MOOP!

When it was time to bike home from dance, my brain presented me with the demand of "Coming Home", by Falco, as what it wanted to listen to. Okay, sure, that's a passionate-yet-tragic one, seems to match mood alright, fine.

And it did match mood! It was good and correct and a little wistful but like powerfully so. And then YouTube went ahead and spun over to a Falco song I don't actually know: The Sound of Music.

Well.
Well.

Like. It's a bop. It's a delight. It's rock and roll, it's Der Kommissar¹ at his best. And it took anything from the brain that wasn't working out and presented with a very simple set of demands: I listen to baller dance music from the eighties and nineties, and in exchange my brain would provide me with serotonin. The good stuff.

So from there we did Rock Me Amadeus and Shake and Egoist and closed with Jeanny. And it was great! It was a really marvelous bike ride! I was dancing and singing along and bouncing and it was so fun!

It is nice that I have access to joy, even when some parts of my world are simply not allowing it.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: you know, Falco. Der Kommissar! Falco!!!! (yes, I am quoting, no I'm not even sure what I'm quoting beyond "my mother" but I think it's an interview thing he did at some point, self-identifying thusly.)

(This entry will make slightly more sense if you have read my previous entry)

So therapy spent a lot of time processing through Sovay's excellently depressing observation that "It's really insulting and reinforces the idea of teachers as interchangeable, disposable, and not really part of the building.". And then we also spent a lot of time on the whole "pretty vs useful" thing from my footnote one, and here are some of the conclusions I drew, in approximate order:

Quick wording note: When I use the word "pretty" below, I am using it as a shorthand for "aesthetically interesting" -- my dinosaur bedsheets are more pretty than plain blue ones, for instance, even though I wouldn't normally refer to them as a pretty item of bedding. But having one word to represent the wide range of "someone put thought into the form of this item as well as the function" is gonna be easier, and so pretty it is.

*The idea of Being Useful is so deeply ingrained in me that I cannot possibly conceive of anything else. It's one of the fundamental truths: I Exist To Make Other People's Lives Better is basically "Kat is Useful" writ large. I find the idea of being pretty-but-useless anathema, because I find the idea of being useless anathema.

*That being said, I own so many objects where their sole point is pretty. The art that covers my walls, my flowers that don't die, the star wars action figures, my enamel pins.... I don't feel bad or revolted by these items, and I continue to buy or make or bring these things home and feel good about their existence. (I mean, hell, my dice collection at this point is basically the definition of "pretty but useless"¹)

*This also extends to myself. Sure, my default avatar is jeans-t-shirt-flannel-chucks, but even then the chucks should be bright orange and the t-shirt should be entertainingly geeky. You give me half a reason to dress up and I'll be there in proper face paint, giant earrings, possibly a hair flower or three, and six different decorative pronoun pins.

*But I will still sacrifice those for practicality. I wear the super bold guillotine earrings *to* the tower, but I take them out for ringing. Useful nearly always takes precedence over pretty.

*Here's the real trick though: Useful things can be pretty! Sometimes you can make them pretty (my laptop has stickers! My chucks have rainbow laces! My bed has, as mentioned, dinosaur sheets!). Sometimes you can just get the prettiest version (I should probably buy a rainbow umbrella sometime because they're just so happy, but Ezri got me one covered in lemons and it's pretty damn adorable)

*And I think that's the true goal for me: Useful is good. Useful is necessary. Useful paired with pretty is *even better*. Me angeling at the Tech Squares class mainstream party (for when all the class dancers are halfway through the program and can do all the mainstream level calls now!) is useful. Me angeling while wearing five inch neon orange heels that clash magnificently with my green dress and lizard batik shirt is useful *and* pretty *and* gets me a boyfriend.

(I mean...that's not actually how Austin and I started sparking off each other and eventually dating. But uh. It's also not _not_ how that happened.)

*So in conclusion "pretty but not useful" has a place, and that place is "art objects and other happymaking items, where the pretty making happy *is* the use". "Useful but not pretty" has a place and that place is "look I gotta wipe my bum and I don't really care if the pattern is flowers or diamonds". And of course "pretty and useful" has a place and that's "me and everything I touch motherfukkers!"

But what doesn't have a place is "pretty instead of useful" and that's where my school building too frequently sits. "I love the design on this t-shirt but the sleeves bite into my arms" is pretty instead of useful (and I'll never wear it). "We designed this cool swooping ramp interleaved with the staircase and without railings lol suck it wheelchair users" is pretty instead of useful (and ableist as fuck). "I used seventeen sheets of gelatin to ensure my mousse layer would be perfectly sculptable and who cares if it's chewier than a goodyear and tastes about the same" is pretty instead of useful, (and will lose you that chance for star baker for sure).

Useful things should be pretty! It is good for useful things to be pretty because it makes people happy and that is a secondary bonus use. But you absolutely cannot focus on the pretty over the useful, and you can't make things pretty instead of useful, because form over function, style over substance, however you want to present this, it will really just be empty and awful and bitter.

Be pretty and useful. You deserve both.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: The ratio of "sets of dice I own" to "instances I have played RPGs that require polyhedral dice" is probably quite close to 1:1 these days. Certainly if you only count RPG sessions post-college...because the majority have been the DnD game I played for a year and a half with JoshZed et al. Lessee...we had 40 sessions (I know because I take very copious notes) and I owned 39 sets of dice when I last spread them out which was in February and uh, look, I've bought a lot of clicky clacky plastic this pandemic no I don't know how many sets what are you a cop? But yeah. Better than 1:1, probably not 2:1. Probably.

Updated footnote: I currently own 73 sets of dice. They are so beautiful, and I spent like two hours this evening rearranging and sorting them.

There was post on the Am I The Asshole twitter today that boiled down to "Am I The Asshole for believing this girl who has been part of my SUPER NERD friend group for two years has been faking it and giving her a "nerd test" to show that she's not worthy".

(The answer is, of course, yes. Apparently he asked a question wrong and she schooled him on it, then the whole friend group found him annoying and when he demanded of his friends "her or me" they all went with the non-gatekeepy asshole. He is very angry that AITA reddit does not think he is in the right rather than this terrible imposter-girl.)

ANYways, one of the things I find dearly annoying (besides...all of it) is the assumption that "nerd" has a clear canonical set of information which you can test on. One of the things that I like about nerds is how "nerd" implies passion in niche interests and there are _so many_ of those you have no idea.

To that end, I've written my own test. I expect this "king of the nerds" to be able to answer every question 100% correctly! Please feel free to add your own nerdy test questions, so we can have as broad a representation of nerdship as possible!

1) How many years has it been since the Abrasax Matriarch was killed, and which of her heirs did it? (I'll even give you a hint and say this is from Jupiter Ascending)

2) On http://fanfiction.net, who are the three men most likely to be shipped with Hermione Granger? Bonus points if you can identify the name she took on in My Immortal. (And does it differ on Archive Of Our Own?)

3) When knitting a cabled sweater such as the one worn by Chris Evans in Knives Out, how many yards of yarn can you expect to need for each sleeve? (NGL, I don't actually know the answer to this and I do know it depends on size and cables, so assume you're knitting for Chris Evans. But then again, I've been calling myself a fake geek girl for *years* so I have no ego lost in not knowing the answer to this very nerdy question!)

4) Hooper's Jig is well known for its "clap". On what bar should the dancers clap? (oo, this one is a trick question! I hope I don't lose my own nerd card for wording it badly!)

5) Primrose is almost identical to another bellringing method. Which method and what is the difference? (This is the most recent bit of bellringing lore I have learned, so I'm excited about it)

6) The most recent Animal Crossing game has almost four hundred villagers. Name ten who have stuck through the series since the first game! (This might also be a trick question, I don't know how often villagers "retire")

7) Name the five most common animals used in fursonas. For bonus points, name one of the three most common hybrids. (my roommate has linked me to an entire broad research website about this, with datasets in the thousands, so uh, this is probably pretty close to the answer)

8) The harvestman is an arachnid but not a spider, despite being commonly assumed to be. What's another (less badass) name for this spindly-legged beastie?

9) To date, how many characters from the October Daye books have we met who are named for months of the year, and which months are represented?

10) Name five webcomics that have at least 1000 comics in their archives.

***

Note that while the topics were about as broad as I could make them (with an absolute minimum of thinking work), the questions within those topics were trying to be relatively simple --I'm sure you can answer most of these with a couple minutes on a search engine. I would love to hear your additions --a broad-but-not-deep nerd test for all!

((also, the humour here should be *mocking* gatekeepers, not *being* gatekeepers. I am not upset if you cannot answer my questions! I can't even answer all my questions! Nerdship is _so huge and broad_ that no one can hit all of it, that's the point! To that end, I have put answers to all the ones I know in the first comment¹ to this post.))

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Okay, unless one of y'all is real quick.

1 year ago today, I made a post about breaking my 12-day streak over on 750words. At that point, it had been the longest continuous streak of writing, every single day, that I'd had since 2016.

(The longest streak I'd _ever_ had, at that point, was the one I had that ended in February of 2011. It was about 220 days total. I'd never since broken 200, despite using the site off and on since I first joined, in March of 2010.)

I was sad, but I was resilient. I was coming out of a couple years of pretty bad funk, and I was ready to be present again, and start doing more of the work, and communicating, and coming back into my true self and power. I was ready to be writing, not stories necessarily, but notes and journals and reminders and a history of my life. So I grounded myself for the next day, picked back up, and started again.

And I said, in that post:

I think that's going to continue to be the punishment moving forward --if I miss a day of writing, I don't get to play with my toys the next. We'll see how long this pattern lasts. Hopefully, it will turn into just...me writing my words as part of my existence, rather than a weird yo-yoing back-and-forth of days where I can and can't log on.

And as part of being grounded, I gave the list of things that were allowed. Accountability, yanno? I'm a big fan of using other people to help hold myself accountable, and writing something on my journal means that it's real and stuff.

So that's been the rule. Every day that I miss my words entirely, the next day I am grounded and I have to post an accounting of what my punishment is. It just makes sense, right? Surely I have enough self-discipline to keep doing that?

Well, it's been a year, and I haven't made any more accountability posts. Which means I'm distractable, and scattered, and can't hold on to the games I create to try and beat my ADHD brain into shape. None of this is surprising to me --I am, after all, very aware of my own damages, and one of them is a total lack of consistency and a desperate keening for novelty (despite how much I despise change).

...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...wait.

It's been a year and I haven't made any more accountability posts.

Because I have written 750 words --three pages-- every single day. Arisia, California, Pinewoods, Summer School, moving, visiting parents and hanging with friends and having dates. Yesterday, I called Austin over to witness me (shiny and chrome) as I hit refresh and the little counter at the top of the page clicked over to 365. Today will be 366.

All this entire year I've been looking at the numbers creep by. 2019 still isn't yet my _best_ year since starting the site, I had a year when I only missed four days total. But this is, easily, by _far_, by well over a hundred days the longest continuous streak of writing I've ever had. I started using this site 3,553 days ago, which means that this streak has been over a tenth of the time I've had to write. (It's almost a fifth of my completed days, if you ignore all those days I didn't write at all, or didn't write enough).

This all feels very clinical, very data-driven, facts and figures and no feelings at all. But it's...it's a hard thing to feel. Because the feeling that comes in if I let myself is pride, and it's such an utter painful sobbing thing for me to feel. I am proud of myself, I am _so_ proud of myself, I have written and written and written, and sure, half of it's probably absolute drivel but...

...it's there. It's real. It is, as I am fond of saying, opening the veins and letting the ink flow out like it's meant to and covering pages upon metaphorical pages of the noun-and-verb of writing, which is the verymost thing that keeps me alive.

This is not possible. It is just not possible for my _very_ ADHD self to commit to something that takes an enormous effort of focus, to say "I am going to make absolutely sure I do this, every fucking day, even if it is a bad idea." I have written a dozen words at a time, in fits and starts between hitting snooze on my alarm at two in the morning, trying to force myself done before I fell asleep for good. I have written quick and dull in the face of boring meetings or boring notes. I have written lesson plans and to-do lists and schedules.

It is not...good, in the aggregate. It is not worth having spent the time on, the energy, the stress. It is not worth ignoring pretty boys while they get ready for bed without me, it is not worth slipping back to my cabin early and double-checking my wordcount on the laptop then cheating an entry with quick copy-paste on my phone. The effort expanded here is not worth anything, because "I wrote three pages every day for a year" can only possibly be met with "why?" and I have no answer to that.

It is worth _everything_ to me. I use so many words to identify myself, and I know I can never have it real, because I'll never be published and I'll never have the time or energy or focus to finish any fictions, but damnit shit fuckitall, I am a writer by god. I know that word to the core of my soul, before dancer, before teacher, way before mathematician. I am a writer, and I write. I am a writer because I need to write. I need it like the moon needs the sun, like the tree needs the sky.

Why, because I can. Because I can because I cannot believe in any reality at all where I was able to make this happen, where I could do something --even something I _love_-- for every day, for every day for this long. Six am to six am means three pages and 750 words.

I am so proud (I am not allowed to be proud) I am so proud it aches. I cannot believe this is real.

I don't think I'll keep holding myself to this standard --at some point I will slip and miss a day, and that is fine, that is what will happen, and I'll write more again after. But the fact that I was able to do this, even just once, means maybe someday I can do it again. Or do something else impressive and long-lasting, steady and strong.

273,750 words. More, of course, because it's rare that I only exactly make count. Well done, little childe. I'm proud.

~Sor
MOOP!

A *long* time ago, mek titled me The Demigoddex¹ of Dance. Think...mid 00's, so it's a title that I've had for a decade and a half or so, the better half of my life so far. And it's a title that has brought me a lot of comfort and thought over time. It's fascinating to me that mek was able to See Me in My Power when I was _that young_, but maybe there's just confirmation bias at hand, and all the goofy stuff he called me that I *didn't* throw my heart and soul into dropped away.

Anyways, I am a Demigoddex of Dance, and what that means is that dance is a thing I have incredible power around and through and with. And probably what you thought when you heard that was "yes, I have seen Kat at Scottish or Contra or Squares and they do seem to be pretty enthusiastic and fun to dance with!" You are not wrong if you think that, but you're also not entirely hitting the point of the thing.

If you wanna see me full into my power as Demigoddex, you need to see me dance like no one's watching. Bouncing-twirling-thrashing-rebounding, music too-loud from the speakers or piped into my ears alone, arms gone windmilled and catching myself on the surrounding architecture. Almost certainly if you see me like this, I'm not going to see you --I usually close my eyes.

And it's not about being Seen, it's not a _performance_ for other people to watch. Even when I do this goofy solo dancing in public spaces (Arisia comes to mind) it's not about the rest of the population. This is a chance for me to apply music directly to my body, and that makes it a chance to fully release my Aspect. It's a chance to _play_. I know because I am just as enthusiastically into it when I'm doing it in an empty room as when I'm doing it in a crowd².

And it's a _damn_ good warm-up for me. This is often how I'll loosen up my body before some kind of dancing thing, just informally flailing like a fool until the person leading brings us into more organized stretching. Hop-twist-skip-swing and the shoulders loosen out and the ankles find their balance and everything falls into place.

On Sunday, just before my candidate exam, I spent fifteen minutes or so in an otherwise empty room dancing like an utter fucking fool. It was an accident, I just went in there to listen to too-loud music³ as a form of centering, of prayer. But then I was alone in the upper balconies of a former church, and there was room enough between the pews, and I had too-loud music!

It's a wonderful way to loosen my body. More often it's done though to loosen my mind. This is a thing I can do to make everything right again, even just for a short time. It doesn't solve any problems, it doesn't change the world, but for five-ten-twenty minutes while I'm moving, it takes me out of the rest of it and puts me into something here and now and loud and wonderful. For lack of a better term, it's meditation, even though it's done at full tilt movement and sound.

I'm fair sure I passed my candidate exam. My lesson felt _good_, the compliments I received have been kind. I know what I needed to do, and after all, Scottish Country Dancing and Teaching are the only two things in the world I'm allowed to feel any arrogance about. But Sunday, the part that mattered to me, the part that felt like happiness and existence and all that is right in the world was not the part I did in front of the examiners, and with my class.

It was one small body in one large space and a small handful of songs. It was flushed and panting and red with exertion before the lesson even began. It was a demigoddex gathering their power, ready to present it in full control and majesty. It was dance, and it was lovely and it was exactly what I needed for that moment.

Demigoddex of dance. That's me!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Okay, technically he named me the Demigoddess as I was more a girl at the time. Apparently I really like the way the gender-neutral x signifier sounds in goddex, in a way I don't particularly care for in princex. I'm curious as to what's different enough linguistically to make my ear feel that way.

2: Actually, maybe inversely so --in a crowd I need my eyes open more often and my movements slightly more restrained to avoid the rest of y'all.

3: I'll tell you where the real road lies / between your ears behind your eyes / that is the path to paradise / and likewise the road to ruin

((I sing songs differently from the known lyrics sometimes, when the power in the words matters.))

PostScript1: Here are two related posts that came up in my writing, but then I didn't actually wind up including.
*This is a very long post from NYFaerieFest a few years ago. It talks about how s00j is a goddess unto my eyes, and the way for me to handle that is to summon my own aspect around me and let my magic respond to her own.
*This is a post from 2010 that may be the *definitive* post about me and dancing. I am incredibly lucky that I truly lack the social anxiety that stops people from managing to actually "dance like nobody's watching". I have danced on subway cars and platforms, on rain-soaked streets, on empty dance floors and in empty classrooms. Sometimes other people are around to see. It doesn't stop me.

PostScript2: Last fall, I was out Doing Bells at Smith for the first time, and I was having a No Good Very Bad Brain day, because that was right in the middle of my brain being shit about bells. There was a tiny little studio with mirrors on the wall and a sprung-wood floor, and yanno, my brain was broken anyways, so why not.

The studio had a balcony above, and people could overlook and I dunno if they mostly did or not (recall I dance with my eyes closed⁴) but afterwards choco_frosh complimented me and asked what I was practicing for.

It was such a funny question, practicing. I don't remember exactly what I stammered back, because my dance is not practice for anything except itself.

4: This was an instance where that turned out to be a _very bad idea_. I have better than average proprioperception⁵, but it isn't perfect, and that studio had very rough brick walls with the bricks all set at odd angles to each other. Head-cuts bleed a lot. Slamming your head into a wall by accident because you didn't realize you were That Close is not fun.

5: I mean, probably? I have no idea what average is, but mine seems very good.

It's the 15th anniversary of Massachusetts legalizing equal marriage. They/we were the first state.

Vienna Teng has a song called City Hall. It's very good, and completely gender-neutral. It's a song about marriage and the last goddamn verse makes me cry just about every time I hear it --"if they take it away again someday, this beautiful thing won't change". The first time I ever heard her sing it was live in concert, with Magus. My best guess is that this was late 2008 --not long after Connecticut, and before California overturned it again. (She sang it specific in celebration of a step forward, I remember that. Iowa is what sticks in my head, but I can't find any evidence the concert was that late.)

I haven't listened to City Hall (on purpose) in almost three years. Oh sure, it comes up randomly on shuffle sometimes and I'm not paying enough attention to skip, or I'll get a bit stuck circling in my head. But I haven't _chosen_ to listen to it since the night of the 2016 election. It was one of the songs that came up while I was on my way to or home from voting, and it seemed such a hopeful song, such a beacon.

A few days ago on Twitter, I commented the quote that's been cycling in my head for weeks now. From V for Vendetta, in Valarie's letter: "It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and apologized to no one."

The quotes have the same essence, the same bittersharp sadness to them. I am trying my best to keep up the good fight, to teach children to be kind, to be strong, to be revolutionaries. I am not apolitical in the classroom, I will not speak neutrally of T*mp in a room half-full of bright-eyed immigrants, willing to learn. My hispanic boy, telling me proudly how he's the third in his family to graduate high school, after his two sisters. My brown-skinned lesbian, talking about how hopeful she is to apply her skills at auto-mechanics to working for the mbta. My muslim girl, voice sharper than ever with her Ramadan fast, but still always willing to engage. My black boy, calling out police brutality and saying he's not making plans to live long. All my students are made of power, and all of them are more willing to talk about the hard stuff than "adults" think.

They haven't gotten to have roses. They were 14, 15 when T*mp took office, still pushing away from puberty. They certainly know and remember Obama, but the direct effects are gone, behind climate crisis, school shootings, deportations. His slogan was Hope, but that's not what we've got anymore.

And I give money to the ACLU and I give money to Planned Parenthood, and I turn out my pockets for surprise funds when I realize them, bailing out black mamas for mother's day, giving an Alabama abortionist support for another day. I haven't been calling my senators, but it's hard when she's busy campaigning.

When Iowa legalized equal marriage, in 2009, I remember sharpiemarks on my left arm. MA, CA, CT, IA. Four states! Four! Nevermind that one had already taken it away again. I was looking out to the long and winding road, wondering if I'd ever be considered real.

In 2015, it was legalized across the country. In June of 2015 -- it has not even been four years. And it's wonderful and a huge step forward, and while the world still hates queers, maybe it hates us a little less, maybe it can learn to bear with us and accept us and share this place we've made.

And maybe our lives will end in a terrible place. At least we had roses. At least this beautiful thing won't change.

I want to stop being scared all the time.

~Sor
MOOP!

Today was the very last day I needed to be in the school building (which of course means there's at least two small things I need to drop off tomorrow before I am *done* done, but I digress).

I cried a bunch and took some final photos of my office (they're on Twitter) and then determined that I was going to take the long way home and take pictures of nature. This was a good decision! You can see the results ( under the cut! (The results are mostly birbs) )

And I'll put my favourite photo from today outside the cut, because that's how I do --I caught a sneaky chipmunk hiding behind a chunk of wood!



It was a good adventure. I feel good.

~Sor
MOOP!

So there was a post on Tumblr, "Things you will see on a road trip across America"⁰. It spoke to me, far more than the Regional Gothic trend did, and I was quick to respond with my own listing. You may read my additions ( under the cut )

---

Of course, then I started writing more about it all. Have some blather about road trips. It's not under a cut, because I do not love you enough.

According to my quick count, I have visited (or at least driven through) 36 states. Let's look at some highlights...

-From very young to age 11, the family drove to Peoria IL every year to visit Great-Grandma Deemy. She died in 2000, which was the year of...

-The Big Trip! Mom, her best friend Neva, and me and the sibs spent 2-3 straight weeks on the road. We drove from Maryland to Colorado, took a turn north up through both Dakotas, cut east back to Minnesota, just missed Michigan, and swooped back to MD. It was an absolute fucking delight. Kansas is terrible, we somehow skipped Nebraska entirely, and mom spit-swore she'd take me to the Mall of America to ride the roller coasters before I turned eighteen. This is why I don't trust my mother. ;)¹

-From very young until college, we drove to Winsted CT for Thanksgiving, and also usually for a visit in the summer. Dad's parents (St G'ma, G'pa Gus) live up there, on a wonderful horse farm with rock-walls to climb on and a pond and art and books strewn everywhere. I haven't been to the farm in several years --Thanksgiving started moving around my sophomore year of college-- and I miss it terribly. I should organize a visit some weekend!

-Starting in about, oh, 2002 or 3, us kids (Shan, then Al, then me) attended Stayaway Camp in Maine. Have you seen the Parent Trap? That is the camp we stayed at. No literally, they wanted to film at Wyo, but they were told to piss off, there was a camp to run. Anyways, there would be 2-3 trips up a summer (dropping off, changeover day, picking up) with some subset of siblings and parents, and staying the night in either Winsted or Boston.

-For two of those years, when the sibs were at camp and I was not, me and the rents drove down to South Carolina for a conference at Myrtle Beach. This is relevant because it means I've visited both South of the Border and Wall Drug.

(The second year, when it was just me and them, mom started to have some really funky vision problems and dad had to do all the driving home. Turns out she had MS. Anyways, that was 2002, which means Shan started camp in 2001, which works out since I did 2003 and 2004. Good talk.)

-Moving on to adulthood, I went to college in Boston (well, Cambridge). The family did many runs to pick me up or drop me off with my stuff, several of which did not involve my mother (see also, Dragon*Con.)

-Didn't roadtrip much in college, but right after I graduated, I got to do 14 straight hours in a car with one other driver (mom --although Shan did drive a couple hours), two siblings, and two cats. We moved to Chicago! Cats do not like it when the car goes 80 mph. They are fine when it is up to 85. No officer, I had to speed, I was doing science!

(Two days later, I did half that again, doubling back to Hiram, Ohio with Alys in tow. Dad was out of town, mom had to wait for the movers, I was her Official Adult for her college orientation. This was a profoundly uncomfortable experience for us both, I suspect, plus we had a serious argument about whether World/Inferno Friendship Society was a hipster band in the first thirty minutes of driving and were both super tense and stressed for like an hour. That bit I mentioned about the Lion's Den? I think it was figuring that out which calmed us the fuck down and brought us back to giggling like loons.)

-Sparr and I have made the Boston-Atlanta(ish) drive a few times. One of these times, I drove 17 of 20 hours (I did not make that up above for humour value). One of those times, our rental car was totaled and we had to frantically scramble to get home. The last time went quite without problem, except for the entertaining logistics of picking people up or dropping them off in at least five different locations.

-In early fall 2012, I was unemployed. My favourite ex-partner decided to move to Seattle. Their rich friend offered a plane ticket home. Mel and I packed up a uhaul (technically a Penske), drove to Cleveland (where we spent a day with their mother and raided a storage unit), drove to Chicago (where we spent about an hour and a half with my mother before she left for some vacation and we hung out in the house and watched movies --maybe George of the Jungle?), and drove and drove and drove and drove to Seattle. The Milky Way is every bit as stunning as I implied, Buttes will never not be hilarious, and having a governor keeping you from going over 75mph when you're on a 70mph speed limit road going DOWN THE ROCKIES is the shittiest thing.

I think that's the most of 'em. There's some small ones with strangers (from Indy to Chicago a couple times after GenCon, and I'm about to do Boston to Syracuseish) but most of the long trips have been with friends or family. States I have been to without driving there: Florida, Texas, California, and Arizona. And I suppose technically Tennesee in that I *have* driven to Georgia before, but the trip we went to TN, I flew to GA and then we drove up there. Dunno if that counts or not.

I hold no respect for America the Corporate Identity but I do fucking love America the road-trip liminal space of folklore and legend. Given a world without capitalism and a Tesla Roadster², I wouldn't even bother with a house in exchange for a rotating selection of friends riding shotgun as we roam around this world.

~Sor
MOOP!

0: Although I appreciate the thing someone pointed out, which is that they mean "USA", not America.

1: In case the smiley is not obvious, my mother is THE BEST MOTHER and I trust her very much and have forgiven her, but it's fun to tease.

2: I am adding this footnote seven years later to acknowledge that this reference did *not* age well.

At 6:56 this morning, I finally dragged my bleary ass upright. I have found checking my email early in the morning can help jumpstart the "actually awake" part of the day, so I glanced at my phone.

Just 7 minutes prior, Julie Parr had sent me an email with a subject line of "Unit 2/3 Results". Oh gods. I always thought I was going to be the last to know, that they were going to come while I was at work and not able to check my mail. I never dreamed I'd be the first to see 'em.

And I read the email...and it doesn't matter what it said, because I am only one person out of a team. The thing that matters is that my brilliant and talented dance-sibs made it, not me.

***

(An aside that I find fascinating: I have been having serious brainweasels about the fact that I have seemed to myself to be far more mean then I would like. It's not a matter of girl socialization per se so much as a wish, a desperate wisk, that I were a better hufflepuff. Being as I have been worried by this latent capacity for brusqueness in myself. (not cruelty, never intentionally cruel, but I have been impatient and more efficient lately than nice --some would find it admirable, I am not sure it's a change for the better, even as I recognize that nice should only be a baseline and is not as important as kind.)

So it was unexpected, and deeply reassuring, to realize that my empathy was in force in such a capacity as to make it actually impossible for me to think about my scores. All my anxiety and hope and fear and crossed fingers and whispered prayer (St Genesius, pray for us) was bound up in THEM. My classmates, my team, my family, my nakama. My own scores are irrelevant as long as THEY made it.

The depth of emotion I feel about this is astounding to me. If you ever wondered, I am not a sociopath. (If you've never wondered, suffice it to say I have.))

***

So there we go. Just short of 7 AM, I've pulled out the real keyoard (too important to type on the phone) and sent off the first email in the "congratulations/commiserations" thread. And then the hard part: Waiting.

At 9:30 AM, I'm standing in the copy room as the RISP whirrs. I check my email again.

All of us.
All five of us.
Both units, ten total exams out of ten, perfect score. We all made it.

I want to cry, and I don't, because that would be hard to explain even as a good thing what with the red eyes and runny nose. I also want to jump for joy, and I do because dear goddess, I am so happy and pleased for this and I've never really let the presence of other people dictate my reactions of happiness. The teachers standing by the main copier do not seem to notice, anyways.

We passed. We all passed. There are five new level one teachers in the Boston branch and they are us!

***

Every
Other
Saturday
For
Eight
Months
We hauled our collective asses to Stow, and if you're local and thinking "that's so far!" oh honey, Connie drove down from motherluvin' Burlington VT! Stephen and I had the short commute, "only" an hour each way to bracket our five plus hours of dancing.

In the weeks between those Saturdays, we read and read and read and read and wrote lesson plans and talked our dances and sent each other snarky texts and practiced our dancing at our own weekly classes --o gods, did we practice.

Hit your thirds, more extension, sink and surge, THIRDS, hands up, hands in, hands relaxed, DON'T LOSE THOSE THIRDS, turnout from the hip, lift from the ankles, tuck in the tuchas, you're still hitting third position, right?, make eye contact across the circle, cover across the set, smile at your partner, and don't forget this is fun, look like you're having fun!

(it was fun. It was also intense. The two states are not mutually exclusive.)

Maybe sometime I will scan and put up the weekly quizzes Gregor wrote for us, every week talking about more figures and our 12 candidacy dances to perform and how to teach better and dance better and BE better. They remain ridiculous, so much of the work remains ridiculous, but every single one of us passed and I can't speak ill of our training, not with that in mind.

I have not been so proud of myself since I realized I knew how to juggle. I am so, so happy words can't even say that our little congratulations party is going to be only that when we have it. I am looking even more forward to ESCape than previously, because daaaamn, we're all gonna be there and it's gonna be *great*.

I'm a certificated dance teacher. Fuck. Yes.

~Sor
MOOP!

(Of course, this is only my level 1, there's still 2 years and two more units before I get my level 2 and full teachership. It's okay, it'll come. I've been spending way too much time this week hyperfocused on the future. It is nice to think just about being happy with the present for a little while.)

Oh hey, here is something I never posted, from almost a year ago. It is in three parts, and eleven footnotes. It is about legos, about my own creativity, about being the Special, and about having my heart broken by media that refuses to accept that people like me exist. Enjoy.

***

( It's long, so under a cut because sometimes I care. Read it anyways. )