Oh I definitely need some strife. It can just be me vs situation like my current position trying to run an efficient dispensary, but I need the challenge way more than the perception of earning or owning. I gotta be solving problems and completing tasks. I can’t live idly.
That’s silly. I’m in a really good place personally. My best friend is my assistant manager. I just signed the lease early for another year (starting in May) in my nice apartment that is just a few blocks from my dispensary. We could reasonably be a million dollar a month location by this time next year. I’ve found a Discord where I can make friends with other trans people in my area despite my powerful introversion. And just being a visible trans person in a popular business running a safe place in a conservative area is fighting the good fight! I have integrated the resistance into my life. I have the financial stability to take care of some real life shit that’s in arrears. And despite isolated examples of the opposite, the fact is that people are overall safer, healthier, and freer than they have ever been. I say that as someone who has been attacked in public for being trans. 2024 is going to be good. It’s just going to be extra good for me.
Oohh I get this one. Me to a friend the other day: “As long as you’re still getting a divorce, I LOVE YOU!” If she doesn’t go through with this divorce, we’re not friends anymore…
Not of the aliens gave Martha Washington the technology to become impregnated by the Bigfoot variety, but there are always plenty of conspiracies on Hexbear. It’s wild how deep into history revision and denial some people will go to justify believing fairly reasonable things.
There is a very real chance that mine is the only one in the city. It’s right in the middle of the city by the bigger college. North side might have a few walkable areas in theory, but it also has dangerous areas you wouldnt always want to walk through. South side is strung out retail and commercial spaces, several minutes drive to anything, poor pedestrian infrastructure. I’m in a sweet spot.
Oh god so many I could ruin this post. Music is my most important processing art, and many of the musicians I listen to are very important to me. So I’ll limit myself:
“We took a weekend, drove to Provo.
The snow was white and fluffy.
A weekend in Utah won’t fix what’s wrong with us
The grey sky was vast and real cryptic above me.”
The Mountain Goats ~ The Mess Inside.
Because the work to get better and overcome truama isn’t easy or short. I’ve done a lot of wonderful things with my wife, and we’ve both come incredibly far from our truamas. But most of the nice things we’ve done had very little impact on that recovery. To paraphrase a Ray Ramano bit from SNL, you’re still gonna be you in Italy.
“I don’t fall in love, I plummet.” ~Ashley Virginia ~I Don’t Fall in Love
“You can’t stay everywhere you leave a piece of your heart.” ~Little Mazarn ~Vermont
These two go together. I fall in love–with people, places, things, experiences–with abandon. I can be slow to let things in, especially people, because once I do it is quickly a no holds barred environment. It’s what the Uhaul key on my necklace means. Because of that, I can’t stay everywhere or keep everyone I love. I have to know when and what to let go, when and where to hold on.
Finally I guess I’m gonna wholly belie all notions of brevity with a whole god damn Diane Cluck song:
"Somethin’ loosened around my heart
From where it was bound, it fluttered around
This funny motion first mistaken as attack
I realize and step back
With real eyes, I step back
And let it happen
Knitted so snug inside my chest
Iron lungs, ribs as rungs
Those who care to try and climb me
Sometimes say it’s hard to find me
Still, in reflex, I would shout
When I began spilling out
Weeping clearly as a blister
“Hey, I’m here, " you almost missed her
And I have so much for you (Na-na-na-na-na-na)
Do you know how I get shy to show you?
I fill up, tender, with a glow (Na-na-na-na-na-na)
Fluff and puff as I try to show you
Display my falling feathers
As they leave me in this weather
The days, they go so quickly
Can’t even stop them
Don’t even want to”
Diane Cluck ~Heartloose
I usually have to listen to this song twice. It’s so short, but so dense. Every bit of it shakes me. I don’t have time to enumerate the ways this song applies, appeals, affects, and relates to me. Diane Cluck is so important to me.
My actual high school experience. I enjoy math these days. When I was expected to learn and demonstrate it, I was an unstable teenager unsure if I hated myself or my parents more. (Spoiler alert: it was my parents >_>) Doing math made me slow down and make space in my head, which let out all the dead Hanks and Deans allowed the TRUAMA to flood in.
I’m probably in line for a promotion to management, and this is something on my radar. The GM genuinely doesn’t believe in people coming in sick and will herself be the extra work or hands needed to replace them. I’m the same way. But the example she sets is having Lupus and being some kind of unwell too often to never be sick at work. The other manager, recently promoted, is frustrated by the fact that we legitimately have people who don’t take care of themselves and take advantage of our relatively lax on time and attendance policy. But she’s a good friend of mine who I think can be inspired to grow and move past that, especially if we could manage to filter out a few problem employees. The advent of rec market realities has shaken out several people already, including three out of four members of the management team. It’s just not the job it was a year ago.