I had sent, one entire third of them had been over the last four days: Wednesday to Saturday.

Tuesday I had gotten an email from the school office reminding me of the urgency of my job search: appointments for the immigration meeting at which I would need to show evidence of 3,000 euro in a bank account to stay were beginning. Over the few days that followed, I gathered my friends and spoke seriously about the choice between returning to Canada and forfeiting the deposit my father was generous enough to let me talk him into paying for me... or staying on, although if I became financially unable to stay through the end of the year and finish the courses, I would be out by thousands more. Still, the real need of finding work is a challenge that my past self knowingly threw my present self into, determined that I should grow to meet it. Incidentally, this fits well with a new determination song shown to me by a new friend: "I'm now becoming my own self-fulfilled prophecy!"

Sunday I woke up feeling utterly done with job searching. I spent the day lazy and played Theme Hospital for most of it. Chatted with Iris, and stayed up almost all night. It set me up to wake to my alarm so hazily that I thought I had multiple alarms keyed to different states, and go back to sleep after turning it off, feeling confident another one would ring. I slept in and missed my first class, but only the first one. I was in attendance for the second.

IT Carlow: Short Notes, The First Two Days

I feel a bit like I've been blindfolded and I'm trying to make my way through the days, but every time I bump into someone I feel ashamed. And it seems as though others are calling back to me, irritably, to keep up, but I just keep bumping into people and it feels as though every day teaches me the same lesson that I'm bad at talking to people... or understanding what I am supposed to do.

- Thursday 13, September (first day of classes)

The first crowded class of our crowded day, I step into the crowded room and spot a scant few open seats. Only one near the front, and when I approached it, the student sitting beside slid her bag over and lifted the folding seat to block me. Incensed, I went elsewhere, and watched...
When another new arrival scanned the room and approached that place, she moved her bag aside.

-Friday 14, September

I have connected with counselling services on campus and may wind up regularly seeing one of the counsellors here on Thursday afternoons. I have also begun reading The Leadership Skills Handbook: 90 Essential Skills You Need to Be a Leader, by Jo Owen. It has made a truly excellent first impression, with wise reminders, some frank insights that I had not thought about before and a great deal of wit. It is broken into very short, succinct sections which makes it easy to cover a whole section even if I only have five or ten minutes, and makes it easy and inviting to keep reading one more bit. Reading the first handful of sections on Thursday really cheered me up by reminding me that the courage to try things even when I don't know how I'm supposed to go about them is a strength, and that I am not the only person for whom that takes courage.

It is too easy to be overwhelmed and caught up in the mistakes, and forget to value the process of learning and finding one's way that demands making some mistakes. Maybe I am not bad at talking to people; being a foreign student, even speaking the same language, is simply hard. That doesn't account for all of my recent mistakes, however, and it still shocks my system and my blood pressure to be intentionally kept at a distance by fellow students at school with gestures of disrespect... even, perhaps, repulsion. I had hoped I was done with that.

The Broken Throne

So. It's been a week and two weekends. I have felt I've been doing surprisingly well. I have reflected on the happiness of working toward a goal that I have enjoyed over the past year. I have cried, have sought comfort in the words and company of my friends back in America and found it. I have felt confused, and hopeful, and empty.

I have searched for work, intermittantly, between sessions of passivity and fatigue bordering on depression, but not quite depression. I have despite this managed to submit resumes or reply to job ads to the tune of twenty in the two weeks I have been here.

I wrote a song. I got into a conversation on FetLife and was disappointed and alienated by an uncanny scriptedness of the advances of another human being, even though his script was polite.

I came into the campus this morning to job search, but wrote "love thyself" on my checklist, consciously, intentionally, a note of gentleness and will toward peace and joy.
(Context: There was a time, during a panic attack that I documented here, that I wrote "LOVE THYSELF" on my checklist as I was leaving class, like a compulsion, in jagged and accusing words, and visualised myself in a round room, curled up in a fetal position, with those words wrought across the rounded wall. It was one of the most direct and straightforward messages I have ever gotten from myself through my visualisations and compulsions.)

I came into campus this morning to job search, and listened to favourite OCremixes on the way, enjoying a variety of the songs that impressed me enough while I was combing through the vast collection that I wanted to keep them and hear them again. A few that I may want to remove, being not as impressed with them now, or feeling I had only liked them in comparison to other songs I liked less. Still at home, I felt a little downcast at the memory of Turks in Pursuit. A fine track, but one that Eoin had pointed out to me, based on an original track he liked, back when I showed him my habit of Audiosurfing these remixes. Now I sit down to a desk in the campus library, access the wifi, and another remix is next to come to my ear. It is one that's always struck me hard and driven me to thoughtfulness, and worse, it also speaks of Eoin. He knew the original duet, and we had planned, once, to sing it together. A 'Kid-pella, a touching a cappella rendition of Setting Sail, Coming Home from Bastion.

I take your hand; now, you'll never be lonely...

Tears come. I had hoped to be professional today. And I still hope I will be. But if I need to cry, it's well that I do it, and the sooner I can get over it.

I imagine the million things I want to say to him. To say I wanted to believe better of him than to think that his having said I would always be special to him last year, having said he liked me, and thought he would like to stay in touch a week ago, was empty words to placate. I still want to. I feel angry, although my wisdom counsels patience. I feel angry that I have heard nothing from him, after promising I would let him come to speak to me if he wished to.

I wonder, in my reeling thoughts, when I think of this, whether that was a mistake. Whether I might be able to claim him as friend quite readily if I'd been willing to lead the overture, but that he will be too intimidated to start a conversation with me, will not know what to say, and so will say nothing, until it eventually feels like it has been too long, and it would be too late now, and so will continue to say nothing. Should I rescind my promise? But that would be weakness. Desperate weakness, and would make me a clinging thorn if the truth is he would rather not speak with me.

I wonder if I should wish there was enough submissiveness or enough apathy in my nature to live on without much thought to it, and let him speak to me in his own time, whenever it strikes him to do so, even if it never does. I cannot wish for apathy, though.

The challenge of staying in touch with my loves across the ocean is upon me. It is quite natural for me to stay up late, but it makes it difficult to get any sleep. I am woken most mornings as my roommates rise, a neighborhood dog barks, a child with some developmental disability hoots a now-familiar loud cry. Perhaps I will be able to sleep in the evening, wake for company, and sleep again through the morning until it is time to wake. Perhaps, but then when will I work? There is so much to answer. It is difficult. But the voice of my dear Iris is comforting, in that blind, desperate way that something can be comforting even though it does not necessarily make any of the things that are wrong better. I remember that I wanted to talk with my friends about my future. I want their advice to help me figure out what to make of it. I realised through this experience that I build myself more to be what I think the people I love want me to be than I may have been willing to admit before.

I smashed the throne I built for Eoin, but the pieces, heavy as marble, still weigh in the center of me. I have not cleared them away, and it is hard enough even to resist the temptation to rebuild it. The throne room is a sad place now, deserted and despairing after the hope that had lived there. "My heart is wrapped in cold sorrow", I remember thinking to myself, as I marched home that Saturday afternoon, after that Friday evening, and my train back to Carlow.

Dear Memory: A Love Story (The End)

There was a time that we were lovers,
through March, April and May.
I went home in the summer,
though I wished he had asked me to stay.
The ocean was very wide,
and it got in our way.
So I came back from the other side,
to see how much had changed...

The time we met;
The time he loved me;
Today.

He always was a gentle man.
He is a gentle man still.
He met me at the train station,
like he'd said that he will.
We had a long, awkward conversation,
head to head, eye to eye.
I had lost his heart some time ago.
I may never know why.

The time we met;
The time he loved me;
Goodbye.

Does he regret
the time he loved me
today- I promised I'll be okay,
so I'll be okay.
Though I loved him- Maybe I'll hear from him,
and I can be his friend,
who loved him.

The End.

The Brambleberry Walk

written two nights ago

The road from my new home into town is lined for several stretches on one side with thorny brambles and little growing bunches of blackberries. From the first day I was here, I tried picking and eating one or two experimentally. Today, I plucked small handfuls as I walked along, and found that many had grown soft and sweet and tasty. A couple of times, someone along the road has given me an odd look about it; someone laughed, someone asked weren't they good? And I felt I was being judged. I wonder if I am committing some faux-pas by "stealing" someone's berries. I don't know. I enjoy the forage, although not the judgement, which may be real or may be imaginary, as it so often is.

I ran some group games with my friends the other night, and got to enjoy their company, carefree and casual as it used to be, although the internet connection hosted on my phone does not support much, and several times the sound of the Jackbox game and all the voices just blended together into low screechy metal noise for several seconds until it jumped forward and began to update again. Still, it was fun. My housemate and host suggested a website I should visit to get a better deal on home broadband than I was able to find on my own, Just One Switch or something like that. I haven't called them yet though.

I am procrastinating on continuing my job search. I am anxious of failure and reluctant, highly tempted to just escape into socialising and play. I know the trap. I know the only thing for me is to set myself to the task and pursue it for as long as it takes. I still have my friends' support, of course. They are still willing to help me along with rewards, and my dear Samedi even mentioned that she would be willing to put a foot down and be firm with me if I needed that from someone. Perhaps I will enlist her. But then perhaps not yet. I am askitter and distracted, somewhere deep in my mind where I hardly even think it from moment to moment. I made my arrangements yesterday to meet Eoin again this Friday.

There is also the fact that I have been staying up late and often had a hard time staying awake before 2 PM or so. It is tempting to blame this on some species of jetlag, but it seems so characteristic of me when I'm in a position of stressful uncertainly that I feel that would be rather unfair. I make the walk through the bramble-sided path into town and back again, my mind mostly blank, the silence filled with podcasts or music. I begin to suspect that there is a roiling space somewhere were a hundred things lie waiting to be said, and perhaps I would feel better after I said them... only I am very reluctant to take the time to lie still and quest after that place, which may be difficult to find and painful to open. I think it will come open soon anyway.

Well then... I put to myself: Would it not be better for our meeting if I went there, opened the tense place and heard the messages there myself, so that I would know what they say and had some time to think over them before I face Eoin? I feel reluctant, and the reluctance feels similar to doubt, but I suspect it is only reluctance to do something difficult and uncomfortable. I sit typing in sticky clothes, worn for a couple of days. I could use a bath and a change. My bath, and the bathroom sinks here, have almost no water pressure. The custom in this house, apparently, is to run the hot water heater a little while and fill a bucket with water of a temperature which is comfortable, and run it over oneself with a measuring cup. It feels very quaint, very old-fashioned, in a way remniscient of my early childhood when I would sit in a bath and use a yoghurt container to pour water over my head in waves, or discover and delight in the trick of setting it so that it would form a sort of air seal and the water would stay in the upturned plastic tub, sitting on my head like a sea crown.

I did a load of laundry yesterday. Like many other things, that seems in some details delightfully old-fashioned. We have a dryer, but my house-mates usually hang their clothes to dry, avoiding the electrical drain. I followed suit, and hung remaining small garments in my bedroom, having run out of room I could reach on the line. I took them down today, surprised they were dry so soon, but content. I will see whether line drying makes them uncomfortable, and let that influence my attitude towards continuing to do my laundry this way.

I think a moment of my family. I hope they are well. I wonder what they would think of me, if they could see over my shoulder, a snapshot of the life I am living at just this moment. I wonder if they think of me at all much. Should they? I sigh. My mind feels heavy and confused, paralysed by the ready distractions in each direction from firm movement in each other direction. I'll set the water to warm. I may not be sure of anything else just now, but I can certainly use a bath.

Dear Memory: Travel Diary

Wednesday 15th, August 2018

Dear Memory:
Today I set out. My bags are packed; They are heavy.
My body is tired, my way long since decided.
Before me there is only to go a long way for a very long day,
full of pulling heavy bags and full of waiting.
But I come today, across land and sky, across the sea I come toward you.
What will happen now?

~~~~~

At London Greyhound: 1:18 PM

Cabin bag 12 kg or 26 lb: 35.75 lb
Checked bag 20 kg or 44 lb: 79.65 49 lb

I packed too much for my voyage. Both my large bags were beyond the weight allowance my flight would grant me, and one was too much even for the bus. Feeling numb and imperative more than regretful, I ripped content out of the heaviest bag, and gave it over to a lady at the Greyhound counter, to be brought to lost and found, and eventually to be donated away. My D&D books, the first I ever owned, were thus sent away. I had decided against selling them, in a fit of sentimentality. Two swimming suits; and my old laptop, now replaced; and tablet seldom used. There is enough personal information on the one, probably, to steal my identity, if poor luck put it in hands that would. But it was with only the grim swiftness of a decision that must be made without hesitation, even if it must be made in error.

My wrist aches from writing on this pad, but I will to tell the story, so I write. I must pull more weight again from both my bags before I fly. Clothes, mostly, I will prefer to consent to abandon. Perhaps a book, and some toiletries if need be. The bus sets out, and I sit in it, as quiet and grim as an inevitable. I do not grieve. I follow my course.

At Pearson International Airport: 5:14 PM

The airport is confusing to navigate and lacks enough available information assistance for a traveler to find someone at hand to unconfuse it for them. However, I have taken this path before, and in the place where visual cues call back to the former experience, I remember enough to make my way more confidently. I left myself ample time, which helped. I did not need to hurry.

In a little heap behind a check-in gate, I left an array of belongings which I have cherished in their time. A stack of old CDs including the game Wolf was left along with clothes laboriously repaired and fondly worn. My broad hat. My grey rain jacket. The faceless rabbit, my companion since before London, when I rescued it from a Christmas drive it was too handmade to serve, was left there on the floor to be tidied away where the airport staff might put it. Perhaps to landfill. My box of dice stayed in my big suitcase to go with me.

These choices may sting, but in truth, I would go and leave everything if I must. It would likely even be easier than choosing which and what to consign away to the blind world which knows none of the stories of these things. Most of the elements of my shrine were left at home, to whoever would live there after me. The musical jewelry box and the fierce red bull sit on a bookshelf to be adopted or admired or discarded, and an empty waxen skull sits on a dead mantle long closed to any use of a real hearthfire, grinning over a basement den, for as long as it is left there. I kissed its crown one last time in reverence before I left. I go, seeking my dreams more boldly perhaps than ever I have... or then, maybe not, given the many journeys I have taken. But I go, and fulfil the promise I made by that candle gloriously.

I treasured these things, but mostly I treasure the memories carried on them. I leave much behind, but it is with a heart willing, and the abandonment of old relics helps me to feel new. They are only things, and I would give up more than I have for the sake of my friendships, which are greater; or just for my freedom, which is also greater. If I had to.

My flight should board soon.

At Keflavik Airport: 4:33 AM local time

My phone's clock reads 12:33. My headset has begun, while on the flight, to lose its strength in the wires by the speaker jack. Like the last one, the bundle of tiny wires inside must have twisted enough to sever almost all of them. I sit and write in a beautifully white bathroom where every stall has its own sink, and a door with no substantial gap underneath it. I was driven there largely by a keen and self-conscious awareness that I smell of menstruation. Probably, it is mainly a function of having worn the same clothes for so many hours in succession, having had to sit still in one spot for so long.

I remember that I meant to look up the phone number of my contact at the house where there is a room waiting for me on Ashfield St. A repeated announcement calls out in some English and some Icelandic for someone with a name that, to me, only sounds a bit like "alien saucepan".

I am tired. It has been too much dull restraint now to feel any glory, or at least any but slight occasional flickers, at my imminent and ongoing return. I did still enjoy the thrill of my last plane building up speed for the great rush that would lift it off the ground, after so long being teased by occasional accelerations that were only to taxi out to our designated runway.

I am tired from sitting still. From enduring the child behind me kicking my seat. From turning aside my thoughts when they wandered to the emergency door near me, and the long scream and fatal drop that could lie beyond. Or contemplated death in a crash, or in the sea in some emergency. I am more than half way through the part of my journey involving flight. I look forward to sleep, on a soft bed somewhere distant. After that, I will be able to begin to take on the tasks of my return and settling in.

At Ashfield, Carlow: 4 PM, Thursday 16, August 2018

I am here. The cool air greets me welcomely. The trees in their robes of ivy and all the walls and farmland look beautiful to me. The wind blows rain like seaspray and clouds like quickly passing crowds. All smells of sea and soil and, slightly, horses. My host met me and tried to help me see where things were. Gave me my keys and a lift to town, to Aldi where I bought some pillows and food.

Saturday 18th, August 2018

I type up the handwritten notes of my journey. It is about a quarter to four in the morning, in my little bright bedroom on the second floor of a neat little house in Ashfield. Not Ashfield St, for that is not quite how things are here. Ashfield is a neighborhood. A little expansion of duplex houses, pretty much all looking the same, and with a little road winding between them.

I am tired, and think I may sleep after this typing. I have slept mostly in evening, up until midnight, so far, and then again in the morning after an interim few hours of midnight activity. So shall it be today, although I mean to rouse myself earlier today than yesterday from my morning nap. I'll hope to seek out some place to access internet, post this blog, talk to my friends... and see whether I have yet any word from my Dear Memory, to whom I left a message: "I am back".

Perhaps I will ask my housemates to take me into town. Maybe to the library, or the grocery. It is hard, but I must constantly remind myself that during the morning, those friends I know best will not be around. The time zone difference would make it deep night for them, when they should be sleeping.

I have learned over the past day that I will need to find a job offer and then a PPS number, in order to take work in Ireland. I should go to Intereo for the number after I have an offer, with my passport, and a proof of address, and a letter of offer. I might open a bank account once I have a proof of address or student ID card.

I have rediscovered that in Ireland, candy tastes better. I remembered thinking this, but the substance of it does not really ring clear until the difference between flavours is in one's mouth again. I bought a couple of sticks of red licorice twist from a convenience store at the near edge of town, where I stopped to look around and speak to the lady behind the counter and ask if I might leave my CV there, once I've prepared one. Yes. And I did not eat the licorice for some time, but carried it in my bag and carried on my way. But it is so full of flavour, like red soda and some kind of delicious fruit. By comparison, a lot of candy from Canada tastes of almost nothing but stale sugar. I might well wind up stopping by Hegarty's to buy a small amount of candy fairly often. The open sweet bins behind the counter are delightfully nostalgic to me of the penny and dime candies at the gas station back in Killaloe. My Killaloe, the little village of my childhood.

My mind wanders to all manner of fantasy over you, my Dear Memory. I imagine meeting, over and over. I imagine singing to you. I imagine lying next to you, on grass under a tree, or in bed to sleep. I imagine asking you demurely a vast array of happy little invitations. I wonder that I ever felt muted in my feelings toward you. I have felt giddy and romantic and happy and suspenseful, and surprisingly little worried.

Typing up my notes here, I had the opportunity to now process the little feelings of loss at the property I have left behind. Feel a pang of anxiety over the accounts my old laptop may have still been signed in to. A little twinge of sadness over my old beloved D&D books, kept with me for 12 years, and the faceless rabbit doll, and a computer game that meant a lot to me as a very young child, and which I wonder to myself whether it can be found online. What is done is done, however, and I would not reverse it, though I do feel the loss. An the serpent sheds its skin it is cleaner and shinier, but also more naked and perhaps vulnerable for a time in softer scales not yet grown thick with scars.

Dear Memory: Volume 2

Good evening.

You have been often on my thoughts. Only natural, I suppose. I do not know, quite, when I am to meet you. You have already been told, given that it was not practical to have our first meeting immediately as I was in the country, that I will wait until my arrival to arrange it. You judged it reasonable.

As the day draws near, the need to have a place to stay becomes more urgent. That, though, pales in comparison. I have spent the last week or so kind of out of sorts, feeling antisocial, bored, tired. It may have been partly the after-effects of a minor cold, or possibly of failing to notice a missed day of my medicine. It has not prevented me from getting anything done, however. I finished the essential part of sewing up my backpack. It is, although not as thoroughly secured and finished as I want it to be, ready to be used. I redoubled my efforts contacting landlords who might rent to me, and have several conversations going with regard of potential places. Two of my friends agreed to come and move furniture for me, to set up a yard sale. Another from out of town asked to meet with me briefly before I go, and I agreed.

I am on my last week of work. My direct supervisor has praised me over several times, for being a good and energetic worker. Proactive, reliable. Last week, I found and returned a ring that had been lost on one of the shuttlebuses when we were cleaning them, and I was given a card and little reward for it.

For the past couple of weeks, I have occasionally stayed behind after my shift to play piano, for there are instruments at various places throughout the building, and some of real old wooden make, with the soulful sound of an organic, resonant thing responding to my touch. It has been a long time since I had convenient access to such an opportunity to practice my playing. I am rusty. However, with a half an hour here and there, I have been able to reclaim a great deal of my elegance, if not my memory of specific songs. Several people have complimented my playing.

All this is procrastination. It is... details. I came to write here today because I thought... maybe... it would help my temper at work, and allow me to sleep a bit better at night, if... If I...

If I admit here, openly in writing, that I am afraid you will reject me.

There. It is said.

Although I have no particular reason to expect you to, and although I have coached myself on every fancy that I must accept whatever answer you give, I am nevertheless afraid. Although I have prepared to move on confidently, with the condolences and support of several dear friends, and the necessity of looking after myself by earning my keep in the more expensive environment to which I go... Perhaps I will sleep more soundly if I have confessed here that for all my preparation, I do care. I do have hopes, and they stand at risk of being disappointed. I do wish... and with a power that makes all this that I have done, to arrange for myself to come back across the ocean to see you again seem perfectly in line, not excessive. I want to share fondness with you again. I want to be permitted to love you again.

The time I spent in Ireland makes a grand story. If it is, as I have at least once named it, like a story that makes all that came before only a prequel, then the time since October has been another very worthy story in the series, and frankly one much better documented within its own time. But I could not have written everything I have felt, all the times I have thought of you. They have been too numerous. I could not have written all the different things I have felt, or believed myself to feel. There have been long weeks of distraction that I did not write at all. There have been weeks I myself have forgotten.

This second volume, second story within the series that follows the arc of you and your impact on my life, present or not, must be drawing to a close. Its content has been doubt, and the coping with doubt, and learning how to respect doubt and carry it healthily and act confidently despite it. Doubt must soon come to an end, and I have been feeling the tension building gradually around me, the thrill of coming closer and closer to the climax of the story, the resolution of the doubt, the answer to the mystery. How it plays out, I do not yet know, but I know that I am nearing the final pages, and feel that however it is this story ends, however the doubt ends... My memory will be watching, and the memory of it must surely be keenly felt and remembered as the next story, whatever its shape may be after this, begins.

The tension is killing me, and my heart is cheering for a happy ending as the days lurch and drag. Two and a half weeks. Two weeks. A week and a day now, and I find that I am imagining talking to you at all sorts of idle moments. The tension is killing me, but so sweetly poignantly that I could have no objection.

Dear Memory: Nondispassionate

Yes, that is a deliberate double negative.

After having written four days ago in a state of surprised and surprising calm, and reflected on my own detachment from the emotional side of my return, I find that strange dispassion... it has not... gone away, exactly. I don't believe that anything I said then has become untrue. I still await the future with great curiosity, without certainty, without demand... and I think, ready to face a disappointing answer if that is what awaits me.

However, perhaps in response to having thought about it more seriously for the first time in quite some time, I notice a more emotional side of my experience. Perhaps it is rising up in response, or perhaps I am just noticing it in response, in all of the little ways that the things I said do not show the whole picture. The details of my life that those words do not adequately describe. Perhaps a combination of both, and I think this is more likely. I always seem to think of an exception to an assertion just as or after I make it.

Like rules in Magic: the Gathering always interacting with one another, and allowing for so many variations and conditions that almost any absolute statement you make will have exceptions. Like, "You won't have more than one sorcery on the stack at once." I have to admit, dear memory, I have enjoyed your Topdeck Tutors podcasts and videos a great deal. I listened to them many times, much like rewatching CarlSagan42's videos over and over again, which you also introduced me to. I like your taste, dear memory. The things you do and recommend have often been interesting, hopeful, clever and funny. Much like you...

I told the story of my relationship with you to one of my co-workers today. She has been working with us only two weeks, rather than the five that I have shared with the other summer students who joined at the same time as me. She is more than ten years younger than me, and working together with a co-worker more than ten years younger than myself feels very strange indeed. It gives me a sense of being older and more experienced in my surround that is very distinct and I am not sure how to react to it. I feel I should be a voice of wisdom and experience to some degree, but am also concerned against being a pretentious adult as I know I used to see adults who would try to talk to me: who thought they knew better, and needn't listen to me. I never want to be like that. I think I am managing not to be, so far.

I told her about meeting you at tabletop society, inviting someone else at the table to walk, but having you answer that call instead, and noticing you in a way I had not noticed before. The March-a-thon, and the long walks you markedly failed ever to make an excuse not to show up for. The discomfort on your face when I mentioned a lover from home. The request to kiss you. A relationship beautiful and intense and supportive, but always bound by time to end with the school year. My own desperate reluctance to leave you behind. A promise perhaps unfairly extracted. Intentions forged from fear of letting go. Inability to keep up a relationship worth having between the pain of distance and the dissynchronicity of time zones. A coming apart, first resisted, and then formally agreed. An attempt to move on. A song, a breaking point, a realization, and a decision, to come back. Plans, applications, formalities; step by slow, beaurocratic step. Success. Acceptance. Further plans. A plane ticket. And an email, requesting your consent to meet me. And a message, charmingly misspelled, 'of coarse'.

I was crying a little by the end of that story. I am crying a little recounting it here. The feelings... they are still there. Of course they are. How couldn't they be? And yet, none of the words I said four days ago, I think, are false. I do not think I am obsessed anymore. I do think I am ready to take whatever comes. It remains true, so far as I can tell beyond a veil of perspective behind which I cannot be objective, that the travel and the adventure may have been welcome even if I did not have this exceptionally romantic excuse to undertake it. That I expect the adventure to be welcome even if the answer I find is not what I hoped it might be.

Beside that strange dispassion is a shining storm of quiet passion, controlled... in some way respectful... perhaps even polite. But passionate nonetheless, moved into a whirl that twists the air into eddies and currents, that pulls me, although perhaps not inexorably. That moves me, because I consent to be moved by it. It would be a great struggle not to move to this current in some way or another, but I can direct it, I think. I can channel and turn its flow. I still am convinced this is not really a contradiction. Like so many other things, my dear memory, in this ball of seeming contradictons, as you called me long ago. I don't think I ever claimed, or ever expected, that I would not feel. I don't think I ever said, even to myself, that I would not cry, or hurt. Only that it would be worth it. It was, and is, my choice. The story worth telling, both the bitter and the sweet of it.

Dear Memory: As Seasons Change and The Time Draws Near

My upcoming trip back to Ireland becomes more real week by week. It is less than a month away now, and begins to solidify, develop the practical gentle urgency of something I need to prepare for. I went out today, and bought a luggage to fit close to the maximum dimensions for an allowed carry-on luggage as permitted for my flight. The one I found at Talize that I decided to buy was missing a handle, but seems roomy and adaptible. Part of its length is collapsible with an extension zipper. It also has little wheels on the bottom, and I know well the value of being able to pull, not carry, wherever the ground permits. I have begun to sew on a new handle, made of a synthetic strap that I have among my collection of various potentially useful objects and materials.

It has been a while since I've done any sewing, although I had a stint of it a while back, before I got this summer job, and I look forward to finishing my backpack as well, before I finally go.

The job... The first genuine interview I got this summer led to a hire. I must have been doing something right, and that brings a little soft smile to my face, although I know it also took me some effort and stress before I got to that interview. I have been working in maintenance at the Boys & Girls Club of London, and my direct supervisor is often impressed with the thoroughness and care of the work I and my co-workers who are also summer student hires do. Even, sometimes, with the speed, although this is far less one of my strengths. I have had sore muscles and joints in at least one place almost constantly since I started - it is physical work, which I have not been used to in recent years; and involves a lot of crouching and bending, which is hard on my feet, and thighs, and knees. However, the staff there are friendly and diverse, encouraging and gentle. They remind me insistently to take breaks and I think they want to make sure I take care of myself, which it is hard to remember to do when I am focused on proving my worth - at work, I always am.

For the first week of July, distant memory, I went into the United States to visit with another friend from the internet, who has seemed to be quite smitten with me for some time, and has been a great source of comfort and companionship. It was a very pleasant week of luxury and relaxation. I was treated to a hotel and swimming and I suspect I would have been bought restaurant food every day I was there had I not pretty much insisted on showing my cooking chops - so one night, I made us sandwiches and then my host bought us a hotplate so that I could cook a jambalaya (a boxed meal that caught his eye when we were shopping) and a soup and a good meal of pasta.

My dear host also offered me the opportunity to take a new laptop with me when I left, which caught me thoroughly off-guard. He had bought it just to have for our time together, he explained to me, and would have returned it otherwise. Although it baffles my awkwardness about money and worthiness, and jarred against my pride clamorously, I accepted; my budget for the coming year is likely to be stretched as it is, and my old laptop is in awful shape, just kind of waiting for one last problem to make it actually unusable. It already has no useable battery (and cannot run at all without being constantly plugged in) and often stalls and threatens to crash when dealing with anything complicated.

My trip in July was romantic, and my relationship with the one who invited me there as well. It continues to be a strong and fond connection. I wish for you to understand that although it took me some time to be ready to open my heart again after losing you last summer, and losing you much more thoroughly in October... I have been able to. I want you to understand that this is not an indication that I do not care about you or am no longer fond of you. It is, however, part of the plan. I needed to let you go, in order to come back to you freely, and with the strength of independence. Forging new romantic connections again, once I was able, has been part of that, a small and vital part of letting you go. But they do not displace my promises, or my hopes. There is a throne somewhere in my heart, now perhaps a little dusty, for I have left it mostly alone for some time... that sits reserved for you, should you want it. I have set up my other relationships to be secondary, to give primacy to the potential of you. If the primacy of you does not come about, I will adjust. If you make clear that you do not want the throne, I will adjust. Offer that place to someone else, or destroy it and build something else.

I think of you only occasionally now, and I think of you as a feature of the future more than a feature of the past. I do not have much to think about you that I have not already covered, and I think I have settled into a reasonable comfort in waiting. I went very thoroughly over all this, emotionally and practically, earlier. I chose my strategy, now it only remains to carry it through, and this I can do quite simply.

It occured to me while I was taking a shower at some point, perhaps a week ago, perhaps two... that there had been a time that a former state of Serp was thoroughly obsessed with you, and that state of Serp had had little else in its focus than you, and what might be the best way to have the best chance to know you again, and to have all the good of your company. That Serp decided that in order to have the best chance, it must cease to be the obsessed Serp that it was, but make a plan to pursue you gently and without being obsessed, so that the future, non-obsessed Serp would not simply ignore you or fail to make any effort. And so my past self plotted, and felt, and dreamed, and wrote you letters here, burning out its passion and resigning itself to pass away, giving way gradually and by its own will to a different Serp with a very different state of mind.

It feels like a different person wrote those letters, a little. This Serp, this present I... I do not think it is obsessed. I do not think I am obsessed, but regard this whole adventure as just the way that things are going to go. In respect for my past self, and in accord with the arrangements and work already put into the plan, in acquiring an acceptance from another Irish school, a deposit from my father, committing to my landlord to leave. I do not feel all that romantic about it day by day, but from time to time I do think about the future and wonder what will happen, when I will actually meet you. What look will be on your face? What will you see when you look at me? Will you notice some differences right away? Will I seem calmer? Stronger? Thinner? Happier? The subtle changes that take place over months are rarely well observed by one who lives through them. They are rarely drastic enough to notice, and even when they are, the new way of things quickly becomes merely normal again. But perhaps you, old memory, will notice.

And so that I do not leave it out, because it is still part of the reason, I do come to Ireland in order to find out. In order to see you, and speak to you, and in order to answer the question of whether we can and will love one another again. Perhaps I will feel a wash of emotion as soon as I see you again, eye to eye in real time and real space. Perhaps I will remember my obsession and be again entangled. I think, however, that I will be able to resist becoming obsessed for a time, by being careful, so as to not overwhelm you or make myself a nuisance by being too attached if it is not reciprocated, or if it is not desired of me. It is not, now, a demand... as my past self insisted it should not be, and I think I am ready to fulfil that. It is not a need for you. It is an open question, one in which I remain interested and curious, and very much inclined to pursue. Will we love one another again? Shall I be your companion for some substantial amount of time? Will your life and my life fit together? Can we make them complimentary in a way that makes each of us stronger? Will you want to?

I remind myself, in a reflex, to imagine that the answer could be no. And I smile a little to myself, because I think I genuinely have managed to prepare to accept that gracefully, by reminding myself every time. It would be alright. It would be satisfactory. The question would still have been answered. Don't get me wrong, I expect it may be at least a little disappointing... But my cunning past self knew just what it wanted its strategy to be, and set it in motion and then lay down and passed peacefully into the past so that I could emerge as I am, as planned, and I have to say I am somewhat impressed with myself. I didn't realize I could do that.

I think I'm ready. I am prepared for long travel, and to face uncertainty with confidence and with ingredients gathered around me from which to forge all manner of alternate plans. I am ready to meet you and be rekindled as a lover, or embraced as a friend. An... old friend... I remember the words, and my mind is transported back to a grassy field, a gentle rise, a tense and tearful conversation. My eyes leak in sympathy with the past and I feel curious, and wistful, and I continue to think about the future, but note that there is still this possibility of being reminded vividly of the past, like a movie playing over again, known fondly and memorized.

I have begun to sell some of my things. Took a bunch of photos and made a bunch of listings the other day. It has demanded more organization from me, and I have done it. It is useful on its own anyway.

I knew it'd been some time since I wrote here. There are a good many things I struggle to make time for, in those moments when I have power and confidence enough to choose to do something, and then go ahead and do it. Rather than going through my life desperately from reassurance to reassurance like it sometimes feels like.

I have three weeks left at my summer job, and then another handful of days left to myself, and then a long, long travel back to the country where I met you, old memory. Since you will not be able to meet me the day I land, there is not really any need to plan the meeting in advance. I will take up the offer given me by my college and be transported to Carlow to begin to settle there, and then I will probably feel I have the right to speak to you more freely, for I will be there, and available at the expenditure of a few hours in transit. I breathe. I sigh. Until then, then, old memory. Heh. The reunion comes.

Out of the Fire and into the Pan

It has been a stressful month or so for me, increasingly so over financial debts and concerns that I may not be able to arrange things adequately even to get myself to Ireland, much less beyond... I was very reluctant to return to Ontario Works, but this week I did so, and spoke very humbly to the staff member there who was quick to listen and encourage me, and trusted me when I said I was job searching already and had applied to ten or a dozen summertime positions, which I had.

I've made up a chart on Google Sheets of when I applied to what and how long I spent doing it, and roughly what sort of positions they were, and I've given to my friends and to my employment counsellor at Goodwill Career Center a link to see it as I add to it. I was feeling so glum and reluctant one evening that I turned to examining the feeling and what exactly it was about. I decided a large part of it was probably the silence. I've never been able to happily endure silence as a response when I put myself out into the world, whether it's a joke or a request or, as now, a job application. It feels like casual rejection, which feels hideous. Although I know that keeping at my job hunting a little at a time, stable-like, is how best to make sure I can find something, it's awfully discouraging to me not seeing any mark of progress, because I've not got interviews or hire offers yet.

So I thought about that, and I decided to ask my friends to help me by setting up like video game achievements for me, so that to help me keep going with gradual consistency, I could measure progress by milestones like grindy achievements; applications X days in a row like studying on Khan Academy, or apply to five receptionist jobs, or to ten labour jobs, or thirty jobs in total, whatever it'd be. Then I'd have marks of progress to look forward to, and to look back on, that didn't depend on any feedback I'm unlikely to get from the jobs themselves.

So that seems alright, and I do think it's helping me stay happy, which ultimately makes everything better. One of my friends agreed in right away and will share with me a song from his music library or a sketch he's drawn that I didn't see before for each two online applications I submit, or each one place I submit in person, up to two rewards every day. And yesterday, I went through and did five applications online to mostly labour oriented positions, so I could focus on how to present as a good labourer rather than trying to organize a bunch of different fronts at one time. I like that strategy, I think it suits me well.

There's also mother. I don't remember whether I wrote it here, but I got back in contact with my mother, and that's been stressful. I think she's trying, though. I told her once a little while ago that she had been behaving unappropriately and to stop sending me any more messages until I could figure out what to say back to her, and then she sent me a message to say she would (because no-one ever apparently thinks that saying yes counts as saying anything), but since then has stayed quiet, and I've got a long email sitting in drafts that I haven't gotten back around to yet to trim down and decide whether to make it milder, but I've been focusing on trying to keep my morale high enough to job search. I might say more about my mother here later, or maybe I won't.

I've come 'round to sleeping days again, which is all a great frustration, but I can still do my job searching at least, in the evenings when I'm awake. Normally I'd try to push my sleeping forward and forward through the days some more until it was back around to nights again, only I talk to Iris in the evenings. He's been very sweet and loving to me, and it makes me feel happy to have that place and time when I'm welcomed for a while. I've got him playing through Doki Doki Literature Club, which I played my virgin run of a while ago. I thought we might be done with his own virgin (or I suppose you could say blind) run through it by now, but he goes through the game so slowly, reading the dialogue and discussing the poetry and thinking hard over every choice and talking to me about it.

We spent some amusing and interesting hours together finding a bunch of secrets in the game, much earlier than I would have expected and which I hadn't even known were there, so I was able to participate in unraveling them from ignorance and with sincere exploration myself, which was great fun. I won't say any more about that here, because between them being secrets and the type of game DDLC is, if any readers have not played it, I would want to encourage them to do so and experience it all themselves. Iris and I have recorded our playing the game and I might put it on YouTube at some point if ever I find a comfortable way to edit videos again, so it's not like our experiences will be lost if I don't write them here.

Last time we played, Iris had a substantial conversation with Yuri for the first time in the game, having mostly spent his time talking to Sayori so far. It was very fun for me to hear him read it, partly because it went like conversations he's actually had with me even more than I expected. I see a lot of myself in Yuri, a lot of my own strengths and weaknesses and fears, depicted very well in some places, and that gives me reason to love the game if I didn't already have an inclination to. I spoke to Iris about it and he can see what I mean by that, although he finds much more kinship in Sayori himself, which doesn't surprise me... Such a simple sweetheart, taking unabashed delight in the simple solaces of the world like restful sleep and tasty food. And what's better, he doesn't mind if I make a little fun of him for it. It seems I get along very well with fellows like that, who can remind me by example to enjoy the simple things, and aren't too proud to let me laugh at them.

I say simple, but it doesn't mean stupid. Iris and Fish and Coda too can understand the complexity and darkness in my perspectives well enough to empathise beautifully and sincerely; I know it's not any lack of understanding or capacity that leads them to deal with life on such simple terms, but their own preference, and oftentimes conscious decision about who they want to be. I can thoroughly respect that. I can enjoy walking a time with Iris's sunny attitude, knowing that he is sincerely willing to take his turn walking with me through nightmares... so spending time lighthearted doesn't mean denying the dark is there, in the way that it has often felt to me as though it does in broader society. It's not whitewashing. It's not stupid politics. It doesn't make me pick sides between two ends of a waveform as though they were contradictory to one another for the contrast. I love that.

Anyway, I started out this writing meaning to say that my benefit return from filing my taxes has come in, and now so has Ontario Works support for this month, since I hadn't paid my rent yet, not having the money, and I asked humbly if they could help me with that and was told they could and would. So I've paid my rent, and I also paid off most of the debt on my credit card that's been building up from groceries and stuff... And my plane ticket... and there's such a weight off my shoulders now about that. But I still need to work at finding work for those weeks of summer I have left if I can, because I can use all the money I can save up to get myself started strong in Ireland.