I have a new job.
This is thanks to Kelly, as my last one was, and indeed is. That was dishwashing an office's teacups and plates and so-forth nightly, and this will be general tidying and arranging and making sure the dud pens get thrown out and watering plants and so forth, at the parent office to the other one. The parent office is much nicer, and I'll be there afternoons rather than evenings, so working around actual people rather than just their teacups. (!) I'm pleased. It'll be slightly more work slightly less well paid, adding up to a bit more money total, and hopefully costing less in sleep. It may cost more in coursework, but I theorise that actually it may not when the sleep and more-pleasantness is accounted for.

Meanwhile exams start Saturday with earth science, and I think I will be okay with that. More alarming is the 50% performance critique due Sunday. What is my thesis regarding Under Milk Wood reimagined as a hip-hop musical? I am not sure. I have been calling the last few days after seeing it necessary time for stewing, but tomorrow I will make a serious go at that.

And now I have a socialists' book group to go to. There are many interesting things.

I have too much to write about now. It is early in the morning, I couldn’t sleep so have just finished the Ivan Coyote & Rae Spoon book.

Things:
-Tomorrow, I am having my eyebrows tamed. (This was what the shop-person wrote down, and I was rather taken by it.) I wrote a poem about this which got very out of hand, but fortunately the computer seems to have swallowed it. More or less I am pleased -- I’m looking forwards to it, but also part of me thinks wistfully of Mr. Provo saying my eyebrows would probably turn out like his eventually. Even though there will more than ample eventually left should I change my mind on that point, it seems like breaking some sort of faith in a small way, even if one that needs breaking. I suppose I mind leaving the person people used to think of me as more when they’re probably never going to meet me how I am now.

-Yesterday, I went to Tiki Taane Mahuta in the opera house with some theatre people. Our cheap tickets got us the back top row where you lose the top third of the screen where screen-people’s faces tend to go, and all of the musicians except Tiki Taane’s head – but the dancers were incredible, and they were most of it.

-Yesterday also I had an earth science test, which went quite well. (I think.) Mostly common sense and basic graphing, except for the eons and periods and epochs and so forth. I had trouble with the epochs. Going over my lab book in Espressoholic with a feta and spinach muffin beforehand did not get me up to there.

I have been wondering why I am finding physics less interesting at the moment. One thing is that I can’t work quickly enough, I think. Lately I’ve been walking in the gardens a lot, which is lovely, because you can go very very slowly and look at trees and randomly sit down for ten minutes when you find a pleasant bench. This is how I like to do physics too, I think, and at school that worked because there wasn’t much of it to do, but here not so much. Aiden on my floor can still do it like that, he’s a maths-major and brilliant, but for me to I’d have to do not much else.
That is one possible explanation. Another of a different sort is that living in families physics was a way of having something entirely mine, and here I have enough that is entirely mine.
Oh and there was a third thing. https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/1/19/14266230/empathy-morality-ethics-psychology-science-compassion-paul-bloom. Tara shared this the other day. It’s fascinating. (And, Justy, relevant to what we were talking about re imagination.) I wonder if I am trying to be more compassionate and less empathetic lately, or as I’d been thinking of it more grounded in myself – and if empathy is analogous to the practice of science, getting inside something and trying to understand it from its own perspective, even if it doesn’t have a perspective, rather than looking at it from the outside.
All of which adds up, or all of other things, to me wondering about trying more arts papers next semester and seeing how that goes.

Alright, that is fairly ramshackle as a blog post, and it isn’t all of the too many things, but they are too many, and it’s almost a reasonable time to be getting up. I will read over this again in a while before posting it and see if it makes sense. Tony: I keep starting to reply to bits of your email and realising I don’t know what I’m saying! It’s a very good email. I will aim to at least make clear what it is I don’t know about what I’m saying, sometime in the near future, perhaps once there has been breakfast.
Oh and Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon are very very neat. I want to lend the book to people. But then it wouldn’t be on my shelf for an unknown quantity of time. I will resolve this dilemma. If anyone actively wants to borrow it let me know, and that might tip the balance.

So my thought with this is I can put things here that are generally about my life and not personally directed, and they'll be generally accessible, and I won't have to worry about who I'm writing them to and not writing them to.

For example: I have just been to the GP to very broadly discuss hormone treatment. Broadly as in, I don't know if I would want this or when I would want it but I would like to understand it better as an option. (What I understand currently is that the receptionist who said a regular GP would have the information I want had an incomplete picture of the system, but I have a referral, and the regular GP was very pleasant.)
(I have also just been reading the amazing Ivan Coyote's book about gender identity, which David brought me back from the writer's fest. More on them later. But they make me realise, again, again, how vastly lucky I am. I was talking about this with David last night -- he said that the bar shouldn't be so low as to count him and the rest of you as exceptional. But it is, and you are, and thank-you for being.
Close bracket.)

Two quick things: I think commenting should work whether or not people have accounts. If not let me know, and I'll try to change that in my settings.

And seahearth. I couldn't think of a name, so I opened a book of my stories at a random place, and it said "Ah, Rosa, I am so lucky, to be here in this house with all of you." And then I opened Tales of Moominvalley at a random place and read the story about the fillyjonk who is afraid of disasters living by the sea. And then with seahearth in mind I opened my laptop and its opening screen was a coast with red stones in neat rectangular brickish formations. And the picture is from Ponyo.

I hope this setup works for you. It's an experiment. If not, do tell me.