MeghanIsMe

I am so close to being able to play through Prelude in C without making one or two little mistakes along the way. So close!

I'm also starting to work on The Sunlit Garden from Revolutionary Girl Utena a little bit. That's the song that Miki plays on the piano. But...I might switch over to the intro to Watermark instead? Dunno.

The job hunt is proceeding. I haven't heard back from anything I've applied to yet, but I'm still trying.

I'm going to be driving to Wisconsin on the 23rd to visit my mom and folks there. I'll be back in Hamilton on the 30 and Miriam and I will spend NYE with a couple we met through queer community events here who are also Covid cautious. That will be really nice! It's been a long time since I've been with friends on a NYE.

And lastly...

It's true. As Miriam said today, I'm very bad at hookups. 😂

I've been talking more with Mississauga girl and I have a crush...

Which doesn't mean it will go anywhere in particular. But yeah. I'm seeing her again on Friday.

Someone responded to my several-month-old post on Reddit's T4T group with the scintillating conversation opener of "Hi."

That said, this is a trans woman approximately my age who is near or in Regina based on her comments elsewhere, and I am feeling pretty lonely and isolated a lot of times. I would actually write back and see if there's any connection to pursue.

Except that one of her comments on a post about rent control in Regina said:

"Rent control may be needed but here is a fact that no one has brought up. The previous owner wanted a tenant. If you jack the price up then maybe that means that the new owners just wants them out? I wouldn't want tenants if l purchased a house. I would find a way to get rid of them."

--I would find a way to get rid of them.-- Not ok. So she's right out. *sighs*

Still, I seem to have entered the Snapchat phase of my second adolescence. *laughs* Yesterday I started talking with a girl from T4T who's in Montana on it. We're sort-of neighbors, right? (She says, having looked and seen that a drive to Billings would be about 8.5 hours.)

Other than that, I regret not writing here more and just putting lots of short bits on Facebook, but writing things at length requires more of some kind of energy than I usually have, and putting lots of short stuff here feels like it would be annoying. I'm not sure why that latter part is the case.

The second appointment with Miriam's new rheumatologist is coming up next week. It turns out that the labs who do bloodwork here just completely failed to do one of the tests the doctor requisitioned. We've tried to follow up with the doctor's office a couple times, and they have finally figured out that the test never got done. They contacted LifeLabs, the place that does the blood draws, and LifeLabs said that test was not ordered. This has happened before, so Miriam had a picture of the req form on her phone to send to the doctor, complete with a big red arrow pointing at the test.

But at this point, it's not going to be done before the appointment, and if this causes another month or two of delays in diagnosis and treatment, I'm going to be very angry. I fervently hope, if that's what happens, that the doctor will make a special appointment to follow up after the test, but I'm not holding my breath. Miriam has suggested that maybe her x-ray results are sufficient for a diagnosis already and that's why the office hasn't followed up yet, but I suspect that's wishful thinking.

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She and I went out to a local winter festival here in Regina called Frost. There was a stand making maple syrup taffy: she wanted to share that with me since it was something she had on field trips growing up in Ontario and I'd never had it before. It was fun. It was tasty. But the experience was also sad. The limitations she has going to things like this just keep reminding me that things will quite possibly never be the same for her as they were before the progression of this illness, and by extension, very often will not be the same for me either. I miss just being able to do something as simple as go grocery shopping with her without worrying whether the activity will cause her pain for the rest of the day, or if she won't be able to stay with me in the store because of pain. We did go to CostCo together yesterday and it was a nice little trip. Some days and some activities are worse than others at different times and it's hard to know why.

The winter festival also had a few metal firepits going, burning wood and making a cheery warmth and glow. I caught the scent of woodsmoke once and felt a surge of fear and did my best to avoid them the rest of the time we were there. There's another way certain things may never be the same for me.

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Despite the above few paragraphs, my mental health has been better of late. Regular attendance at the weekly online Still Coviding group I've been going to, regularly having a group of people who understand a big part of my situation in ways that most other people don't, has been a blessing.

I've been trying to connect with other folks in other ways, but without much success. I wrote someone who posted on the Reddit T4T community who is on the US west coast and described herself as a "Covid-conscious cutie looking for flirty friends." We exchanged a couple of messages, but I haven't heard back in a couple of days. She's a little over 10 years younger than me, so that may be an issue.

I posted on the Discord channel for the local trans support group. I said that it's been hard for me to attend the online meetings because health concerns for my partner mean I need to minimize Covid exposure, and it hurts to listen to people talking about all the things they're doing that I can't do. But, I said, being around just one or two people who are masking is an acceptable level of risk, and I would *love* to have a person or two to get together with and which anime once in a while. I got one message of sympathy and an offer to talk, but no interest in actually getting together.

I've looked at other posts on T4T lately, but haven't found anyone I felt like making contact with. It's funny; I am actively wishing for flirty/sexual connections with other people, and I'm a lot less demisexual than I once thought I was, but contacting people who seem to *just* be looking for people to sext with, or to get on video for sexytimes with, is not appealing. I need there to be *something, anything* beyond that. And the ages of most of the people posting there means my options are fairly limited. But I'm still looking.

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My mental health has been good enough to get absorbed in a couple of hobbies. It's really good to break out of the vicious circle of mental health not being good enough to get absorbed in anything that's good for mental health. I got parts together to refurb the vacuum tube-based audio generator I bought from a Kijiji seller last year, but before they arrived in the mail, I got started on coding LED control algorithms. My friend Posi sent me hardware to do some of that after the fire happened, but I just hadn't been together enough to figure it out. We got on voice chat together and he walked me through setting up the software, soldering some wires to an Arduino and an LED strip, and basic use of existing libraries to make them light up.

Since then, I've spent a lot of hours writing code. I still have a lot to do and learn, but I did manage to finally get trans colors scrolling up and down on the front of the case the way I've imagined since putting this computer together more than a year ago, and it makes me happy. In general, my computer increasingly looks like unicorns and faeries are holding a rave in there and I am pleased. Here's a short video of one of the effects I have working:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fVvkrH4GTj8

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CW: food/body/weight talk

I was managing my eating really well for quite some time, and am currently at my lowest weight since 2018 (which is still 40 pounds or so heavier than I would like) and I've been really happy about that. In the last week, though, I've had trouble again. I think it's possible that as this appointment for Miriam gets close, it's causing me a lot of stress, fear, anxiety, and anger at the medical system. It's so easy to use food to deal with those things.

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Last but not least, I finally got that new piercing done that I've been planning to do with birthday/Chanukah money from Miriam's family back in November. I decided my mental health is finally good enough to take care of it, and I now have a helix done on my left ear. So many elf-girls in fantasy art have piercings in that area - probably a way for the artist to emphasize the exotic ear shape I suppose - and I want to have a pretty elf-girl piercing too. I'm also glad to have piercings connected to both my parents and Miriam's parents; that's really meaningful to me.

I have such fear and anxiety about trying to join online communities that it's mostly kept me from trying my entire life. But I finally managed to not get past that fear, but at least sort of disassociate from it long enough to join a T4T Friends/dating Discord server. To get access to the rest of the channels, there's an introduction to fill out that includes age, and I would clearly be one of the oldest people there, if not the oldest. I'm scrolling past a few people in their 30s, but most people are between 18 and their early 20s. I feel like I'll either have no one interested in talking to me, or I'll just look like a creep. And this is exacerbating my fear that, by the time it's possible to significantly reduce Covid restrictions for in-person stuff, I'll be old enough that no one will be interested.

I'm not sure if I can manage to write an intro here.

ETA: I left the server. I could join again later if it seems like something I could do.

Having confirmed that other people on OKC don't get notified when people go and look at their profiles, I actually looked at other people's profiles for the first time this morning! I was scared.

So much to talk about!

After the ceremony, our friend Mik stayed with us through Tuesday. He flew in from Tortuga.

Mik is one of those people who travels so much (he's originally Dutch, mostly lived in Australia, and has spent time on every continent but Antarctica) that we were not surprised to hear that he'd be flying in from the Caribbean. However, I'd thought from following him on Facebook that he was in California. Danae tried to figure out what flight he was going to be on, but couldn't find anything coming from airports around the island. When he arrived, we asked about our confusion. Turns out that Tortuga is also an intentional community in the San Francisco Bay area. Oh, ok!

It was wonderful spending time with Mik and Danae together. We introduced him to new board games, spent a while snuggled on the couch with a movie, and had some really good conversations. He and I have some similar (though not identical) baggage from past relationships that I think it was good for both of us to talk about. He's also a map geek, he loves exploring cities, and is deeply concerned with social justice issues. I really wish he wasn't so far away; I'd like to spend more time with him. He does do a lot of traveling though; maybe I can lure him out to New York State some time....

On Tuesday, I got to spend some time with another guy I'm enjoying being around lately when I drove out to Erik's new place in Carpentersville. I helped him get a couple more dressers moved from his old place (good thing I had Danae's car!), then we took his dog to the nearby dog park.

He's near what may be the world's best dog park! It's huge, and in two sections: there's an open grassy area for dogs to run around and play in, and there's a wooded area in back with winding paths through underbrush and tall trees which all feels very wildernessy. The whole area is fenced in, so dogs can go explore to their heart's content. I loved it. And Erik's dog is, in temperament, so much like Doug from Up. He's pretty mellow most of the time and lives to just be around his people. I think more dog-time might be on the menu for future dates.

We were both pretty exhausted; he from moving and and starting a new job and me from ceremony prep and crazy hours. At his place, we snuggled on the couch in front of a musical, the 1960 movie version of Can Can, each of us intermittently napping as the film progressed. When it was done and we were both feeling a little refreshed from our nap, we drove out to Darien for pizza.

I had a Groupon for Jet's pizza in Darien. It's an hour away from Erik's place, and even further from mine. This is what happens when you buy a Groupon without carefully looking at the description. The time passed so quickly in good company on the way there, though, that when I noticed we were only ten minutes away I honestly though I must have misprogrammed the GPS. It felt like fifteen minutes had gone by instead of fifty!

The two of us took our pizza to a nearby park for an impromptu picnic in the beautiful golden light of approaching dusk. Finally, after a nice ride back to Carpentersville full of conversation about things like photography (where else but with a professional photographer will you ever hear a phrase like "Corporate sent someone to the branch to show us how to shoot babies"?) I dropped him off at his place about nine and headed home. I wish I could have taken him up on his offer to come in and stay longer, but I had to meet up with Lisa to get her belt back to her (I've had it for about two weeks now) and start catching up on other real-life stuff.