My politics in three words "Community is Good"

Happy Friday.

Monday my brain crashed _entirely_ and probably not for the reasons you'd expect my brain to crash on December 2nd. It appears to have been "spent too much time with people I love and not enough time alone" and also "I am an ADHD nightmare childe". So maybe exactly the reasons you'd expect.

Tuesday I found a new ADHD brain-game to play, to try and keep my brain On Structure for a few days. It's a series of little task cards for each day of the week, that I can rifle through and use to build a presumptive (but adaptable) schedule. I gave it 48 hours, that's pretty much where we're at, I'm gonna try continuing to poke at it but I know it's not going to last too much longer and honestly that's okay, it got me out of nothingland and into at least a little bit of return-to-structure.

I've been thinking a lot about what IS working in my life and brain and what's not. Maybe if I get good at that particular form of observation, I can apply/modify/add to the good stuff, and get more of it? Or maybe I'll just crash and burn and lose the good stuff too.

The biggest problem right now is just honestly that I'm *really* busy. It's mostly stuff I really like doing, but there's so much of it. I'm really glad I chose 1st/3rd/5th Thursdays as the night for my dance class, since it means I'm only doing it (about) every other week. As it is, it's sustainable (if inelegant). If it was every week, I think I'd flame out before six months were through and that would be rotten.

The other thing I'm really glad I'm doing (but _damn_ it's gonna eat a huge amount of time this year) is being on my union's bargaining team for our next contract. We haven't even had our first meeting with the district yet and it's already been a pretty sizable chunk of work and check-ins and collaborating and it's all _really_ cool and positive work that I'm proud to be a part of! But I'm probably not going to do it again in three years, maybe wait until the three years after that.

(Everything I like right now is fundamentally about community. HOW ABOUT THAT.)

Speaking of community, I have started a BlueSky account, and I'm trying to be aggressively mindful about how I use it. I turned off retweets for everyone and I'm trying to focus on seeing actual posts from actual people rather than lots of commentary on other people's things. For me, that means trying really hard to keep my OC/quote-post ratio high. I'm also being incredibly aggressive about blocking people, including a blanket policy of "if your first ever interaction with me is to follow me, I will block you" because like...I want community and conversation, not to be part of someone's firehose.

(So far I am mutually following one account of a total stranger, because I saw them through a feed, left a comment, they replied, and our conversation seemed pleasant enough to them that they followed me, and pleasant enough to me to reciprocate. COMMUNITY AND CONVERSATION.)

It is, of course, making me appreciate Dreamwidth more, even though I'm shit at commenting on other people's posts. Maybe that's a new years resolution or something, more mindful community engagement and social media that makes me feel happy and centered and interested.

I hope you are well and finding things to feed your soul.

~Sor
MOOP!

Mostly Thanksgiving-break books

Let's do Wednesday Books, as always, not on a Wednesday because it's More Fun That Way!

Finished Reading Recently

I actually have a couple of clean-up notes, things that are on my booksheet but I don't think I ever talked about in medialog (or at least, I don't have the entries linked like I do for everything else).

In mid-August I read The Silver Gryphon by Mercedes Lackey, which was indeed my prompt to reread the other two books in its trilogy. I'm not sure why/how I missed it, except that that was an early-October medialog for things read over a month ago, and I'm only sorta organized. Anyways, it's still in my top-three Lackey books and I love it very dearly and that's about all I can say about it.

Also in mid/late August, an offhand mention from my favourite sexblogger had me pick up Nancy Friday's The Secret Garden which is a book from the 70s/80s about "female desire" or more specifically, "what women wank to". It is _fascinating_ as an artifact of it's time, it is _fascinating_ to see what conversations about feminism we're still having and what are new, it is _fascinating_ to see what fantasies were represented on the page and some semi-academic analysis of them. I continue to find sex really neat and even if I didn't agree or like all of this one, I thought it was a good read, albeit a little repetitive through the middle.

More recently, I did indeed finish reading Space Opera by Catherynne Valente, almost immediately after my last post. I think I am forced to admit that I find Valente's stuff very difficult to get into. I'm not sure what I'm bouncing off of --I love her plot concepts and as a long-time Hitchhiker's Fan, this one in particular just kept singing to my heart. But there was no period of time where I was into it and being all "gotta read gotta read gotta keep reading!", which I see in myself when consuming lots of other books. I have a few more of her things to try, but then I may consciously give up on her as an author.

The same day (Thanksgiving Thursday), I read all the way through Richard Peck's Here Lies the Librarian, which I nabbed off Karen's very excellent bookshelf of children's/YA/MG/JFic literature. This was partly to tease SamSam (there was also a copy of "Long Way From Chicago", but we're reading that _together_ damnit, so I couldn't cheat) but mostly because reading the back cover made me go !!!. It was excellent fun! Early 1900s female race car driver/mechanic FUCK YES. Extremely queer-coded librarians FUCK YES. Small town shenanigans and budding ~feminism~ fuuuuuck yes! It was a great choice.

Thanksgiving Friday, I slid into one of the many library books I'd brought with me to Vermont, Lois McMaster Bujould's Barrayar. And then basically spent the entire day reading it, with very brief interludes to have conversations or do a bit of grading. It's nice to return to childhood and slam through a weighty sci-fi novel in a day, it feels _right_. Anyways, the heist portions were *excellent*, of course, and there was slightly? less rape-specific trauma than the other two Vorkosigan books I've read. I think I rank it above Shards of Honor but below Warrior's Apprentice? Happy to have this series to dive through though! I extremely understand why it got the first Best Series Hugo.

Thanksgiving Saturday was a little less reading and a little more socializing, but I did slam through Elizabeth Enright's Gone Away Lake, which is less impressive because it's a much quicker read. I realized most of the way through that this book is really just the Loney M Setnick parody book "The Luckiest Children In The World", and that's okay. The Melendy books are the same way, all Enright's books tend to be fairly thin on plot and are instead stuffed full of jolly children going on happy little adventures in the woods and meeting keen adults who are interesting and interested in being friends. Honestly, I am all the way here for having "not much happen and it's all quite jolly", and wish there was more of that bleeding into the real world.

Currently Reading

Then I returned to the real world on Sunday (lots of driving, no reading) and as mentioned in other posts, got both busy and brainbad. But on Monday I finally cracked spine (metaphorically, it's an ebook) on Chuck Tingle's Bury Your Gays and I'm about halfway through. It is indeed a horror story, which I _knew_ but is somehow still surprising to me? I can't decide if I like it or not, I think it will depend heavily on the ending. I think I will be very sad if this book in specific ends in queer death.

Reading in the Future

I *think* that Vor Games is the next Vorkosigan book in series-chronology so I checked that one out from the library and certainly it's what I'm most excited to read next. I'm getting pretty close to declaring library-bankruptcy, and returning a bunch of unread books, so maybe I should try very hard to read them all first? Who knows! Certainly, I probably should _not_ bring a heap of unread library books with me to Maryland for Chrimbotimes, especially since the house has books in abundance, and trains mean I'm trying to keep my load as light as it is possible for me to keep (not very).

But I did borrow Return to Gone-Away Lake from Karen, so I should read that one sometime soon as well. I expect it'll be nice to have another very jolly happily ever after to focus on.

~Sor
MOOP!