kkscatnip

I have never felt so much that "life is the thing that happens while you're making plans" applies to me as it does over the last year or so, oh my god.

April:
Oh, I'm going to move to California. AM I? I was convinced I would at the beginning of the month, and convinced I wouldn't by the end of the month.

May:
By the second week in May, I knew I would be for sure, in spite of everything. I took a week-long trip to my Dad's at this point, just making sure it was a place I could stand to be for more than a week but less than a month. It was!

Early in the fourth week in May, I moved out my my apartment in Atlanta, into the house I grew up in with my mom. At the time she was on FMLA leave from her work because her various chronic pain things (psoriatic arthritis, fibromyalgia, and trigeminal neuralgia) were getting too bad for her to work. While I was there, I did as much as I could for her. (She's now on SSDI!)

June:
Went to Outer Banks/family vacation. I finally got to hang out with my sister-in-law's sister, Abby, who is an awesome hippie girl. Who is now accepted into mom's side of the family and was invited on her own to OBX this year. Right now I'm facilitating her introduction to the kink world, muahaha. She asked, so I provided.

I also returned my dog, Puffin, to the adoption agency I'd gotten her from. I loved--and still love--her, but realistically, it wouldn't have been good to take her with me when I had no idea where I'd end up in six months, and knew finding a place with a dog would be 600% harder. In hindsight, I am super glad that I did this and that I also left my special needs cat, Marie, with my mom. (She's subsequently adopted Marie, so I'm glad I could give her another special animal.)

July:
Moved to Oregon to live with my dad until August 1. I got to work in his legal pot garden! It was actually a lot of fun but also hard work. Living conditions not so pleasant (a shed + air mattress, though given that dad lives in a single wide trailer, I felt like I got the long end of the stick) but for one month? I handled it just fine, in spite of it being 100+ the entire time I was there and Dad nearly killing me on the level five rapids.

Met theheartsays due to my new obsession with Bat Family everything.

August:
Lived in Oakland! Stayed with a friend of a friend. I found Oakland and SF and San Jose and basically everywhere to be awesome and fell in love with all of it rapidly. Met an amazing furryperson and puppy named Mar. Signed a lease to begin on September 22nd, and I didn't have the cash to stay where I was any more, so...

September:
Back to Dad's! I helped some with trimming. Not tons, because I didn't like working with the dead plants as much as I liked working with the living ones. On September 18th, the landlord called and told me he needed to cancel my lease--but he didn't have the money to give me back right then, even if I'd been in town. So is it okay if he gives me half my money by October 1, and the other half by November 1? Not in any position to argue the law with this assface, I say yes.

This is also when I began to go way downhill mental health wise, both because of the time of year and things going wrong, but also due to lack of therapy and just being at Dad's. It's not the right environment for me!

October:
Without Assface returning the $3k I'd paid him for first/last/deposit, I felt like I was stuck in Oregon. I didn't have any money to live on if I returned to the Bay area, so seeing no other option, I stayed at Dad's. I was absolutely miserable--it was an easy formula to figure out: feeling of not having any options + daily verbal abuse + no therapy + rural area means no way to physically get away from the abuse and into a place with people who won't hurt me = Bad Times.

Near the middle of the month and while I was still at Dad's, I started having serious conversations with saystheheart, wherein she offered me a place to stay with her and her mom. Their place was being foreclosed on, but the auction wasn't until February 11th, so I'd have time to recoup money and get therapy and be somewhere safe. I didn't want to live in Denver, though, even if it meant living with someone as awesome as her.

At my mom's urging, in the middle/end of the month, I took the train back to SF and lived in a hostel for almost two weeks. I succeed exactly not at all when it came to finding a place to live, and doing anything constructive besides. I know part of it was the housing market, but I also needed time to recover and house-searching just wasn't condusive to recovering. This wasn't a conscious decision on my part, but rather that my brain wasn't working. Period.

By the end of the month, I felt like the world was crushing down on me. I couldn't afford to stay at the hostel for another week; I didn't feel comfortable asking the married couple who'd helped me move if I could stay with them; I was trapped, again, just like I had been at Dad's.

saystheheart repeated the offer she'd made while I was in Oregon, and I decided fuck it. Fuck it. I was going to Denver. I might stay when they got foreclosed on, I might not, but at the very least I'd have somewhere to stay until February. The other factor was that plane/train tickets to everywhere else that I'd have a free bed for X amount of time were a lot more expensive--I'd be in dire straits if I bought them. So I bought the $110, train ticket for November 1st. A two-day train ride really wasn't my idea of fun, but needs must etc.

I spent my last night in town with Mar; it was absolutely magical.

(October 2013 was a huge month for me.)

November:
I spent two days on a train! It wasn't as bad as I'd thought it be, probably because at that point I probably had at least a week of time on a train, given all the train-riding I did back and forth to my dad's. I figured out a good way to sleep, and I got to see some really amazing scenery on the California Zephyr between Oakland and Denver. I got some absolutely gorgeous photos. Beautiful. I love them. (My instagram, btw. I update it selectively--mostly when I remember.)

Arrived in Denver! Met saystheheart otherwise known as AJ. As soon as I saw her sitting there looking all nervous, a thought popped up: This is the woman I'm going to get old with.

And then I thought, fuck. But I went for it none the less.

Things have been kind of a roller coaster since then: What do you mean the auction is in mid-December, not February? Oh god, our landlord really actually is a drunk asshole! and so on and so forth. But we've gotten through it together, and it feels like it's been years, not months, since we've been together in person.

We're engaged--the big day is October 31st, 2015, but we're going to elope and send pictures. We have two beautiful, amazing cats. We're going to make it and be okay and stuff.

And now I can write LJ entries about life since then. :D

Things keep breaking in the house that I'm currently living in. It's just annoying and rahh-inducing because we got a lot of the same things fixed six months ago. The house isn't that nice anyway, very old and drafty and the utilities are crap. And there's literally nothing near enough to walk to but the MARTA (mass transit) station--which is still a good fifteen to twenty minute walk--so it's always such a pain to buy groceries and bring 'em home. We're definitely not going to renew the lease, which means...

I am back in the business of looking for a new place to live! One possibility with living with a writer friend didn't pan out, so I'm looking at other places. I have a possibility to live with a house full of awesome queer people and I really would love to live in this place, but the dates are like two months off (They need someone in September, I would be moving in November 1) so it really wouldn't work with me living there unless a minor miracle occurred. Which it may.

I'm going to cross my fingers, but also look at other options. Unfortunately, Craigslist ads thus far seem to be so short-sighted that I can't find any shares that are available in November. I am going to keep looking, though!

Worst case scenario, I use Craigstlist to put together a group of queer people. It would be a lot of work, but I think also very rewarding in terms of finding a place to live and people to live with long-term.

Murr. I guess that's it for now.

I guess it's time for my once-every-few-months life update. Bullet points!

( It's a long list. )

About a week ago, I sat down and watched a bunch of TED talks. I do it every so often, because I like hearing in depth about the ideas that are being tossed around.

One of the videos was Shawn Achor's "The happy secret to better work" where he discusses the results of experiments on how to make people work better instead of harder.

The results were unsurprising to me: people work more efficiently when they are happy, and in order to be happy they need to not have crushing workloads and expectations, and also: they need to focus on the positivity.

It is something that I hear a lot in the mental health program that I go to, the idea of "fake it until you make it"--pretend that you are happy, and eventually you will be happy. This isn't bullshit; it's a proven fact.

If you focus your mind on being happy (or being ________) you will achieve that thing, sooner or later. Because you have a focus, and because it's just the way we are designed. This concept shows up over and over in various schools of thought... it shows up far too much to be ignored, and there are tons of experiments that show that it actually works.

So one of the things that Achor uses as an example in the video is that the workers were instructed to do a few things every single morning, for 21 days:
- Write down three gratitudes, three things that they are grateful for having/being/whatever.
- Journal about one positive experience that they had the day before.
- Exercise. Any kind of thing that moves your body around.
- Meditate in order to escape from the cultural ADHD that is all around us.
- Engage in random acts of kindness, usually in the form of sending a positive e-mail, writing a positive comment--engaging with other people in some sort of positive manner.

Five things. I have been doing them; some mornings it takes me half an hour to do it all, other mornings I stretch it out to two hours.

I genuinely feel much better than I did a few days ago. I am still stressed and feel closed in blah blah blah, but I am more productive than I was last month, which is a big thing for me!

So... it's working. We'll see what kind of mental state I am in by the end of the 21-day trial period; I have a feeling I will end up continuing to do these things.


In other news, I am going to all the conventions in the next five weeks.

This weekend (March 5-8) there is Atlanta Poly Weekend! I attended last year and had an amazing time, so I am looking forward very much to attending again this year. I will probably be volunteering again but mostly I am going for the people, to meet and learn from people.

Next week/weekend (March 15-18) is Furry Weekend Atlanta. Calvin is going to be attending and talked me into going. I figure, why the fuck not? At the very least I will be able to spend time with him, which will be fun.

I get two weeks to rest/recoup after that, and then there is Frolicon April 5-8. Bonnie has a room on the club level and we are going to be pimping like motherfuckers; I am looking forward to it. I had so much fun and met so many people last year and am looking forward to meeting even more people this year.

SO EXCITING.

My girlfriend and I broke up. It took about a week.

She said something on the lines of "but we can't talk anymore, because I couldn't take it" so I haven't spoken to her since November 17th. Yep. It hurts, but most of what hurts is not being able to have her as a friend. Maybe someday, but I think probably not, with the way she was talking.

Post break-up, I have been thinking a lot about myself, about what I want, about how much I let other people dictate my actions. I shave because other people are uncomfortable with me going natural; I keep myself from doing "out-there" things for fear of what my family and friends will think. Essentially, I self-censor my actions, to make myself more appealing.

For what purpose, though? I realized over Thanksgiving that, beyond alienating people, there wasn't a lot of point in doing things because other people expect it. So I got my lip pierced--something I have wanted to do since I took the earring out of the top of my ear for work, five years or so ago.

I am going to dye a streak of color in my hair, too! It's another thing I've wanted for ages. Purple and blue, maybe a little red. But probably just purple and blue.

Now I am turning that type of thinking inward, wondering about my sexuality. I have always formed more lasting relationships with women; I am more visually interested in the female form than the male form.

Does it mean I am lesbian? I don't think it does. I like cock too much, I like androgyny too much, to be purely lesbian. But I do think I am going to shift my label from pansexual to queer. Queer is just more fitting, since I am really beginning to notice that yeah, I do have a bias.

Makes me wonder about writing m/m fiction, but... that's a can of worms for another day, I think.

So I'm going through my stuff and throwing things out, because I am moving on the 27th. But I'm also trying to do something larger than that in addition: a house-cleaning of everything I engage on a daily basis.

That means that I have new icons and have deleted something like 50 of my old ones. I haven't gone through my icons like that in years! I kind of want to make a new moodset too, but I really don't have very many images to work with in that respect so it might be better to wait with that. Plus I have a zillion and one things to do in the next two weeks.

I'm debating doing a sweep of my flist, just people that never post or who I don't read their journal or anything like that. It's not like I post any f-locked entries nowadays anyway (or many entries at all, heh) so it wouldn't really effect their reading of my journal. Hmm. Maybe after I move.

Packing this time (as opposed to when I was in Boston) feels good. I'm taking out the trash. :D

I use the chipper mood icon a lot, I think. So I'll put grateful this time, because I'm glad that mentally I am at the place that I am right now.

Two posts in one day! Miracles can happen, I guess.

I feel like while I really learned a lot about myself last night, the learning took a lot out of me. I didn't get to sleep until 3am (normal bedtime for me is 10ish) and it was somewhat fitful sleep; I woke up about 9:30am. 6ish hours of sleep is nowhere near enough for me; I'm used to 9-10, or even just 8 on days when I wake up super early.

I went and laid down around 5pm because I was just feeling sore, tired, and fussy. Normally my naps last 3 hours, but today I was conked out for five hours straight. Dead to the world entirely.

So I guess there's a lesson in this: play really takes it out of me. Good to know!

In other news, I've started a new... I don't want to call it a series, but I don't know what else to call it. It'll probably be a series of short, self-contained stories rather than a longer piece. The plot/characters are based loosely on the Research Subjects Anonymous AU, and in some ways it's very easy to write because of that. But in other ways it's more difficult because I have this driving need to make it different and separate from both RAG and the existing RSA story.

It's kind of vaguely based on Project MKULTRA, if I had to point to some real life example of the events in the story.

I meant to write a longer post but my mind is so muddled; I really hate napping.

Never go on a trip and think, "Oh, I'll keep up with online things, no problem at all!" because boy, will you fail. Or I will fail, anyway. Which is what happened. I've spent the past week trying to just re-adjust and let me tell you: it's not easy.

Anyway, so, the trip. This is totally long and I am absolutely unapologetic about it; I'm not going to cut.

On Los Angeles, the city itself: I really enjoyed what of it I got to see; it seems like a good combination between Atlanta and Boston. I do want to try a trip where I spend more time in the city (rather than at home watching anime and having sex) but that will have to wait until later this year or next year because I'm not going to be moving until March 2012 at the earliest. This is very saddening, but it's the best decision for my mental health to take things slow.

On my girlfriend: Both her and I were super nervous about meeting IRL. I think we knew we had no cause for the nerves, but they were there nonetheless and I think when I got off the plane I was practically buzzing I was so keyed up. And then I saw her and ffff. I don't even know, my first thought was: she's so lanky. Second thought: nipples. (Yep.)

Anyway, things went just fine in that regard. We have great chemistry, we get along great IRL too, she's a good kisser, and even if I can't manually get her off myself I know how to help her to get herself off which is nearly as good.

( Probably TMI )

On RAG Party (aka my birthday): SO MUCH FUN WAS HAD. Penis identification, panties, prompt game, drinking, reading snippets-- oh man, it was just... it was so awesome. I think next time Tens just needs to pace herself a little better and not get blackout-drunk before it's even midnight! I wish that I had gotten to see more of the party, but I was mostly interested in making sure that Tens was okay and after that I was interested in making sure I got to make out with eeveil.

I got to have tea at the maid cafe Royal/T with Saji, too, and that was actually very enjoyable! Saji is a cool person, and I look forward to getting to know her better when I move to LA.

On Oregon/Visiting my dad: I had thought this lately when talking with him on the phone, but in person it was really obvious-- my dad has found his place. He's happy where he is; he's happy to just be there. He's finally acting more like an adult than a child, which is probably a fucking huge step for him.

I visited Crater Lake and the Southern Oregon coastline and Ashland while I was with him, and it was fun, but it all confirmed the fact that I really had no interest at all in actually living there. It's the very definition of bumfuck nowhere, and... yeah.

And now I'm back home and doing my best to deal with adjusting to life not-on-vacation. It's going kind of slowly, but I think I'll lick it in the end.

Quite happy for two reasons!

First and foremost is my girlfriend, the beautiful and wonderful tensergorn. I made her a corny mix CD and had so much fun doing it that I think I'm going to make another just because I can.

Butbutbut the reason I'm so happy is that she called me. It seems like such a little thing, but for various reasons it just ends up never happening. But she did, she called me, and I felt like squeeing gleefully or something. Even just remembering it I feel all breathlessly happy, heh.

We talked for like half an hour, too, which-- okay, I have to explain first: my normal threshold for phone conversations is about twenty minutes. After that I start thinking, is it done yet? Can I hang up? but-- but it's never been like that with Tens; I could talk with her for hours about absolutely nothing and still feel deprived when it comes time to hang up.

I had thought, well, maybe it's just because we voice chat and not on the actual phone but, nope, it was just the same on the phone. When she had to go, I felt very aw, already? and was surprised at how long we'd talked, because it had barely felt like ten minutes.

So, yeah, happy about that.

The other thing is RAG. Typo and Veda and I all wrote pieces, and it's felt good to post them. Like, it's not over after all; we still got it! A good feeling.

Thus, I am thankful for tensergorn, for Typo and Veda, for my family, and for my friends.

But most of all for the bits of sanity that I've managed to win back over the past year of what has felt a lot like trench warfare. The ground was hard-won, but hopefully that means I'll not give it over so easily when insanity threatens me next time.

The Secrets of Scientology. Shit like this makes me want to go back to protesting those fuckheads :|

brb, finding about when the next raid is. I'm totally going to drag narroch along with me if there's a raid, too, because THAT'S WHAT FRIENDS DO. (No, really, all the ones I went to were tons of fun. At least until they weren't.)

In other news my sickness is progressing from fever to a certain shortness of breath. I really fucking hope this isn't bronchitis setting in, although all evidence points to the idea that yeah, it is. A change in the tone of my coughs + shortness of breath + lack of fever... If I'm still sick on Monday (which is looking very likely at this point) I'm getting Joyce to take me to Mercy Care.