Susan

Anniversary has rolled by, which means that LexGarrett and I have been married for EIGHT YEARS. WHAT THE HELL. WHO AUTHORISED THAT. I am very happy, just also confused. We have been together since 2009, and now we're here in our own house, that we have lived in for six months now, and just – this is wild. I know I'm constantly baffled by linear time, but this is linear time and someone having positive emotions towards me, which is the most bizarre combination I can imagine. I'm into it, mind you, just – wow, 2009!Susan would never have seen this coming.

In non-husband related news: I am okay! Got authorised to renew my anti-depressants without talking to the doctor first, forgot to actually renew them, spent a week not on them and being suspiciously okay. Got back to aggressively organising bookcases. Discovered a secret hidden cache of Magic cards. Picked a fight with the university's chaplaincy department because one of their chaplains tried to argue that Putin wins unless ~The West~ "regains its catholic identity." Accidentally fell into BL gacha hell and unsurprisingly this is my hole, it was made for me. Line manager has left for an exciting new job, so now I'm Best Manager's problem. Terrible Goddaughter, my friends' cat, passed away suddenly and I'm gutted. My billing responsibilities at work just got more complicated as IT started purging customer accounts without warning us. Discovered SECRET FLOWER BEDS in the back garden because it turns out the previous owners left us daffodils, crocuses, and tulips, time to learn how to garden.

... Okay now I write it down like this March was a rollercoaster and the fact that I was even vaguely okay without my brain meds is honestly more impressive than I gave myself credit for. Maybe I need to crack out the colourful star stickers again!

GUESS WHICH DUMBASS REALISED THAT SHE'S NOT LOOKED AT HER DIARY ALL WEEK BECAUSE SHE 100% KNOWS WHAT SHE'S GOT GOING ON. I did not, that was 100% the ADHD demon whispering to me and I should not have listened.

• Today has been a day of discovering incredibly soothing activities!
  
  
  • butnotdegeneres recommended Picross Luna, which is a pastel witchy looking nonogram thing that has eaten hours of my day.
  
  
  • I installed the kudosed/seen/unseen script for AO3 and it turns out that going through a fandom tag and clicking "skip" on anything in a language that I can't read or that's a crossover into something I don't care about is INCREDIBLY PEACEFUL. 10/10, would recommend, at least if you're like me and you only truck with small-ish fandoms. ... I just find clearly defined end points soothing! Being able to tick things off makes me happy!
  
  
  • Twitter rolled out the scheduled posts thing for non-business accounts and I didn't notice! So now I can queue a shit-ton of links to cute soothing art and not a power in the verse can stop me.


• Scum Villain's Self-Saving System has latched onto me, I was right right. ... Or I latched onto it, I guess, because my brain goes "Oooh, id fic that hits all of the delicious tropes? Yes, you may have happy chemicals for this." I am strongly considering reading the other (more sweary) translation, just to see if I can match up which bits of the fandom read which translation.


• It's been disgustingly warm this week, even for me.


• A group of us got together and had a socially-distanced picnic, and it was really nice! The anxiety was high, but my theory was "All involved parties have been as locked down as possible, and there's no way for any of us to isolate due to the house layout, so if one of us goes we might as well all go." We got to see our friends and gently roast each other and laugh at each other's quarantine haircuts! I nearly ate a wasp sandwich while looking for the wasp that had been harrassing Lex! I continue to be confused by the neurotypicals, because when I'm at home not interacting with people, I'm like "Yes, this is how life has always been," and when I'm sitting in a park with my friends I'm like "Yes, this is how life has always been," and basically what I'm saying is that I love my friends but also forget that I've not seen them in a while once I actually see them.


• Monday marked... Twelve years since my dad died? I think? 2008-2020, what is maths. Didn't drink to him this year, but that's because treating my mental health issues, which I feel is a better tribute considering he didn't or couldn't.


• I accidentally fell into a pit of fandom nostalgia this week and god I miss fandom newsletters. Like ff_press was GREAT and I loved it. It wouldn't work now, because fandoms are spread too far across the internet, but weirdly having a feed reader bring me AO3 updates for my fandom makes me feel more involved? I dunno, feelings are weird, nostalgia is weirder, I don't have object permanence and my memory's awful so nostalgia as a CONCEPT is fucking weird.


• I really need to figure out a better solution for my keyboard and stuff. When I have access to my desk, it works great! Got my laptop on top of a box so there's space for me to use the desk as well, and it's probably better for me through ergonomics or something. But I don't have access to my desk 9-5, when I'm trying to do things, so... Not perfect yet. I'll think of something.

I have finally succumbed to the Crossing of Animals (... Which sounds like a weird breeding experiment now that I put it like that), so hi everyone! My Switch friend code is SW-7705-1297-3990, feel free to add me whether you're playing Animal Crossing or not.

Now, back to my master plan for today, which is dismantling my diary and putting it back together again. Let's see if that helps.

Dear dreamwidth friends: as part of bringing the unfuckening round full-circle, I'm trying to get back into, like, actually existing in a community instead of just leaning out of the window and shouting about my opinions and problems. If you get necrocomments on stuff from a million years ago, or see me signal boosting something from the dawn of time: this is why!

Apart from that, current state of the Susan:
+ Went to the dentist and she didn't mention any damage from the teeth-grinding I'm apparently doing, AND I didn't get the inside of my face scraped!
- Accidentally stabbed myself in the gum with my toothbrush and now I can't stop poking at it, and I have to go back next week to get a filling. But it's a WHITE filling, which feels very weird and fancy.
+ Discovered the phrase "executive function halt state", which feels like the shorter and fancier way of describing that feeling of looking at the stuff you WANT to do and almost bursting into tears instead. Will naming the demon help me to defeat it? WE SHALL SEE. I am definitely in the stage where the thing I want to be doing the most is the thing that's hardest for me to get at, so I guess that's fun.
~ If anyone is waiting for anything from me, it's coming, I'm just trying to unstick myself. (Here is your metaphor: everything was flowing nicely down the river of my brain until one thing went sideways and jammed everything, so now I'm trying to pick out the smaller bits and pieces so I've got room to move the bigger pieces.)
+ Have set up my folding desk in my living room and I'm not only using it, but enjoying it? It's comfy and means that I can actually spread stuff out like I want to!
+ Went to see The Gentlemen with LexGarrett and my Pseudotwin this time, and they very kindly let me complain about toxic masculinity and violence against women as a fridging technique.
+ captainraz has finally managed to lure me into her bullet journal cult, in that I've gone "fuck it" and taken the actual diary inserts out of my filofax and am just going ham on some lined paper. I'm hit and miss on the bullet journal thing, because it feels a bit "tech bro invents to-do lists" (like, some of the stuff I read about is just like "The innovative part is INDEXING YOUR NOTEBOOKS" and I'm over here like "Mate, everyone indexes their notebooks, this isn't a new thing.") but I'm gonna give it a fair shake! It's easier to do in a filofax, because if I decide I don't like something or need to rearrange pages, I can, so I guess I'll see how flexible it is?
- Possibly coming down with the slowest-moving cold in history, in that my throat's been going "Nope, need more water, here is STABBING PAIN to remind you," for a while
+ I'm not doing that thing I was doing 2015-2018 where I'd just go flat out for months and then literally collapse as soon as I had a day off! Having a sore throat that isn't part of me getting a fever like a victorian urchin is honestly progress.
+ Just over a month to go till my NHS ADHD assessment! Excited and terrified, and I found out today that I don't need to work the time back or swap shifts to go because it counts as a hospital appointment. Yaaaaay!
+ Exam season ends on Saturday! Fewer stressed out students means fewer stressed out members of staff!
~ All that said, I'm fucking knackered mates, so I'm off to bed. Wish me luck with the fixing things, I'll see you on the other side of the war this mountain of shite I'm doing. Be good, be safe, be careful.

I usually refer to the days between Christmas and New Year as The Nothing Days, because nothing really HAPPENS this week and nothing feels like it really counts, but I've actually been BUSY AS HELL.

• Came back to Nottingham, and Lex and I have spent the last two days hanging out with JosephTansley and madebyjenni!
  
  • They accidentally ended up with enough turkey to feed the five thousand, so we've nobly been helping them with that. I am not joking. There was A LOT OF TURKEY.
  
  
  • We've been playing Ticket To Ride expansions! We played Old West, France, and Pennsylvania, and... Well.
    
    • Old West suited my playstyle the most, because I will build one incredibly long route that everything's connected to in any form of Ticket to Ride, because THAT'S HOW YOU WIN. But it introduces towns that you can build, which means that if ANYONE builds a train line going into or out of that town, you get the points instead of them. And then Joe and Jenni accidentally locked down every route in and out of Denver except the ones that would give them both fifteen points. And ALL FOUR OF US needed to go to Denver. I swear there was nearly bloodshed.
    
    
    • We played Pennsylvania as a warm-down, because it's way more straightforward. Plays like regular Ticket to Ride, but most of the routes now offer shares? Like "stocks and"? So unless you're good at cardcounting, which sithe is and the rest of us are NOT, it means that the winner is way less obvious than in other expansions! Because it's not just who completes the most tickets, but also who actually scores what off the shares. That said, first time we played it, I accidentally went round the board twice and won with something ridiculous like 230 points, and the second time all but one of my five routes started in Buffalo so I was contractually OBLIGED to make them all one track.
    
    
    • France was the one that we were expecting to be the most cut-throat, because it has TWO weird new mechanics. One is that most of the tracks don't have pre-defined colours on them; whenever you take cards, you get to put down tracks of whatever colour you want. The other is that some of the tracks overlap, so if one person builds a route that overlaps other potential tracks, those can't be used anymore. And did I mention that there aren't enough coloured track segments to actually fill the entire map? So yes, we all expected that to end in tears and actually we were all very civil! No blood was shed, there was minimal name-calling, and no one stole anyone else's tracks irrevocably. It could have gone so much worse!
  
  
  • We played Colt Express! Which is a train robbery game, and I'm here for it. As far as I can tell, it's like Robo Rally in that you all set your cards before anyone's actions resolve, but better because everyone sets their actions sequentially and no one has to know their lefts from their rights. It does still end with you trying to fight someone who isn't there anymore, but the most fun bit for me was tactically deploying the Marshall (who throws you off the train) to either get rid of people or as a free way to escape to the train roof. I didn't win, but I DID have fun. (And accidentally ended up shooting Joe's character a lot, and getting Jenni shot by the Marshall or the train passengers. WHOOPS.)
  
  
  • Jenni got the expansion for Port Royal that gives it a story mode! ... Which is only printed in German. Which only Lex speaks. So Jenni, bless her, has been scavenging translations from Imgur and Boardgame Geek, and actually writing out what the cards are supposed to say on stickers that she's sticking to the cards, and between Lex and Google Translate, they've managed to puzzle out most of it I think? We played the first chapter of it today and it's FUCKING NAILS though! Like, you have to complete a bunch of objectives AND get a certain amount of points AND you're on a timer, which is... Pretty much the opposite of how regular Port Royal plays. We're pretty sure we've missed something really obvious about how we're supposed to play, because it has crushed us each time.


• Discovered that if I want to play Mario Kart/trade Pokémon with people who don't live in my house, I have to pay for a Nintendo subscription. DAMMIT CAPITALISM, JUST LET ME LIVE MY LIFE AND CRUSH JILL WITH MY ADORABLE POKÉMON.


• I want to start my planning for the New Year, but also I'm caught up in how much stuff I've left undone that I meant to get done during the Nothing Days and blatantly haven't. I'm doing a quick shuffle around to see what I CAN get wrapped up before Wednesday, but I'm not hopeful. On the plus side, I'm doing sensible things like "reducing my Goodreads goal by 20" and "trying to triage what is actually important to me to get done," so maybe this is what character growth feels like?


• I promise that next year I'm going to try to take on FEWER PROJECTS. Like, I'm not going to remove the "NO, FEWER THAN THAT, PUT SOME BACK" reaction image from its hotlist place on my phone, but I'm going to try to make everything a little more achievable. It helps that at the start of December I actually made a list of all of the bits and pieces that I've already committed to in 2020, so I've got sort of a sense of scale? Not sure how to apply it, but definitely smaller reading goals and fewer weekly/fortnightly commitments, because it turns out that that DOESN'T WORK FOR ME. ... Levelling up is hard and I'm doing my best is basically what I'm saying here.


• Tune in tomorrow for me screeching about Past!Susan leaving all of this work for me and hoping that Future!Susan will be a mensch and take some of it off my hands!