Dr. Memnus Lagbane Soultooth the Mad

So, now that I've salted the earth over at LiveJournal, if I'm going to pretend that I'll start posting over here again I should probably give the rundown of what I've been up to, and just how thoroughly illegal I actually am in Russia. So, in moderately chronological order, my last three to five years...

I ended, or finally allowed to end, a toxic and harmful relationship. I'm not proud, but also not hesitant, to say that I was the one being abusive. I won't dwell on the details of that - if you've heard those details from the other party to that relationship, believe what you've heard. Many of the changes in my life since then have been directly in the service of making sure that I never allow myself to get near that space again.

I've finally put down deep roots in Seattle, and at the end of 2014, I bought a house and moved in. It's a larger space than I strictly need, and I live alone here except for the cats, but I have space to fill with my favorite people, throw parties, or just let a friend hide here and still not be in my way. I have a luxurious, spacious kitchen, a giant garage, and a hot tub on the roof. I also have the hassle of maintaining all of these things, of course; right now there is a hole in the ceiling and the hot tub is out of commission.

Qualcomm closed the Seattle office early in 2016, laid off the team that was based there, and told me to go work from home, with no network or IT support, and oh yeah, they wouldn't support a Linux workstation offsite so I would have to ship that back to San Diego and remote into it. I was skeptical of this choice, and of my own ability to work effectively from my own house full of distractions, but I know better than to make permanent decisions in late winter or spring; after sticking it out for almost six months, I quit in June and gave myself my first real summer vacation in over a decade. It was glorious. In the fall, I joined the Android Security Response and Review team at Google. I hadn't actually done any security work before then, but apparently my Android experience was what mattered and I've done a fine job of coming up to speed on the security parts, because I've now been there six months and people seem to trust me. In any case, the Kirkland-based team trusts me enough to work out of the Seattle office most of the time.

(In an adjacent alternate universe, I ended up at Glowforge, and am almost certainly much more stressed and anxious than I am in this one. The startup life is not for me.)

I've grown comfortably into an independent, saturated, solo-poly lifestyle, and it suits me extraordinarily well. I have five partners of various degrees of intensity, each one of my metamours is a delightful person that I don't get nearly enough social time with, and I still get to spend enough time alone (or with the cats) that I feel centered in my own life. I have lovers of all genders (or lack thereof), of diverse backgrounds. And those relationships have been stable and durable - the newest of them is now eight months in, and deep and intense and enriching. Not that I haven't had my share of heartbreak - at least two breakups stand out for having devoured my attention for weeks - but even those won't let me regret this life I've lucked into and embraced. I have a rich and supportive community around me, and space in my house to throw parties that only begin to give back.

And finally, this year, I ran hard into the question of my own gender. It's not the first time - I've reviewed it periodically over the years - but this time I have the vocabulary and experience and support and self-awareness to express that binary masculinity simply isn't for me, anymore. In February, I started coming out to my closest friends as genderfluid, and nonbinary, and transfem, and was greeted with a resounding, "Yeah that makes sense." I've been expanding that outness, asking more and more people to use "they" and "them" pronouns when referring to me, and at this point I'm out to pretty much anyone that might be using that information. For myself, I've only just started to explore that rabbit hole - once I allow myself to embrace that new thought, I can't let go of it, and whole worlds of options (and anxiety and dysphoria) are open to me. More on this as it develops.

Oh, and my hair is blue and purple now. If I do actually post more on Dreamwidth, I'm definitely going to have to update some icons.

Forgot to post Monday's, here's that and today.

( squats, overhead press, chin-ups; front squats, conditioning  )

I have now been to the gym as many times in March as I did in February.

( front squats, conditioning )

I just lost two weeks of gym time to bad scheduling and lurking depression. To keep myself a little more accountable, I'm going to start keeping a record here. Actual numbers will be under cuts.

( Squats, bench press )

I've been reading a lot of feminist or otherwise social-justice-adjacent blogs. They're full of powerful stories, justified anger, and palpable pain, and the least I can do is listen... but reading them is also reading their explanation of who's doing the oppression. And of all the major privileged groups in the US, "Christian" is the only one that I can't make a claim to or easily pass in. That's seductive.

My mind sometimes feels like an echo chamber. Thoughts are words or sentences, represented basically in audio form, but instead of leading one to the next they loop back to themselves and repeat, bouncing over each other and going nowhere. Most of them are petty and trivial, but dangerous, hurtful thoughts bounce there too, getting into shouting matches with sense and/or compassion. Neither surrenders, neither relents, despite knowing which I want to favor. So I keep my mouth shut and try to listen to love.

I took a final look at dinner and decided that it wasn't so much a salad as a vegetable soup without liquid. Chopped pecans, sunflower seeds, leeks (chopped fine and cooked down hard), beet flesh and greens, shredded cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, probably some other things I'm forgetting now. Definitely best eaten with a spoon.

That title almost implies I'm going for a paleo diet. I'm kinda against the paleo thing in general -- it's expensive and unbalanced, takes more prep work for less food, plus doughnuts are delicious. But when you're trying to use up the contents of a CSA box before you get the next one, meals like this are kinda inevitable.

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There's nothing quite like sports to get a bunch of self-identified nerds to start competing about who can be the most ignorant.

• If you value knowledge (doubly so for obscure or trivial knowledge) it seems ridiculously petty to start arbitrarily deciding some knowledge is Good and some knowledge is Bad.
• Really, people: football, basketball, and hockey are no more similar than Halo, Warcraft, and Civ.
• I don't see how it's possible to stay in touch with local current events (that will affect your life much more directly than national ones) without hearing about the two or three local favorite teams. Failure to at least recognize those shows that you're either out of touch entirely, or willfully ignorant (see first point).

It seems like people forget that little knowledge of the overculture goes a long way towards successfully navigating it.

(Not prompted by anything in particular, just a thing I've been noticing...)

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