who only by moving can balance

(1) I thought Easyjet had somehow, inexplicably, through considerable application of effort, lost the clothes guards off my wheelchair -- to the extent that I actually did the lost baggage form-filling. I then went to have one last forlorn look at the baggage carousel, stood up temporarily, and they... clattered??? out of the back of my chair??? I have NO IDEA HOW but it's much less grim than I expected.

(2) To my mild surprise, I am just about managing competent interactions in French, to the extent that I'm having to interpolate a lot and very sheepishly ask people to repeat themselves more slowly. This includes "explaining that my clothes guards vanished", "enquiring politely about having a place in a restaurant for dinner", and "explaining what the fuck we're even doing" as polite smalltalk to the airport assistance.

(3) I have spent a lot of today either asleep (in a cozy slopy-ceiling nest) or sitting on a sofa watching snow fall on the Alps and reading short fiction. I have done some physio. It is all very pleasant.

My Very Sad E-mail to the railcard folk got answered - quartzpebble let me forward the e-mail and assured me it wasn't a disaster, which is also some of how I deal with e-mails I don't wanna - very briefly, to the effect of "sorry about this, I see customer services have now sorted this."

... so I logged in on the website to check, and the status is now "dispatched". Which means it will be with me soon. Which means that I might have a card in the wrong damn name but I will at least have a card without having had to give them a name I didn't want to, and that's... a thing. *relief*

(However, I suspect this means that a different member of the team got assigned to verify my evidence-of-entitlement when I resubmitted and the structure's still fucked? WHATEVER I AM SORTED FOR THE NEXT THREE YEARS.)

I spent this evening in the company of carmilla, sebastienne and shortcipher; they all acquiesced to being dragged along to see open-air Much Ado About Nothing, and better than that, they organised picnic food. So I sat sprawled on a lawn with some of my favourite people watching my favourite Shakespeare in the sunshine, with strawberries, and it was glorious; and then, eventually, it finished, and we set off on our walk home, and as we passed the river we looked over it to the green and saw people spinning fire poi in the gathering dark.

( And then, of course, people happened. )

It's been another year in which Neil Gaiman has done things which distress or annoy me, but it's also the first year in which I feel I can say that this wish came wholeheartedly true:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

I got medicated. I didn't plan suicide. I started afresh with wanting to learn. I got DLA and a wheelchair - and another wheelchair. I took a train to Germany, cooked a huge pile of lasagna with footpad, (finally!) met his wonderful beautiful dog, and watched him get married. I spent a glorious, fantastic, nonsensical week in Singapore (with a day-trip to Malaysia) with noldo, mustela_nivalis, and azuire, and I've got the Myspace photo of the four of us on the southernmost point of continental Asia on my bedside table. I learned to code - I've got five? six? patches actually live in the actual Dreamwidth codebase. I migrated my Dreamhack from Mercurial Queues in a CVS repository to github. I went to Edinburgh for the Fringe - I never thought I'd be cool enough to do that. I went to Austria and read scientific papers and watched the swallows migrating and felt like I was home. I read and I wrote - poetry I take seriously; fanfic I take seriously; fanfic I really don't; songs for Lashings, safer space policies for VP; essays and analyses and notelets and most of my Master's project and my diary. I kissed really rather a lot of people who think I'm wonderful. I made a library; I made new friends; I made grad school applications.

I took care of myself. I made mistakes; I was kind, as much as I could be. I took care of other people, as much as I could do.


So here's my plan for 2013: I'm going to try to graduate, and if that doesn't work out that's okay. Whatever else happens, I'm going to spend the summer on me. Come autumn I'll move on to something new - and I don't yet know what, but I don't have to, either. I'm going to read poetry and novels and some more of the Hard Stuff, because I'm starting to be in a place where I can cope with that again. I'm going to finish watching Buffy and Angel. I'm going to write.

I'm going to take risks and I'm going to take care and I'm going to keep on finding out how to best be myself.

Thank you all, so much, for taking care of me and sticking with me this year. Here's to you. <3

My current daily pain relief regime looks a little like this:

mefenamic acid 3x500mg daily
paracetamol 8x500mg daily
buscopan 3x10mg daily

diclofenac gel (as and when)
codeine (as and when)

I've done a shitton today. I've co-run a social; I've done a lot of errands in town; I've hung out with some friends; I've played a game of Scrabble and not done too shabbily; I've turned my mattress and generally reorganised my room a little and done some paperwork.

I've also taken 75mg of codeine, applied the diclofenac gel liberally four or five times, and contemplated faffing around with my TENS machine.

... it's the first proper day of my period and I can DO STUFF. I've been stopped in my tracks by the pain pretty frequently nonetheless, sure, but do you know what? What I HAVEN'T been is curled up miserably in bed all day.

This is kind of magic.