an account of a week and a half

Peggy
February 9, 2017

Sunday, Jan 29: Protest.

Tuesday, Jan 31: Hung with friends, watching them buy supplies for their Physical Art Doings at the art store. Impulsively buy cool mirror with dragon on it. Seriously it is fucking rad, it's circular and has the dragon splaying across it, dividing it into a ying/yang sort of pattern.

Thursday, Feb 2: finally unbox cool mirror. Contemplate places to put it. Come to vague decision, don't feel like nailing anything up. Leave on floor in foyer.

Friday, Feb 3: the inner Magician vaguely wonders if it's really a good idea to leave this mirror right at the door, reflecting the energies being filtered by the big picture of the semi-divine version of my dragonsona that's hanging on the inside of the door. Other things like “hanging with girlfriend” and “buying some magic chocolate with high THC and CBD content because my throat hurts when I smoke and there is no way I'm doing the Trump regime sober” distract me from this. There are ten little chocolates in the bag; I will go through them over the next few days.

There is pretty much no point in the rest of this journal entry where I am not at least a little high, until the last day.

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Bureaucracy

Peggy
April 21, 2016

I'm sitting here sorting through the pile of mail that's accumulated over the past few months while I was too busy grieving to deal with it. Now I know why there was constantly a huge pile of mail on the table when I was twelve; Marie-Jeanne must have been swamped with a similar pile of Stuff Demanding Her Attention after Russell died, plus the extra fun of trying to raise a kid who was falling into his own pit of grief, and of scrambling to figure out how she could get some kind of Day Job to keep things together. I know Elmina (Russel's mother) passed us some major chunks of the money Clayton (Russell's father) had managed to get by some lucky investments. Which I am still mostly living on, to be honest.

And I'm just contemplating all these bureaucracies spinning away, generating all these little notifications. Banks and insurance companies sending me a new letter every so often with an update on my or my mothers' accounts. A retirement fund that I guess doesn't know Mom's died yet asking her to vote on the now-passed board election. A note from her doctor reminding her that it's time for her yearly appointment, the month after she died. A few lingering debts that I missed dealing with when she died that are still sending collection notices. Eventually I'll get all of this covered, and my mailbox will go back to its usual slow rhythm of credit card offers and the very occasional note from a human.

I'm sorting through all of these because I'm plucking out all the tax stuff to send off to my mom's accountant. Along with my tax stuff because I just can't deal with it right now. If ever to be honest, I should just start paying someone to do the dirty work of sorting through all the forms and entering the numbers for me. Think I'm gonna finally go talk to the bank about setting up a business credit card, too, so I can quickly and easily say “I lost this much on my business this year” and get tax deductions for that.

Anyway. Vast bureaucratic machines, running at the slow time of snailmail. They'll wait patiently for me to bother dealing with them.

mental health day

Peggy
August 6, 2014

Well.

Yesterday, the shipment of Rita 2 arrived. I put half of them them in the studio and half on the storage shelves; why bother wrestling with making space for all of them when I’m going to be shipping half of them out?

This morning I woke up with a cranky back, quite possibly from moving all those books around. I assessed my shipping supplies, found them lacking, and ordered some new ones, so I can get these things out as soon as possible. Then, I thought, I was going to crank on the Rainfurrest conbook cover and maybe get a significant chunk of it done.

But first I figured I’d go get some lunch and relax a bit. Because there was a lot of tension about all of this boiling beneath the surface of my mind. I grabbed the iPad, made sure it had all the stuff I haven’t finished reading yet downloaded into the Kindle app, and left the apartment. At first I thought I was just going to go to one of the sandwich shops on the Ave and come back and get to work. But soon I found myself getting on a bus for downtown, without really thinking about it. I ended up going down to Pike Place for a sandwich at Beecher’s, then lying in the little park nearby. (Google informs me that it was VIctor Steinbrueck Park.)

I kept my phone in my purse, except for purposes of time-keeping and route-planning. I didn’t need Twitter or MeFi to occupy myself on the road; I had a book. Specifically, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, which you have probably read already if you read lots of fantasy what with it being much-lauded.

I enjoyed it a lot. The main character was not at all an appealing person, in a way that felt rather familiar. Especially near the end, when he’s completely burnt out and has rejected everything of the magical world. It was a good thing to read today, with this weird emptiness hovering around the back of my head. It felt very much… adult. It was a fantasy full of regret at things that went awry, and a knowledge of what it’s like to live on after your youthful enthusiasm for a craft completely burns out, leaving you an empty husk with no idea of what to do next. I’ve been there with regards to animation. It’s not a place most of my reading ever prepared me for. Or maybe some of it was trying to and I just didn’t have the ears to hear it yet; I don’t know. A while back on one of the subreddits I read there was someone whinging about how they thought the phrase “you’ll understand when you’re older” was just a sign of surrendering to the dominant culture, which I thought was bullshit, and left a list of some “when you’re older”s that I’ve personally experienced. This definitely spoke to some of those Adult Problems via the framework of KID INDUCTED INTO THE SECRET MAGIC SCHOOL! and KID VISTS A MAGICAL LAND AND HAS A QUEST!.

I snagged the second volume and may read it soon. Hooray for coming in onto a series late in its life.

I cancelled out on pole dance class tonight, mostly because I just feel utterly exhausted. I’ve been pushing myself hard for the past few months, and haven’t given myself much of a break the past couple weeks due to needing to Get This Cover Done On Time. The immense relief when I did this told me it was the right choice; I could have pushed myself through it, and been glad for it, but sometimes you just gotta listen to the exhaustation.

There is stuff happening tomorrow but oh man I’m so glad I let myself just go sit in the sun and not worry about anything beyond a tasty cheese sandwich and a book today.

Also when I came home there was a package on my doorstep: two Gorillapod lights. When I finish shipping the Kickstarter books, I plan to reward myself by getting an annoyingly expensive and highly articulated action figure, which will live on my desk and get used for quick pose reference, quite possibly dramatically lit with those two lights because I find myself wanting to do stark shading lately and don’t want to have to work out every bit of it from scratch.