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From shelter

It's raining, and I'm in a library, having just collected a pile of nine largeish books which will decidedly not fit under my coat. I may be here a while.
The books from smallest to largest are:
Intaglio Printmaking by Mychael Barrat Big Cotton by Stephen Yafa Cotton by Beverly Lemire Etching Engraving and Intaglio Printmaking by Anthony Gross Intaglio by Robert Adam & Carol Robertson Textile Nature by Ann Kelley The Illustrated History of Textiles edited by Madeleine Ginsberg & Engraving and Etching 1400 - 2000 by Ad Stinjman
and they'll be going on the floor-edge which is currently my bookshelf so that I can be productive without leaving the house, because this rain is only symptomatic of Autumn's general keenness to make up for lost time, since they arrived in town day before yesterday. The intaglio stuff & the cotton stuff are actually both for my printmaking course -- series of three prints using intaglio processes to represent human use of cotton, is our new brief, squee, happy jumping -- the other textiles stuff is for textiles class, starting Monday. Excited. Really very happy I started doing this degree. On Thursday my teacher for the finishing fashion course told me that yes she thought my approach would fit textiles quite well, and somehow I felt buoyed with pride for the rest of the day. Because maybe, maybe the things I care about turn out to be useful and valued?
and ok the library closes at 8 on Saturdays, it turns out, so, out into the rain.

[update: the books mostly do fit under my coat.]

Between the here

This is moving day. Not very much moving, really -- just a bag of bedding & a bedroll & some clothes -- books, the rest of my wardrobe, and my chair will follow along later. The rain decided to rain for the occasion never-the-less, which is really a boon despite the drying that will need to be done, because the rain doesn't spend much time here at the moment. I'm at uni now with my somewhat damp stuff. I'm told the Finnish couple are departed from their/my room, so I should think in about half an hour I'll go over there.

Yesterday me,

ablackart, and

leaflemming went to Jordan Peele's Us. It is terrifying. I can't actually remember being so scared in a movie as I was in the opening scene, though I'm sure I must have been sometimes when small. Is horror about solidifying what we define ourselves against so that we can question that defining? I've never thought about it; but if it is then I think Us is the most perfect horror I've seen.

ablackart gave me The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang to read afterwards and then we all spent the evening watching Steven Universe.

There are cats at the flat. I am excited.

stuff

It’s been a while! And a lot has happened.
— I’ve started uni again, doing design this time, and it is awesome, and I’ve only had one crisis so far and I got through that so clearly everything is going to be good.
— me and Sam have broken up. Which is sad. I’m living with

leaflemming and

ablackart which is being lovely, but it’s possible I’m moving into a flat on Monday, should have heard about that by this time tomorrow.

ok I guess that’s all that’s happened. It feels like a lot. I will try and post more regularly.

Dreaming

I was lost in an airport — I’d been there with

leaflemming and

landingtree , but we’d gotten separated. I was trying to find the terminal we were to leave from, rather desperately moving through car parks and roadways and foodcourts. This airport was a city.
But I found the train that would take me there, and when I got on it the other two were there as well. After laughter and mild recriminations I glanced over my shoulder and saw the shadow of the conductor moving its way along the carriage — did I have any money? I searched through all the pockets of my bag, at last came on a stash of pleasantly thick golden-coloured coins.
When I looked up it was into a weathered, ruddy-bearded face much creased by laughter, and perhaps pain too. The conductor was smiling a low smile at me, and asked would I like to buy any sermons? 1, 3 and 4 he particularly recommended as a combination, he said — but, oh, never mind his eyes grew sad, he could see I was not really someone who was interested in sermons, he said. I could not dissappoint the conductor. I pressed the correct number of coins into his hand, and told him 1, 3 and 4 would do very nicely.
So, for the next week or so, while the train moved on its way towards our terminal, that blesséd man walked with me down long red-dirt paths between bushy gulleys and the high banks of wild flowers, down into valleys and up onto hills, across streams and by rivers, and he told me, through mist and clear sun and star-lit dark, he told me what he knew of the ways of humans and of spirits, and, more than that, of the ways of flowers.

Pamela Dean's Tam Lin

I don't know how I feel about this book. I spent about a week making dents in the first hundred pages and wondering why it wasn't gripping me, spent another week coming gradually into the middle two hundred's sway, and spent yesterday with the last hundred whooshing past me as I flopped between suitable reading spots. I think Dean's prose is not really my cup of tea, but her characters light it up very bright, once you love them.
Tam Lin is a retelling of the Scottish ballad "Tam Lin," which I am fond of. I met it maybe (hah) seven years ago in Dianna Wynn Jones' own retelling Fire and Hemlock, and have listened to it fairly often since then. It's an odd song; it exists in a hazy disturbing space between the story it describes, of its Janet's rape by its Tam Lin and her successful effort to win him from the Faerie Queen's company to be the father of her child, a story of compulsion upon compulsion and two people's desperate struggle to win some kind of future for themself; and the softer, gladder, story its language implies, where Janet falls in love with Tam and rescues him for his own sake as well as hers, and their life together opening out at the end can be imagined happy. Fire and Hemlock takes the second story, removing the rape and the pregnancy and having its Tam trick its Janet into a friendship that becomes truer than anything else in their lives. Tam Lin -- well, for most of Tam Lin's length the ballad is not actually very present. It's there in names and odd happenings, but not in any certain form. The book is set on a 1970s university campus, and its body is Janet's coming into and progress through her university life as an English major, with frequent asides about the poetry she's reading: it seems to be making a thing rather like Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters, where the magic is breathtaking and real and not the main point. But very late in the piece the "Tam Lin" story comes up into the fore and sweeps Janet into itself entire. I like that, in theory. It's a neat shape: here is her life -- this is what someone's life is, and then this is what happens when the Faeries get involved, and then this is the power a human life can have. But it takes the more positive love story while retaining the sex/pregnancy elements in a way that works really weirdly in its social context. To me it seems like it changes Janet's story so that its end has to lie long after the end of the original ballad, and then it stops at the end of the ballad anyway, with Tam's story over and Janet's not.
I am very happy I read this book; it has wonderful characters, and it conveys reading experience better than anything I've read but Jo Walton's Among Others -- but it could have been beautiful, and I'm still mad that I can't see it that way.

A friendly bit of stone

In the greywacke tumble projecting from the sand which makes the East end of Houghton Bay beach, there's a sort of cup having the shape of a just-vacated beanbag. If you lie in it a small flat face makes a pillow for your head. If you sit there's comfortable shoulder support higher up. Greywacke is not stuffed cloth, and the sharpnesses saying hello to your calves and thighs seem quite hostile for the first minute or so, but on acquaintance they become quiet neighbours. It's quite an unlikely shape-set to exist in a jagged up-swing of tide-cut rock.

Monday was a really, really shit day. Nothing got done, three separate heft-having obligations went unfulfilled, thoughts and feelings organised themselves into a sort of chaotic military coup comprised mostly of coconspirators assassinating each other. Latish in the evening (on Sam's suggestion) I took Sasha the motorscooter out to Island Bay beach -- decided to go around the coast to the little lighthouse on Miramar peninsula --- stopped at Houghton Bay beach because I'd never noticed it and hey -- saw while standing in the middle of the beach in my impractical shoes a just-vacated beanbag up a greywacke tumble over at the East end. A bit like an aha! moment with a jigsaw puzzle except one piece was my body and I hadn't known I was puzzling. Once I got there and my legs established relations with the sharpnesses I stayed for what I would guess was an hour and so was probably a half hour, before a wave from the rising tide came and doused me slightly and I decided I should get home to a hot shower and cheese on toast and bed and Sam. The light over the west curve of the bay was almost out by that point. Tuesday night I went earlier, and stayed less long: there was barely a touch of dusk when I was leaving and the tide was not high, but Sam had dinner for us, baked potatoes and chorizo sausages and carrots and cauliflower in white sauce which we ate in front of the first episode of the new DC Titans show, before a long, good sleep. Tonight he's at a friend's birthday with Sasha. I considered busing to the bay, since the bus runs straight from our place there, but in the end I practised doing makeup instead, and watched the first half of La La Land, after figuring out that Birdman was not going to be a good idea.

Turn, Turn, Turn

So this evening, after a lovely dinner, me and Charlotte and Landingtree met up with Sam and.... had the distressing and confronting experience that is Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You.
And I am not going to write about that, except to say that I'd seen it once and gotten hope out of it, and so invited the others, and this time I don't think any of us got much out of it except hurt.
But after leaving Charlotte and Landingtree to go hopefully find comfort, and after Sam left me to scooter home, and after I wandered around for a bit and got myself together and walked towards home and got to the somewhat lonely somewhat dark hill road to Vogeltown, I decided to listen to Nina Simone's Here Comes The Sun. I opened my playliist entitled Help, and tapped the song title, which expanded into the screen --
Which seemed to flash and then for a very brief moment displayed another Nina Simone song entitled Turn, Turn, Turn (something or other) -- and then died. My first thought was, well, shit, there's a symbol, my second thought was gosh, was I really listening to that before? and my third thought was to turn around, to see the car approaching up the hill, slowing down and stopping beside me, and the man inside. The window scrolled down and he said a word -- I wasn't sure what it was, edged slightly closer to the window -- he said it again -- it might have been Sorry, it sounded like a question -- he said it several times, then shrugged, drove off.
The word was Tory, I believe, the name of a street in Wellington Central which he and I were both leaving. He did not turn around, as I did to see him, because I didn't tell him to. He sailed off into the night, the wrong way.

Hataitai

I am staying at the house of

ablackart and

leaflemming while they’re in the South Island, for about a week. Today

landingtree and

justy visited, in the brief overlap of them being in the city, and Sam was coming by independently, so we all hung out and drank tea and cordial and ate, and then

justy went to her plane and Sam went home and we decided that

landingtree would stay another half hour or so; which, with the consumption of beer, ended up becoming seven hours or so, before we realised the next bus was the last bus and he really did have to go.
And it turns out this is something I really, really like. The last time I had a large nice house to invite people to for food and drink was in my last year at home when I had the Onewhero house to myself for the odd weekend; when I think back I loved it then too; I’d almost managed to forget. There was one night, the night after my eighteenth birthday, my friends came over and we played risk and I made lasagne, one of them brought beer, and one of them brought home-brewed peach-flavoured stuff that made anyone who had some go slightly cross-eyed. I was new-mintedly non-cis and bi and I was looking at everything in the world like someone just woken up from a very long, vaguely unpleasant dream who can’t quite believe their luck. After most of us had gone to bed my best friend and now sudden, intense crush and me stayed up reading to each other in the book room. In the morning we talked like we’d talked before and never talked after.
And that was not where I meant this post to go, but. Things echo forwards. I guess that evening, those evenings, were why I called myself seahearth, a year later when I felt friendless and placeless. And now, having abandoned this blog and come back to it, and left Wellington and come back to it, and made a few friends, and found Sam and ended up with a little place for us to live in— here I am in this fine house with an oven I can bake in and a view out over the Orongorongos, going too late to bed after drinking and talking with someone I love — who has seen Europe.

A peculiar New Year's Eve

Sam has a new motorscooter, gift from his parents. He lets me ride it; and last night he was going out to club and drink and be merry in non-scooting-conducive ways, so.
The thing with the scooter is, I can just go places, and not have to organise, and not take a long time getting to them. I'd done spontaneous beach trips a couple of times the last couple days; I decided I'd be a proper city person and go to the movies and go to the midnight fireworks display.
So, I ended up at The Favourite, at the Brooklyn Penthouse Cinema at 8.30 in the evening.
And gosh.
It starts brilliantly; all style, all wit. A high court, high court politics, a smart and charming young woman trying to come up from poverty, a whimsical queen and her down-to-earth friend-advisor.
( And it stays stylish, and witty, and... )
And then there is a pattern of light and dark wisping in the air, and then there is nothing. And my hands are clenched over my mouth, and a song plays, and people leave, and the song dies down, and more people leave, and the credits roll and roll in their weird hard to make out style, and at the end, right at the end under the people talking at the back who haven't left yet, there is the sound of birds. And insects. And wind through leaves. I walk out still wanting to cry and also probably smiling madly. And call Sam, while sitting on the comfy Penthouse sofa. I'm wearing my nice fancy polka dot dress

leaflemming got me on my birthday, and a woman smiles at me.
Then I ride to the very end of the Wellington coast road, which I have thought of as slightly sacred ever since me and

landingtree discovered it at the end of 2014, and which has seals living at the far end of it. And there are stars.
And I see fireworks as I ride back along the coast, and think that it's the new year, and I've missed the display. There are crowds at Oriental Bay. There are crowds in the city. But when I draw up to Frank Kitts park the countdown to 2019 is at twenty, and the fireworks start going up as I'm locking my scooter, and keep on going as I cross the road into the many many many people.
And when they finish I ride to Tass and Simon's where I am kind of housesitting, and have a gin and tonic, and go to bed.
And now it is 2019.
Happy new year.

Midsummer Midsummer

Happy solstice to all! Me and Sam are in Onewhero, and today we had a very quiet at-home day.

A walk in the evening — twisting and piling clouds in apricots and peaches and pinks and reds, colours of sky from eggshell to azure to clear dun to gold; fields lying away in ploughed red-brown, in new-leaf green, in the purple-green of established brassica. Smell of hot grass cooling, and mud in one valleylet where a stream flowed. Still air passing out of day’s heat. Shade of hills becoming evening’s dark. Full light of moon rising behind dim Eastern clouds.
And that was my solstice, though the sun stopped coming South and paused and turned around and started off North again in the morning sometime.

Rally for Reproductive Rights

Good turnout. Unexpectedly good weather. Me and a friend were discussing whether the wind was oppression to be overcome, or whether it’d shown up in solidarity — it was nice to march in, but made trouble for the speakers once we got to parliament; anyway there was no rain. The organisers were from the more intersectional and radical parts of the Wellington left, so there were speeches about disabled rights, and trans and intersex rights, and beneficiaries’ rights, and sex workers’ rights, and there was a trans inclusion chant, and “Solidarity Forever” and “Nga Iwi E” were sung, and a terf who showed up was identified and dealt with early. This is how I want our rallies to be. But there were no Maori speakers, apparently two people had to cancel. The Pakeha organiser’s replacement spiel about colonisation was not very adequate, being improvised, though it was a lot better than nothing.
A lot of people who I slightly knew there — nice, but towards the end I was getting dysphoric and anxious as I tend to in mass social situations. Very nice being in a crowd with so many other trans women though. Now I am sitting in a library de-stressing and eating lunch, and soon will go and check out fabrics for a prospective tunic.

Summer arrives

with heat and thunder. Really it arrived yesterday with less interesting semi-fine weather -- also with a mysterious package of Virginia Woolfs turning up in the mailbox as I left for work. Mrs. Dalloway made me late, I didn't manage to stop reading it when I got off my bus.
Today, I woke up much earlier, and read on a small hill with breakfast and dawn, and walked over Mt Victoria to Hataitai as it got hot to spend the day at

ablackart and

ablackart kept bringing me more books of interesting poetry. (While the thunder happened outside.) And we talked amongst my reading and

leaflemming's writing downstairs, and me and

ablackart had tea.
On the way home it was sweltering hot and no longer raining and there were people hanging out in bunches on Mein Street, semi-clad youths milling about this corner and toddlers nipping around that corner and back and middle-aged folks chatting on that grass verge. Really, it felt like a festival. The greengrocer was humming (which was emptyish and not fully stocked last time I was in there some months ago) -- and eggplant for two dollars! I didn't buy any, but, today felt blessed. Summer feels blessed; on the last day of Spring I had nothing I really wanted to read and I was bored and kind of dysfunctional, on the second day of Summer I have Woolf, and Le Guin and Tan in my stomach like helium balloons. And everything is in the sort of wave that feels like it doesn't need to break.

(The package of books was not actually from Summer it turned out, it was from Tony and Darien. Thank you Tony and Darien!!!)

Rain and things

Have now been back almost a week. A rainy week: only one day I got to garden. Two I went and sewed on Jan's machine, with her advice and help between comings and goings. (I acquired sewing things for a class I'd signed up to, then failed to show up to the class after week one. This arrangement is nicer.) One day me and Sam stayed in bed all day and went to Leaflemming and Ablackart's for dinner. One day was my birthday, and there was brunch and buying of clothes and pencils, and I had a small meltdown and had to sit on a hill with the Tao Te Ching for a while. And today I went to my doctor's for a repeat prescription, and shopped and soon shall clean the house a bit, and shall go to Darien and Tony's for dinner. Having finished Saramago's Cain I'm reading Woolf's Books and Portraits. I've never read her fiction, oddly; except I started Orlando once and was distracted. I'm finding her essays extremely readable. She reads books and lays their authors out in pieces on the table, from deep motivating principles on up to little habits and biographical details -- it's entertaining and rather terrifying, because my life is very removed from her context in which that kind of analysis makes sense, but her voice is so compelling I just want to set it loose in my head without qualifications. I will try her fiction again soon.
Quite an idle time. Hopefully it will fine up sooner than the forecast says it will.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Vogeltown, Wellington

Home

The flight was nicer this way. Sam slept, and I slept a bit and read -- Cain by Jose Saramago, take two, three quarters through and liking very much. (I finished Sherwood Smith's Inda day of botanic gardens, I love it but it's too distressing for me to think about going on into book two right now.)
We reached our own steps 2 pm ish, unpacked heaps of things returning home like us and heaps of things new here, all of which fit neater in than I expected. Lounged. Sam went out to see his stepfather in hospital -- semi-serious, but he's ok, he drove Sam back actually, on his own way home. Well, him being him that only says for sure he could drive, but I think he really is ok from what Sam said. I hope. I went on a food shop. There were all these people who were New Zealanders and all these familiar flowers and trees and it was steep and chilly.

landingtree called from Auckland airport, luck on his wings. I called Jan to arrange sewing/catching up tomorrow, if it does rain as it's supposed to and we don't have our bowls and gardening to get to.
Our last day in Melbourne we went on the Ferris Wheel. I think some of my romantic associations with them are borrowed from Susan Ferris of O, but then they really are romantic things. Up, up, up, all leasurely. The site of the Melbourne one's not perfect, I suppose they seldom have the sites they want, being so large, but from the upper parts you can just see so much. And down, down, down, still leasurely. The voice that tells you things is a shame, too loud, too eloquent, too praiseful of the city.
Then we went to The Crimes of Grindelwald at imax in the evening. Sam had never been to imax before, me not for years or to one so large. We walked in slightly late and there was an air-chase going on, a thestral-cart, people swooping, edging to our seats at the back, Grindelwald's white face, he gets who he's getting out out, an animal's murder, settling our packs down, a wizard's last-minute not-murder -- that was truly wonderful. In 3d, the only 3d I've seen in years, some of the best I've ever seen. The movie was a total, total mess, but it had that, and it had other wonderful things. I wonder, if JK Rowling had been dealt not what she was dealt with the Harry Potter reception, would she have learned to write identities she didn't invent?
Since we left, one of our two tall roses has come out in yellow bloom.

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Location: Sofa while Sam is still sleeping
Current Music: There's so much wonderful busking here

(no subject)

Last day in Melbourne... it's been a good week, but now I'm looking forward to being home. Proper tea, and family, and work, and our own bed, and the little hill up the road on which one can eat breakfast when it's fine: this travelling is all very well, says the little voice in my head, but that's what one needs.
Spent yesterday morning in the botanical gardens. Wonderful flowers, and birds, and trees. A wetland down by the Yarra with coots and swamp hens and lots and lots of rainbow lorakeets all singing the same note through the trees. Moreton bay figs taller than I knew they grew. Ravens squabbling with a magpie and a brave pigeon. Two women who smiled at me. (Here less smiles, more stares.) Walking back home by the Yarra, 28°, sun coming straight down and no shade, no hat though new sunglasses, just like sitting in front of a bonfire, or like I was a lizard, or bread toaster defrosting.
Slept most of the afternoon. Tried going off ibuprofin, that was a mistake. In the evening Sam took me to an Italian place and made me take a tablet with my green tea, so I could eat my linguini by the time it arrived. The man who hooked us in off the street, after the place we'd been aiming for wasn't there because it had just closed down, he asked us if were enjoying our meal, we were, good, he said the word "good" like our enjoyment was inevitable and simultaneously like it was a great source joy to him. And he said it very quickly as he whirled on to the next table. Later we met a huge number of bats and several possums in a park.
The day before yesterday we visited Sam's aunt Helen and uncle Chris and cousins. They're a lovely family. Helen and Sam did most of the talking, they had a lot to talk about. I was having rather an air-headed day. I'm afraid they must think me an odd choice for Sam. But after dinner Helen took me through old family photo albums.
Today we are going Ferris Wheeling, and up onto a skyscraper observation deck, and maybe to the immigration museum. And we are going to clean the apartment, and pack, and get an early night, and tomorrow home.

Friday

Am sick. I quite like this. Yesterday we took the train to Ballarat and I cuddled a wombat called Georgie at the wildlife park. Indescribably nice. The country is beautiful. Lots of different kinds of tree with the brown-red yellow-red sheen kahikitea have. And red earth. Some places just like our one whero, some deeper or richer. Cockatoos. Ravens all along Ballarat’s station road, cawing. Today went to the markets, huge. Have a wallet but not a hat. Lots of berries. We slept most of the afternoon, and Sam made me chai berry watermelon smoothies.

Aquariumming

We went out searching for a patisserie we'd heard about, but didn't find it. We settled hungrily on a mall bakery we happened to be next to - our savouries were fine, but Sam's lemon meringue pie was the best he can remember eating, and my pan au raisin was at least the nicest I've had in a long time. It wasn't a pan au raisin actually, it was an escargot: pan au raisin only got baffled looks from staff.
We were going aquariumming, but we passed St Paul's open door on the way, and were tempted in. It is magnificent; magnificent and unassuming in the way only grand churches seem to manage. St Mary's windows and her statue above the door at home are more moving to me, perhaps only from aquaintance; no, the first time I went in there I fell in love with at least two of the windows, and none of these here took me like that. Too high up, you can't study the faces. Only the one painting of Mary, and she's looking away, graceful and present only in her scene. But being in the building wasn't like being in any building I've been in, and I'll go there again. Plus, there's a very large poster saying "Welcome all refugees fully" on the outside wall, and on the way in the first language on the welcome sign is indegenous, I assume Boon Wurrung, and there's another sign saying in English, I don't remember exactly what it said, that white people have done terrible things here which have to be held in mind, and work has to be done. Which would make me want to like the building even if I didn't.
Next we were tempted by clothes shops. I got a bit stressed in the first shop because there were so many nice things, but it was queer-staffed, and Sam was very helpful and confusion-tolerant, and I ended up with a sea-green blouse and a polka dot red jersey and a lavender cardigan, all fine things in slots I wanted things for. And Sam found two lovely button up shirts in the second shop.
And next we actually made it to the aquarium! And there were jellyfish. And corals. And a huge huge jaggedy alligator that could perfectly well have decided to smash out the glass and make us lunch, it just chose not to. And penguins andd sharks and not as many seahorses as one could hope for but still some seahorses and turtles and a very large skink we could only see the back of and a green snake that was coiled around a branch and looked out at us very yellowly and never blinked because it didn't have eyelids.
Aquariums are weird.
I ate an Australian mango by the river, and Sam had one of our apples and accidentally threw the other one of our apples in the river, but I got it back. He went home, and I walked down the bank on one side and got a bit freaked out and sat on a bench for a while, and then came back up the other side and saw this:

Which is part of an open ring of about eight rocks with different carvings, near a wonderful playground, with carved posts in the ground going away from it. I stayed there a while. The carvings are all lovely, but having had possums as the enemy my whole life at home there's something more powerful than just seeing a majestic eagle's face in seeing one laid out all beautiful and belonging. And then I ended up in NGV gallery by mistake, was captivated by a painting of the desert after rain. This was after wandering flummoxed by the multitude of things, and then in the indigenous section wandering flummoxed by the foreignness of the tradition. This one, oh, I've forgotten the artist's name, I must go back there too, it was beautiful, completely catch-your-eye. And I could think well, it looks like clouds over flat ground, and read the sideblurb and see that it was that, and then look at it for a while trying to get the symbols it mentioned into my head, the white dots over the dots mean water, and water does holds light like they do, and some of these patterns mean lightning, though I don't know which ones but maybe it's those ones, and this could mean that -- a very speculative understanding, but after that I could enjoy more of the paintings. The feeling is strange. It took me a semester's course on New Zealand history to start appreciating Maori art without fear of the things I'm missing. It's exciting to be scared like that again, but not pleasant. I wish they had prints of that painting.

I came home and woke Sam up to come down and let me in, because we only have one key. And we cuddled in bed and I am here at the table now, having eaten the last two of the timtams our air B&B person left out for us.

I feel like I need to write down everything just to understand what's going on. I still don't know how I feel about the aquarium: captive fish are basically terrifying, which I guess is why my best experiences were with the things without eyes and the thing that one can feel straightforwardly terrified of. Now having written that sentence I feel I can archive those memories without a pin. I'm a bit swimming in pins. I may be posting three times a day. Which seems a bit like experiencing through camera, but I came back to the apartment to rest, and this seems to be the rest I need, so.

Tonight the fire show.

Rainy city

In Melbourne. When we disembarked it was like stepping into a warm bath; I liked it, unexpectedly. Slightly cloudy evening. This morning the clouds are low and raining, and I believe it is what people call cool. The shiny towers vanish upward into mistiness.
On the way in from the airport I kept looking at the clouds. I told myself it must be an illusion that they looked so different, then decided it was a combination of the wide expanse of sky, and being so much above gum leaves.
I have not found out the Boon Wurrung word for gum tree. No online dictionaries simply searchable, some I think I could download and I'll try that later today. It's distressing how absolutely nothing there is of the language here, to a tourist glance. There are some sculptures in the streets that look indigenous-influenced, nothing else to suggest to one that Melbourne was not the first habitation set up on this land. Google says there's a gallery of indigenous art not too far from us though, I will check it out.
Sam saw a raven on our trip in, but I was looking out the other side. Our apartment is nice, though a bit loud from the street. This morning I walked to the Yarra, and saw rainbow lorakeets. Now we are going out to breakfast and the aquarium.

Have finished Steven Universe S5!! (Some spoilers.)

( And I am very very happy. )

In other news, we're going to Melbourne in two days. It seems quite soon. Also at work today I was given a pair of extremely fancy shoes and lots and lots of coathangers. And sweet coconut water. And semolina cake drenched in rose-and-lemon syrup. Which is called.... I can't remember what it's called. Basically my employers are pretty nice.

A little bit late...

I am kind of a mess. I haven't felt like blogging, maybe because that would require some kind of distance from and reflection on things. But I said I'd blog every week, and it's been eight days, and I'd like to do what I said I'd do.
So....
This has been a really, really shit week for Sam. Previous times like this we've pretty much folded, because when I see someone lying on the ground under a large pile of rocks I go "Ooh look, rocks" and crawl underneath the pile as well -- but this time I'm managing not to do that so much, so one of us can still do the maintaining basic functionality things. I think I'm learning a bit from Sam, who has been a good support person as long as I've known him.
The odd thing is I'm actually doing better than I have been in ages, in terms of getting things done and being vaguely cheerful about it. I'm getting to work, and doing the work that needs doing at home, and getting out to do family things such as boardgaming at

ablackart and

leaflemming's tonight and going to a play with Jan tomorrow night; I'm moderately happy, and not stressed about the future, or anything really beyond getting through the week. Which feels manageable. I think I used to be someone who enjoyed crisis; maybe I still kind of am. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

At the weekend Sam took me to see Bohemian Rhapsody. I liked it.

leaflemming tells me it's not accurate story-wise, which is upsetting. But what I want to say is how something struck me during an AIDS hospital scene: that if climate change is as bad for humans as it might be, and all our civilisations break down, and even if we all die, it won't be worse than what people have gone through before. Because when everything that your heart belongs to is ending, it probably doesn't matter how much survives? There's no reason this should have occurred to me at that moment, not when watching or reading or thinking about other catastrophes -- or when watching Pose earlier this year, which portrays the AIDS epidemic more powerfully. But it did: we aren't different. Worlds have often been ending. Whatever happens there will be trees. When there are no more trees there will be stones.
And of course one needs to keep on living in the world that may end, and hopefully working for it to not end yet; but comfort beyond that scale is useful.

I should probably go to bed because it's getting towards one o'clock and I have work tomorrow. I also want to say though that the fifth season of Steven Universe is wonderful and wonderful and everyone should watch it.