An Exercise in Futility

Had a fun afternoon celebrating (belatedly) the birthdays of a couple who are both among my favorite people. One asked for sourdough pizza and a wander around the market at Manchester Leather Weekend.

I bought a trans-pride earring at the market and was delighted to see, but didn't manage to determine if available in appropriate size, a t-shirt with a lot of Care-Bear-looking colorful cartoon bears with symbols on their tummies, including a rainbow which is canon in one of the bears I remember from my childhood, but this time the other bears have trans/leather/bear/pup symbols or flags. It seems the absolutely perfect thing for someone like me or A who had to live through being a girl in the 80s but are now cautiously leaning into our bear-y selves. (Like I told the other birthday boy, I, this week when he lamented Fat Bear Week coming to an end: hey, some of us are here all year!)

D bought himself a leather waistcoat too which he looks amazing in, so that's fun. I tried on one like it was that technically my size but made me feel unusually dysphoric. I'm glad the market included vendors with explicitly trans stuff but it also had a lot of very normative bodies. Or, diversity of some kinds but not others. I guess it's why I've always steered clear of such things, despite my long-term yearnings...which I used to think were (just) yearning to be with rather than (also) to be -- lots of queers have this problem.

It was great to hang out with our friends and be silly together for an afternoon/evening.

Tomorrow will be busy in a really different way so I'm going to try to get some sleep.

I enjoyed the sunset function last night -- after some faffing I managed to get the right amount of light to start from (fairly bright?) and a sound I like (crickets! I really miss crickets, they sound like summer to me and remind me of being a kid).

I fell asleep before the thing went totally dark, which to be fair could be because of the melatonin I treated myself to last night...but I haven't had great success with them lately.

Maybe it was just how tired I was, after a busy day at work, straight in to counseling, then eating dinner, then off to the local queer club where I'd agreed to turn up early and help set up, and by the time we left, about half past 9, I was so tired that I was yawning uncontrollably on the short ride home (and very glad that D had driven me, so that I didn't have to walk or try to get the bus home.

Today felt similarly intense: work, then an important and positive but also exhausting and anxiety-inducing conversation about U.S. politics, then I made dinner, and by the time I'd eaten my parents were ready to talk. I've missed them like three Sundays in a row so couldn't dodge it too much longer.

And that was a mental and emotional marathon of a conversation too: my grandma's house will be sold in two weeks, the upshot of which is my mom's horrible sister was saying horrible things about my mom at an extended-family event and when my mom asked if I wanted my share of the money from the house sale I said "Absolutely not," and she said "I knew you'd say that, but you're going to have some anyway, and I want you to use some of it to get yourself something nice..." Well okay then, I'll be a tax haven or whatever for my parents this one time.

And they talked about politics at me a bit (which again we don't disagree on but I'm so spoiled by my little bubble where people seek consent and check in during these heavy conversations that this drives me up a wall now).

And then we got on to their computer needing to be replaced because support for Windows 10 is ending and they thought they could just take their PC to Best Buy and get the Quicken transferred to a new laptop... I was trying to disabuse them of this notion gently when their iPad battery died because they believe you must always let it discharge completely and they never use the iPad while it's plugged in.

I'd wanted to go to the gym this evening, and suddenly it was bedtime. And my head was too full of things.

And actually I had to rearrange my bedroom a little for the alarm clock. I don't have a bedside table next to the bed; my room has a lot of fitted closets and drawers so there's only really one place for the bed to go and it means the door -- which is at a weird angle to the rest of the room because of the way the whole upstairs is, and the fact that almost every door up here opens the opposite way to the way that'd make the best use of space -- leaves no room on this side of the bed.

Mostly I've gotten around this by using a floor lamp as a bedside lamp, and shoving a piece of wood between the mattress and the bed frame which I use for bedside stuff: glasses, water, phone. But the piece-of-wood shelf is too low for the alarm clock: not much of the light would actually end up in my line of sight which would defeat the whole purpose of the thing. Also it wasn't easy to get plugged in.

Last night I balanced the clock on some good thick books, and I don't know if the light would have woken me up so I set it to make a normal sound. Then I woke up 45 minutes before my alarm went off this morning and leaned over to look at the clock to see when it would start lighting up, like a little kid. So I don't know any more yet about how or if that will work.

So tonight I've bodged a slightly better solution for clock placement next to my bed (and just as I'm writing this do I realize there's a better way to rearrange the things that need to be plugged in because the lamp has a long cord...always so much to think about!). And I hope the nice cricket sounds and dimming orange light do their magic!

I do wonder how well this supplementary daylight works on someone whose eyes are as bad as mine.

But I really should put my phone down now.

It occurred to me the other day that since the SAD-fighting daylight lamp I have is pretty old now, it still has a big light bulb in it that gets really hot even in the short amounts of time it's supposed to be used. And I'm not as poor as I used to be so I could get a new one.

As always when I need to purchase anything, I asked V for help because they're very good at this. They suggested I might want to try one of those sunrise alarm clocks too. Which I'd never thought about because I'm not really an alarm kind of person a lot of the time, thanks to sleep-maintenance insomnia. But when they sent me a link to what they found and I saw it does a "sunset" thing where you can have gradually-diminishing light and sounds to put on at bedtime, I thought that might be worth a try. I've had increasing trouble settling down to sleep in recent months, and I don't love the workarounds I've resorted to.

Both arrived today, so I write this with orangey light and nature sounds next to me, and the daylight lamp set up by my desk downstairs waiting for me in the morning. We'll see how they work.

While we were in Stornoway, I noticed that my phone wasn't getting text messages when I expected them for 2FA.

Again. This happened a few months ago and the phone company's suggestion was to try my sim card in another phone. Which D (who can see these tiny things) was obliging enough to do by swapping it in to his phone.

And (with a lot of me running up and down stairs between where V was and where he was asking people to text each other and letting them know when the other had so we could check if the text went through) that actually worked!

But then (with a lot of me running up and down stairs asking people to text each other and letting them know...) it turned out that his phone/sim card was now having the same problem! Only worse! I felt so bad for having "infected" him with this, a version so bad it wasn't fixed for a few days when he got a whole new sim card in the mail... Even though I didn't actually do anything and it isn't like Independence Day where you can infect a gadget with techno-gremlins like this.

I didn't want any of this to happen to any of us again, and I figured I could put it off until we were home anyway because it's rare that I actually get SMSes (other than for automated stuff I mostly ignore and the 2FA; I could use other options for that) and besides D needed his little phone-takey-aparty kit with the tiny pokey stick for the sim card which of course he didn't have with him so that settled it.

And I forgot about this entirely (because I never think about SMSes) until this morning. The ongoing dregs of the restructure at work have taken another fabulous colleague from me; she had sent me a message saying goodbye with her personal email and phone number. So without thinking much of it I sent her a text...and then I got a reply text a minute later!

Which is a good thing, because I soon after got a text from the pharmacy saying my meds are ready for collection and I'm about to run out, but then even more importantly I got one from the gender clinic telling me I have finally made it near the top of the waiting list for Voice and Communication Therapy.

Only fifteen months after I was told I'm near the top of the waiting list for voice therapy, only three months after I was assured that I really am near the top of the list, I've been sent a form asking me when I'm free and stuff shout accessing the sessions.

The form also asked me why I want voice therapy, which feels so much less urgent than it was when I was referred for this 3+ years ago. Then, my reason could have been described as "I can carefully sculpt my appearance to avoid most misgenderings, especially online, but I'm sick of being misgendered by everyone who can hear but not see me and I work with a lot of blind people." Two years of planned manitizer has mostly taken care of that problem.

But I am if anything even more interested in voice therapy now because I feel like I've been given by the 2+ years of testosterone a...tool? weapon?...that I don't really know how to operate properly. And, nothing against YouTube videos and the other online DIY resources, but I've never felt good about steering my (post-)transition life by them. To say the least (I still have to write about how the whole top surgery thing is going... I can't just now but let's just say that the two big headings will be Medical Anti-Fatness and Why are Healthcare Professionals Telling Me I Have to Go on Facebook and Reddit).

But anyway, the SMS with the link to the form also included a boilerplate NHS thing:

If we do not hear from you within 7 days, we will assume you do not want to access VCT, and you will be discharged from the VCT service. You can re-refer at a later date by contacting...

I was gone for longer than seven days, imagine that had been in the U.S. where I wouldn't have access to my SMSes, or imagine my phone hadn't fixed itself this time. I had no other indication of this information, no email or attempt at a phone call or anything.

It's maddening when a referral I've been waiting three years for depends on my phone working properly (and a bunch of other aspects of my life working properly!) during any given one-week period.

Recently D sent me the link to a 2019 Dreamwidth entry of his about an outing to Anderton Boat Lift that stands out in our minds for two reasons: one is that it's the day before we ended up dating and we had no idea but the other is that he mentions that we, he and I, had been on about going to Anderton Boat Lift for ages by that point.

And the other feat of canal engineering we always talked about wanting to visit is the Falkirk Wheel.

But unlike the Anderton Boat Lift which I could rush my work day to finish a bit early and be picked up in time to get there for a late lunch, or the Barton Swing Bridge which is so close we biked to it last summer (or maybe two summers ago), Falkirk is very far away so we'd never found an excuse to be in the vicinity.

Until this Stornoway trip. D has a complicated spreadsheet with all the moving parts for such a trip and realized that if we stayed at the further of their two usual spots after the ferry back to the mainland, it would leave us with little enough driving to do on the second day that we could spend some time in Falkirk.

We saw the Kelpies first, which I'd heard about as motorway landmarks from haggis but never thought about as a destination. We had so much fun there though that we stayed past the time D had expected our visit there to last and got home at 8pm instead of 7pm. The weather was beautiful, there were good dogs everywhere, the visitor centre had a very good video explaining the history of Falkirk and was full of excellent tactile models: the kelpies made of Legos, little models of them to scale with world landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, the Sphinx, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil...

Then it was on to the main event. First we had lunch at the kind of place where we'd have wanted to sit outside even if we weren't always doing that now anyway, we ate in the literal shadow of the wheel. I was sitting across from D who when the wheel was moving was just smiling at it in a way that reminded me of icons of saints gazing upon some heavenly scene, full of proper awe and joy. So I got to see the Falkirk Wheel and I got to see how happy it made him, and I can't decide which I enjoyed more.

We finished eating just in time for D and I to take the next tour, where you get in a boat, go up to the aqueduct and along the canal a little while you listen to a local do their spiel (ours was called Gary! and he complimented my #TeamGary t-shirt which I happened to be wearing that day).

Sadly V wasn't feeling up to it: this was Day 9 of traveling and being so much busier than usual was already catching up with them. But they made the right decision; they know so much about narrowboats and canals anyway and the tour was very audio-based and they'd have struggled to get much out of it. They had a nice time in the sunshine watching ducks and moorhens and more good dogs, and buying the cutest fridge magnet in the gift shop, a little abstract model of the wheel that you can spin like a fidget toy, which is delightful.

For a few years now I've been desperate to show him the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth, and this has only deepened my desire to make this happen. It doesn't seem overly likely any time soon, but then the Falkirk Wheel has only existed for 23 years and we must have spent at least half of that talking about wanting to go see it, so I'm okay to wait a while.

We're halfway(ish) home.

Fun fact: I didn't know there was a Perth besides the one in Australia until a few years ago. Possibly when the other two started breaking this journey here.

The trip was uneventful if hard on poor D, who hates driving and is exhausted. I'm glad he got a little nap on the ferry. The weather was beautiful: fluffy clouds, sun glittering in the blue water of the Minch as we crossed it. I didn't doze this time but listened to podcasts about baseball and had lots of feelings (I'm having so many baseball feelings lately!).

We've just been in so many places lately; all I wanted from this one is for there not to be too many weird stairs and there weren't any! Our room is cute and cozy. I also hope the shower isn't too haunted but I'm not awake enough or stinky enough to try that tonight.

Wild to think we'll be home tomorrow night. I am not excited to go back to work but I'm excited to know where everything is and how the shower works.

"There's a wee step here," D told me as we made our way out of the cemetery where we'd gone looking for the pyramid monument that he'd been alerted to on Pokémon Go.

He's often warning me of little things, potential hazards, like this as we're walking around so that wasn't remarkable at all.

What I remarked upon was the language. "Do we all get to say 'wee' now that we're in Scotland?" I asked. "I noticed V saying it earlier but didn't know if it applied to us too."

D had a ready answer. "Yes." It sounded very authoritative!

Stirling has been great. The trip here took an hour and a half longer than it should've thanks to spending that time at a standstill on the M6, thirteen miles back from something that'd happened near Tebay. So by the time we got here, checked in, and found some food, it was 8:30 and I was thinning about going to bed soon when D asked if I wanted to join him for a walk. We could walk down to the lively studenty area or uphill to the "Old Town," with things like the castle, a bunch of statues of old dudes with extravagantly Scottish names, and other touristy landmarks that were all closed and in the dark. But I've still enjoyed it a lot, I was introduced to the concept of a paneer burrito which I'm sad I can't have again in a hurry, and we did find a pub (a hotel bar actually) near the castle -- so close to it that it's called The Portcullis, because it was in the castle's portcullis.

And now I can use Scottish words for things, apparently! So that's nice.