MOOP!

(here's what I posted on Facebook)

Hey RSCDS Boston friends! You may have seen a survey in your email about role terminology! I strongly encourage you to fill it out. (If you need a link, send me a message --it's open to anyone who dances SCD in the Boston area, no matter if they are beginners or experts, no matter if they are members of a class or free-range.)

Here's what I wrote in the open field at the end. Consider it my open letter to the Scottish Country Dance community.

***

As a nonbinary person, it has been so disappointing to watch the SCD crowd lag behind other dance forms regarding gender-neutral calling. I continually get misgendered at events, in both explicit (wrong pronouns) and implicit ("you look like you're on the wrong side" --I'm agender, I can't "look" like a man or a woman!) ways. I have been called rude for countering people misgendering me, and it has been made very clear to me by multiple dancers that I am not welcome in this community.

It hurts, so much, to hear people cheer for "men and women" and know that they are cheering against my existence. It hurts to hear people whine about how my identity is "confusing" or to just ignore my buttons and pins and frequent reminders of my pronouns. It hurts to stop bothering to correct people after they misgender me again and again and again because they never listen or change or get it right. It hurts to hear people argue and fight against any suggestion of inclusivity. When I started Scottish dancing, I thought the community would be more loving than that, and it hurts to be disappointed again and again.

But I'm here because I love the dance form. I _love_ Scottish Country Dance. I love the precision, I love the power, I love the action, I love the music, I love the fiddly timing and the joyful abandon. I love it and I am damn good at it: I have put a _lot_ of work into learning How To Do This Thing Well and I don't regret that work because the work itself has been joyful.

And I'm here because I believe we _can_ be better as a community. I do see people trying, and I recognize and appreciate that. There are people -more than one- who will hear the wrong pronoun used for me and _speak up_ on my behalf, so I don't have to always be the one making corrections. There are people who are looking at the things that are exclusionary and saying, out loud, "this is wrong, we shouldn't be like this". There are members of Exec and TMC who are saying "how can we be more publicly and loudly inclusive", there are teachers who are saying "how can I shift my language to be more welcoming", there are dancers who are saying "I don't understand but I'm willing to try".

That's why I'm still here. Because every time I receive another metaphorical slap in the face about how my existence is a burden and I am not worth considering, I remember that there are those here fighting to keep me around. And because I believe there could be those in the future who deserve to have their identities respected as well and I want them to have an easier time of it then I have.

***

On a related note, if you are also tired of waiting for the broader community to make space for us, I am going to be starting a gender-free SCD class in hopefully September. I am waiting on venue details (they're in the process of replacing their floor...) but it will be in the middle of Somerville, not far from the Magoun Sq green-line station and with some parking. Most likely 1st/3rd/5th Thursdays from 7-9pm.
If you want to throw me your email address, I'll send proper details when I'm ready to announce the first class.

~Sor
MOOP!

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

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

Well.
Well.

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

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

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

~Sor
MOOP!

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

Youth Trad Song: The Annotated Ephemera edition!

( about 1700 words and a lot of images! But it is as complete a con-report as you'll get. )

It was a good weekend, and honestly, I think this sufficiently covers what all I did. Any time not covered by the above was probably spent cuddling and chatting with my friends, and singing all the nice songs they were leading.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: It is me, if I were a half-centaur, half-minotaur.

2: She is my nemesis and was fool enough to tell me the etymology of her last name. Honestly, usually I refer to her in my head as "Laurie Sheepfucker" because that has a much better ring to it, but technically it is not fucking the sheep, it's getting them to fuck each other. Hence.

Original Tags: how can I keep from singing?, conreports

Tonight was _stellar_.

I didn't necessarily expect it to be. But the dances for demo team are coming along pretty well and I had a nice time there. Dancing with my dance-sis¹ is often a really good experience, and tonight felt really good...of course, part of what felt so stunning there was the bit of Village Reel, a dance we have done together literally hundreds of times for candidate class.

Then I went straight from demo team to BIDA! I started by sitting on the steps outside and eating a granola bar, since I know myself, and I know that while I can and often do enjoy contra dancing, I also sometimes get too snobbish for it and have less fun than I would if I could more easily turn off some of the more precision-oriented bits of my brain and just vibe. Eating beforehand will _definitely_ move the needle away from "grouch"² and back towards "enjoyable dance friend". Eating a granola bar on the steps of BIDA means apparently quickly chatting with three different friendly acquaintances. Good shit!

I finished my food and went in to dance! And the dance...oh man! The band we had was called Countercurrent and _holy shit_. I am incredibly charmed to have looked up their website and found a blurb saying "How does so much music come from just two people?!” because I pretty much said exactly that somewhere in my second dance through.

I like dancing because I like moving, and the ways in which I can dance require pretty much any kind of music, including none at all. But it is a truth universally recognized that the better the music gets, the easier it gets. And this band was absolutely in the category of better. So I was set up already to have a very good time of things (from community and friends and loved ones) and then and then _and then_ it was just absolutely knocked out of the park by a caller who knew what he was doing, calling dances well that were interesting and fun, and accompanied by a band that repeatedly distracted me away from just dancing because they were _so good_ to listen to.

I am pleased to be trying to fit BIDA in on some Sundays after demo team, even if that does make for quite a lot of dancing. I know not every week will be this good, but I am so happy to have gotten this energy and joy to take me through this next week of work. I hope you are also finding things to make you happy!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: For the first round of candidte class, the five of us decided we were siblings. So I have three dance -sisters and a dance brother. They're good people and I love them!

2: A (male) friend of mine was talking about a contra behavior that made him "grouchy" and while talking further I said something about my own responses to the same behavior being "bitchy" and I realized that that's a cruel word for many reasons. But actually, I think grouchy is absolutely the word I mean a lot of the time when I say I'm feeling bitchy, and so I'm gonna try and get serious about dropping the b-word from my vocabulary, because sluring women is kinda not cool and I shouldn't get away with it just because I caucus with them sometimes.

I am writing these words on a little black thinkpad I have decided to call Melody Clementine Verandern. She runs linux! Which took me _fucking forever_ and required _four other people_ to actually make happen.

(I will try hard to write up an actual explanation and put it on the internet, mostly out of potential use for other people, but long-story-short, there was one little thing to change that no one ever mentioned to change and on Austin's advice to change we tried it and bam! Yayyyyy I hate computers and I do not understand why I have decided to do this to myself.)

Anyways, I name electronics after fictional women I like, and I name computers with German words, so that's where it came from. Melody is Mell Kelly's given name, Clementine is from the best books I read as a substitute, and Verandern is the German word for "change".

(Okay Kat, but Clementine is even more disasterADHD than you are and Mell is literally insane? Yes, this is going to be a very exciting computer. I am looking forward to mixing Clementine's introspection and awareness of herself, and Mell's easygoing nature and get-shit-done attitude. I regret absolutely nothing here).

The next few days are going to be Very Exciting as I do things like...gosh, literally everything. It's been something like eight months since I last had a working laptop of my very own, and this is a new hardware (why are the fn and ctrl keys wrong? why can't I pinchzoom the touchpad?) and a _brand_ new OS (I know absolutely nothing about linux) and there's a LOT to do. Hopefully this will be a fun way to keep myself busy, and not an agonizing slog.

Here's a todo list:

*I'm putting this first because a lot of the later things depend on it - I need to figure out how to make my backup drive from the previous computer talk to this one. Previous computer was a mac, and the beautiful automatic time machine backups worked *great*! I can plug the drive into Ezri's mac and see all my shit. If I plug the drive into this machine, so far I get a complete lack of folders where there should be a lot of folders. Research will occur!

*Once I can speak backup I'M GONNA HAVE ACCESS TO ALL MY MUSIC AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Absolutely that gets that many exclamation points, fight me. It's been ages, I have had to survive with solely what is currently stored on my phone. Of course now I have to choose some sort of music library software and learn how that works, yayyy oh gods. All I know is that iTunes has gone downhill with every version since aught-five, and fuck cloud-based storage solutions, I want to actually own my music.

*Back up my phone? Yeah, there's a lot of things I'm willing to do with the work computer, but this is not one of them. My fellytone does not get plugged into the work lappy, which means...yeah. Eight months, huh.

*Start fuxing with photos. I have a huge photo library and tons of time on my hands because ~pandemic~. Maybe I can work to combine these two things and start posting more photos or whatever.

*Download GAMES! Steam is an absolute must, as is whatever will get me access to Heroes of Might and Magic 3. (I own a copy from GoG, I just need to figure out the install instructions). For extreme bonus points (lol, not happening), figuring out how to get a copy of Gahan Wilson's Ultimate Haunted House would be _very_ cool of me.

*A whole lot of configuring work to make the keyoard do my fucking bidding. This absolutely must be possible, that's the whole damn point of linux. How do I have multiple workspaces? How do I quickly hotkey into them? How do I switch between programs and between tabs? ALL OF THIS IS SOLVABLE.
(ETA: I have since at least figured out how to switch between workspaces. it's a start!)

*"All of this is solvable" is hopefully going to be my motto going forward. But I'm also still leaving space for the idea that I do this for a month, say "that was a great adventure" and install back to windows. I'm not daft, I know that I am not actually a computer person, and that at my core I just want a box to do the things I ask it to. I also have literally no idea what anything means in terminal, and that's gonna be a pretty steep learning curve. Hopefully I am more looking forward to it than fearing it.

Gosh, I can actually start saving my words on the regular again.

...I can start a BehindtheWalls file again. That's...that's been a while.

So the moral of this story is...I'm happy. I'm going to have an adventure. There is going to be a _lot_ of screaming in my future. Advice is very _very_ welcome, including just straight up recommended reading suggestions --xubuntu 20.04, which I've already discovered looks different from regular ubuntu.

Have a good day, my lovelies.

~Sor
MOOP!

I haven't updated in five days. Here are some things:

*Austin came and visited from Friday evening to Monday early afternoon. It was a very nice visit --he walked over, instead of taking the T, and given how close we are and were even the week before, probably neither of us have changed our risk profiles *that* much? But it was lovely to have him around for a bit, especially since we don't know when that will happen again, not really.

*Schools have been closed until May 4th, at least. I have a meeting with my department head tomorrow afternoon (immediately after she has a meeting with admin) so I'll know more about the Longterm Distance Learning Plan then. We are still only giving enrichment work, which means my students are largely not doing _anything_ offered up. I have some thoughts of things I might try, including maybe reading chapters of The Number Devil as a YouTube stream, if I can figure out how that works. (Probably I should email the author and find out if there are copyright issues with that idea --maybe only if I archive the streams after?)

*I am still alive, still eating multiple good meals a day, still showering every day (or every other sometimes, but that's totally normal for me). I missed my meds for about a week straight, just because I kept not remember to take them until it was too late in the day --I took them today and hopefully that will get me back on track. Physically, I'm fine.

*I finally started a calendar, after realizing that there are Too Many Good Things happening online with the livestreams and whatnot. Tomorrow is the Anna and the Apocalypse tweet-along, (as well as my meeting and my first attempt at an open office hours for my students), then Friday we're gonna try and have a family zoom meet-up, and Sunday is a s00j concert. Every Wednesday for the next five weeks is one of Patty's online archeology classes, about half of which sound SUPER INTERESTING and the rest of which merely sound interesting, and I'll maybe be able to go except that...

*Wednesday night is also the night the bellringers have been getting together for group social. Last week I failed to have a date with mek (we just...didn't manage to sync and really need to try again) instead, and this week I missed about half of the fun due to attending the Exec meeting and talking about Srs Future Stuff instead. But it was really nice to see everyone's faces --there were at least fifteen ringers represented-- and get like...tours of Michael's new apartment and to see Mira and James's cat and stuff like that.

*I've been _really_ laggy ever since Austin left. I was doing SO WELL with the cards, and then I was too busy hanging out with him to focus on them (I still _did_ stuff --my taskmaster projects, my words, lots of good food and hanging out outside!) and now I've completely lost track of them. Maybe tonight before I go to bed I'll choose a set? I don't know. I suspect I'm slowly moving towards a more stringent schedule, even though those usually don't work for me very long or well. I like the generalness of the cards!

*But yeah, Monday I watched nearly an entire season of British Bakeshow, and then yesterday and today both had _long_ stretches of playing _lots_ of dumb phone games. Probably I am not allowed to play dumb phone games tomorrow.

*I haven't been outside since Monday, and that's probably bad. I'm not very good at making my brain just...go be outside (especially when the weather's not particularly encouraging), I really need a destination in mind in order to leave the house. I should try and get back into PokeGo, that will help.

*The inbox zero project is about the only thing that's been making progress. I'm down to 1369 unread emails in my inbox, which is...staggeringly low, for me. There is hope! There is a light at the end of the tunnel! Then I can start interacting with the 15,000 emails that are just...in my inbox and need archiving or whatever. Sigh?

(The read-but-still-in-the-inbox emails date as far back as...well there's only one from 2007, that's a start anyways. The vast majority are LJ -not DW- comment notifications of some sort or another.)

*I keep thinking I want to do something like "Screenfree Sundays" or whatever, but I absolutely lack the conviction, and also I don't actually want to do that on a Sunday, probably. Maybe I'll trial run it this Sunday, with the exception of the s00j concert, oh bother. There're just Too Many Good Things going on, despite the apocalypse.

*Something great is going to happen tomorrow.

~Sor
MOOP!

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~Sor
MOOP!

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

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

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

There is a forward to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy specifically on the subject of having adventures. It says: Don't. Ever. While you may think you would enjoy gallivanting across planets, running away from the worst the universe has to offer, outsmarting, outbluffing, and outfighting aliens from a hundred thousand million different races, the truth is most people much prefer to stay at home, or in a nice well-made spaceship, and drink a good cup of tea.

But if you can't get the tea, you might as well.

Every once in a great while, I am driven to reread something I have written, and I find that I can be an _excellent and enjoyable writer_! Which is not to say I wouldn't take an editor's sledgehammer to my works, but it's very reassuring to find reminders that I Don't Suck at this, I just need to get my damn act together and DO THE THING.

The above quote is from my Hitchhiker's Fanfic, The Cold Sands of Anatidae. It is fluffy, and cute, and quite rough in points -again, sledgehammer. And just enough of it gets the voice entirely right that I think my H2G2 peeps should go read it, even though it's several years old at this point.

~Sor
MOOP!

Trigger warnings: Self-harm, depression, anxiety, hope

There on Twitter was a link from The Bloggess, labeled "This is the hardest thing I've ever written". I had to follow --she is too good a writer, too good a person to pass up, and with a tagline like that, well...yeah.

It is a post revealing the fact that she self-harms.

I do it to self-sooth, because the physical pain distracts me from the mental pain.

There was the line that makes my heart break. Because that's why, exactly why. Because you can't destroy the thoughts in your head, so you have to destroy something else, anything else. Because if you hurt yourself enough, you'll have to start spending time fixing it, cleaning up, anything that's not just sitting there trapped in your own thoughts and nothing more.

I don't know that I've ever explained publicly my complicated relationship with insanity and self-harm. ( I think it's high time I did )

So I'm not a self-harmer. I do not, in fact, self harm. But I understand the impulse, I understand the need, I understand every single person out there who has to and why. I understand how fucking hard it is, and I understand that because I've never really been there, with my blood on my hands, I'll never really understand.

But I'll be damned if I stop marking myself when I need to.

The Bloggess dreams of a world where people wear silver ribbons --survivors and supporters of mental illness-- with pride rather than shame. People on Twitter have started posting pictures of their ribbons.

I don't know if I qualify. The only mental fuckery I've actually been established to have is a healthy dose of ADHD. Honestly, I don't think I've got it bad enough to have anything else, not when there are so many more people out there who have so much less cope. But even if I'm not a survivor, I'm sure as hell a supporter.

So here's my ribbon. May you too find the mechanisms you need to keep yourself well.

Much love.
~R.

I know it only very rarely is able to be used, but if you are ever in need of a shoulder, a friend, a reassurance, a place to sob, whatever, you are welcome to contact me. I am on IM much of the time, and when I have a phone, I am always willing to receive calls and help. You are awesome people I know. Stay that way.

Trigger Warnings go both ways: Self injury, depression, and anxiety. And just a little bit of hope.

I reread "Alvin's Secret Code" the other night, my favourite of the many excellent Alvin Fernald books.

That makes this link from Ria particularly apropos -- What your favourite childhood book says about you as an adult.

Of them, mine would have to be:

The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill
You are – or wish you were – an amateur guerrilla graffiti artist. Damn the man, man!

I pretty regularly shake my fist at trucks, _especially_ now that I'm riding my bike all over the place. Man do I ever love that book.

The above link also points at A collection of 50 books every child should read. I've read, urk, ten of them --nine, really, since they have the Moomin series twice (but I've read at least three, so it's okay).

I don't know what I'd put on such a list were I to rewrite it. The Number Devil, certainly. The whole series of Alvin Fernald --especially Alvin's Secret Code, despite how damn misogynistic the main character (though not particularly the author) is. The Great Brain. From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and for slightly older (high school) audiences, Silent to the Bone¹. Oh, Boy Meets Boy, for anyone who likes romance of any sort.

(The Pirate's Mixed Up Voyage, although there's a little part of me that wants to keep that mine.)

Basically everything Tamora Pierce has ever written, but probably Keladry's books most of all --First Test, Page, Squire, and Lady Knight. (Which is to say, not my favourite quartet (that would be Daine, iirc) but the one I think should most be read by all children.)

The Magic Moscow, and Atilla the Pun, and Wuggie Norple (you are the size of a small razorback hog) and THE BIG ORANGE SPLOT and man is Daniel Pinkwater fantastic. Oh! Ohgods, I could not honestly write this list without alotting half a dozen spots to Roald Dahl --The BFG was my favourite, but The Witches, and Matilda, and The Twits, and Esio Trot, and both Charlie books, and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, and _yes_.

I kinda want to work on writing such a list. I'll keep you posting if I come up with anything.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: I can't say that Silent to the Bone is a better book than Mixed-Up Files, but I can certainly say that I've read it more. It's absolutely haunting. E.L.Konigsburg is a wonderful author.

Original tags: books, children