An Exercise in Futility

A podcast I like just did a Patreon bonus episode about Christmas songs, and listening to it today was a fun way to get into the spirit, now we've gotten past thanksgiving and into December.

They invited us to tell them about other songs than the ones they mentioned at the end, and I compiled such a mental list that I made it into a physical list. Especially because they suggested at the end to let them know about any Christmas songs they might not know, and since it's a baseball podcast and they're from the U.S., and I didn't know about Slade and Wizzard until I left the U.S., I figured they were worth a mention (I do like both songs as well and think even if I ever get back to Minnesota for Christmas, Noddy Holder yelling "It's Christmas!" will have to be part of it.)

Here's my list, in no particular order:

• Last Christmas
  Obviously.

• Coventry Carol
  This is in the medieval/haunting/melancholy vibes category; I've loved it since it was on some Christmas album I had as a little kid

• Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy
  I just love this, contrived as it is. It's like the baton is being handed over from Mr. Traditional Christmas to a new generation. It never fails to give me goosebumps to hear their individual melodies come together at the end.

• Sleigh Ride
  I slightly prefer the original/instrumental, but the Ronettes version on the Phil Specter album is so iconic it's practically its own entry.

• Do You Hear What I Hear
  Another favorite of mine as a kid; my mom is a soprano and would sing along to this which I really loved. I thought this was another centuries-old one, but looking it up to link here I learned it was written in 1962, by a married couple who "wrote it as a plea for peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis."

• Duke Ellington's Nutcracker Overture
  I love the music from the Nutcracker anyway but I love it this way the best.

• Slade's Merry Xmas Everybody and Wizzard's I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day

A little while ago angelofthenorth had offered to cook a thanksgiving dinner with some of my usual recipes.

Fuck thanksgiving as a concept, obviously, but an excuse for a fancy meal is always welcome.

So I found the handwritten notes-to-self that constitute my versions of pumpkin pie and scalloped corn, and she made those tonight with a delicious veggie haggis, roast new potatoes, turnips, carrots and parsnips, and what would've been mashed swede except we didn't mash it.

I helped, doing chores like chopping the pumpkin and washing dishes. It was fun. At one point when I was drying a mixing bowl and about to put it away, she said "we make a good team!" That was nice to hear!

Everything was delicious. It's so annoying that I stull have a headache that has come and gone all day, because I have no spoons to say more.

I was so busy talking about other things yesterday that I entirely missed something I wanted to say.

It's been something like three and a half years...yes I just went and checked, March 2022, I know it wasn't long before I got offered the job I now have (which was May of that year) because it was important that I was still so-underemployed-I-basically-unemployed, pretty much working as a favor to the friends I was working for, and really struggling with job hunting and interviews.

That chance meeting with someone who I got along with so well and who was so complimentary to me meant so much.

Things quickly got complicated and then the rest of my life got more complicated -- I remember having phone calls about the CEO recruitment while I was in Bournemouth for the work conference that I basically abandoned halfway through to deal with the ticket office closure campaign, still the biggest thing I've dealt with at work, and I'd been there barely a year at the time.

I did present at the board and staff away day that summer about EDI; amid people who could really do finance and governance and stuff I felt like such a lightweight with my focus on inclusivity and lived experience and all that, but everyone was supportive and flattering about absolutely everything that I did as a member of that board of trustees. I learned a hell of a lot -- including getting my first experience of being on the other side of a job interview, so soon after I was lambasting them, which was really interesting and did end up useful at work where I've been part of a few recruiting processes since.

Around the new year, with the sad loss of Gary and the impending Trump doom and the potential to lose my job or face a much-changed workplace and my grandma in hospice care, I reached a point where something had to give and it turned out to be this. I e-mailed the new CEO and said I thought I'd have to step down. She was very kind and said that if I could hang on until the end of my term, which them understanding my reduced capacity, it'd make various things easier for them. Since this meant probably no more than attending a few online meetings and the occasional e-mail, I said I was happy to give it a try. I did make an attempt to meet them on this summer's away day, as I was in London that day anyway for work, but it didn't end up happening and that was fine.

Monday was the AGM at which I and the long-time treasurer stepped down: our terms had ended, his job was more demanding now, and I was sad to go but feeling sufficiently battered by the year that I know I made the right decision; I already feel bad that I wasn't able to give this more time and attention in 2025. The outgoing treasurer said his little piece and left the Teams meeting, and then I quickly burbled something about how much this has meant to me, how much I appreciated having been brought in (sadly the person who did so has not been able to be part of the organisation for some time themselves, so they were not able to hear me say this) and how much of a difference it had made to my

They also got me a free Audible credit as a leaving present, which is a perfect gift for me in that I like audiobooks, maybe not enough to faff around setting up an Amazon account (I had shared Andrew's, back in the day, so already lost access to years of Audible subscription that way, sigh), but the thought really does count. When I wrote back to the CEO to thank her/everyone for it, she replied not only being gracious about that but also saying "I was touched by what you said about the impact for you of becoming a trustee and wondered if you might be willing to write a paragraph that we might use when we’re recruiting trustees again or for our Trustees report? It would be great to capture as a quote if that’s possible?"

Yeah, I am very happy to write them a paragraph. Least I can do.

I had a pretty good day for it being the blackest day on my calendar.

Twenty years ago today my brother died. It was thanksgiving day, that year. He died in a car accident. No other cars involved, he wasn't drunk, the weather was fine, he was on familiar roads...

So there was no reason for it, no lesson to be learned from it or cause to take up because of it.

Normally I will have a wee dram for the occasion, but tonight I went to the gym instead, knowing that the rest of the week is too full to allow it and not wanting to let the good effect of actually making it to trans gym on Saturday wither away already. It was a good choice but means I got home and as usual went upstairs to a shower and bed.

It was a pretty good day. I woke up absurdly early as usual but didn't feel tired. I got up and did my morning chores (opened the curtains, emptied the dishwasher, made a pot of tea), made breakfast and started work an hour early. My manager is off all week and his manager is off today, so while I'm awaiting feedback from them on a report that's perilously close to its deadline now, it's not my problem if they don't get it to me. I didn't have many meetings either (though the two I did have were bad enough), it was much warmer than it had been at the end of last week and the sun was even out sometimes.

Most of all, what made this November good is that I wasn't fretting about my dog dying (like last year), I didn't break my ankle and need an operation (like two years ago), and a dear friend wasn't having a psychotic episode where I was the only person she'd talk to (like three years ago).

November just sucks.

But this one has been okay. Yes it's been full of work and of counterprotesting fascists, but it's also had some fun stuff and there's more happening this week: a birthday party, a wedding, a new Knives Out movie, a thanksgiving dinner that I'm not cooking...

Twenty years.

It doesn't feel long ago.

And yet I've also been so many people since then. I'm sad I didn't have the chance to find out who he would have been.

"I gotta show you something," Dad said, and got up from the sofa so disappeared from the camera. My mom was left looking boggled; she didn't know what he was doing. There didn't seem to be anything in the conversation -- about them decorating their house for Christmas, I think -- to hint even to her what he was thinking of.

He came back quickly, with a big white fuzzy teddy bear. The bear was wearing a blue knitted scarf and something I couldn't quite see on his forehead that might have been ski goggles or earmuffs. Dad was waving a white fuzzy paw at me. It was the cutest damn thing.

He explained about how he saw it in the window of the local secondhand store a few times, and that the bear was asking my dad to bring him home, so one day he just went and bought it. He said it didn't cost much.

"I'm trying to think of a name for him," Dad said. "I'm calling him Bob for now but that isn't quite right." Mom asked if I had an idea for a name, and honestly my mind had immediately gone to Bernard but I think that'd be too fancy for them. Dad mentioned Frank which I like a lot; reminds me of my old pal from a volunteering group who's retired even from that now; a lovely old blind guy called Frank with a guide dog called Ronnie.

Frank, or whatever he's going to be called, lies on what I think of as the guest bed but my parents call "my" bed because they think the guest room is my room. (For a long time, my mom was calling the basically-theoretical bedroom in the as-yet-unfinished basement "Chris's room" which...makes my head hurt just to think about. I think now that the basement is finished it's being called just "the bedroom downstairs," which is a vast improvement.) "Your dad had been wanting to get a bear for your bed for a while," Mom said, which again is a strange sentence.

But Frank is lovely. Even when Dad put him back, his black quarter-zip was covered in fuzz from the bear. It was very cute. It's really heartening that he continues, in his dad way, to just get Ideas in his head and do these little whimsical things that my mom can only humor him in; it's one of the few things my parents don't share.

What a busy day!

I got up for trans gym this morning, which should be normal for a Saturday but I missed it last week thanks to trainfail, and I didn't make it to the gym at all this week and my mental health suffered accordingly. So it was really nice to be back even if everything felt difficult!

Sadly D wasn't feeling well enough to do gym, but he was feeling well enough to give me a lift to and from and do some shopping for treats from the grocery store in between, which was welcome. It also meant we got a tinfoil-wrapped packet of our friend I's homemade pancakes, still warm when he handed them to D, which was really lovely.

Then this afternoon we had a doggy date! Thanks to Borrow My Doggy, a neighbor found us, said she thought she recognized us from the photos I put on the website, and indeed she was right. She and her husband are retired and dealing with various health issues that mean they need help walking their sweet adorable poodle/Irish setter cross, Teddy. He immediately loved V and I (again D was not feeling up to joining us, he needed a nap), demanded pets from us both and fell asleep pressed up against V while we talked with his humans. We all got along and it seems like we can help each other which is lovely.

Soon after V and I got home, angelofthenorth's friend came over, who soon said "I feel like I've found my people, even though I've never met you two before!" V was delighted at this of course, and I know it's something they and D have always aspired to.

We had a great conversation until D and I had to leave to go see Beowulf at Park in the Past. It was really fun to get to enjoy Beowulf in something approaching its original setting: In a dirt floored, wood-beamed, wool-thatched hut, listening to a bard recite it from memory and in between "acts" some talented musicians play a variety of folk music. We drank mead and D got to eat a wild boar burger. We snuggled up to stay warm and to enjoy each other's company. It was a great evening. Great day.

Making [workplace] a great place to work involves us all. It's about everyone playing their part, and of course that includes myself and the Executive Leadership Team.

It's important that we lead by example and that's why we've signed up to some important commitments following your feedback via the recent Colleague Voice survey and listening groups.

Thanks to my involvement with EDI via helping run one of the protected-characteristics staff networks, I know this has been a big fucking deal for our EDI lead, she's been working a lot and trailed this to us earlier this week, so I'm intrigued (if not overly optimistic...) to finally see what results from this.

I've recorded a five-minute video (link) to talk about these commitments, or you can read the transcript (link).

I'm a transcript person. So I click on that and... Sharepoint tells me "You don't have access."

Our internal communication people are good and work hard and with the amount of stuff they put out it's inevitable that every so often a link is gonna go wrong or a file won't have the right permissions like this.

But it had to be this one about how we're all in this together, didn't it.

I did laugh, bitterly.

So many meetings today. I had to run a focus group, I had to talk to my manager about something stressful (it turned out fine), I had to have a meeting that felt important but probably wasn't, about a task I totally overlooked somehow (very erikphobic of the DfT to launch a consultation with a deadline right after my own big deadline!!), which was supposed to last half an hour after the usual end of my work day and actually overran even that tomorrow...

Also today, in other Boo Meetings news, I realized I have the other focus group tomorrow evening, which means I can't go to any of the Transgender Day of Remembrance events that my friends are going to (though me being unable to go does free up D for another thing that's more "fight like hell for the living" than "mourn the dead" and I think that's fine too).

The good part of my meetings today is the one where a colleague and I were in an external meeting which was arranged by the other organization so it was held on Google Meet rather than Teams as we are used to. This is only relevant because on Teams I have my background blurred and in this thing I never used before (I could barely even unmute myself or hang up at the end of the call, never mind such niceties as adjust my background!).

In the debrief with my colleague, after the normal stuff, she said "off topic but I spotted the distinctive design of a pits and perverts power in your background. Dope, love it." I had noticed my background was clearer and sharper than I was used to, but I didn't think anyone else would notice that! And indeed I didn't really notice the poster, as distinct from the mirror or the door covered with coats (they hang on hooks over the door) that are also visible behind me. It was very sweet that it was one of my queerest colleagues in this meeting and I'm glad she noticed.

She asked where I'd gotten it from and I explained about this event the others had gone to, put on by one of V's friends, and that I'd been brought the poster as I hadn't been able to go (I think I was in London for a work thing actually, or something like that). My colleague explained that she'd been wanting one of these posters for years but always wanted the money to actually go to a queer person or something. She decided a museum would be close enough, some good cause. I checked and they're still selling the poster, and at a very reasonable price too! So much so that I feared the shipping would ruin the good deal and offered to pick her up one and get it to the London office the next time I'm there for work, but she ended up finding other stuff in the shop that'd make good Christmas presents for her friends so she didn't need to take me up on that offer.

The shop listing does a good job of explaining the poster:

Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) is an activist group that formed in solidarity with the striking miners in 1984. Mark Ashton, one of the founders, saw the struggle of the miners as the same faced by gay people fighting for their rights against a government that would not listen.

LGSM organised fundraising events like the one depicted in this poster from a concert from 1984 featuring Bronski Beat at Camden’s Electric Ballroom. Designed by LGSM member Kevin Franklin.

"Well that meeting has been productive on several levels" she said after all this. And that was a nice way to go into my last meeting of the day (the one that took until what I thought was dinnertime if not bedtime!).