#tales from the RL front

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Ok cool you know what?  I’m at home doing nothing but online tutoring for the next two weeks.  It’s time to make a self-quarantine goals list.

(Yes.  Yes, this is what 2020 has brought to us.  This is the world we live in and I’m just leaning into it at this point.)

So!  Goals!

Write at least 2 respectably-lengthed meta posts about the most recent episode of CR, and post them before the next one airs

Clean up my living room and unpack all remaining boxes from moving in December

Finish writing and post the next section of the Vox Machina/Dragonriders of Pern crack crossover

Do every piece of laundry I own, fold it, and put it away

Fully clean the kitchen, including scrubbing the countertops

Make pasta carbonara

Learn to make puttanesca sauce.  Cook and jar as much as I can reasonably produce with the amount of capers I have on hand

You know what just fucking make homemade pasta, we have a million eggs and the counters will be clean, it doesn’t even matter, do it with a rolling pin and figure it out

Sort through all of my tutoring binders and organize them properly

Start knitting the sleeves to the sweater I’ve been sitting on for months

Finish those damn socks

Order the yarn I need to finish the chunky cowl.  (Support small businesses!)

Organize my knitting needles and other accoutrements properly

Vacuum the living room

Organize my dice

DM at least 1 game via Skype, Zoom, or Discord.  Get my players the fuck out of koboldtown and up to level 3 already.

Take at least 2 nice baths with wine, music, and no laptop death

Relatedly, clean and scrub the bathroom

Read at least 2 paper books

Start and/or finish watching any one of: The Witcher; The Untamed; Knives Out; all of Leverage for the seventeenth time

Answer my work emails once per day

Text my mom every so often so she doesn’t think I died of plague

That seems like a respectable list of things to get done over this impromptu vacation.  I feel good about my chances at accomplishing at least, like, half of that.

If nothing else, I am sure as hell stocked up on things for making interesting pastas.

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The last three months of this decade...

October

--I am absolutely out of all meds, and also Medicaid has officially dropped me, precisely one month after they finally admit I qualify in the first place.

--I finally quit my truly shitty part-time job, resigning myself to making rent entirely on my slightly less shitty part-time tutoring job and figuring more shit out in two weeks once I have more time.

--I have a birthday.  The next morning, my paternal grandmother dies after a long illness, sending my father’s enormous, overly-political family into a tailspin of public grief and private combat on every single front.

--I start tutoring three new students in approximately five new subjects, and am now working every single day of the week.

--I successfully DM four times

--I listen to nearly the entire first season of that podcast I don’t listen to or talk about any more, giving me nightmares and a persistent fear off the dark for the next month.

November

--I wake up on November 1 to an email from my landlord informing me that my rent is going up by $350 on the first of next month.

--I recruit my mother to help me apartment-hunt, which leads to two straight weeks of all SORTS of exciting bullshit of all the most predictably terrible kinds.  Also, it’s clearly her fault that my sister and I are terrible with money, and she’s going to pray for forgiveness for failing us like that very soon.

--I take on three more tutoring students, retake the SAT for the first time in fifteen years, and at least start making enough money that I can mostly hopefully make rent on the upcoming new apartment, not that any proposed landlords believe me.

--I successfully DM at least twice, probably, who even knows any more.  Our bard moves halfway across the country on precisely one and a half weeks’ notice.  I recruit us a brand new cleric, handle all of his character creation in between scheduling moving trucks, and make goddamn chicken and dumplings for game night to clear the stockpiled meat out of my freezer.

--The day before Thanksgiving, my mother begs off couch shopping for the new place I’ve finally signed a lease for because, sigh, dad’s weirdly dizzy, she guesses she’ll take him to the walk-in clinic, maybe she’ll meet me at the furniture store later.  Six hours later it becomes clear he’s had a major stroke and will be in the hospital for the forseeable future.

December

--I pack.  I move.  This is at least five bullet points.

--I get an excellent damn six-month tutoring review from every single tutoring student, barring the one that decided to quit tutoring six hours before a lesson via email and stopped answering emails from me or the company after that, and also the one that cancelled a scheduled lesson by moving and not telling me their new address until I showed up at their old front door.  I tutor every single kid so good.  I answer last-minute calculus panicking questions via text at 9:45 PM on a Tuesday night.

--I continue to successfully DM, god damnit, so help me god.  My players do not successfully manage to provide a working electric drill to hang my spice rack.

--I spend three entire days at my parents’ house for Christmas.  We spend most of those days hanging out in a hospital room attempting to pretend not to notice when my dad starts crying multiple times an hour.  He is, at least, engaging with a negative emotion other than anger, so that’s probably a positive, right?

--I come home to the new, still-not-unpacked apartment, go to bed, and wake up the morning after Christmas with the flu.

I am ending 2019 with the flu.��  I don’t even have the energy to comment on the appropriateness of that fact.  I am so done with literally everything.

2020 is going to be great and I cannot fucking wait to put this entire bullshit decade behind me

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Today I am applying for a new apartment, health insurance, and a new job-type thing with my current employer.  In one day.

I demand accolades, damnit.

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Things I fully intended to do this weekend:

Write that post about Beau, finally

Turn that accidental bullet-point GO ficthing into an actual fic polished for AO3

Start even beginning to chip away at the mountain of asks in my inbox that I have read, and appreciated, and said nothing to for some weeks\

Fill out my new hire paperwork for my new job that has to be done by tomorrow

Several loads of laundry

Also dishes

Also cooking

Possibly go to the beach

Things I actually did this weekend:

Watched the entire new season of Queer Eye (hey guys, did you know there’s an entire new season of Queer Eye?)

Watched the entire new season of Stranger Things

Found on Youtube and then watched the entire twenty-year-old miniseries of The 10th Kingdom

Knit some things and also pulled out some things and then knit some more things over the 20+ hours I spent watching things on the internet

Made a mediocre lasagna, I guess?

Did not set foot outside the apartment or so much as get dressed once in the whole past 48 hours

A small portion of this...might count as having been something like productive?

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I don’t know what eldritch yarn demon I summoned to bend the laws of mathematics when I knit the first sleeve of this sweater, but I decreased and increased in every single one of the exact same places on the second sleeve and I’m nine stitches short.

I am Very Tired, friends.  Why is it 50 degrees out and raining on June 19th.  Why did my tea bag explode and send tea particles floating everywhere when I poured in the hot water.  Why hasn’t the lady from monday’s job interview emailed me yet.  Why can I not simply make a sweater.

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I know people who get paid to explain ecology to people. Mix of community organizer and science nerd that explains science topics to kids and adults in the city with a focus on sustainability.

Yup!  Sounds a lot like my past two jobs.  I know this is a thing!  I’m GOOD at this thing, even.  Like, ‘can lead a small horde of twelve-year-olds armed with loppers and handsaws in eco-restoration without anyone losing a finger’, ‘once talked for an hour on native herps of Illinois to a hundred and fifty people on five minutes’ notice and still had 70% of the crowd there by the time I was done’, ‘organize outdoor environmental ed events for a thousand guests and two dozen community partners’ good at this thing.

It’s a super-cool field to work in and to anyone who’s passing by thinking about careers in environmental ed, biology, urban ecology, etc--yes, definitely, do the thing, I can talk to you about what it’s like to work there and what sorts of things I’ve done.  I don’t regret this career!

Just.  Tracking down and then persuading the people with money to pay me to do the thing, once the last group of people with money have ceased to do so.  That’s the tricky bit.

(I am absolutely soliciting job hunting tips.  I am not proud and I am not health-insured.  And I’m not quite desperate enough to work for one of the super-sketchy possibly-evil Alternate Energy Supplier companies who deliberately sell overpriced electricity to customers who don’t understand their power bills around here.  Yet.)

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Look, I know how to do about five things, period, in the world, and only one of them is a marketable skill*.

Somebody has to want to hire me to explain science and ecology things to someone.  It is basically the one thing I can do.  I am very good at it!  This is of value to somebody, somewhere in the world, probably, right?

WILL EXPLAIN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MUTUALISM AND SYMBIOSIS FOR CASH does not make a good roadside sign, guys.  aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.

  *(The other four are ‘pitch story ideas that make people cry and never turn into real stories’, ‘analyze media on very specific whims’, ‘knit very cool lace quite slowly’, and ‘make edible cheesecake’.  I do not see a lot of career options here.)

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Sometimes I’m like, ugh, I’ve never actually stayed in one job or one position at a job for longer than about 2.5 years, why do I think going back to grad school is a good idea, I am going to change my mind halfway through and drop out again, who am I kidding.

Then I remember that the very specific research question I could theoretically write an entire thesis on if I get into a PhD program is something I started wondering about and tossing around in my head in the middle of the last time I was in grad school, fully a decade ago, and I could in fact actually answer it.

So like.  Maybe I actually do care about this specific question?  Maybe I’m not just generally interested in the field and willing to pursue whatever problem pops up, maybe I actually am ready to do the science thing and figure out what’s up with this one precise thing that I can define and test and explore.  Maybe the longer I sit and think about it, the more I can start picturing exactly what data sets I would want to collect and how to do it.

Like.  Maybe I actually can do this thing.

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A funny thing that happened this week: I think I finally understand at least one side of the ‘damn kids these days with their phones and their internet’ argument in a way that actually has a lot of resonance with me?

I was co-leading a community engagement workshop (I do community engagement work now???  I’m a freaking biologist, but life and non-profit work takes you funny places, and now I’m a person who teaches community engagement, and I’m actually good at it, go figure--in part because of things the internet taught me, both in the ‘good example’ and ‘bad example’ ways) with about 35 people in it, which is a pretty huge group for us.  There’s some really neat diversity in this group, too.  We’re still, on the whole, far more white than we’d like, but we’ve got a really wide age range, a really obviously wide socioeconomic spread, several trans and non-binary trainees, and just generally a pretty big spread of different types of folks with different life experiences and opinions.

Which is awesome.

The big theme of our community engagement training is that every community is different.  We can’t tell you how to engage your community, specifically--we can teach you how to talk to your community and learn who they are in particular so they can tell you how to engage them yourself.  Having a group full of people with such diverse communities in their lives can be really great for driving that point home.  (Plus we’re not doing our job right if we’re only talking to people from one specific kind of community in the first place.)  We love it.  It just also causes friction sometimes.

So we had a trainee--youngish guy, probably about 30, very much a millennial, talking about how he’s lived in apartments in three completely different neighborhoods in the past six years and it’s really hard for him to feel connected to any of the geographic communities he’s lived in because it’s so temporary.  Which is a really relatable, cool, and interesting point to consider in our ‘community’ of millennials-in-our-early-thirties-who-still-rent-apartments-and-don’t-know-our-neighbors.  (There are a lot of us.)

But this led, through various discussion, to another trainee chiming in.  She’s a Black woman in her late 60′s who still lives in the same low-income neighborhood where she raised her children decades ago.  And she was talking about cell phones.

What she said--and at first this really did sound like a tangent into the same old cell phone rant--was that part of the reason young people aren’t connecting with their communities is because they’re too busy connecting with a screen.  She sees kids in her neighborhood walking around looking down at their phones instead of up at their neighbors.  The older generation, she said, didn’t need those.  Didn’t have them.  Doesn’t know how to use them.

All things we’ve heard before, right?  And so another trainee spoke up.  Young college kid, maybe twenty-ish years old.  Outspoken.  White kid with they/them pronouns.  They reminded me, I remember thinking when I first met them, of someone I’d run into on Tumblr.  They probably have a Tumblr.

And they were really offended.  They said, don’t devalue and look down this thing that we use to keep in contact with our communities.  You don’t even understand.  You don’t even try to understand.  This thing has value.  They basically gave the pissed-off argument Tumblr echoes amongst ourselves when we run into another article on Those Damn Kids And Their Cell Phones, only I think this might have been the first time I actually heard it coming out of someone other than me, directly to the source of criticism in person.

And as the older trainee went into explaining that she’s not against cell phones, she just wishes people would look up for an hour, and the younger trainee fumed in self-righteousness, and my coworker finally got a word in edgewise to table the whole discussion and move on productively please, I realized--they are saying the exact same thing.

I have a community and I love my community.  (I love this neighborhood, where I’ve lived for decades, where I’ve been for good times and tough times and seen people come and go and watched people grow, that’s supported me for so many years.  I love my internet friends, the disparate group of hard-won people like me, a thing that means so much in my life it’s almost magic, that I can’t see in person all the time or maybe even ever.)

In this community that I love, we talk to each other a certain way.  That’s how we communicate.  That’s our culture and part of the fabric of what binds us together.  (We text and we chat and we like each others’ posts and we have three different conversations at once and we nightblog each other through insomnia and it keeps us sane and alive.  We say hello on the street and we check in if we haven’t seen someone in a while and we keep an eye on each others’ children and know each others’ names and watch out for each other because this is a hard scary world and we need to.)

In my community, we acknowledge each other.  We recognize each other as people and it makes us more fulfilled and more secure and more human, because this is what a community does for each other.  This matters.

We like each others’ selfies.  We wave hello in the street.  We recognize each other as part of a culture and a community that we share.

And YOU, person-not-in-my-community, you maybe don’t belong there and you’re not really invited, but.  People like you refuse to get it.  They refuse to acknowledge my community as important.  They won’t participate.  They won’t even learn the rules of participation.  And a whole world would open up to them, if they would just try.

I guarantee the young trainee has read six million articles on how millennials have murdered everything good in the world and Gen Z is gearing up to be even worse.  I guarantee they’ve heard people demonize the technology they’ve used to find people to support them when their geographical community couldn’t or wouldn’t, a million times over.  Because we’ve all been there.  And it fucking sucks.  It is the collective social devaluing of our community.  And we all know how that is.

But the older trainee was saying--my community is being devalued, too.  The little acts of acknowledgement that bind or bound her community together--people who know each others’ names and look at each other in recognition, people who are loyal to this place--her neighborhood that she loves is now full of people who don’t engage in those ways.  Who won’t engage in any of the ways she and the people like her, aging and elderly, a community in their own right that’s been through decades together, know how.  

She wants the people around her to recognize her community and learn their language.  Which ends up sounding really, really familiar.

I don’t know if there’s a moral to this story.  Self-righteousness and self-defense often sound really, really alike, and frequently enough they come out in the same breath.  There are lots of community engagement principles we teach that Tumblr could stand to learn, but Tumblr’s not a monolith either, for all we talk about it like one.  But it’s interesting to hear somebody make the argument you usually make yourself, and finally be in a position to realize the other side might have a point.  It’s interesting to think about how we self-select for the communities we most want to talk to just by talking a certain way.  It’s interesting to realize just how similar the bare bones of needing human connection become, whatever trappings we put on them.

Community engagement is really cool.

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So I woke up this morning to a massive and utterly predictable hangover and a bunch of really nice post-replies and comments in my inbox, and I just wanted to say <3 thanks.

I’m largely doing ok in a life sense, just off-kilter and completely unable to focus on anything writing-related for more than a couple hundred words at a time on really really good days.  I’ve deleted so many tumblr posts half-written in the past few months, guys, you don’t even know.

Hopefully the meds come back soon (there is a plan for this!) and hopefully the words will come back with them, but I kind of want to try posting just one thing to tumblr a day for a while, just to try.  Whether it’s reblogs or random observations or, heck, more stories I’ve fished up out of the bottom of my drafts file from three years ago (there are 67 posts in my drafts folder, X-pack Allison was far from the only abandoned story bit).  Maybe some of the three-years-too-late-to-be-cool Homestuck meta @zeezoutenijs and I have been throwing back and forth.  Maybe some whining about my brains and my mom.  Maybe some pictures of yarn.  We’ll see!

We’ll call it this year’s attempt at NaNoWriMo.  Can I do thirty posts in thirty days?  I can sure try!

(and the voice in the back of my head pointing out the time I wrote a 90,000 word story in six weeks can fuck off and die.  sometimes things are hard.  that doesn’t mean we stop trying.)

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A thing that actually, legitimately, honest-to-FUCKING-god happened to me tonight

There is so much backstory to this, and so many annotations required, including but not limited to, ‘C you live in the middle of Gentrification Central in Chicago, why in god’s name were you on a date at Olive Garden in the first place if it wasn’t intentionally a setup for a terrible meme joke?’, which is a fair question, but I am still so baffled by so many things that happened to me tonight I can’t even begin to answer it.  Suffice to say that literally nothing that occurred this evening was on purpose, or well-thought-out in literally any way.

Here is what matters, and I swear to god it is the truth.

Tonight I went on a date with a lady who asked me out at work.  We went.  To Olive Garden.

There were breadsticks on the table, Tumblr.  Soft, buttery, garlicky, all-you-can-eat breadsticks.  There they were, and there were we.

My date, in absolute, sincere honesty, trying to make conversation:  “No, but really, if humans evolved from apes, it would still be happening!  Why isn’t it still happening?  Our kids look like us.  Ape kids still look like apes!”

Me, with two actual literal degrees in evolutionary biology: ... ....... ...............

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So what’s everyone else’s usual time gap between getting something new and awesome that just keeps coming, and convincing yourself that you’re going to manage to fuck it up any minute now?

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So last night I went over to my parents’ house after work because I got a new (perfect, at my ideal institution, finally full-time) job, and I wanted to tell them and also use my dad’s scanner to scan and email the contract/background check paperwork/etc etc in to the new place

And my dad was super-bitchy about me using the scanner until I finally told him what it was for, sort of unceremoniously in the middle of things.  And my mom went upstairs to call my sister as soon as she walked in the door, saw I was there, and said hi, so half an hour later I just went and dropped the offer letter on her lap while she was still chatting.

She shrieked for five minutes with joy praising god because finally, said a couple of super-insulting things about how, well, I didn’t have any experience doing the things in the job description (which have been a key component of my job for the past three years) but okay, sure, at least I somehow had a job.  Then she spent another ten minutes on the phone with my sister.

We went out to dinner, then, not really as a celebration but because my parents are rich and lazy and it was a Wednesday night so half-price bottles of wine at the Greek place, and neither of them asked me anything else about it all night.

And it’s ok.  It’s about what I was expecting and it’s not great but it’s fine, and they do care, they’re just kind of self-involved and used to not asking me anything about my life.  But I’m going to go into my old job today and fill out paperwork to formally resign and spend all day getting congratulated and talking endlessly with a dozen different people about what I’m going to be doing and how awesome it is and how much the new place loves me.

And I just needed to tell somebody, so I wouldn’t accidentally tell them.

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Tumblr, for your viewing pleasure, the current skills list for my resume that I need to have finished by the end of the day:

word, powerpoint, excel, photoshop/ilustrator

graphic design in general

statistical analysis fuckers

technical writing, instructional writing, creative writing, proofwriting, bitch I can beta hardcore porn written by two people with completely different styles in RP format into something solidly good how's that

also I speak and write french

I can use a chainsaw.  I'm pretty good with a chainsaw.

Also loppers and bowsaws and herbicide

and power tools

all that fun stuff

I can burn a brush pile and nobody gets hurt.  I can also cook over a brush pile.  I can also cook not over a brush pile but that's somewhat less impressive.  I can burn a prairie or a forest and probably a cattail marsh though I have not done that and apparently it sucks

I can birdwatch.  I can ID birds and teach kids how to ID birds.  I can ID bugs and teach kids how to ID random bugs.  I can ID turtles and snakes and teach kids how to look let's just assume that if it lives in Illinois I can get it at least to order at a glance and if it's got a backbone down to family, and I know how to use a field guide. I have fun stories about milkweed.

Also I'm solidly good with ipads for citizen science projects and using them during programs.

I can lift and carry 50 lbs.

I can talk to anybody in an interpretive fashion about basically anything.  I also know how to say 'I don't know' when appropriate

I can sequence DNA and use electron scanning microscopes even though I don't think we do that here

I can totally do kids' crafts.  I can invent kids' crafts.  I can single-handedly guide a table of eight different kids under the age of five through all trying to do and being at different stages of a kids' craft.  Even if half of their parents aren't there.

I can organize spreadsheets and balance budget stuff for purchasing

I can cold-call other institutions we want to work with and talk them into working with us

I can run a mile, I think, probably, or at least I totally could in high school

I can explain any given concept in a minimum of ten different ways, given a little time to think it over and provided I understand the concept to begin with, until it makes sense to whoever I'm talking to.

I can shut up and pretend I didn't overhear my coworkers talking about things that are not technically my business.

I'm not afraid of teenagers

I'm a decent driver

I'm extremely creative

I'm good at re-juggling my entire list of tasks and priorities to accommodate whatever new thing just cropped up in front of me two minutes ago but has to be done now

I'm good at problem solving so long as somebody bothers to tell me what our goals and priorities actually are

I take direction well

I can ace any standardized test on the first try without studying

When I really have to, I am more likely to make a phone call than hide under my desk

I can keep as many as twelve unchaperoned Montessori students from stabbing themselves or each other with loppers for a whole hour at a time

I can pick up snakes, spiders, turtles, frogs, salamanders, and most insects without issue.  Including wild ones.  (Ants not included.)

I can decipher most terrible handwriting

I can plan lessons and fit them into curricula.  I can write tests.  I can grade tests.  I want this job so I do not ever have to grade tests again.

I can sing, a little, particularly karaoke

I am pretty much fearless re:spur-of-the-moment 'oh let's go hiking over there!' adventures.  Mud holds no terror for me.  I know how to tuck in my socks and handle permethrin so as to avoid both ticks and self-inflicted poisoning.

I can tell a guy who’s sitting in his car waiting for a hooker that he can’t be there right now, without mentioning the hooker part or making it particularly awkward, and actually get him to leave.  I don’t really blink at it, even.

and I can do complex math in my head

and I can flip to the periodic table in the chemistry textbook that every high school in the entire Chicagoland area uses without looking up the index

and I basically know at least one tidbit that I can contribute about almost any topic somebody might bring up, thereby giving me the skill of 'people tend to think I know everything'.

I know the most basic rules of not being an asshole to disabled kids! And also disabled adults!  I can like, do programming for them just like I do for literally everyone else wow what a fucking concept.

I knit stuff.  That’s kind of a job skill.  I used it as a job skill at my old job.  (At my old job, we never shrunk down to the size of turtles and went to the bottom of the river.)

I can rearrange these skill items into a far, far better list than this, because my writing and communication skills are top notch.  I swear.

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On the bright side, I have a job interview on Tuesday for a position that’s basically mine to lose?

So, you know.  That’s cool.

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Oh man, within the next week I have appointments with the therapist, the psychiatrist, the eye doctor, and the auto mechanic!!!!

I also just remembered that I scheduled my car appointment at the mechanic near my apartment halfway through my week of house-sitting for my parents 45 minutes away because I am a total genius but whatever!!! I’ll use it as an opportunity to visit my snake and pick up new clothes.  I am the MOST ADULT today, heck yeah.