sorcyress | Recent Entries

Lacking other things to write about, lemme poke at an interesting seed that Sam planted the other week, when I found out they don't know who Sandra Boynton is.

Which I find absolutely nonsense batshit wild, and told them so, but like, I do know that they are not a person who has ever really "done childcare" of any sort --it wasn't ever one of their pursuits growing up. And they later came back and pointed out that, as one of the youngest children in their extended family, they also never would've seen board books being read to younger cousins even.

A fish has no word for water, I know you have never really "done childcare" but what do you mean you have _never done any kind of childcare_?! This is a completely reasonable and normal situation for a human to be in, but it also felt like slamming into a wall to catch this completely unexpected cultural difference between us (and possibly between me and more people than I realize).

I have been doing childcare, in various forms, professionally since I was like. Eleven. For twenty-six full ass years now, for well over two thirds of my life. Different ages, absolutely, different intensities. My day job is NOT babysitting, but like, also I have been paid to babysit within the last year.

I tell people sometimes that I was lucky, that my parents had me and my sisters, and then about ten years later all their friends started having kids. How I had a built-in roster of kids to babysit, with parents who Knew Me Well and Trusted Me Very Much because they had Watched Me Grow Into A Responsible Young Adult or at minimum, they trusted Greykell to have my back in case of any emergencies.

( this is the digression where I cite my credentials and list a bunch of examples of Childcares I Have Done )

BUT I DIGRESS.

The point is that I have basically spent my entire life surrounded by children, who I am often in some way caring for, and that's so unbelievably normal to me that it baffles me to realize there are people who just...haven't done that. What do you mean you don't know any kids? Kids are everywhere!

But it is a feature of my life, and the age I was, and the people I interacted with. I was nearly the oldest of my cousins: Cass reached age 18 before Katie got pregnant (I think), and I don't know what the rest of his life is like, but at Thanksgiving, he was always the one looking up to the cool older kids, and never the one being looked up to. If my parents had held off, if the tumble of us had come in a different order, how different would I've been there?

It's not a secret that I keep my testimonials file in my profile, where I store nice-and-or-accurate things people have said about me. One of the ones I treasure most is this, from Keshwyn some time ago:

You are one of the most qualified not-parents I know. You are actually probably *better* equipped to handle this conversation than I am, by virtue of training, whereas I fly on instinct and guess and hugs. So I really appreciate this.

I can't even remember the specific context --maybe something sex-ed adjacent? But it felt like such an honor, for me to carefully try and make clear "I am giving parenting advice but I'm definitely not a parent" and hear back a recognition of "no no, you belong here".

Of course I know who Sandra Boynton is, because it's important to me to keep track of what board books are best to read (incessantly) to infants. Of course I have a favourite dinosaur, and construction vehicle, and pokemon, and disney princess², because it's important to me to be able to pass the judgement of five year olds. Of course I can juggle and stand on my hands and do stupid body tricks because it's important to me to distract ten year olds. Of course I keep track of the latest slang because it's important to me to make the teenagers say big oof when I show how deeply unjiggy with the lingo I am.

And maybe these things are not of course for other people and that's definitely okay and reasonable! But I like realizing just how much of the life I lead is designed around being able to relate to and interact with kids, of all ages.

My partner's spouse is due in a few weeks, and it's going to change everything. I'm never gonna be a parent on my own, but this feels like another huge jump towards being the village I grew up with and I'm very excited by it. And you can bet your ass I'll be right there reading Moo Baa La-La-La the whole time.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: neener neener, Veronica!

2: triceratops, excavator, meowth if we're old school maybe spheal if we count past 150, Belle but Mulan is close

Author's Note: I wrote this entry a couple weeks ago, because I was in the mood to then, so a couple of the timeline verbiages might be weird. I'll try and fix anything necessary along the way as relevant.

Just about a year ago¹, I wrote this:

*Also found a thing in the garage and did a thing in my room and am feeling quite a lot of feelings about it, so we're not gonna talk about that one more until I actually decide what to do with them. Practice being bad at things, probably. Engage with the act of doing things for the sake of the act rather than the sake of the things.

And shortly after, when it became obvious to me that I was not going to stop talking about it, at least quietly to myself, I made a google doc called "[redacted]" and started collecting all the scraps as I mentioned them, bits of cryptic and behind the walls. Mostly it was because I kept not-quite being willing to talk about it to SamSam specifically, and I knew I'd want to eventually, so I wanted to make it easier for myself.

This meant that in December when they visited and they immediately clocked The Thing, I was able to just hand them my phone with the file open and hold their hand on the red line as they read through it all. They weren't the first person I told, because secrets are weird sometimes, but that little space --October 22nd to December 12th-- was the limbo space where I wasn't telling anyone. Once I told Sam, it wasn't [redacted] anymore, enough people had seen, enough people knew.

I still didn't post about it until my end of year retrospective, in part because I was trying to make a thing for Veronica as part of it all. "I think knitting is good for me" I say, with all the confidence of someone who sure can make rectangles.

........I wasn't wrong.

It's funny as hell to go back and read [redacted] because so much of my initial consternation was around the ways I continue to fail at traditional femininity. It's a lot of emotions that I've just....entirely gotten over and don't think about anymore. I fucking adore that one of the first things I ever said to myself on the subject was "death before detransition doesn't just mean physically", and I'm _thrilled_ that I've gotten my brain swept out there.

it's funny too, because the other thing I worried about was very much that people would think I am Much More Into the hobby than I actually am.

But I don't want to disappoint anyone when they're all like "OH MY GOD YOU LIKE KNITTING NOW LET'S BE KNIT BUDDIES AND IT'S GONNA BE THE BEST EVER WHAT'S YOUR RAVELRY NAME LET ME GET YOU ALL THE PATTERNS DO YOU HAVE A FAVOURITE YARN STORE YET WANNA COMPARE STASHES?" and I'm like "hi I'm adhd and want something to do with my hands sometimes"

.....ohno.

I mean, my ravelry is hellaciously out of date, because posting about knitting is harder and less interesting than making things (although I was watching SamSam use it as their repository for information about the things they make, and that might indeed be more charming than dumping things haphazard into a bunch of threads in a channel in my private discord). Comparing stashes is meh, because collecting yarn and using yarn are two different hobbies, and I don't actually go hard for the first one --I mean, obviously I have a lot, but it's weird scraps and odds and ends and mostly earmarked for projects, it's nothing like Veronica's truly impressive collection of hand-dyed skeins.

But I've gotten patterns from two different people now, and enjoyed both of them, and I absolutely have a favourite yarn store², and this past weekend at YDW someone came up to me and said "is there any chance you have a spare set of needles and yarn, I need something to keep me from picking at my cuticles" because they correctly clocked me as someone who might. I am ADHD, and I want something to do with my hands sometimes! Like when I'm riding trains or walking my commute or singing³ in groups or standing around at demo team waiting for the dancing to start or at bells or when the students are taking a test or during literally every meeting ever or...

And there's a post I've been meaning to make for most of this year now, about my chaos scarf, the weird little project that started it all, that I retrieved from the garage⁴ just to try and do something with my hands. Because _man_ is it a disaster of an item, just absolutely riddled with dropped or scrambled stitches, with the ways the different yarns badly don't go, with places where the tension was way too loose or sometimes too tight, the way it's about ten feet long so there's no graceful way to wear it, just multiple loops around my neck and taking up too much space and being messy and fucking glorious.

I get complimented on it _so_ frequently when I'm out and about. And people are right to do so! It looks so damn cool! It is not an item made with perfection, so fucking what! It is an item that was made with _love_. A seventeen year old made this scarf for me, most of it. She put love and energy and weirdness and an incontrovertible sense of self into every damn stitch, 42 across (give or take) over and over again until you've got something long enough to make the fourth doctor proud.

That seventeen year old had ADHD, and didn't necessarily know how to finish things. I'm a thirty-seven year old who has ADHD and still doesn't necessarily know how to finish things, but I was able to help her out and make something that I can wear with pride. And I've made some other things too! A scarf for Veronica, my first present (somewhere there is a photo from just before I sent it to her, me recognizing that this would be the last time everything I'd ever knit was in the same spot). A cover for my ereader, cozy and bright orange. A tiny red mouse who frequently sits in my pocket with me. Lots and lots of rectangles, practice projects, trying different ideas and different things. My pride scarves, my June project that I pushed like hell to complete⁵.

And unfinished things aplenty --my original goal was to not have more than three things on needles at once, and yeah, obviously I've fucked that one, because why wouldn't I've? But it's not too bad. The project sitting next to me is the eighth (of twenty!) square for the baby blanket for my metanibling⁶, due in December. Alys's christmas present needs a couple more skeins and then she'll have her own chaos scarf to match mine. Mom's gloves aren't on needles yet, but I had a good concept today that I think will be a good compromise between "I'm scared of learning cables" and "I don't want them to be dull". I was working on a sock for a while, and I've always known I was gonna knit at least three socks to get a pair, and I've been paused a long time as I try do decide if I can get away with knitting two and a half. And there's the pumpkin, which technically isn't on needles at the moment because it keeps falling off them.

Anyways, that's not too bad, right? Five active projects?

I think knitting is good for me. Certainly, I am enjoying the hell out of it. And yeah, sure, let's be friends on ravelry. <3

~Sor
MOOP!

1: This is of course very funny, because I am a Hero of Time, so I can tell you: It was October 22nd. I've known that date for ages now.

2: It's Make&Mend, although the fact that Gather Here gives an educator discount on yarn means I'm absolutely beholden to them for Projects

3: Okay so I've been to two YTS's, and at the first one I had my sketchbook which was pretty great, but at the second I had multiple projects on multiple sets of needles and that was _primo_. Pub singing and knitting go SO fucking well together, it is _delicious_ and it's also really cozy because at YTS I super wasn't alone in this opinion, and it felt fun as hell to look around and see dozens of other people knitting or crocheting or doing embroidery or needle felting or using a drop spindle or...

4: That I retrieved from 2006, and 7, and 8. No idea how long or late I worked on it, but it'd probably been 15 years in storage, carefully brought with me from one place to the next.

5: They're a matched pair of shawls, and the first one did get completed entirely within the month of June! I just missed being able to wear it to my pride party, but I had it for Pinewoods and got _so_ many compliments on it, which is correct, because it's incredible!

6: I dunno man, is there a word for "partner + metamour's kid"

Today was Todd and Tessa's wedding!

For those playing along at home, this is my boyfriend's spouse's boyfriend and his now-spouse! The far ends of the polycool from me! It was incredibly pleasant to be at a wedding where that was able to be public fact and everyone was just super cool about it, including Todd's parents. (And presumably Tessa's, but I didn't really wind up meeting them).

It was a good little wedding! At an absolutely beautiful big manor house in Waltham, with lots of woods to ramble through on the way there. I got some excellent pictures of Tuesday and Austin and Phoebe tromping through their woods in their lovely and very colourful outfits --I was the only person wearing Actual Sneakers, which meant I absolutely won at the forest game.

For the ceremony, I happened to be sitting behind someone who had brought an ASL interpreter, which was very convenient for me, a person who is slowly trying to learn ASL. Can I track what is being said in a conversation? ehhhhh not really, but I can have a very slow conversation with someone, as long as they're willing to be patient! That part is nice! (very glad that Lingvano just gave me nice and meet, since those are useful words for this).

There was lots AND LOTS of dancing, which was really excellent. The quality of the floor was quite high, too. The DJ played a little too loudly (they always do), but I ran Strip the Willow which everyone got super into, and there were a lot of people absolutely cutting a rug, including, critically, Todd's dad who is very much a "ah, I see where you get your boundless energy and charm from" kind of relative. I had quite a good time dancing, and got to polka with both of my sweeties at different times --Tuesday and I to "Shut Up and Dance" and Austin and I to "Little Lion Man".

The table decorations were dice, which is always excellent. I have gotten dice from at least three different weddings at this point in my life, and I find this a deeply satisfying thing. Y'all nerds, yanno? I did some end-of-night scurrying, and managed to collect one complete set and two almost-completes, which I'm pleased for.

(I have been mostly not dice-gremlining to the extreme end recently, but I can tell it's lurking, ready to take over my brain again. Moving my room around a little has been a critical sign for this, because re-organizing the dice shelves is very high on the todo list for making my room better. I really need to score another expedite so I can finish the big furniture parts of it all, and get into the small frippery parts.)

The vows were beautiful and everyone was well dressed and there was enough food and I am very happy right now. Weddings are good!

~Sor
MOOP!

Today I went to the Lowell Kinetic Sculpture Race!

This was something Austin and I discovered last summer, and which I rather enjoyed last year. I almost missed it, and feel very grateful that Thrantar pinged me the other week to be like "you planning to go?" and very sad that he couldn't actually get the time off work to join me. But I dragged Tuesday and Alexander with me onto the train¹ and then we found a Lucretia and Evan and Daniel (F.) and slightly later an Anna.

Because of my train timing mishap, I very virtuously (sigh) sat at the table for our spare hour at home² and did a bunch of the necessary grading for this weekend, which I honestly do not actually expect myself to get done because I have a _Tuesday_ in town and I love her dearly and want to spend all my free time snuggling kem instead of doing boring work things.

This was an extremely annoying hour, because it actually worked, I finished grading all the MiniQuizzen and Lesson Synthesis assignments, so 2/4 things that needed grading. Then on the train I graded the front page of all the homeworks. I had more time but I did not have more grading brain, and this is an important lesson for me to note, that there is a finite amount of mass grading I can handle before I just get _sad_ about the state of everything. If the children are doing poorly, it is my fault and depressing! I do not like that!

ANYways, after I did some grading and a little knitting, we were in Lowell! Timing was tight enough that we didn't bother heading to the opening ceremonies, and instead the three of us sauntered directly to the mudpit, along the race route. We'd gotten about halfway there when we started to be passed by sculptures and began our initial discussion of what seemed most good. I was extremely fond of the theming of Laika and Godzilla, and pleased to see the return of Moose, who I recall enjoying last year.

We made the mudpit in plenty of time, and sat down across-ish from the announcer and ASL interpreter --not close enough to watch him well all the time (and photographers and stuff would pass in front of him sometimes) but a good thing to try and look at occasionally and see if I can Learn Stuff as I do. Last year I had not as carefully tracked the competitors, so this year I made a point of getting photos of every sculpture team as they squelched their way through. I haven't had a chance to really look through and see which photos turned out best, but we all fell very in love with Treadward the Mud Skipper, who managed to get through by sheer force of will, with about seven seconds remaining on the clock.

There were fifteen teams headed through the mud, and it was delightful to see them charge through and/or fall apart. We sauntered off the stands and met up with the Pinewoods gremlins, and collectively sauntered off to the water to see the next significant part of the race. I'm glad we didn't try to take the shuttles --the lines were VERY long and it was probably supremely crowded-- but I did very much miss having bikes like my crew did last year. It is simply the superior way to see the show, even if it's much more of a pain in the ass to bring on the commuter rail.

The weather was extremely splendid, and we spent a lot of time dawdling as we walked along the extremely pretty merrimack river and contemplated going rock-hopping. Somehow, none of the gremlin votes won, and we stayed safe and dry at street level. But we made it to the end of the river a bit before the first sculptures did, and had a jolly time sitting in the grass and sharing out ice cream and other snacks.

I didn't shout myself hoarse, but I did demand that Jandro help me tie my MD flag mask around my arm as a patch when I saw a sculpture that had missed the mud, and was themed after the B'more skyline. What a delight it was, to get that taste of childhood home! (there were lots of these, honestly, Baltimore also has a kinetic sculpture race and I want very badly to go down some year and see. Probably not this one, though, I'm told it's typically first Saturday in May, and this year that means May Day.)

After, we sauntered back to the finish line, well after most of the competitors. But that was good, it meant we could do a slow dawdle up and down the line of sculptures and examine them closely. I wound up mostly with Lucretia for this, other people were watching the band, which was nice and all, but scullllptures!

We did make it back in time for some jolly good funky dancing though! And after, when the crowd had made it into the little cool bookshop, a guy specifically signaled me out to be like "you were bustin' a groove out there you looked great!" which felt very nice. I do so like dancing!

Sticking around for the award ceremony turned out to be...fine I guess? It was late and everyone was wilty, and maybe next year it is just correct to get the earlier train. Useful data! But we found a Tasty Dumpling restaurant, which both lived up to its name and was _swamped_. We felt so bad for the poor woman who seemed to be running things and really was RUNNING them --she didn't seem to get off her feet at any point, and seemed to be actively upset when she told us we'd have to wait a half hour for our food. It was okay though, it was nice to sit together and tell bad jokes and talk about school and other lovely things.

And once we had dumplings, we walked back to the train station and ate them in a little copse of trees just outside. The food from Tasty Dumpling absolutely lived up to its name, and also the dumplings are HUGE. I was very satisfied! And we finished eating in just the right amount of time to go get our train (read: I was Extremely Stressed trying to powerwalk to the station and Tuesday was walking at a completely normal pace and struggled not at all with getting there on time). Home again home again meant more knitting and goofy conversation, and now I am writing words while Tuesday snoozes against my arm a little. It's very nice!

Tomorrow will be a MUCH quieter day, whatever winds up happening. Probably I will do more grading while Tues does some Mystery Hunt work, but also we will snuggle and watch and/or play things and maybe even ~kiss~ a little. I might make it to demo team, but I also might not, we'll see³. Hopefully I will continue to live happily ever after or whatever. I hope you do too!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: er, the slightly later train than originally planned, since some dumbass doesn't actually remember that the mbta has different schedules for weekdays and Saturdays, so if you're looking up an event that's happening on the latter, you can't do it on the former.

2: Seriously, I did not bother to double check the train timing until like, a few minutes before we were due to leave, at which point I learned we had to get a train a full hour later than expected, deeply embarrassing

3: I am not actually performing in the next demo team event, for Stupid Reasons About Sticking To My Principles, which is. Annoying, given that I was excited to actually decide to do it this season and then find out I can't. But it does mean I'm rather less serious about getting to every practice.

I survived my first week!

I've been saying for years "pssh, it's so silly that students are expected to come in for only a half day and a full day before getting a four day weekend" but having experienced a slightly different schedule (huzzah for late labour day) and instead having had the students for a half day and three full days before our four day weekend........I might need to revise my opinions. WHUF.

So far I have successfully:

*Kept mostly ahead on class prep
*Actually used all of my scheduled during-the-day prep periods to do school stuff instead of fuckaround personal stuff (ie, play phone games, really)
*Done a Power Hour every day after getting home --I'm not going to manage one today unless I'm very lucky, because I need to scamper back out to dance very soon and might need electronics in between, but the effort is there
*Gotten out of bed at first alarm (no snoozes!) every day except the one where I had a houseguest whose alarm was thirty minutes earlier than I set mine
*Kept up with grading Do Nows enough that I could and did return them to students the following class, for every following class.

None of this is going to hold, that's not who or what I am. I'm splitting myself this year across two different rooms, and very frantically trying to adjust to new paradigms and routines and whatnot because of it.

This job is very very exhausting. But I have at least two favourite students already, and if I take my class 7 prep at my desk in the corner while Coworker teaches her Algebra 2 kids, I get to see a couple of my favourite kiddos from last year. And even though I don't have any prep overlap with WorkBestie this year (alassss), we are still teaching some of the same things, and so I get to see him on the regular for subject-area meetings, and we still walk home together sometimes. It's good!

It's good.

~Sor
MOOP!

Okay! Let's write about yesterday, because it was really nice!

I have turned thirty-seven years old officially (unlike the weird rounding I tend to do that means I've been saying "almost thirty-seven" for a couple months now) and it's the start of the new year for me.

Work is...gonna be work. There are a great many things that are Annoying about it, and I'm at the local minimum in which I've had my two days at the start of the year where there are lots of meetings and interactions with admin and listening politely as the superintendent tells us what a great year it will be and acknowledges our support networks (genuinely sweet) and "thanks to the person who packed your lunch for you" which...stings slightly, as someone living pretty thoroughly outside the heternormative space where that's a thing that happens. Since yeah, Ezri often makes food and I generally eat the leftovers for lunch, but I'm definitely the one packing them and it's a weird assumption that every person here has a support network making them a lunch, especially (if we are being honest) in a profession that tends to be more women than men.

ANYways, local minimum which will continue until I get to interact with the _students_ which starts on Monday. I haven't sorted everything quite out, I've printed things but not actually fully prepared slides or intro games or whatnot. That will be a Sunday night problem, I imagine.

But! After work was over, I was able to pack up and go home (eventually) and then off to Davis Square where like...thirty people stopped by to have ice cream with me throughout the evening, some of whom I didn't manage to hang out with very much at all, oops. I saw bunches of old and newer friends, including the requisite small handful of people I'd not met.

I got to introduce my two current most same-brain friends to each other, and watch them try and figure out how much same-brain is transitive. I got to flit through the crowd watching the conversation comparing polycules to molecules echo back and forth. I got to be Very Satisfied when I realized all the teachers (from different schools!) had clumped themselves together to mutually commiserate about the start of the year. I got to steal sips of frozen lemonade and cookies and cream milkshake from people I love. I got to drape myself on Tessa's shoulder and sigh "isn't our metamour cool?" at them as they nodded fierce agreement and both of us looked star-eyed as Phoebe showed off the pants they had sewn (which were _gorgeous_ and so good!). I got to debate whether I'd seen more squirrels or rabbits in my life. I planned with at least half the people there that we should go see Hundreds of Beavers at the Somerville theatre next Saturday (enough of whom I'm dating that if we all show up, we will have to be mindful of that one xkcd).

Also I ate ice cream twice and was gifted two different books filled with handwritten annotations by the person who had gifted them to me. I'm very _very_ happy for that!

I have good community and I am lucky to be so loved. Maybe the school year can keep that energy strong.

~Sor
MOOP!

OH HEY! I didn't post this here yet, so I'm gonna steal the verbiage from Facebook. It gets a separate post because it's Very Important to not bury it in the middle of my other post.

HEAR YE HEAR YE!

Friday, August 28th, is gonna be my BIRTHDAY woooooo!!!! Friday is a very convenient day for doing BIRTHDAY ICE CREAM!

IF YOU'RE NOT LOCAL ENOUGH TO DAVIS SQ WHAT YOU DO IS:
*eat ice cream or some other frozen treat in my honor
*send me a selfie if you really want, I'm always thrilled to get them!
*go ahead and get other people in your life to do this too, I am happy to be An Excuse!
*do it whenever you want around this time! I have already gotten a handful of birthday ice creams for the year!

IF YOU ARE LOCAL ENOUGH TO DAVIS SQ WHAT YOU DO IS:
*show up sometime between, I dunno, 8pm and 11pm? I might be there a little earlier/later, but those are the guaranteed times
*get ice cream or other frozen treats
*hang around and chat with people and have a nice time in the middle of the square unless it's super rainy at which point we'll probably move over to the t-station next to seven hills park and the theatre because it has a roof

Also I wanna make real clear that YOU ARE INVITED TO THIS! YES YOU!

If you are a person I haven't seen in ages, you might want to remind me when you see me because I am only so good at names and faces, ditto if you're someone who doesn't actually know me. But this is a PUBLIC PARTY because ice cream is DELICIOUS!

No nazis or terfs allowed, because slime should stay under rocks where they belong.

WOO ICE CREAM HELL YEAH!

~Sor
MOOP!

Iiiiiit was the first day back to school wooooo.

I really tried to set up a paradigm where I could _actually read my damn comics_ (which also means Dreamwidth) this morning, but I missed it. Trying to get back into the habit because I desperately miss y'all. There's a lot of habit-work I'm trying to do RIGHT NOW because it's the New Year New Me or whatever.

Tomorrow I turn 37. Maybe once I'm back into the prime of life I can make things go better for myself? We'll see.

I am disheartened and pretty low-energy going into the school year, but I do really (_really_) appreciate my work-bestie, who I still get to work with. He's only half-Geometry this year, and returning to the CalcHonors classes he loved having a few years ago, and I'm a little sad that I am not getting to go back to the class I want most ("Quantitative Reasoning" or as I like to call it "the last math class these non-math oriented seniors will ever take in their entire life so let's make it count") I would be a lot less salty about the situation if the coworker who had Quant wanted it, but he is indifferent at best.

Our schedule situation this year is such a shitshow and I don't know if there's anything we can do about it.

I'm also feeling disheartened because I have gotten straight up spoiled ere these last several years. It's the first year since the 2018/19 school year where I have to move between multiple classrooms! At least it's about as painless a move as possible --two rooms right next to each other, and my schedule is such that it's two classes in the one, a prep, and then three in the other. Plus the one I'm in for three classes is the one shared with a teacher who is an early-mornings person and likely to fuck off from the building every day by like three, which works very well with my tendency to stay until stupid o'clock.

See paragraph two though. I am proud of myself for, once I detangled from PLCs and chatting with WorkBestie and stuff, setting a short todo list with a last item of "leave the building by 5pm". Which I then even mostly managed. I've left a _lot_ of things undone, because holy shit, there is always SO MUCH to get done, and I really wasn't expecting to lose all of my start-of-year prep time to having to completely reconceptualize and move around my shit and re-share and set things up and ughghhhhhh.

At least both my shared-teachers are awesome and communicative and this is all going to go very very well. I am so lucky to have such a deeply kickass department.

And one of the new teachers I met at orientation on Tuesday (when I was there as union rep answering questions and helping them fill out paperwork) approached me today to be all "hey, you know how y'all have an open spot for organizing leadership? I want in!" and that is _thrilling_. She seems SUPER cool and I am excited to get to work with someone who has big organizing energy! I have some ideas for how to make union stuff better at my school in particular, since our district is fantastic, but the high school I'm at is sometimes a little arbitrary (mostly because of horrible siloing and lack of ability to interact between departments).

It feels like a good point to mention that yes, my opsec is terrible, however I try not to explicitly name the district I work for on public internet, please also do that for me.

Anyways, finis--okay, reached 5pm at work, and set a Forest Tree to start growing while I biked, which is a fun strategy I learned ages ago and never use. But it means that I am already stuck in PowerHour mode when I walk into my house, and then I can't just like...immediately get home and collapse onto my phone. So today I did a load of laundry and worked on cleaning my room some. After five years, I am attempting to acquire some new furniture and kinda rejigger things in my bedroom a little. It would be splendid if it worked? I'd like to figure out how much of the _stuff_ I have in here can get actually dealt with and Put Away versus how much I just need to pare down.

We had fambly dinner tonight which was really nice --thank you Ezri for actually pushing for that a little! And now Austin is here and he and I are going to watch some Leverage. Tomorrow I will try and get to the school a little early so I can try and write some more questions for the Algebra diagnostic test we want to give the Geometry kids (framed as "I'm tired of reteaching y'all these particular skills you're supposed to have from last year and will especially need when you take Alg2 next year") so that when the Geo team meets in the afternoon we can look at it together.

I love you.

~Sor
MOOP!

I haven't posted in One Hundred Years! What have I been up to this summer?

I spent a month at Pinewoods! It was real great! I did two weeks as a camper (well, my usual mess of "lol, what's it like just being a normal camper" and then immediately transitioned into crew for two more weeks. I had a great time! I got to drag some guests to camp which was lovely ways to spend my days off (and in one case my working days). I got to visit and photograph every single camper cabin (nts: dump those photos up somewhere sometime).

I engaged in one hell of an archival project in which I ripped every single CD it was possible to do so from the Pinewoods kitchen. I have listened to zero of them yet --no wait, that's not true. There was one handmade CD labeled "PLAY ME URGENT PLAY ME" that I obviously had to immediately play. It was one track. Probably not the one you're guessing. Instead...well, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess --my one hint is that if you live in the United States, you have almost certainly heard this track sometime since it came out in the mid-90s.

I enjoyed crew immensely, and am looking forward to sneaking back for the fall work weekend --nts, actually see about signing up for that one! See if I can entice anyone else to sign up with me! Promise them I will not lead them astray with the driving this time, I definitely actually know how to get to camp now.

***

I was home for a very small number of days, it felt, in which I did successfully spend an afternoon hanging out with

mindways (he took me to the local ice cream shop which does a _killer_ bakalava ice cream, complete with filo dough mixed in and somehow still crisp? Gods that was awesome) and spent at least one day fucking around doing nothing? But not a lot of days.

My dance class restarted after being down for all of July --I had something like eighteen or nineteen dancers the first Thursday in August, and a splendid fourteen tonight! I am trying --at least until the ADHD distracts me-- to pick a figure for each week's focus, and choose dances in and around with that theme. It's a nice chance to try and put a little more actual class in it!

And then I had a nice dinner with The Family --which is to say, Belmhaus, with Mr. Belm and She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed and their daughter, plus John and Jamie and their kiddo, plus my parents. Lots of interesting conversation, and a great chance to catch up with Maeve and Liz, as the second generation of this particular grouping. Yet another person I've babysat is headed off to college, which always feels wild.

The next morning -Saturday the 8th- I piled into the car with my parents and we drove drove drove back home to Maryland, where I spent a little more than a week. Yay!

***

The big Maryland goal was mom and I doing a serious run at the shed full of boxes leftover from her dad and step-mom's estate. Our goal was Ten Boxen Per Day, which was especially lofty considering they had a birthday party in the middle there as well. But we somehow did it? It was...exhausting.

Physically, it was just huge amounts of moving and lifting and sorting and re-moving and loading the car and unloading the car. I pulled a muscle in my back about three days from the end, which was not splendid (but has mostly healed). But the physicality really was not the hard part.

It's just....so much emotional labour, sorting through the detritus of a hoarder's life. Especially when some of the detritus is REALLY FUCKING COOL! And some of it...really is not. We threw a ton of stuff away, and we brought a ton of stuff to goodwill. Some highlights, from this time around:

*Found Grandma Brin's wedding hat, which is a very cute little lace pillbox hat, and the negatives of their wedding photos. The latter I have taken to Make Art with, the former I will take eventually (I didn't have space in my very laden bags).

*The Giant Food Corporation guide to being a Good Homemaker which begins "Dear Mrs Consumer" (copyright 1960)

*So many index cards, so many bricks and cables, my classroom is gonna be *choice*

*Grandpa Perks's "Black Book" with lots of details of how he wanted his death and funeral to be, some of which actually happened but like. No one involved knew this was a document we were to be looking for. Please tell your loved ones where they can find this info.

*Many photos, most of which got quick scanned and recycled, but I kept a few in particular:

**Grandpa Perks, as a very young man, smiling and looking incredibly rakish and cute

**Two snaps of Grandma Brin actually smiling, a rare and glorious sight

**A whole envelope of photos of Brin's cats, beautiful siameses that she had SO many photographs of --I already had an album of them from a previous run at the boxen, so I'm gonna add these photos in too

**A photo of my parents and me as a tiny squashy baby, wearing the same outfit as in my birth announcement photo, so pretty damn early in the whole history. Probably I ought to frame this one.

**"me as a princess", a polaroid thus labeled and signed "to G'pa Perks, love Kat" at the bottom. I was...six? maybe? (the groupchat had a field day with that one)

**And my favourite, the one that got me unexpectedly choked up when I came across it, just a quick snapshot of Grandpa Perks helping Aunt Sara load her car for her first day of college. But the thing that caught me was catching sight of it in an innocuous stack and thinking "oh hey I have a shirt like that" before realizing that no, that really is a photo of him wearing the shirt he gave me ages and _ages_ ago, my favourite of the Grandpa shirts. It's stunning! I may try to bring the shirt with me to Chrimbo and see if I can convince Sara to recreate the photo with me, I think that would be _charming_.

***

Anyways, I came home on the train on Monday and this week has...also been largely busy. I did get a day off on Tuesday at least, besides DnD and therapy and hanging with Tailsteak? And then yesterday was trying to do an AntiProcrastinationWednesday and work on my room and the like. It kinda worked?

Tomorrow morning I'm getting up early and Austin and I will take the train north and then bike our way to a little campsite and spend a lovely weekend together in the totally unfair rain. We're looking forward to it!

School starts next week --officially on Thursday, but I need to show up Tuesday for Union Purposes-- and while I'm not _remotely_ looking forward to that, I am excited to maybe start to put my life back into routine again? It's the new year, so maybe I can start some new routines and resolutions and stuff? Make myself happier and more productive? I dunno.

Certainly it would be good to get back into the habit of reading (and writing!) here. I miss y'all and don't know what's going on in anyone's lives. I hope they've been good lives? I hope they continue to be good lives!

I love you,

~Sor
MOOP!

Oh hey, I went to go see when I had last updated y'all, and it was my first day of Pinewoods. I'm currently on my, uh. 19th day of Pinewoods, I think? To be fair, I did transition to crew somewhere in the middle there.

Let me explain. No no, there is no time, let me sum up.

I did ESCape! It was my last year of teaching the basics class, and it went SO WELL, I did SUCH A GOOD JOB! My best ever teach of Strathspey Poussette! Lovely sized perfect classes every day! Joy and good and wonderful!

I danced every Scottish dance in the evenings, maintaining my rule of not dancing SCD with Scottish dancers at ESCape. I don't know if that rule will continue to hold next year, but by the last night, we had a dedicated "hey, if you're unexpert and want a partner (or expert and want to be supportive), meet over here" going, and that seemed pretty great!

Scottish 1 had its usual mental/emotional crash, sigh. Next year we're going to have to be REALLY MINDFUL of everything to try and minimize that. Being as I'm teaching at Scottish Pinewoods and all.

(there is a two thousand word formerly private post seven entries back, if you are so inclined to read more on that particular thread. I shant rehash it here. It is, as it turns out, a big deal.)

But anyways, Scots1 was...emotionally hard but mostly fine? Once I was done crashing, it was lovely :P. And then we got into Scots2, and that was much easier for me to handle. A lot more normal!

Scottish 2 had me being my usual saucy self at the auction, and generally doing good with things. I MC'd and *that* was awesome --I think I took thirteen minutes longer this year than two years ago, but I think I'm comfortable with that (and certainly at least half that overage was from a different, longer band situation --having to re-set the stage halfway through!) And then it wrapped and as mentioned, now I am crew!

I have worked a weird changeover day into Family Week, and now I have been largely entirely ignoring Family Week itself in favour of like. Spending time with SamSam, the last few days we had overlapping, and then playing video games and just trying to reset my brain a little bit. Mostly not doing any homework or anything productive, except of course my literal working. I have learned how to feed the composting toilet and today I got to climb a tree to help attack the bittersweet that was growing all up ins! It's very satisfying work!

(I did also get to spend a good chunk of the day with my favourite three-year-old while her mom was off swimming across the pond! That was delightful!)

The next two days I have visitors, which will be fun --I quite like the idea of having people come hang out with me at camp! And then there's all of English Week, and one more changeover day, and home again home again that evening. Sunday Aug 2nd I'm getting brunch with some MD friends, and showing them Old North, and then sending them onto their train and going home and _unpacking_ probably (although I'd rather be doing absolutely nothing).

Maybe I will write more reports later? But more likely I will not! We shall all suffer with the incomplete notes!

~Sor
MOOP!

I'm at ESCape and I'm pretty happy about it!

The moment that it all really hit and crystalized and clarified was just before I rushed out of my cabin to the staff meeting, hanging up my flag outside Kitty Alone, and just feeling...home. It was real good! It was _real_ good, to have that moment of stillness, that song in my heart.

Here are some other moments I have liked!

*Last year when I arrived for ESCape, my cabin was utterly _covered_ in hangers, as a brilliantly executed practical joke from me-at-LCFD dropping a suggestion saying "more hangers in Kitty Alone plz". This year I didn't have anything quite so ridiculous, instead I had an orange light-up spiderweb, plus two giant spider decorations, carefully festooning the interior of the cabin. I am _so thrilled_ and immediately texted my crew-sweetie a thank you, only to later learn they weren't from her.

"It's a bit of an unexpected answer", she told me when I made some other faulty guesses who. I did later learn, and oh boy, it was unexpected but totally in character and very very lovely. I dearly love my spiders and will obviously be keeping them up for all of camp! (they will be easier to dodge than the hangers).

*A small bittersweet moment, at staff meeting I introduced myself with "my role at camp is this is my tenth, and final for a while, year of teaching the beginner SCD" and Chloe from the committee throwing her hands over her face in gentle despair that they're gonna need to find someone else. It was very flattering! I've had several people describe or talk about me to my face as "very good at SCD[/teaching]" and that's also extremely flattering.

(why am I stopping my favourite job I've ever had? Because it will be better for the community as a whole if ESCape has a rotation of _different_ excellent SCD basics teachers, and is not just "the thing Kat does only". I don't plan on doing anything else that week, ever, and I am of course immortal and going to live forever, but it is healthier for the community to not lock institutional knowledge away and instead spread it out. I am increasing the week's bus number, and ugh, I hate it so much and next year will be _so weird_ if I get in off the waitlist.)

*Oh, directly related to the above, a friend of mine from contra who is a beautiful dancer told me that I am the dancer they watch when they are looking at the SCD floor! Again, extremely flattering! That felt super nice to hear!

*I liked going down an ECD line and being able to say to each member of Torrent in turn "I like your outfit" and get back some variety of chipper "thanks, did you see my bandmates?!". The three of them matched, and it was extremely cute.

*I experienced a just _beautiful_ moment of consent practice today and I want to file it away and try and do this for other people in the future. After staff meeting, I was very briefly touching base with Arthur, who is MCing SCD this year, and I mentioned I'd love to get a quick check in with him at some point before I teach tomorrow afternoon, just to confirm his program and what I might want to focus on.

He said to me "oh, we could do it right now. Are you busy?" and then he looked at me as I hesitated or possibly had my face betray me and followed up a reasonable beat later with "say yes!", clearly giving me an out of "yes, I am busy".

It was just so earnest and kind, him noting that I didn't immediately assent to the meeting, and making it *much* easier for me to give the "disappointing" answer. Reminds me of one of my favourite ever consent quotes (which alas I no longer remember where I got the context for this, so sorry to unattribute words): "the easier it is to say no, the more a yes actually means".

*It's great to see and feel part of crew! And also great to see and feel part of other friendships! Gosh I am happy to be here!

*I spent about an hour hanging with Tuesday, working on unpacking my room real nice, and that was _lovely_. I am very pleased for it! We're gonna stay together after the pub night and I'm excited for thatttt!

Okay yay! Love you all, goodnight!

~Sor
MOOP!

Have I been updating here? No I have not! It's been a shockingly busy week for "ah yes, a lovely lazy week with a partner before going to camp for most of a month". Let's try and fill in some details:

Sunday was going to BIDA! My memory says we also did something before BIDA, but it might be incorrect? BIDA was in the afternoon, so maybe Sam and I just hung around the house having a nice restful time of things, and then went off to the contra dance! I saw SO many people there I liked, and also got to really enjoy that it was a not-too-crowded hall. (I did count at one point, and a not too crowded BIDA was, I believe, six hands four in each of three lines, so like. 72 dancers on the floor while I was sitting out to count them. My kingdom, etc etc.)

Monday we went to Gather Here, and I bought yarn for a Big Project that I am very excited (and a small anxious) about. Shhhh it's a secret (it's not a secret). Then grocery store on the way home, and straight off to the graveyard for a bit!

Pre-dance wandering at Mount Auburn Cemetary is something Alexander and I have been trying to institute as a new Cambridge Class tradition, at least while the weather is not totally rubbish. The very rough details are "we meet approximately at the gate at approximately 7, wander around looking at graves and bunnies, and then leave around 7:30 to walk to dance and only be a little late". When it's just me and Alexander, we hop the fence closest to the CanAm, when we've had other friends (hi Thrantar! hi Eel! hi SamSam!) we've bothered to go the proper way out the main gate, which does not close until 8.

The Cambridge Class party was quite lovely, although I am feeling a little guilty about failing the intergenerational game by accidentally only dancing with people younger than myself. I will have to watch out for that, and try and diversify my partners more in future weeks! We did have a lovely chunk in the middle where several of us were hanging out outside instead, which was Real Good.

After, Willow and Alexander gave me and Sam a lift home, and the four of us wound up hanging out at my place until a bit after midnight which was very charming. (I figured (correctly!) that these were all friends who would get along, and we had a tentative plan to play escape room games on Friday, so it was nice to get to meet each other properly beforehand.)

Tuesday, we hung out for the morning, and then trekked out in the godsawful heat down to the far end of the red line, to go get dinner with Thom (Sam's older brother) and Liz (my longtime amazing fiddler friend, also happens to be married to Thom). The heat + not enough proper meals + car ride from red line to Canton kinda hit me _real hard_ and I spent the first half hour or so at Thom and Liz's house being miserable and sipping water and trying to eat crackers. OH. GATORADE. THAT'S THE THING I SHOULD'VE PURCHASED WHILE OOT AND ABOOT TODAY AND GETTING READY FOR PINEWOODS STUFF DAMNIT.

Anyways, the _rest_ of the visit was very very good! They made delicious food, and we went for an excellent little ramble in the park close to their house (we saw the Amtrak go by over an extraordinarily picturesque little rail bridge!). Before we left, I got to hold Ruairidh, who I am very very in love with, and who is a much larger beautiful orange corn snake than he was in 2023, the last time I visited Liz and was able to hold him.

Wednesday was Sam and mine's dedicated day _just us no errands no distractions damnit_ and it was lovely to be shmoopy and silly and have a nice time. We read some to each other, and they showed me Company, which I had never seen. It was an excellent staging --the 2006(?9?) cast where orchestration was provided by the actors. For a musical where absolutely nothing happens, I _really_ liked it --I want to find some brain time sometime soon to poke at it more as someone a bit past 35 and contemplating marriage, and see what stirs.

Thursday was a trying to get things done day. I finalized my packing list, and did some good serious work to get my briefs ready for MCing at Scottish Pinewoods. Then Sam went off to hang out with Amanda, and I had Austin over for the evening. He and I watched a bit of Leverage, and went on a...well I was going to say long walk, but mostly it was just a long "sit on the park bench like five minutes from my house and have a good relationship chat" which was super valuable and affirming. Took him home and squished him thorough and that was a lovely end to the night.

Friday, I sent Austin off with a "good luck on the peal!" (shocking no one, they didn't get it because someone got overwhelmed by the heat partway through. Austin says the ferry ride down to the Hingham tower was lovely, and swimming in the bay excellent, so it sounds like it was a very good time!) and continued to try to gogogo getting things done!

In the afternoon, we paused our accomplishments and once again set out into the horrible heat, this time with the very noble intention of Obtaining An Ice Cream Sundae For Free. This was because Gracies was doing some sort of complicated partnership with the MLB to advertise the existence of baseball oslt. Alexander met us there --well, okay, Alexander met us at Make'n'Mend where I was _mostly_ good but did get some more knitting needles in new sizes I hadn't had before-- and we got delicious sundaes and ate them and then were cursed by the bus gods and walked the whole way home from Union, which would've been fine had it not been eighteen billion degrees.

Luckily, I own a shower and Many Towels, and so we rotated in and out of the bathroom and then hung out to play board games until it felt like dinnertime. SamSam made scallion pancakes, and Alexander made a tofu-veggie stirfry and Willow showed up in the middle of dinner and we all had a jolly rest of the evening. The escape room game turned out to be a bust (not sure what we were doing wrong exactly) but it was fun company, and we were able to play some other games together that were quite good.

Saturday was "get serious about packing" day, sped along by the state-by-state updates from mom as they drove up from Maryland. They arrived around five, I finished gathering items to pack around...midnight-thirty, I think? Packing this year is _hard_ but I have broken down and begged some friends to take things home for me after Scottish sessions, so hopefully I will (somehow) manage to bring everything home on the train after the crew days.

(My friends and community are so good and wonderful and I love them so much. I am a very lucky person to be loved as I am.)

And then today! Today I shoved everything into bags (

_@), finishing just about in time for mom's "hey let's have plenty of time to go to the pharmacy before it closes" alarm to go off. Mom and Sam and I walked off to Davis Square, which was...okay, it's not hot anymore, but I would like the air to not be soup? Anyways, we got meds and crepes and fancy lemon soda from HMart (it's not discontinued! just moved! Sam found the new spot for me! Yay!!!!!!) and then went home and I spent three hours working on the Jobs Coordination for Scottish sessions. I had estimated 4-6 hours of work, I'm at about five total and I _might_ make it?

Anyways, that brings us pretty much to now, modulo dinner and a brain break and stuff. I spent a nice bit of the evening looking through the Pinewoods NGI letters page, which was a charming part of the scholarship for a while. It was real neat to see different people's "how I spent my summer vacation" letters!

Tomorrow we pack the car and then get in the car and then DRIVE DRIVE DRIVE to Pinewooooodssss! I am very excited! I will get to see Tuesday! I will get to dance! I will teach things! Aaaah! It's gonna be g-o-o-d good!

<3
~Sor
MOOP!

I have not done this in _so_ long, and I've forgotten everything, and also I've not been reading very much. But that's all quite rubbish, let's give it another attempt and pick up where we left off.

Finished Reading Recently

As I mentioned in my previous post, SamSam has been reading me Anne of Green Gables for the last year, after they were slightly astonished to learn I'd never read it before. In retrospect, I am also slightly astonished I've never read it before, the whole thing felt _deeply_ familiar. Not in a deja vu sort of way, just in how strongly I Recognized Anne Shirley in myself, and myself in Anne. I would've been even more insufferable if I'd been able to read them as a child and I'm still a bit disappointed I didn't, but oh, it was thrilling to be read them by someone who loves me.

In the last year, we have gotten another Murderbot Diary, so of _course_ I bought that immediately and reread the whole series and also read that one with desperate squee back and forth to Elishka, as we carefully spoil-tagged our screeching at each other. We did indeed choose the same Most Important Passage because fuccckkkkk the herald to secunit pipeline Sure Is A Thing.

I started doing a serious reread of the October Daye books, but I also started doing some Serious Tracking Of The Lore, and unfortunately those were slightly incompatible goals and I got bogged down in the latter and distracted from the former. And. That. Was at the beginning of the school year. And I think now I'm essentially caught up on shit I've read this year. :(

(Learning to knit has been my project instead, which isn't like, bad at all, but maybe this summer I will get back into books.)

Currently Reading

I have read Sam one chapter of The Adventures of Blue Avenger so far, and I quite want to read them more of it.

I had a library hold that I placed _ages_ ago for Hench finally come in, only it was like, right when I was distracted by the end of the school year, and so I did not in any way follow up. Whoops. But maybe I can re-snag that.

I dunno, what should I read when I go off to camp? More Toby? More Discworld? More Oz? Something else entirely???

Reading in the Future

The Stolen Women comes out on October 27th and you should order it now if you like things such as feminism and Roman history and queer shit. Or if you like my sister!

Next from Sam is gonna be Pride and Prejudice, another classic I've somehow missed.

Beyond that, shrug?

~Sor
MOOP!

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent the last weekend¹ at Ashanty! It was a jolly time, and I'm feeling quite content with the world because of it.

Ashanty is the family house owned by my friend Thom's family. This is an intentionally silly way to put it, because while yes Thom and I are still friends (and it was great to see him and his wife Liz there), my actual invite came by way of my partner SamSam, who is Thom's younger sibling. It is neat to have partners who drag me into their family sometimes²!

And the weekend has been extremely relaxing and re-energizing, which is what these things often are. I had sorta understood conceptually that you can hear camp from across long pond, but with FAC in full swing, this was my first time actually experiencing that --the dining hall bell and music at the evening dances and all! We did not have much dancing (well, Sam and I danced a little in between folding laundry when the song was right, and Ruth and Laurel did a bunch of clogging) but there was music, and very good food. There was rambling through the woods and sharing stories and playing card games and it was a just delightful time.

I liked especially having a version of camp that was essentially just the relaxing parts --no classes to get to, or other responsibilities, not really. One of these visits, I will be family enough that I'll be expected to help with a meal (which is fine, and I'm definitely not flat panicked at the thought), but this time around the sum total of my responsibilities was agreeing with Meg when she suggested that joining the walk would feel good. I helped clean up my dishes, but it felt glorious to get to choose when I sat around on the porch and knit vs when I went down to stick my feet in the water vs when Sam and I went off to the hammock so they could read to me.

(I've not been reading regularly, but I do need to restart my bookposts because we finished Anne of Green Gables, which we started just under a year ago. It was really lovely! I found it such a delightful little story!)

And I liked also having a much smaller subset of people to distract myself with. It was nice to meet some of Sam's village, friends of their parents who they've known their whole life, and it was wonderful to hang out with the other "kids" --Thom and Liz and Ruth and Laurel. If you read the 2020 post I linked above, Meg continues to do a superb job of making me feel included. It felt good to be so close to camp but not have quite so much of the rush and desperation of "oh no, I know everyone here how can I spend time with all my friends at once".

Now Sam has followed me home, and we've got a week to futz around in Boston --which will probably be at least half spent on packing-- before we collect my mom and go back to the other side of Long Pond, for ESCape. And then I'm at camp for all the month, and I'm quite excited for *that* as well. ESCape, Scots, Scots, Crew, Crew! Not totally sure how I will handle packing, but that's why I have this week.

I hope you are also happy with the people you get to see.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: For values of weekend defined by "Thursday just before dinner to Saturday just after"

2: And now that I'm in my mid-thirties, I actually have some of those. I kinda spent the vast majority of my adult life dating people who weren't necessarily out to their parents, and so I never really was publicly their partner like that, and it's not a bad thing, it's actually a really workable thing in a lot of ways, but it means that when I started dating Tuesday I suddenly had to start learning how to Attend Family Events.

So I did a bunch of knitting on the train --I got very nearly one entire half-skein on the train, and then did finish it and an entire second while hanging around doing dinner and games and good conversation and stuff! That was all very nice! I am thrilled to have a hobby I can just _do_.

I'm also weirdly pleased to be back at Ashanty, which was one of the last dominoes on the stack that led to me actually knitting. Because being there in early October last year, I sure did observe that yes I had my sketchbook, and other people had colouring and stuff, like I wasn't the _only_ person not knitting but uh. It was close. It was most of the people there having a project close at hand. It was feeling left out sitting around the table and watching everyone else have this bright and beautiful fidget. And so, a few weeks later when I was in the garage and found my doctor who scarf from so many years ago, I said "oh yeah. okay. maybe."

It's my first time rereading the [redacted] file since maybe when I let Sam read it? Because I can't do anything without writing about it (see also: why I always put on cat ears when I cook¹), when I decided to take up knitting and was Extremely Cool And Normal About It², I was writing a fuckton and dumping it all into a secret file that I called [redacted]. I should probably rename it because it's not useful to call it that anymore.

Anyways, this is fascinating to reread because I had more recently forgotten that the start of me knitting was Fraught, _not_ because it was something that requires skill and I was inherently bad at it starting out³ (although also that a little) but specifically because _gender_.

Here, have some earlydoors quotes:

[2025 10 22]
And knitting fucks me up in the same way other "girl crafts" does. Femininity and the performance thereof. And the success thereof. It's not just being bad at crafts or making things, although it touches on that. It's that I'm bad at being a woman the way that I've never quite forgotten no matter how more okay I get about my gender and lack thereof.
Anyways. Yeah. Sewing hits it. Cooking hits it sometimes. Being bad at other stuff is hard and I don't always cope great, but gods, there is such a...just...additional slap when it's something that I should be able to do because girl, and can't, because not.
I guess the only answer is to just keep doing shit badly anyways. Death before detransition doesn't just mean physically. It means we're gonna dismantle the fucks in my brain before we give in to them. So a woman is good at these things? So what. I could be too. Or I could be shit and do them anyways. Either way, I win.
Sometimes we're okay in here, yeah?

[2025 11 17]
One of the knitting problems is the femininity thing, and I think I finally figured that one out, at least a little better:
If I become good at skills which classically belong to womanhood, it makes me appear more like I belong to womanhood.
And that's complicated and bullshit and obviously not how anything works --femmes can be thems is not just about looking all frippy.
But.

And I'm thrilled to have stabilized into the normal kinds of brainweird, and not the rotten bonus gender kinds. I'm also thrilled to have spent enough time with this thing as a secret that I was able to just....get over myself with it. To be clear, note that first quote is from October 22nd. Sam was the first person I actually Told⁴, on like...December 11th. That's six weeks, give or take, where the hobby was completely a secret (and fifteen pages of writing).

I am in no way _normal_ about the hobby because I'm not good at being normal at anything. I have like four times in my brain in the last week wanted to be like "oh no, I don't know how to knit" when people have asked me what I'm knitting. My standards for "knowing" something are fucking _high_ and I don't think I've met them yet, but also given a long enough time to be Weird about a thing that is private, I will get over it eventually.

And it's real neat to look back in conversation with myself and be like "....that's the part you were worried about?" Because yeah, okay, fine, in general society mostly women knit, but I don't hang out in general society, I hang out at YTS where fuckin' _everyone_ had needles out, or hooks, or whatever you call the specific tools for needle felting, and maybe quilting?

It just feels so _natural_ at this point, eight months later, and now I'm one of the people at Ashanty with my needles out and a project in my lap. Some of the [redacted] file is me fretting that people will think I'm Way More Serious About This Hobby Than I Really Am, and unfortunately for pastKat, they completely failed this time to predict how serious I was going to be about this hobby.

Because it's bright colours and neat textures and something to do with my hands (we love a fidget). It's counting and counting and COUNTING and did you know that I like counting? It's turning string into cloth, which feels like the best kind of witchcraft, it's being able to fuck around *and* find out, it's deciding what I want and just...doing it. It's community! It's _so much_ community, it's any time I get remotely stuck I have people I can reach out to and ask for help and they will be excited to do so (and some day I will be able to do the same).

It's the second best thing I've started in the last two years⁵ (nothing will beat my dance class) and it's not perfect, it hasn't _fixed_ my ADHD but my goodness, I am absolutely using the tool as it is meant to be used, in that I have something kinda mindless to do with my hands that _isn't_ shitty phone games. That is...huge, honestly. It's also great because it's giving me access to music more regularly again, which is also huge!

I'm happy to be learning how to knit. It pleases me. Sorry this entry is so unreadably bouncy back and forth. I hope you also have things in your life that bring you joy.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: this is an extra-funny reference because I haven't written a Cooking with Cat Ears post since like.......2014, apparently. Which is genuinely more recent than I would've guessed. But yeah, even though I don't spend half my kitchen time at the keyoard anymore, I still wear the cat ears as a tribute.)

2: That link is to the first post in which I talked about knitting. See the fifth bullet point. SEE HOW EXTREMELY COOL AND NORMAL I WAS BEING?! (I am neither of these things ever.)

3: Because, say it with me, the first step to being good at something is to be shit at it.

4: A bunch of people knew beforehand because I slowly started knitting in front of people earlier than that, and also I did put knitting supplies on my chrimbolist that year. But there was sorta this clear line between "this is a secret" and "this is something I can actually be public about" and it was telling Sam.

5: This is probably still true, but see also "it takes a while with a secret before I talk about it sometimes". How sign s-e-c-r-e-t?

So, like a month and a half ago, the mid-Atlantic crowd of Scottish Country Dancers determined that we desperately needed to drive to Walpole and get Rita's water ice.

To be clear, this was over an hour each way, for, I dunno, maybe 45 minutes of hanging out in a corporate park parking lot (and, to be fair, having very good conversation). BUT WE GOT TO EAT RITA'S, which was plenty good on an objective level, and even better on a "get excited and make things" let's-have-an-adventure level!

I got to drive the first (less exciting) half, and listen to music and cheerfully jump in with a bit of banter here and there. Willow drove us home from the place, which was very kind of them, especially because we were close enough to ~stadium traffic~ to get kinda entangled for a while. (much like my stupid fucking knitting, which I lost yarn chicken to quite badly, siiiiigh.)

It was pretty much everything I ever dreamed of, and I highly recommend the rest of you go out on some very stupid short adventure sometime. Bonus points if it involves ice cream or other frozen summer treats (because then you're just getting a leg up on my birthday!)

I love you!

~Sor
MOOP!

Okay. Let's write an entry, and link to a _lot_ of other entries. Which will be tricky, because honestly, most of the relevant writing is not actually in Dreamwidth or otherwise linkable places. Most of the relevant writing is from unposted 750words stuff. Except the part that's in BehindTheWalls. So it's mostly just going to be quoting myself, I guess.

(Ha, here's a thing that I can tell I'm doing and am not very sure how apparent it is to other people. It's flattening. It's something that is too big to actually look at in the whole, and so something about my voice shifts sudden. here's an example from when I hit a 1000 day streak on 750words. Or this example from the first time I rang Stedman Doubles. There's a really good one I can't find right now, where I say something like "I'm focusing on the numbers, the data, the concrete because I can't cope with the emotions of the whole thing". Anyways. That's apparently the voice we're in right now.)

Anyways, let's start chronologically.

On May 9th, 2015, I posted scared and enthusiastic about passing part one of my certificate. "We passed. We all passed. There are five new level one teachers in the Boston branch and they are us!". I actually say I'm proud of myself, because maybe in 2015 I was less of a mess somehow. It was before the Depression Year, certainly.

A couple weeks later, on May 20th, I write about how much I love dance, and about trying to think with intentionality about how to lead a life that has a lot of it. "I love dancing and I am fucking passionate about it. If I could spend all my time and energy on it, I easily would.". It's the wheels starting to turn, remembering that the way you make your life be the way you want is you go out and fucking fight for it.

We wrote more about that specific idea, recently. About the way that I wanted, since 2012, to start a regular dance night, and now that I have it really is everything I've ever dreamed of.

***

We're going to jump ahead in the chronology a bit. May 13th, 2019. The entry is not particularly interesting, it's just an invitation. What's interesting is reading it not on dreamwidth, but on 750words, on seeing what else I wrote that night. Have some words:

( Right now it's all of them, because sure, the walls can be permeable. For this, they can. )

There's some really interesting things in there. There's a thread that'll be picked up more later, of the idea that there are spells I can cast that I have to sneak around or they won't actually work. And there's a really important sentence.

There's a sentence that runs akin to _casting_ except more realistic. More reasonable. Looking at the shape of the world and the space and the way I fit into it. Thinking what seems logical and likely and fair. Specific: Staff teacher position at Scottish Pinewoods. Measurable: easy to grade on a binary, have I done it or not. Achievable: this is possible to do once I have my full certificate. Relevant: It is the thing I love more than anything else in the world.

Time-Bound:
Before I turn fifty.

***

A small jump forward this time. June 9th is my exam. I didn't wind up posting any of the words I wrote, I kept them just for myself. But I haven't forgotten that goal, and I write:

I have a goal about Scottish dance and it's a secret goal and a private goal and that means I'll absolutely tell you accidentally out of nowhere, but please don't ask for it specific. This is a point towards that goal, a distinct and necessary step. If I reach that goal will I be proud of myself? Will I feel like I've done well?

I write a lot more, about pride, about work, about whether being good at things means I even can be proud about them too. "But there's no sense of pride, no sense of accomplishment. I did well because of course I would. I know how to teach. I know how to dance. I am competent and skilled at this, and yes absolutely arrogant.". The ways I can acknowledge my skill in the same breath as I can remember that pride is not an emotion I get to have has never stopped being fascinating. It's one of my most regular echolalias lately, Elle Woods scoffing "what, like it's hard?"

From words on June 11th, still waiting for my results "I did well at the Scottish exam because I was supposed to. And I can't feel proud of it, because like...I dunno. It would be feeling proud of breathing? Feeling proud of grading? Of biking to work? Feeling proud of doing any of the other things that I just need to do in my day-to-day life."

What, like it's hard?

Two days later it becomes even more absurd when I take to twitter to post about my scores. That thing I wrote at the start about flattening? Full force here.

( I'll save you the click and repost the thread here )

What, like it's hard?!

***

And that's the day I wrote an actual bone fide BehindTheWalls entry. 750words is the diary, BtW is the diary. It was only half an hour of writing --I know, because part of doing BtW is timestamps-- and I knew from the beginning that it was _important_ maybe one of the most important entries I would ever write in there.

And Magus said this (because would it _really_ be a _real_ BtW post if I didn’t talk about Magus, at least a little?):
“Holy fuck, 24 As? I don't know *anybody* who got 24 As! Well done!”

Which leads quickly to This grade does not matter in the slightest, to anyone _ever_. Except knowing that it’s high —like, surprisingly so, to someone with different contacts and different knowledge— means that suddenly my rock-hard arrogance has proof..

And then the part that finally let me cry, as I was working through All Of This, circling around something that requires flattening to even remotely be able to comprehend. Something too large to bear, not without feeling my chest clutch.

(have you figured out yet there's a really important end of this post? Have you figured out yet what it is? Did you just scroll down to spoil yourself? I wouldn't blame you if you did. Anyways.)

BUT but but but, this is suddenly no longer bravado. This is _real_. This is someone else looking at my skills and saying “there is nothing fake there”. Saying “yes, you absolutely belong here”. I’m on unsteady ground with this. I’m not used to being legitimate, to actually being the expert in the room.

That's the part that made me cry, that made me _sob_. I didn't have time to have An Emotion the way I wanted, the way SecUnit would've understood it. There's a lot more that goes with it, fear and pride and the first time I ever called dancing the opposite of dissociation. I don't generally share the stuff I write BehindTheWalls. That's like. Literally the point of having the walls in the first place.

But I'll give you the skeleton. There's things about being able to be honestly myself. About being professional, but not fake. About how to approach perfection. About the weight of responsibility that comes with being actually good at something, that now there really won't be anyone to blame except myself if I don't then make it. And okay fine, I'll share the end. It also made me cry.

My dream could be real. I am actually good enough for this dream to come true.
_Other people_ believe I am good enough for this dream to come true.

My true and honest self is good enough for this dream to come true.

I call it a dream and I call it a goal and I call it something that I tuck away in the back of my mind and keep there everpresent.

***

I haven't gone diving through much more of the seven years, one month, three days between May 13th, 2019 and today. From the time I set myself a goal: Teach at Scottish Pinewoods before I'm fifty. Goddesses all know there's been a lot that's happened in that time. I was dwelling recently wondering when was the first time I ever wrote the phrase "I love my hobby but it doesn't love me back". There's been times in between I haven't even wanted to reach this goal, felt too alienated, too not-a-part, unwelcome, unwanted.

Twenty months ago, I started my class, and that really is the most important thing I've done these last two years. For itself, absolutely, and its value to the community, but also for me because it is very much the thing that let me fall back in love with Scottish Country Dancing. It's not just my class, the fact that there's a Monday night cohort is a brilliant thing as well. I love this hobby _and_ it loves me back.

I am thirty-six years old. I turn thirty-seven in August, and will stay that way until the following August. For time-based goal setting, it is nice to set things up with a little wiggle room --easier to meet a goal by age fifty if your opportunities all happen in the summer before your birthday.

Thirteen years of wiggle room seems pretty decent. As I explained it to SamSam, TMC has been doing ranked choice voting over the last month on who they want to be the local teacher for Scots Pinewoods next year. And they asked their clear first choice and I accepted.

What, like it's hard? Yeah. Yeah, it fucking is. It's seven years of hard. It's more than a year of planning to see if I can do a good job of hard. It's Scottish Sessions of Pinewoods camp, 2027 and six teaching days of hard.

But you know? My class ethos is "do hard things badly", and I stand by it as a teaching strategy. It's a great thing to do. Except not everything actually falls into that space. This one in particular isn't gonna be like that. What, like it's hard? Yeah. And we're gonna do hard things fuckin' well.

Because my true and honest self is good enough for this dream to come true. Let's dance, everyone.

I'm proud of you, little childe.

~Sor
MOOP!

It is a well known fact at Pinewoods that there is exactly one shower in all of camp, so here I am, sitting and writing some of my words while waiting for it to become available unto me.

(This is extra funny, because waiting for it necessitates being directly across from the open empty room with another shower. In a building that has at least two more showers beyond that, none of which are currently occupied. But no, the outdoor shower is the single and only shower and I will not be hearing any arguments to the contrary.)

Anyways, I am having a _wonderful_ time at Lavender spring camp. Here are some things from today!

*Ben Sachs-Hamilton hosted a callers confab, which was a completely unplanned/unstructured session devoted to "hey, uh.........let's chat about stuff!" and it was a really interesting glimpse into the How Contra Callers Do Things situation. I was able to say some hopefully useful things and learn a lot of hopefully useful things, and it was a nice situation!

*Lindsay Dono, who I deeply adore, stopped me very briefly to be all "hey, I'd love to pick your brain sometime about how I can work on getting the Seattle SCD scene ganderfree" which OH GODS YES PLEASE ME TOO! So we didn't actually have that conversation yet, but I'm so very excited to do it later.

*At the very end of the evening, after last waltz and people are packing up and the like, a couple of the young spry gremlin-like creatures at camp suddenly went full goofy beast mode, scrobbling around on the floor in a squat and bounding forward on their hands. There were two of them, and some wry lad shouted "do a reel" to which they replied "we can't with only two". Which meant inevitably there were suddenly six of us. Four of us, me included, did manage a really quite fantastically weird reel, kinda leapfrogging around our partners, and then we had to do Quite A Lot Of Balance And Petronella as well, which was _extremely_ satisfying because we got a good rhythm and quite literally, "everyone clapped" to keep time for us. Really fun and stupid and goofy.

I am so _so_ thrilled for a body that I somehow do manage to take enough care of that I can do absolute nonsense bullshit like that sometimes, on very little notice.

*Everyone is unbelievably attractive, and that's great in and of itself, but it's also extremely charming to have moments where I am hanging out with one attractive person, and we are both very wistfully commisserating as we look from the porch to the suddenly-at-eye-level extremely short white tennis skirt being worn by another attractive person.

*The music is making me gay? Like, by which I mean, I have an emotion in my chest that I've long since identified as "I am attracted to this person in a gay way" and I have received that feeling multiple times in response to the music. Which is _fucking fantastic_ honestly, I would be very very happy to continue to be queer for music for a long long time.

*SAW A LUNA MOTH! Best part was one person pointing it out and a whole bunch of us scrambling over to also see it! It was _so_ large and _so_ beautiful! I don't think I've ever seen one at camp before? Maybe just once, but years ago and high up in the rafters of Hands Across and not going anywhere, this one was fluttering marvelously around Ampleforth.

*Also saw a dragonfly this afternoon that landed on my shorts in a very photogenic way, and as I was photographing it, I noticed it had something sightly weird going on, which I eventually determined was the damselfly it was in the process of eating! That was VERY COOL TO WATCH and I got a lot of photos of it with various amounts of blue darner sticking out of its mouth.

*I have been talking so much about Scottish Dancing, and it has been with SO MUCH MORE LOVE than I norally feel like I get to talk about SCD with non SCDers, and I'm sososososoososos happy about that! I've also been putting some conversational thought into "what is the difference between SCD and contra/ECD, and that's been _really_ fun to puzzle through and work out the many differences that actually mean anything!

*I am going to run an SCD class tomorrow and I really hope it goes well to Do Hard Things Badly, and also I hope I have chosen some good hard things, but also I was looking through my collection of dances and had SO MANY OPTIONS! Some of them are much more accessible than others, but I'm really looking forward to seeing what I can get away with!

I looked unbeleivably good for the costume dance tonight, wearing clothing that I have all gotten in the relatively recent past. I own so much Good Clothing and I really enjoy getting to peacock it up!

*The mustard tempe tonight for dinner was so fucking good, damn

*I have gotten to meet a new friend! He doesn't necessarily realize we're friends yet, and to be fair, we do not have to be friends, but I hope we will. He is FOUR MONTHS OLD and his parents love him so much and also love each other so much and watching all this community be all starry-eyed at each other is really fucking wonderful!

*Now the shower is open so I'm gonna do that! Then maybe I walk to the camphouse party past the wifi shed to see if I need to write any more, or can just post these. I really fucking love LCFD, which I have been informed stands for "Lets Contra Fucking Dance"!

*Finished showering and now my hair is clllllleeeeeean which I am extremely excited about (I love the Pinewoods shampoo/conditioner/water situation very much --in 2023 I washed my hair at camp for the first time (normally I wash it just before camp) and realized How Good It Was For My Hair and now it's my *favourite*!)

*Speaking of good hair, a friend of mine is going through a really tough time, and I was hearing about some of it while braiding my hair this morning. So then I offered to braid their hair, as a social friendliness thing, and they were all "actually, it really needs buzzing on the sides" and immediately I was like "I ALSO DO THAT FOR PEOPLE I DO IT REAL GOOD" and I got to have the amazingly queer experience of being at queer camp and touching up a beloved friend's badly grown-out undercut to look fresh and fuzzy and new just like, out on the camphouse back porch and that felt Very Gay And Good. Great times!

Now I'm at the wifi shed. Let's check word count...

Yep, 1149. Let's party!

~Sor
MOOP!

Iiiiiiii am at Pinewoods!

It is the...fourth? Third? Hangon, lemme see if I can check!

I can check! It is the fourth year LCFD has hosted their spring camp at Pinewoods, which means it's the fourth year I've gotten to attend! I like this session! I like this session _so much_. The highlights are obviously the people, all of whom are thrillingly attractive and carrying quite a lot of gender about them, but here are some of the highlightiest bits:

*Lindsey Dono is calling! I met her several years ago at a YDW and immediately went head-over-heels heart-eyes for her calling abilities, she's _fantastic_ at it, and really wonderful at teaching-level calling. So that's a delight, and someday I really will have to travel to her coast and visit her on her home turf!

*Many good little conversations and connections have been had with various people in various capacities. It feels like _home_ and it feels like _FAMILY_ and I am so happy about both of those things!

*The music is absolutely stunning. Cecilia Vacanti especially is just fucking _phenomenal_ in a way that keeps accidentally surprising me --I need to stop letting that happen and just embrace the fact that she might be one of my favourite contra musicians!

*Jamie asked me about my collar, and I was able to give a very happy "It's not for anyone but me, it's just been a while since I regularly wore one and this felt like a good space for it!" Which is true, and it's actually _really_ nice to have something substantial around my neck again and know that it's not going to get me into serious trouble at work.

(look, it's 2026 and society is a shitshow. The way we get joy back is by embracing and loving and being in solidarity and community with the filthy perverts who have always been the backbone of the queer community. I stand with my siblings! Or kneel, more likely! Respectfully kneel. Maybe grovel a bit.)

*I got some very good knitting-and-gossip time with Lucretia during the back half of the dance! I am so happy to see my crew friends especially! I am so excited to come join them and be a crew friend in the second half of July!

*It is unbearably humid (this is not a plus) to the point where I have _actually gone in the pond_. In early June! This basically never happens to me, I am far too unable to handle the cold to actually go into Long Pond much before Scottish sessions, usually. I am pleased about having pond access, and not exactly pleased that it is both eight hundred percent humid and not actually that hot. I mean, I'd be less pleased if it was more hot, but it feels awful being cool and sticky at the same time.

*The post-dance snax were _very_ good. A true abundance of cheese and crackers! I am a simple white people and you can absolutely control me with cheese.

*And the dancing is quite good! The floor is enthusiastically full, but not brutally so, and Lindsay is very proactive about managing placements. I am very much looking forward to the fancy dress ball tomorrow! I should figure out before lunch if I have any Talents for the Talent Show!

I hope you are having a good weekend as well!

~Sor
MOOP!

Hey. Don't give up. The world is slowly getting better.

It's taking me several days of background processing, but it all hit me this morning, this particular moment from Monday night at the RSCDS Boston AGM. Because in the process of thanking me for my service to the branch/exec, especially vis-a-vis gender stuff, Linda McJ accidentally let a "she" slip out.

And like a dozen? so many more than just me, resigned, half under my breath! people chanted "they" at her in response and she apologized and kept going and holy wow, there were enough voices, distributed enough through the crowd that there's no way this was just a few of my weird queer friends. This was a lot of you.

This group of largely non-queer dancers made sure to keep my pronouns correct. And yeah sure fine, some of them collectively don't always get what that means, like, I know for some people it's "Kat's a girl with a weird preference" and not actually any understanding of genderqueerness. But they're respecting that weird preference. They're taking the first step forward, the one that opens you up to being able to understand more later, and they're taking actions that respect me.

It's been a, uh, _wild_ week as we close out the school year and I haven't had space to process this proper --I don't even really have that space or time now, but it struck like a bolt as I was getting ready, and so I'm taking these five minutes to write this and cry a little.

Because maybe the hobby I love so much can actually love me back.

~Sor
MOOP!

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MOOP!

The Rantings of a Terminal Optimist

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