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I'm Still Here
Jul. 18th, 2024 10:00 amI haven't written in a couple days because I've been a bit busy. On Tuesday I was in the zone at the day job, and then spent the afternoon doing laundry and cleaning up the living room a bit to prepare for a guest, Le Chien.
Le Chien is an old and very dear friend who used to lived with us when I first moved to CA back in 2006. He's a particle physicist who used to work at SLAC in Stanford, but had to leave the country when science funding dried up. After a stint in CERN, he now teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris! He's one of the smartest, kindest people I know -- and definitely the most British.
His teaching schedule and very wide social network means we don't get a visit from him as often as we like, but when he does come around it's a cause for celebration! He'll be staying until next Tuesday, flying to visit friends elsewhere for a week, then coming back to celebrate his birthday with us! It's a lot of fun; he's an easy guest, and it's great to catch up with him. I wanted to be a better host for him than in previous visits, so made sure to prepare the futon for his arrival, dust and clean the surfaces around it, and set up a little charging station by the bed. Sneppers, for his part, seriously decluttered our DVD stores.
Yesterday was the first day with Le Chien in attendance, so another busy day. I had a lot of meetings at the day job too -- one impromptu, where I helped a newbie walk through a ticket they were having trouble with. I learned an awful lot through that, and it made me reflect on the progress I've made here in just under a year's time. It also made me feel a LOT better about being so nervous first starting out, since the newbie was going through the same thing I was. It's a small thing, but it's nice to have independent verification that the on-boarding process is practically non-existent here.
I volunteered to help with the creation of a generic workflow that could be expanded to form the basis of a Work Instruction document that hopefully gives new colleagues a fairly comprehensive overview on how to do the work. I get the feeling that everyone has a fairly unique process, but if we can crowd-source a standardized workflow based on best practices from everyone it would be a really strong resource.
Progress in all other aspects of life are...slow, but steady. Writing hasn't been happening, and I haven't been keeping as tight a grip on my finances as I'd like. But I have been paying more attention to my grooming and cleanliness around the house, making a conscious effort to reflect on the good things in my life, and being more mindful about my...tendency to hide what I'm doing.
The good things? Well, I'm always grateful for my friends and support network. Sneppers has been responsive to preferences and has really put himself out there to work with me on becoming more open and intimate. I realize how much I've grown distant from him, especially now that I'm working to be more affectionate. I had been braced for pain/unpleasant feelings at his touch, and it made me really jumpy. To be clear, pain in the sense of nipple tweaks, biting, etc. I don't know if it feels like this for anyone else, but those kinds of stimuli take me right out of my body in ways I just can't process at the time. My instinct is to freeze (show no emotion) and try to process internally as fast as I can, which...isn't great for intimacy.
But they're totally normal things, and the way that Sneppers likes to be physically affectionate! It felt like very much a "ME" problem since I know my...experience of many things are heightened in ways it's hard to put across. I don't want to discourage him from being himself, but at the same time I have to be open about how things work with me. Nipple play isn't bad, or something only monsters do. Biting isn't bad. It just crashes against my particular baggage in ways I can't cope with immediately. And that makes that kind of intimacy hard.
I'm happy I'm in a place where I can...tease that apart without emotions hijacking the reflection quite so much. It's easier to let go of the most difficult feelings around that because I understand where they're coming from.
In general I feel a bit more grounded, which lets me show up for people a bit more often than I have been. And recognize all the ways I haven't been showing up for people before now. <:)
Le Chien is an old and very dear friend who used to lived with us when I first moved to CA back in 2006. He's a particle physicist who used to work at SLAC in Stanford, but had to leave the country when science funding dried up. After a stint in CERN, he now teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris! He's one of the smartest, kindest people I know -- and definitely the most British.
His teaching schedule and very wide social network means we don't get a visit from him as often as we like, but when he does come around it's a cause for celebration! He'll be staying until next Tuesday, flying to visit friends elsewhere for a week, then coming back to celebrate his birthday with us! It's a lot of fun; he's an easy guest, and it's great to catch up with him. I wanted to be a better host for him than in previous visits, so made sure to prepare the futon for his arrival, dust and clean the surfaces around it, and set up a little charging station by the bed. Sneppers, for his part, seriously decluttered our DVD stores.
Yesterday was the first day with Le Chien in attendance, so another busy day. I had a lot of meetings at the day job too -- one impromptu, where I helped a newbie walk through a ticket they were having trouble with. I learned an awful lot through that, and it made me reflect on the progress I've made here in just under a year's time. It also made me feel a LOT better about being so nervous first starting out, since the newbie was going through the same thing I was. It's a small thing, but it's nice to have independent verification that the on-boarding process is practically non-existent here.
I volunteered to help with the creation of a generic workflow that could be expanded to form the basis of a Work Instruction document that hopefully gives new colleagues a fairly comprehensive overview on how to do the work. I get the feeling that everyone has a fairly unique process, but if we can crowd-source a standardized workflow based on best practices from everyone it would be a really strong resource.
Progress in all other aspects of life are...slow, but steady. Writing hasn't been happening, and I haven't been keeping as tight a grip on my finances as I'd like. But I have been paying more attention to my grooming and cleanliness around the house, making a conscious effort to reflect on the good things in my life, and being more mindful about my...tendency to hide what I'm doing.
The good things? Well, I'm always grateful for my friends and support network. Sneppers has been responsive to preferences and has really put himself out there to work with me on becoming more open and intimate. I realize how much I've grown distant from him, especially now that I'm working to be more affectionate. I had been braced for pain/unpleasant feelings at his touch, and it made me really jumpy. To be clear, pain in the sense of nipple tweaks, biting, etc. I don't know if it feels like this for anyone else, but those kinds of stimuli take me right out of my body in ways I just can't process at the time. My instinct is to freeze (show no emotion) and try to process internally as fast as I can, which...isn't great for intimacy.
But they're totally normal things, and the way that Sneppers likes to be physically affectionate! It felt like very much a "ME" problem since I know my...experience of many things are heightened in ways it's hard to put across. I don't want to discourage him from being himself, but at the same time I have to be open about how things work with me. Nipple play isn't bad, or something only monsters do. Biting isn't bad. It just crashes against my particular baggage in ways I can't cope with immediately. And that makes that kind of intimacy hard.
I'm happy I'm in a place where I can...tease that apart without emotions hijacking the reflection quite so much. It's easier to let go of the most difficult feelings around that because I understand where they're coming from.
In general I feel a bit more grounded, which lets me show up for people a bit more often than I have been. And recognize all the ways I haven't been showing up for people before now. <:)
