sir_guinglain

Do I want to do a masters in disability studies or do I just want an institutional login and a reading list.

I think this a lot, but I was inspired to think it today because I had a fun conversation with a friendly acquaintance who is also disabled and has a much more academic background than me and it was just so nice to have a conversation about disability that's not 101-level all the time because it was with another disabled person. We talked about lived experience vs. adjacent experience (like having a disabled immediate family member), the social model of transness, diagnosis overshadowing... It was so good for me.

I work for one of the big disability charities which is on the toddler side of that "talking about gender with cis people" meme that I also think applies to any area of marginalization (I am honored to sometimes get to quietly observe the conversations black and brown people have among themselves about race and racism). Of course my household and my friend circle is full of crips and queers but I spend so much time at work and most of the rest of it thinking about work lately that I forget how good it is to have a break from that 101-level stuff.

I actually had the second half of my voice therapy session today, and after some initial nightmarishness with their proprietary system (on Firefox she couldn't see me and on Chrome I couldn't hear her...), she eventually just sent me a Teams link and that worked okay eventually. I asked her to just send our next meeting's link to my work email so I'm less worried about the tech going wrong next time. I still don't know what she got out of seeing me during the voice exercises, except that at one point she told me not to do something as I moved that I wasn't in fact doing.

I turn out to be fantastically bad at some of the basics of these exercizes, which luckily is a fact I could approach with curiosity rather than judgement or negativity toward myself but it is very funny to me.

I also continue to not be judgemental about the pitch of my voice; she said many things to pre-emptively assuage concerns that I didn't turn out to have at all. So it's nice that there are other pitfalls I'm avoiding even as she was visibly surprised at e.g. my inability to hold a hum on one pitch for a whole exhale, heh.

Between this and yoga and The Thing I'm Still Not Writing About and exercise generally, I am thinking a lot more about breathing and moving and how everything in my body is doing, and I am not sure I am coping with this very well. Right now I'm weary of being aware of my body in these ways. But also when I feel myself being too much in my brain or my body I tend to try to lean into the other for a while, and I'm just way too tired to read or write or think much lately. I just feel. And even that, too much.

I had the worst migraine I can remember for a while yesterday evening, only slept four or five hours all night, and got through work today mostly by virtue of it not being a very demanding day. As soon as I turned off my laptop I crawled upstairs and into bed. I dozed a bit but woke up feeling worse. Luckily, the migraine symptoms seemed to depart as suddenly as they'd arrived 24 hours earlier, just in time for me to make a very easy dinner and do a Tesco order to get here tomorrow (and I just remembered, twenty minutes too late to change the order, that I didn't include more burgers to replace the ones I made tonight; what a rookie error!).

I was left with a ton of anxiety (not unusual for me post-migraine) that I'd normally take to the gym and lift some weights about, but my mom said she'd call tonight since I missed her last night with the migraine, so I hung around waiting for that but never heard from her. It felt like such a waste of an evening. I tried to salvage it with sorting out some little things that have been annoying me -- ordering a new phone case because mine's broken, tidying up my work desk the tiniest bit -- but it's been an uncomfortable, unsettling end to an unsatisfying day.

Just like last week, when the last handful of fash finally left, one person from our side said "say it loud, say it clear" and all of us yelled "refugees are welcome here!

The sentiment we've been holding back all afternoon, to be sufficiently boring that fash livestreams don't get viewers is all distilled in to three or four repetitions of this.

I was picking up our stuff and yelling and thinking Ah, yes, the benediction. It is Sunday, after all.

Like every day lately, I wake up and check the results of the MLB postseason games I'm not allowed to watch.

I was delighted the Blue Jays eliminated the Yankees of course, and delighted at Vladdy Jr.'s expressions of his own delight.

I was really sad for the Phillies even before I learned about the Kerkering error that ended the season for them if not this peak of the competitive cycle for them -- they're gonna be a pretty different looking team next year.

But today I saw that the Tigers-Mariners game had gone to fifteen innings. And I saw the name Jorge Polanco, an old favorite of mine who spent most of his career as a Twin (and only had to leave because it would save a very small amount of money when the team's owners decided the way to follow up on the best season the Twins had had in 20+ years was to ensure that this kind of success would never be possible again). And then I saw "walk-off" next to his name which meant the Mariners won, which I was so excited about I nearly burst for the lack of someone to tell about it right that minute.

I know a weird number of Tigers fans, at least one of which will read this, and my heart truly goes out to them for the wild end to a wild season for them. But I am so goddam joyful over this news, and it isn't even my team, I'm feeling downright exuberant so I can't imagine how its actual fandom is coping. (I'm looking forward to hearing how Meg is doing on the next episode of Effectively Wild!)

Except I've heard a little bit about it, through one of my favorite mediums which is star players on teams that might go from one generation to the next without being in the playoffs respond in an emotionally savvy way to the intensity of their fandom's mood and mental state when they do achieve the kind of thing that New York or L.A. get to take for granted but most or the rest of us don't.

In the game recap I read, there was a great quote from Julio Rodriguez:

It’s been unbelievable, honestly. Just kind of hearing about it, friends that I got here in Seattle, how they talk about it, how I see the city’s moving. Even like when I was walking off the field, this girl that works over here, she was crying. I just know there is a lot of passion that they have for this team, and I’m just happy that we were able to play a good ballgame for them that they can enjoy...

(Meg talked too on the podcast the other day the other day about Mariners fans crying and all the folks that just aren't here now who were the last time this happened in 2001 or something, and it was really moving and lovely, she's so smart and so good at getting her points across, I want to transcribe it but that won't happen tonight.)

Literally two days' worth of my last three work days has been taken up with Teams meetings.

I counted it up, when my last one for the day finally finished a little after 4, it was literally one hour short of two full days.

Several of these meetings I had to chair, many others I had to meaningfully contribute to; there was at most one where I got to be room meat.

I am so tired.

I'm allegedly working for another hour but am hoping that I can hide from work for that long.