(no subject)

Back in one of the previous incarnations of the internet, I was involved in a group called alt.lifestyle.furry on usenet. There's a group on LJ of some of the same people who were there, but it's pretty quiet. As part of my recent campaign to be here on LJ more, I've been trying to be involved in conversation there and getting interaction started. Just to have it here as well, here's an intro I wrote up for that group just now. It's also a nice little introduction to me, for those who haven't known me for quite so long time as others have.

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Hello everyone!

In the interest of seeing more activity here on LJ (where I've been for years) and of trying to create a place that's more social and conducive to getting to know each other in ways that don't work as for me in newer venues, I'm going to follow aersad's lead and write up a little introduction for the other folks here in Homestead. I hope you'll all introduce yourselves too; maybe some conversations will start.

I'm Stormdog! I'm 32, and living in Kenosha, Wisconsin these days. I've identified as furry since, oh, '95 or so I guess. It's kind of a shock when I realize how long it's been sometimes. In that span, I've gone through a huge number of personal changes since then: from someone too scared of people to talk to them, even online, to someone who is seeking an anthropology degree and wants to be involved in oral and folk histories. From completely romantically inexperienced and pretty much asexual outside of heterosexual anthro-related daydreams, to happily married and monogamous, to happily unmarried, bisexual, and polyamorous with two wonderful girlfriends. Neither of them are furry, though one used to be part of the security crew at Midwest Furfest for years.

I worked in IT (help desk/systems adminstration) for eight years or so. I was getting really tired of and stressed by the industry, so when I was laid off after a merger around January of 2011, I took it as a nudge from the universe. I'd gone from wanting to live in a little cave with my computers to believing that people are more important than things and wanting to try to make the world a better place somehow, so I decided to go back to school. I think a lot of problems in the world are caused by people not understanding other peoples' points of view, regardless of whether they agree with them. So I want to be an anthropologist to promote some of that understanding.

I've lived in Kenosha, then the Detroit area, the north side of Chicago, and am back in Kenosha. Currently, I'm living at my parents' house, since I am a poor college student and they're kind enough to let me stay there without charging me anything for the privilege. My parents are old-school sci-fi and fantasy fans, so I'm entirely open with them about the things going on in my life, and they're happy that things are going so well for me on many levels. I do miss having more space of my own that's a bit more private, but this is making it possible for me to go to school full time and not have to work, and it's more than worth it.

I haven't managed to make it to MFF for the last two years, and don't really do much socially with other self-identified furries. Life has kept me busy and/or poor during November when the con happens, and I've never really been part of a general furry social scene local to me. Part of that is, I suppose, the shyness I used to have. I'm not too scared about people anymore to go out and meet new folks, but I just have so much else going on these days that I don't think I have time to regularly go out and meet up with people in person outside the ones I already do.

I still feel like furry is a big part of my life. When I was younger, I identified more with animals than with other people. People my age were mean to me, and though my parents' gaming friends were nice, I don't think I could get the same kind of interaction with people that I was craving. For a long time, I'd convinced myself that I didn't need the company of other people; that animals and my own space were enough to make me happy. The process of realizing the error of that was a long and complex one.

I still refer to myself as a dog, and many friends call me Storm, or Dog, or (in the case of my girlfriends) puppy. I love furcons and fursuits and all the various points of view about just what it means to be furry in terms of social networks, views on spirituality, perceptions of the self as human vs animal vs both or neither. I remember Homestead being a neat place where people talked about all of those things and much more.

Maybe that's enough for now. I'd love it if people posted their own introductions, or wrote back to me on mine. I'm often busy, but I'm trying to stay more away from Facebook and G+ and spend more time here. I want to give LJ one more big chance before deciding that it's just going to fade out with a whimper instead of a bang.

Stormdog

(no subject)

Digging back into Livejournal has been putting me into a melancholic headspace from time to time. Usually late at night, when I have all my work for the next day of school done, and I'm digging through communities and other people's journals, and being reminded of a great deal that I miss, both on LJ and elsewhere, in venues like usenet.

I'm trying to figure out how to best manage those emotions. Realizing two things helps. The past is static. And what I'm doing right now, in terms of starting to invest time and thought and keyboard-wear in making my places in LJ living spaces again is something I should be proud of doing. That I'm making a real effort to reach out and connect with people in a venue I care about. Whether that turns out to be worthwhile in the long run, I'm doing the best I can with it, and if the ship floats instead of sinks, its not going to be because I wasn't bailing.

And you know, if I'm not able to make the connections here that I want to, there *must* be other places where I can. I'm sure I can find other communities of people who have in depth, respectful communications with each other about things they and I and not a lot of other people care about. Places to feel at home and indulge my eccentricities. Places to feel a sense of community, something that I lacked for a very long time in my life and that, even now with my friends and network of connections that's much better now than probably at any other time in my life, I still yearn for more of. I guess I do want to go where everybody knows my name.

But on managing the occasional spikes of melancholia, I had a strange experience a few nights ago. I was, rather to my surprise, feeling so down and despondant that lying in bed under the blankets and squeezing a plushy while wearing a shirt that was a gift from my girlfriend lisagems (a virtual sort of hug) and spending an hour reading a warm and domestic graphic novel (Castle Waiting) was still not enough to get my mind out of where it was. I was in this horrible spiral of depression and angst. It's not something that happens to me often. I really can't remember the last time I felt that way. But I sure did earlier this week! And then I had this very conscious thought about the experience I was having. My brain, I told myself, is going in circles. Thinking about a piece on NPR that I heard about using strong magnetic fields to treat people with sever depression, I imagined my mental state as a series of circuits on a circuit board with the wrong one stuck open and electricity going around in an unending loop. And I said that that was enough was enough and imagined that circuit's gate physically closing.

Bam. Seventy to eighty percent of the despair just left, like turning off a lightswitch. I was still feeling down, but it was in a much more manageable way, and before too long I'd managed to nod off. The next morning, I was feeling so much better, albeit a bit sleep-deprived since I'd been up to about one-thirty. But still, it was a really strange and memorable experience. Of course it's entirely mental; I don't really believe I was directly doing something physical in my brain. But somehow it was a good enough visualization to make it work.

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I just learned today that the art gallery here on campus will be closed, which means I don't have to come back to Kenosha on Wednesday to work there, which means that I get the whole span from after my last class today through to Monday after next to myself! I'm going to visit my girlfriends, work on school stuff, and I'd like to see some of my family too, since usually I'm too busy during the week to do much with them. I have to think more about how I want to schedule things this weekend. But for right now, I'm just very content at my upcoming vacation!