jaeholderman: (text: whatever o'clock)
Okay that's a lie, this week has just been a carousel of disasters and I have a headache and feel like someone is squishing me in a clothes mangle.

The only one of the swirling pools of chaos I feel comfortable discussing in public is the impending surgery of one of Tammy's cats, who has a hematoma in his ear that went from "noticeable" on Monday to "balloon heavy enough to tilt his head to the side" yesterday. He's getting it poked open and stitched shut with mesh on Monday.

Oh, the other one I feel comfortable talking about is that the muffler issue I was praying would be a cheap fix is actually gonna be about $400 and a complete part replacement.

This coming Monday is also my last day at home for a week. I'm hitching a ride with one of my fellow students and zooming away to my first-ever graduate residency, which SCARES THE BAJEESUS OUT OF ME, but at the same time I also know I'm as prepared as I possibly can be. I have done classwork that hasn't even officially been assigned yet, I've started working on a draft of my thesis contract, I'm finishing my laundry so I can be packed by tomorrow night - I keep repeating these things to myself because it reminds me that yes, I am prepared. Even though that preparedness makes me feel like I'm forgetting something.

I think I'm going to start copying Seanan McGuire's way of outlining continuing writing projects/goals/sales (hahaha), once I sketch out my own version of her posts. It's a good idea, at least for the way my brain works, and it will make me feel a lot less... I don't know, somehow both static and overwhelmed. I think rather than summaries I might include my "goals" for each piece, or maybe a bit of both.

Honestly, my brain is just so fried right now. I feel like this week has gone on forever and simultaneously slipped away from me so fast that I don't understand how I'm not flat on my face.
jaeholderman: (baymax: hairy baby)
I am eternally grateful that my employer gives me the day after a convention off, because I invariably need it. I slept through most of Monday, got online, then immediately got off, hit by a wave of anxiety that told me it would be best to keep to myself for the rest of the day.

I cleaned cat boxes, got my house back to the beginnings of order, read (SEKRET which took me a little while to get into but by god I'm hooked, and also The Daughter of Smoke and Bone which I'm reading for my MFA and has my attention if not dedication). Watched a lot of Justified with semantics. Snuggled my cats, cooed at my cats, ambushed my cats with love until they ran away. ...I really missed my cats.

I had some trouble getting to bed, because of con-crash anxiety. Knowing that the real world paced on the other side of a full night's sleep. I wasn't even sure I would get a full night's sleep - every single night we were in Dallas, I would get up in the morning with my bed half-stripped from all my tossing and turning.

But even with a succession of early mornings and bad nights, the RT convention was so great. I don't think I've ever been in an environment other than Alpha that got me to drop my shields so fully. Women everywhere, of all body types, wearing all kinds of clothes; a level of diversity I didn't expect; men who respected the women present, and even cover models for romance novels who took selfies with every woman they caught staring. (There was a lot of staring. Those abs are not photoshopped, my friends.)

Women chatting in the bathroom about polish for biker boots while applying fresh lipstick, fixing necklaces of skulls or pearls and sharing compliments on skirts and fascinators. Smart, sharp, involved fans who asked intelligent questions and creators who clearly wanted to be there.

The real world of bills, internet-driven social anxiety, housework, and deadlines is kind of a comedown after that.

Tim and I are already wheedling Tammy about going next year. It's in Las Vegas and she's in full refusal right now, but with luck the two of us can change that. I want to go back. It's a little paradise pocket of how the world could be, and I really really want to go back.
jaeholderman: (text: poem about this)
I'm vibrating with rage right now over the collected weight of existing outside of my own home.

It started with the nonsense about Black Widow, the bullshit nonsense of the press tour that I have largely avoided by not reading or listening to anything from it, the questions about diet and Natasha's sexiness and her place with ~*~all those men~*~, and then two of Johansson's castmates calling Natasha slut and a whore. Even as a joke, even if it did come as the product of their own frustration at that line of questioning, it was still a slap, and that only one of them apologized with anything like sincerity was a nice little follow-up pinch on the bruise.

It went on to include standing in lines trying to pick something up with men on either side intruding into my personal space to the point where I stuck my elbows out and stared at them without apparently making my meaning clear. While I asked a man my own age to get out of my bubble and got laughed at by an older man standing two behind him, Jessie's Girl played over the store's loudspeakers, that whining entitled ode to a woman who is referred to as nothing but the possession of another man. Jessie's got himself a girl and I want to make her mine!

Then home, home I go, forced to listen at a stoplight to the ravings of another white man declaring any woman who dressed inappropriately to be an abomination in the Eyes Of God. When he shouted "Can you bare yourself and truly say you are a lady?" I rolled down my window and screamed "Yes!" loud enough to make my throat hurt for a moment, thanking the deity who apparently doesn't hate me all that much for giving me a green light to get away.

His shout still followed me through the intersection: "I would say no!"

There are days where I feel like becoming a statistic. There are moments where I wonder what it would be like to just burn it all down. This day is one of them, and I want it to be over.

I'm going to go watch Orphan Black.

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J. Holderman

June 2015

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