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

1) Do you like your birth-name? Why?

I don't have very strong feelings about it one way or the other any more.

I have at various times both liked and disliked that it's relatively uncommon.

As a kid I wanted a name I could have a nickname from, which I didn't have. I never really liked abbreviated versions of it when people tried to address me by them.

When I moved here I didn't like that it has a vowel sound that Brits pronounce differently than I do so it was difficult to make myself understood properly when introducing myself.

And eventually I didn't like that it, while it is technically gender neutral in that everyone can think of two or three characters who have it, it really isn't understood that way and especially when it was most difficult to me to be parsed as Not A Girl, it was important for me to remove as much ambiguity as possible.

2) If you could change your name to anything else, what would it be?

Erik, apparently!

In the early 2000s I remember wishing I was called Alexis. Which makes sense from the perspectives of different things it could be shortened to, and gender neutrality.

3) What names would you consider giving your children?

I cannot imagine having children. But I like names from my family: Carl, Frederick, Otto, Anna, Josephine...

I looked in to family names because I'm the kind of trans person who would have asked my parents what they would have named me if they'd known but since I couldn't I tried to reconstruct the kind of thing they might have chosen based on what I know about how they did choose my brother's and my names.

4) If you had a band, what would you name it, and why?

Depends on what kind of band it is I think. Different music suits different names.

5) Is there a name that you completely hate? Why?

I completely hate the middle name I was given. It's very femme, it was literally chosen as a girl's version of the name of someone I was being named after, for a stupid reason, and who I have no real connection to. And I've known a few annoying people who have had that name, heh. But I wouldn't hate it if not for my own connection to it.

In one way, the timing of our shuttle to the airport was a bit awkwardly early and has made for a long day today.

But in another way

• we were both awake in time to finish packing, have breakfast, and stroll around Castela de Fuste before we had to leave
• the shuttle was on time, comfy, and so well ventilated we could have a break from wearing masks
• the Fuerteventura airport is the nicest I've ever been to, we're waiting at an outdoor bar now so I'm chilling in the sun with a refresco same as I would've been if we'd been able to stay at the resort longer.

The combination of things, even stores, being able to stay more open-air and the need for more HVAC-type climate control has meant for a surprisingly unmasked-yet-unexcluded-from-society few days. I'm gonna miss that at least as much as the sunshine itself.

So I'll do it too: describe yourself using 5 things that are probably in your purse/backpack at any given moment.

I think, excepting my wallet and keys, there are only five things in my little man bag! Here they are.

1. masks
2. co2 monitor
3. guide cane
4. Disabled Person's Railcard
5. fingerless gloves wrapped up inside hand-knitted hat (that might be too small for me now; I blame its age and number of times it's been washed, rather than me getting a big head!)

I keep being told how dadcore I am and I haven't felt like it in a while, but this Father's Day I've mowed the lawn while listening to a baseball podcast, so that has probably re-upped the dad vibes.

Earlier this week D shared a meme of "what five things would summon your gender," and when he asked me what mine would be, of course my first answer was "dunno" because I am still agender. But after much effort, the only thing I could think of was "lawnmower." Heh.

It wasn't quite a joke answer though. I'd love to have something more farming, to represent my upbringing and the value I put on six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains. And also how much work it is. And how I really do like outside chores; I'm always happy to help MB in the garden. But I'm not the farmer or the gardener, I don't know anything like as much as my dad and MB do. I'm the himbo who mows the lawn because it's a physical task that I can't really mess up.

Other things I've since thought of:

• My white cane (my gender would be so different without my blindness)
• a vest (US)/waistcoat (UK)
• Suspenders (US)/braces (UK)
• I'd have to steal one of D's list of five things: "various kink paraphernalia" (I'm finding it as unsurprising as it is inconvenient that my gender now seems so closely connected to my sexuality)
• the International Phonetic Alphabet chart
• a glasses chain
• Cargo shorts (or maybe cargo pants, but I'm thinking cargo shorts)
• Stitch (as in "Lilo &")

I feel like I've absorbed so much toxic positivity around my disability that it's very easy to say about today "Thanks for your kind words everyone, but it all went fine and I didn't have anything to worry about!"

It did all go fine, especially because my friend was able to pick me up from the train station which removed the most stressful part of the journey I'd prepared myself for, which was getting to a new place on my own. My kryptonite, I called that earlier today, and it really is.

Before I could know that my friend could rescue me from this (they were waiting for something that was going to happen "between 9:30 and 2:30," could pick me up if it happened before I got there and couldn't if it didn't), I really was struggling.

Occasionally my nystagmus can be so bad it leads to feelings of derealization.

Or maybe it's just that the nystagmus is worsened by stress and derealization also happens when I'm really stressed. Maybe they just share a common ancestor. Regardless, it's really inconvenient and uncomfortable to deal with this.

I said so on social media as I was getting the bus into town, having left the house just too late to get a train that would've been quicker.

And by the time I

• got a tram across town from where the bus dropped me off
• bought a ticket (thank goodness I could do this from a person! I had no idea if the ticket office would be staffed at that station and I physically cannot buy the ticket I needed from a machine even if I'd been able to use the machines (apparently 3% of blind and partially sighted people can use those touchscreen ticket machines without difficulty and I'm in the 97%!)
• just missed a train
• thought I had to wait 40 minutes for the next one
• went for a pee (yet again bemoaning the lack of hooks or shelves or anywhere to put anything in accessible toilets)
• came back to find two staff near the display boards which also had a big sticker on the floor saying "Passenger Assist meeting point" and a little kiosk saying "information point" which was now staffed, but by someone busy chatting to his station but the other staff member so neither of them paid any attention to the guy with a noticeable limp and a white cane peering very hesitantly at the display boards above them
• found another train 15 minutes sooner than I expected which gave my slow self just enough time to get there
• determined the platform
• found the lifts to get there (I'd only ever used the stairs at this station but there are a lot of them so with my ankle as it is today I wanted the lifts)
• worried I was on the wrong platform because I didn't think the next train expected there could be out of the way in time
• heard an announcement minutes before my train saying it was now coming in on a different platform)
• got to the right platform (luckily no more lifts were needed)
• got on the train
• found a seat as far as I could get from others (which meant being near the toilet and I guess that was smelly because the one person sitting near me made a point of getting up and closing the door when someone leaving left it open, but I didn't notice anything -- yet another reason to wear a mask!) and
• read the number of very kind replies on my phone

...I was able to feel much more grounded.

So yeah, it went fine. All that stuff happened though. And that's part of what I'd call an incredibly smooth journey. Maybe it's okay that I get anxious and exhausted when traveling or sometimes just considering traveling? It's not as if I'm incorrect in the assessment of the situation that leads me to such anxiety.

I don't want to minimize that just because it all went smoothly.

Anyway I had a great day with my friend and the kids: two of whom have grown so much since I saw them, the littlest of whom didn't even exist the last time I saw her family and she's already a year old! It was great.

...in this article about snowshoe softball.

• In the headline "- that is not a typo."

What would be the typo? "Snowshoes"? What's it a typo for?

• Wisconsin

Of course it's Wisconsin.

• But then, halfway to first, it happens: The batter trips up over his snowshoes and falls face-first into a pile of sawdust. The dust gets everywhere -- into his mouth, up his nose, inside his shirt. He crawls the rest of the way to first, smacks the bag with his right hand and laughs until he can't breathe.

• Well, in the 1960s, town chairman Ray Sloan had an extremely wacky, very simple and possibly brilliant idea for warm-weather snowshoe baseball: Just pour a bunch of sawdust on the local ball field.

• "It's a lot more entertaining [with the snowshoes]," - much funnier with the square brackets

• "Guys would dive headfirst and then their feet would come up and the tails of the snowshoe would come forward and hit them on the head," Punches tells me. - this is two laughs, one for the mental image of what's being described and one for the fact that this is being said by a guy whose surname is Punches. His whole name is Cole Punches, which is way too close to Hole Punches for him to have had a good time at school.

• "The first-timers have a rough time, they wanna run too fast with [the snowshoes]. You tangle up and you fall down, and that's exactly what the people wanna see. Someone's gonna fall."

• "Just flopping around, trying to run, and once you start losing your balance, there's no way to regain it. You're gonna go down. The flailing, shoes and arms flailing, and eventually you eat sawdust."

• The hardest part is that outfielders can't just spin around on a fly ball hit over their heads. Punches says you have to do more of a "three-point turn" with your shoes and by the time you've done that, you've either fallen on your face or the ball is way past you.

• The other reason the people come? "Pies, the pies are almost as big as snowshoe baseball," Punches says. "They come for the pies and stay for snowshoe baseball."

• made food and drinks and transported them to different rooms! I took tea and toast into the living room for breakfast. I could refill my own water bottle. I could make dinner when everyone else was too tired to.

• many little dog walks! I'm getting around the house fine now (if slowly, but that's as much a function of "can't bend the ankle so have to take small steps" as it is anything else) but I am using one crutch outside where the ground is a lot less even than it is in our house, and I can hold Gary's leash in the other hand. He's been really chill about it, which is nice because he hasn't always liked the crutches in other contexts so far. It was a sunny day again and it was lovely to be outside with him. Lots of tiny walks seems good for me too: mother_bones at one point described his keenness for walks as "physiotherapy for his papa." "Puppyotherapy," diffrentcolours added.

• I made tea for everyone once we got back from B&M! This involves so much going to and fro in our kitchen, and even getting the milk out of the fridge is really hard without being able to shift your weight from one foot to the other: where you stand to open the door often leaves things out of arm's reach, if your arms are as short as mine anyway!

• emptied the dishwasher! This is one of my usual "first thing in the morning" chores (since MB tends to run it last thing at night) and I haven't been able to do it because it's another shifting-weight-from-one-foot-to-the-other situation, especially while you're holding stuff too, especially when most of it is breakable... I have genuinely missed it (though D has done a good job of taking over while making both his and my breakfasts before he starts work on weekdays)

• went to B&M! Technically I have done this in the last month, but D had to push me in the wheelchair. This time I could walk around, I brought the crutch to be on the safe side but I probably didn't need it much. My foot was sore when we got home, not the ankle but the foot, whose muscles were telling me they weren't used to this. And I think the ankle was a little swollen; deflating the air in the cast was enough to help with that. But it was nice to feel like I had done as much as I could today

When you tell people you broke your ankle, they'll think about what a big deal it is to be able to walk the dog again, maybe not about what a big deal it is to be able to make tea again, but they both feel pretty equal to me.

In other updates: my brain seems to have remembered how to walk already, and the ankle still doesn't hurt at all. It doesn't even feel that weird today, though I have a feeling it's probably about the same and I'm just used to it. And using my "outside" shoes has evened out the level of my feet which does make walking easier.

It is annoying that I don't get any tactile feedback from the bottom of that foot because of the boot. That's the only reason I had to be really careful coming downstairs this morning (well, that and that of course it means I can't bend my ankle): turns out even with shoes on I rely on some feeling getting through, and nothing gets through the hard plastic base. This makes it a little more difficult to step over D's feet too, which I have to do to get to the best place in the living room for me to sit now because I can put my leg up. So it's a nuisance not to have that feedback, but it's not that bad.

I thought I'd sleep with the boot off but I ended up putting it (mostly) back on, just without the hard plastic front piece and with the straps a little looser. And no inflation. This was fine until I needed to pee in the middle of the night, but I'd taken the other of my pair of crutches upstairs with me at bedtime in case I needed it and using that worked out fine. So that crutch is next to my bed now and it feels good to have a plan for that.

I broke my foot when I was eighteen (only two years before I started writing the blog that's now archived here, which is a wild thought...). I remember it being annoying and boring and all that but not really that bad?

So I wasn't prepared for how much I am struggling mentally with this now.

I have to remember

a) A lot has happened since then! I didn't even know I had depression or anxiety then! And they've gotten so much worse thanks to various trauma and whatnot. My brain is much more broken now generally
b) This injury and the treatment thereof was far more traumatic this time than the broken foot was. (And that's even counting the fact that my mom refused to take me to the doctor about it until I'd kept my appointment at the dentist, to get all my wisdom teeth out!)
c) I'm an adult now! A lot of what I'm frustrated at is not being able to meet responsibilities I didn't have at 18. Especially with a disabled household where we're all good at different stuff: without all of us, various things start to fall apart pretty quickly! Also especially with a little dog, who doesn't know why I won't take him for walks when he's asked so nicely.
d) I lived in a house with no stairs then! I'm still only dealing with one stair to and from the kitchen (and thus the bathroom) and it's better with barakta's excellent suggestion of using a chair (mother_bones's perching stool handily lives right there!) to sit down on and then stand up at the higher level. But it's still so tiring I'm literally breaking into a sweat every time I need a pee. I'm tired enough to get angry and frustrated. Which are also more tiring!

It occurs to me that I know cute names for transfemme hormones (tittyskittles, anti-cistamines, another one I'm forgetting right now??) but I do not know any for the kind I am taking!

I assume this is because of my excessive elderliness and refusal to partake of transmasc culture online by refusing to go anywhere that it happens (youtube, reddit, tumblr, etc).

For those who don't know, my choices were a regular but rare injection or a gel you put on your skin every day. I have panic attacks at needles (and I'll need to do enough of those anyway because this also involves regular blood tests) so the gel was the obvious choice for me.

I asked on Mastodon this morning and got two answers of categories: things people might already say and shitposty answers from my friends.

• proboyotics [I suppose estrogen would be anti-boyotics then!]
• "beard ketchup" when someone had the gel that came in little sachets like ketchup sometimes does at restaurants... This person's partner who was explaining this to me now explained they have the pump bottle and described it as "like hand sanitizer... 'tranitizer'?" They didn't like that, but I do!
• tranitizer!
• masc arpone
• lad-ger
• guynness [like Guinness!]
• nut shots [this feels more like an injection one than gel, but it's still funny]

1. Can you diagram a sentence?
I sure can. Well, I could five years ago. packbat asked a very good question -- "why do sentence diagrams put the verb at the top?" -- and in my attempt at figuring out this thing that I probably got taught but do not remember, I looked at some wikipedia pages because I couldn't even remember the name of the kind I'd learned in my syntax class. Eventually words like x-bar theory and lexical-functional grammar started to ring a bell. I learned how to make diagrams that look like this:

2. What word do you always spell wrong, no matter what?
I used to be fine but now I can't remember how many R's embarrass has.

3. What word always looks like it's spelled wrong to you but isn’t?
Honestly so many British spellings still look wrong to me after almost 20 years. Especially the extra vowels: my initial reaction to things like "foetus" is still what is that, that's not a word I know. It's bad when they team up too: colourise has both the -our and the -ise endings and that's just not fair.

4. Do you have any little memory games when it comes to similar words, like principle and principal?
Stalactite has a C in it because it comes out of the ceiling. Stalagmite is, uh, the other one.

5. Was grammar something you enjoyed or detested in school?
I didn't study it until college! When I was an English major there was a class called Grammar & Language which everyone talked about like it was the worst thing ever, so I planned to avoid but then I had to take it one semester because my schedule clashed with my other options. The "Language" part ended up being the history of the language, and between that and "grammar," this was my first exposure to linguistics. I adored it. I was sufficiently convinced to take Old English (this professor's specialty) the next year. I then realized -- at the end of my junior year in a school that didn't offer it -- is what I should have been studying in the first place. And which I spent 15 years feeling bad about until I went on to do just that!

Before that, I thought I enjoyed grammar but what I actually enjoyed was reading parts of our English textbooks that we never studied in class, and just reading a lot anyway, and getting from this a pretty good idea of how "correct" English should be, which I was relieved to be good at since I didn't feel good at much else, and which I was delighted to weaponize over others who were less good at it. It was only in adulthood that I realized how racist, ableist, and otherwise bigoted this idea of a single correct English which all else should aspire to is, and how much harm it does. I learned how arbitrary standards are in language; they are, like all else about it, just made up by people and they could just as easily be different than they are. I used to call myself a grammar nazi proudly, but it turns out that power-dynamic control-freak shit isn't grammar, and we've had real nazis all along.