Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I do feel like I've done nothing today even though I know that's nonsense.

We're going camping, leaving first thing Saturday and I'm working a lot tomorrow so I wanted to get a lot of stuff done today.

I tried on all my new swimming gear and was immediately too warm in leggings and neoprene gloves and socks, which I'm taking as a good sign for hopefully not getting too cold. I'm really glad to have my eczema-prone feet covered for outdoor swimming, too.

I tried on my rollerblades too, which I got because when diffrentcolours and I were in search of the swimming stuff in Decathlon yesterday, while we were looking for the right section he said "They have roller skates here," because he knew I'd been wanting some ever since they became a Thing in lockdown (I'm envious when I see kids in the park with them!).

"Don't tempt me," I said.

"I'm tempting you," he said.

He bought them too, so fair enough.

I should really get some pads before I use them because I haven't done this in like twenty years and it was wet today (it's wet every day because I have to live in Manchester), but I put them on and adjusted the laces and straps and everything today before I tried on the swimming stuff.

And while I was in my room I noticed how grubby it's been getting, so I changed the bedding (which I've been meaning to do for days!), emptied the bin, tidied up a bit and vacuumed.

I searched for camping lanterns and got mother_bones to show me how to work the air mattress pump.

Just after I'd sat down, I got an email asking if I could be in a zoom meeting in twenty minutes about disability access at Manchester Pride, so I did that. And then spent a lot of notes on the document they're sending out to people who said they have access needs. All of which made me really happy I'm not going to Pride; nitpicking about working and details for what's likely to end up being a super-spreader event is just surreal.

Then I stayed home with Gary while mother_bones and diffrentcolours went to Go Outdoors to collect more goodies for camping: a new stove, a table and chairs, lantern and head torches. I made dinner (chicken and salad with fresh stuff from today's veg box) so it was just about ready when those two got back, shattered. As soon as we'd eaten Gary wanted a walk, but as soon as we left we saw the Tesco van turn up with our groceries, so we all came back inside, the humans bagged and put away the food and Gary was a good patient boy until we'd finished and could take him for that walk.

By 8pm we were reminding diffrentcolours it's possible to go to bed and I was ready for it myself, I'm still downstairs at a quarter past nine but I don't think it'll be long before I'm in bed; I've got a much earlier start and a much longer and less-fun-than-usual work day ahead of me.

I had a horrible night, but on the plus side I found out the day bed is pretty comfy to sleep on, except for the dog who insisted on sitting right in the middle of it. I woke up squished against the wall and with him stealing the blanket. He didn't move all night. I say "night" but we were there from about 3am until my alarm went off at 9:30, bookended by Incidents of aggression.

I'm so tired.

I was getting up for a volunteering thing, in person this time, and I enjoyed the novelty of getting a train to the airport. Just to its train/tram station, where I got to be filmed pretending to get on and off them. Well, we really did get on and off of course, we just did them all in quick succession before the trains or trams went their own way. It's silly work but I'll get paid for it. And it's a close-knit group I've only joined about six months ago so they were all happy to see each other in person again and I was happy to listen more than I talked for once. It was weird being in the airport again, or near enough to hear the announcements: "to reduce the number of security alerts, please keep your luggage with you at all times." I always hate being in that airport when I'm flying from it but today I hated it because I wasn't. Trying to imagine the possibility of seeing my family for Christmas feels surreal: way too close and impossibly long to wait at the same time.

As I was waiting for my train home, I saw an email saying I was unsuccessful in my job interview yesterday and suddenly I felt like throwing my phone onto the track ahead of me. I feel like I used up all my luck at the beginning of the year; I haven't been able to catch a fucking break since then. My big achievement for the summer will be ending it with two front teeth again, that's just getting me back to baseline. Job applications and interviews are grinding me down. Other stuff I don't want to talk about here is fucking grim. What is the point of me trying to do anything.

I don't know, but I keep doing it anyway. I helped throw the Tesco delivery into bags when it arrived. I walked the dog. And I went to see Stuart, which was much overdue and really good even though all we did was I told him everything shitty that's happened to me and he told me a really shitty thing that's happened to him. It's so good to see people you love and who love you though, isn't it. I made dinner (pizza and salad, easiest dinner, thank goodness). We watched some more Schitt's Creek, including an episode that hit me in the feels which is very unfair from my current go-to source of brainless fun. It was good though.

This week has been so demanding that I feel strange that I have to go to work tomorrow...and even stranger that I haven't been to work yet this week.

6. What’s the last thing you said out loud?

Heh, it was something like "look at us, still awake at ten o'clock." We were celebrating the fact that the movie has just finished. (The movie was from the 80s and called Chopping Mall, and it was exactly like you'd think it would be based on those facts. We loved it.)

It's been a long day, it started for me five minutes before someone rang the doorbell who was supposed to call before he turned up but hadn't. He was here from the British Heart Foundation to collect clothes and furniture and stuff that we wanted to donate, and it's exciting having all that stuff out of the house, heh.

It was 7:30 by that point but I knew I was awake for the day. I had a pretty chill morning until I got a "reminder" for a meeting I didn't know I was expected to be at, or maybe I'd confused it with another one this afternoon that is organized by the same person. One was 10:30-11:30 and mostly consisted of one person ranting about one thing. The other was from 1:00-3:30 (or maybe 4?) and I was the lucky person absolutely beset by technical difficulties so I couldn't answer questions when they were asked of me, couldn't really contribute at all. It was so frustrating and I think it was just the last straw for my mental health which hasn't been great this week/fortnight/etc. anyway. I could feel myself overreacting, just thinking everything was terrible and being unable to imagine anything good ever. Same as I was the other day about the job interview. It has really felt like a lot of work being me lately.

I actually had to go lie down after a while of pretending I could function like a person after Zoom finally kicked me out for the last time sometime after 3. I slept fitfully for a couple of hours, my head throbbing and other symptoms making me wonder if I was getting a migraine. It might explain the brain chemistry imbalance being even worse than usual, too?

This evening was better: diffrentcolours made dinner, kievs and rice. We took Gary for a long walk and then he walked with me up to the polling station. I didn't feel like voting but was keen to audit a new polling place/staff after having had pretty disappointing experiences with my old one. This one was only the expected amount of terrible, people saying "go over there" and so on, but at least they did speak to me which is all it took to improve upon the last place.

As usual finding the small black slot in the big black ballot box was a nightmare, and two different staff were no more help than telling me to fold my ballots in half (which I had already done) and put them in the box -- which was hard to do! Especially with covid hygiene theatre meaning I didn't want to touch things more than I had to; normally I'd quite happily fumble around for a thing like that but even though I'm personally convinced that touching things isn't a risk (and I'm a day short of two-weeks-post-second-vaccine, so all but fully vaccinated at this point) I didn't want to be seen touching everything. Plus I'm all out of the habit! I only just started touching the spinny cones again yesterday on my way home from work. I love touching things, I'm looking forward to that again! It just saves me so many spoons.

And then we watched Chopping Mall, like I said, and all managed to go to bed or near bed at a decent hour!

I said a couple weeks ago that I'd have an "informal chat" about a voluntary position that actually pays money, but I didn't follow up to say that it wasn't actually that day at all, I'd misread the date (in an email I read while I was in a meeting, to be fair to me) and it was actually scheduled for today.

Something else I mention in that linked entry was that I wasn't working that next Friday morning but that I would be after that. This means that I'd been silly to say "yeah, that Friday morning works for me!" But the meeting was at 9, I start work at 10, the walk takes half an hour, surely I could expect an "informal chat" interview to be done by 9:30. This just meant I had to get up early enough to get showered and dressed, have breakfast, make lunch, give Gary breakfast and meds, and do everything else before 9 so I'd be ready to leave the house right after my meeting.

The plan went well (and the meeting went well! I was successful so now I'm officially in Transport for Greater Manchester's disability consultant group) except that I didn't have time to walk Gary. I thought I could sneak away and someone else could walk him at lunchtime, but then he looked so excited when he saw me with my coat on that I couldn't let him down. I figured I had time for one of his five-minute walks which is about all he's been interested in most of the time lately. So of course today was a meandering, slow walk that eventually I had to drag him home from and I was 20 minutes late for work.

I was a little worried about how full-on a day it'd be, one thing after the other with no break, since I had so little sleep. My usual sleep-maintenance insomnia was joined last night by the regular kind of insomnia so I was awake until somewhere around two and yet woke up at 6:30 and couldn't get back to sleep.

Work went okay but I've done nothing at all since, except put some laundry away and make fajitas for dinner.

I've got my alarm set for the first time in a long time tomorrow. I've got an "interview" for a voluntary position rather than a real job, but it does pay a little for the kind of thing I'd do for free anyway so here's hoping this "informal chat" means I'm likely to get it.

The alarm's going to stay on for Fridays, and with Mondays added too, because those days I'm going to be doing more hours at work now, starting in the mornings rather than the afternoons. I'm looking forward to it actually. I do better in the mornings generally and get sleepier as the day goes on.

I turned off all my alarms on the 17th of March last year and, with the odd exception of an early GP appointment or something, I haven't turned any back on since then because I stopped having uni and started working at like 3pm instead of 11am. I've missed having a need for alarms.

For the second day in a row I've failed to nap. I also slept like garbage again last night. I'm so tired it was a real struggle to do some concentrated thought for like half an hour on something time-sensitive this afternoon.

Tomorrow I have a big meeting (the work I had to do today was in preparation), and while it feels pathetic to find a two-hour Zoom meeting such a big deal, it's the first one I've done in about six weeks (oh except one last week but I just had to turn up and chill for that one). It's a volunteer role, it's actually paid as well as being something important and the group takes participation seriously so I want to too.

I really hope I sleep better tonight.

I'm back on my 2016/2017 bullshit, going to meetings where I get to talk about stuff like color contrasts and what materials it's best to build the bus station out of.

There's a couple ways that being disabled can take you when it comes to interacting with the built environment, and I've leaned into having Opinions and learning stuff. I've seen (terrible slides of) the plans for the new Stockport bus station now! Nobody thinks this is cool but I actually sorta like meetings like this. Even if they're full of people whose favorite mode of transport is the hobby horse.

I was part of a radio recording yesterday morning, broadcast tonight, for Radio 4's In Touch, a show for/about visually impaired people.

It was an interesting thing to be a part of over Skype -- at one point, the producer or engineer or someone reassured the host "soon we'll all be back in the studio again" and like yeah I get that the technical difficulties can be fearsome and annoying (as I think they were by the end of this session) but also I'm kind of glad that this way it isn't limited to people in London who can get to the studio at 9:30 in the morning. When it's all back in the studio, it'll be harder for the likes of me to participate.

Again like with ITV the other week I was glad, if a little less surprised with a blind host of a blind show with someone from the RNIB also there, that my story's appreciated even if it's less stereotypical or less serious than the kind of problems faced by the other blind guest, who cannot vote secretly and independently at all. I don't want to sound like I'm whining that people are mean to me. Things like "staff need better training" are so important and would fix so many kinds of problems but it's so dull as a point and people can be unsympathetic to it. So I was relieved I didn't get that impression here.

While it was a pre-record, to go out tonight, it was done "as live," which means I got to hear basically the whole show from start to nearly-finish (because of the technical difficulties) and not just be asked about my little bit. It was interesting to see what the different guests contributed and how the RNIB and government people responded to what me and the other blind voter said about our experiences. And it was interesting to see how the whole thing fit together, with little behind-the-scenes chatter going on at various points. At the beginning one of the other guests said she didn't catch someone's name and it turned out to be mine, so I told her "Hi Holly" instead of "Hi I'm Holly" but hilarious off-air rookie mistakes like that aside, I think I did okay. Haven't listened to it yet, though. (I kinda want to but the prospect of some other voting thing going on today is making me too anxious to actually want to just yet.)

Last week the RNIB was looking for people with voting experiences to talk about them. Every UK election, they campaign for more accessible voting, and a report has just come out today detailing some of their findings after the December general election. I vaguely remember that survey they talk about there, so I was almost certainly one of the 480 blind and partially sighted people to answer it.

I did pre-recorded interviews for lcoal radio yesterday and local TV news today. The radio was a nice 5-10 minute phone call that happened exactly when I was told it would and was easy and pleasant to do. THe TV today...was a little different.

I got an e-mail from the RNIB person I'd been dealing with yesterday, saying it was planned for 2:30 and I'd no doubt get a phone call yesterday, or perhaps this morning, to arrange a meeting point and finalize details. I didn't hear from them until 2:40, at which point I'd almost hoped I wouldn't hear from them, not least because it was raining. They thought I lived too near the noisy main road, and I don't want strangers in my house anyway so the back garden wasn't happening (it's ugly af anyway), so we tried to find some place with any kind of shelter in the local parks because it was raining off and on. We eventually had to settle for a picnic table sorta under a tree and hope the rain didn't come back on (which it didn't until I was walking home about an hour later).

It was still windy and chilly though; I dressed like I would for going to work, expecting to be outside about as much as I am for my commute now, but I didn't think that walking normally keeps me warmer than sitting still was going to do (the only walking I had to do was at the end, fake walking to give the camera some "this is how a blind person walks" stuff where I repeated the same little bits a bunch of times).

I was a little worried that my story wouldn't be appealing enough for the narrative -- I'm one of the apparently-44% of partially-sighted people who is able to vote independently and secretly, and I can access campaign literature and polling cards and other eelction paraphrenalia in their ordinary forms. But my three UK voting experiences have all been unpleasantly stressful, and Andrew and I now consider it mandatory to schedule our day around having to go to vote together because I end up relying on him for a lot of access and accommodations that would be more properly supplied by polling station staff. Any disabled person will tell you this is not ideal (albeit, sadly, typical), but abled people don't always see the red flags in this kind of situation; they tend to understand "I needed this flashy thing, this gadget or whatever, and I didn't get it" kind of stories much better. "Disabled people need the culture to change" is just not a story a lot of people want to hear; much better for us to be assigned some magic app or something that makes it all okay without anyone else having to do any work eh?

But the radio interviewer said she has an invisible disability and she seemed to immediately understand all the wider points I was trying to make, which is one reason that was so effortless an experience. And today's abled interviewer and cameraman were actually encouragingly on board too; they clearly hadn't thought about the things I was saying before (one of them said as much) but the interviewer asked me really good questions that made me feel like I was being understood, and as the cameraman and I were walking along together for a few seconds at the end, he said "well, even having something like a braille template wouldn't do you any good because what you need is for people to talk to you!" Exactly, yes. I certainly hope that comes across in the finished product.

It was an exhausting day though; I didn't get much done this morning which could be because I might not have anyway -- I slept awfully -- but certainly wasn't helped by always half-expecting the phone to ring, and not being able to get too involved in anything. And afterwards I was really tired. I always remember that I enjoy these kinds of interviews, I never remember how exhausting they are, heh. Plus honestly it was tiring coming in from the cold; warming up again and finally being able to relax a bit meant I wasn't much use the rest of the afternoon.

This is for ITV Granada again, so fellow northwesterners might be able to see it live but like last time if I get a link I'll share it. They said it might be on next Wednesday but who knows.

Awake before six again. I miss sleep.

I spent a couple hours this morning trying to catch up on all the chores I've been too depressed to do lately: laundry, dishes, tidying.

I spent two and a half hours with a couple of BBC people, filming and interviewing first me and Andrew (they were very careful about social distancing, we were in the front garden and they were almost in the road!) and then filming me going to Asda which I had to do for milk and dog food anyway; they were also very careful about not exposing me to any unnecessary risk.

People behaved much better when a guy with a big camera (or a little camera on a really big stick) was following me around, funnily enough. I had to go do work after they left and it was such a contrast. People seem to think social distancing is over. They also seem to think that cycling on pavements is a cool thing to do even when the roads are quiet residential ones anyway and are at their least busy.

I was exhausted before work started (turns out talking about exhausting things, like how society disables me, and then wandering about to demonstrate it, is exhausting!) and my nerves were frayed by the walk there. I had to go to Tesco for work -- not really for shopping, but to pick up prescriptions from the pharmacy there which still meant the queueing and all the palaver. And I worked for a relatively long time for me.

It's been a tough mental health day too. This morning when I went out to walk Gary the air had that lovely summery scent I so associate with beaches and beer gardens and vacations and all the things I won't get this year. By the time the air smells like this, I should be done with essays I haven't started yet. I should be celebrating finishing uni. I shouldn't be writing off the whole year and afraid I'll spend my first Christmas without my family.

I'm having trouble reading or watching anything partly because I still can't concentrate or focus. But also? I can't find a narrative that's "safe" enough to cope with. This observation brought to you by the fact that a podcast episode about Apollo 11 made me cry. And I know if you asked all my friends who of everyone they know is most likely to cry at a historical spaceflight story that they already know, yes you'd hear my name every time! But I assure you this is not normal. I felt a bit better later in that podcast when one of the people interviewed (who was responsible for assessing the alarm code that gives my Mastodon account its name, and also the shoutiest "Go!" that I so love in my favorite song on one of my favorite albums) cried too when he was reminiscing about a speech Gene Kranz gave.

By the time I got home I was too tired to eat more than a quarter of my takeaway pizza and I'll probably be asleep before nine but I don't care. It's been a hell of a day.