The Packbats' Dreamfeed

A while ago, a journalist I know online was asking people in the UK who were still masking if we would like to answer some questions about it. I did, but I never heard back so I don't know if anything came of it and I liked my answers enough to record them for my own benefit.

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Tonight diffrentcolours@tech.lgbt drilled holes in bricks to install brackets that let us hang our bikes from the wall. It frees up a bunch of space in our dining room, where they've just rested against the radiator forever. It also makes the bikes look like they're floating in the air.

I helped by being there to hand him things as he needed them so he didn't have to keep stepping on and off the stepstool in the corner that even he needed to get the brackets at the correct height. I said it was a shame he didn't have a little floating shelf there to put all the stuff on, and he said "Yep, instead I have you for a floating shelf." I was very happy to be a furniture -- I didn't want the job of drilling which I find scary because I'm prone to fucking it up.

A half dozen or so of us at work have started a book club. The first month I didn't get around to reading the book, which is fine because it was apparently terrible. This month we chose some literary fiction which is fine but I'm not used to it.

The audiobook is sixteen hours and forty-nine minutes long!

I've been using a perfectly good app to listen to audiobooks for a year or more but I bought the paid version because that was necessary to listen at higher speeds than 1x (normal).

All my library books (different app) get listened to at 1.5x or 1.75x.

It was a good decision, I'm 21% of the way through the book now.

1) What's one of the nicest things a friend has ever done for you?

diffrentcolours and mother_bones making it very clear to me that I had options, when my marriage felt too difficult to extract itself from, they just loved me and waited for me and made sure I never felt like I was alone.

They let me stay here without paying for much the first few months so I didn't have to worry about money (which I appreciated so much but also when I got money I appreciated that they let me pay it back because it was really important to me, rather than to them, that I do that).

They took on me at my most messed-up and Gary just as he was starting to be a lot of work, and adjusted their lives repeatedly to meet our needs. And they've continued to provide a warm, safe, functional and pleasant house for me to live in ever since.

2) What's one of the nicest things a stranger has ever done for you?

In 2018 I went to London with friends. The plan was to stay overnight, see Hamilton, and then one of them was taking me to Brussels on the Eurostar so I could make use of my less-than-a-year-old British passport to travel within the EU while the UK was still part of it.

By the time the play had finished, I had a Facebook message from a stranger. She said she was staff on the train we'd gotten to London, she'd found the little plastic wallet that I had my railcard and train tickets in which I'd apparently dropped on the floor rather than putting back in my bag after the tickets had been inspected, and that she'd handed it in at Euston so it'd be waiting for me on my return.

Without that ticket wallet, both me and my companion traveling on my disabled railcard would've had to buy new tickets from London to Manchester which is exorbitantly expensive especially at the last minute, and it would've been a cost that was utterly beyond me at that point. And I would have wanted to cover it since it would've been 100% my fault that I'd lost the tickets!

I am so grateful to that lady. So clever of her to look up the railcard name on Facebook to communicate with me, and thank goodness I didn't have a common name! (Also lucky for me it was the same name; since my railcard eligibility is my Certificate of Visual Impairment and since that's in my old name, my railcard is in my old name too; I've been calling it my "blind name" lately for this reason as a lot of things depend on that: so like at the gym I'm getting a discounted membership for being disabled and that means the other day when the gym staff asked my name as I was signing in, I had to think quickly to get it right! Anyway, this method wouldn't even work for finding me on Facebook these days but it did back in the days of Hamilton and Britain being in the EU.)

I got in touch with the train company to lavish compliments on her and I hope they gave her whatever treats or bonuses they offer. It was a small effort for her but it made a huge difference to me.

3) What is a trait in another person that you instantly admire, and that draws you to them?

Vulnerability and emotional fluency.

4) What is a trait in another person that instantly repels you, and prevents you from forming a close relationship with them?

Treating people as things, as Granny Weatherwax describes it.

5) Time to vent: tell us about something rotten someone has done to you.

Two of the three people I was with Answer 3 aren't in my life any more, both related to the same instigating incident where almost all my friends and my community fell for some DARVO, ghosted on me, and/or apparently still drastically misunderstand the circumstances in Answer 1. This being unrelated to but almost perfectly timed with the beginning of the pandemic was incredibly isolating. It's taken time to rebuild friendships and a sense of community, but good progress has been made over the last couple years.

I am endlessly amused that V and my mom have the same birthday. This is all the proof I need that astrology is unreliable: I could hardly imagine two more different people.

V liked the present I got for them, a t-shirt that says "All done" on it, under a sheet ghost who is apparently doing the bsl sign for that thing? I didn't even know that, V told me. I already thought sheet ghost (which they love) plus sentiment they find very relatable was good enough, but they're even more delighted with it than I expected.

And the flowers I ordered for my mom actually did turn up (doing this kind of thing internationally when you're sending them to the middle of nowhere is always an ordeal and I had to use a new company this year so I worried)!

Mom sent me an email thanking me. I even got what was clearly meant to be a photo attached, but is instead a two-second video of the flowers sitting on their kitchen counter. Which is even cuter if anything.

(I only get like one photo from my parents a year, because in between they forget how to attach them to emails.)

D and I were walking home from an errand when we ran into Pickle, a little French bulldog, and her human (whose name of course I have no idea of). We were near one of our old dog-walking destinations, and she recognized D and I right away -- she called out "where's your dog?"

We stopped and chatted, shared the sad news about Gary, and she was really sweet about how you alway miss them and them and the company they provide. She said her mum's birthday is soon -- or has just been, recently? -- "and even though she's been gone six years I still miss her."

It was really nice to run in to her, and I'm impressed that she recognized us without the dog; I don't know that I'd recognize her without Pickle!

I had so much work to do today, and yet an hour after I started I still hadn't managed to log in to my computer.

I had to change my password yesterday (yay security theater! thanks I hate it!). Today I could log in on my phone but not my laptop. I carefully typed my password so many times. Always the same response. I even went through the inaccessible process to change the password AGAIN so then had to remember the new new one and not mix it up with the old new one all these times I typed it... (I even tried the old old one a few times, just in case.)

I felt like I was coming unglued from reality.

I had to call IT.

I hate my workplace IT. I hate it so much I just lived with a fairly significant problem (not being able to access some documents I need), for years, after repeated attempts at getting them to fix this problem that ended with them not even listening to it or understanding it. As soon as they heard a word that meant it could be someone else's fault they switched off, and no amount of me explaining that there wasn't anything anyone else could do and it started when they made me use an authenticator app which I get is more secure than SMS but also didn't fucking have the settings I needed... I just gave up trying and do without access to those things.

So for me to call them is really dire straits. But I have a ton of work to do and it has to be done today! So I called.

The guy I got told me to do a thing that I said I couldn't when I couldn't even log in. He barely let me finish talking before he said, "Totally incorrect."

I don't know if you've ever offered a simple problem -- like "how can I do anything on the computer if I can't log in?" --only to be met with "Totally incorrect" as a reply but lemme tell you, it has a really physical effect!

I could hardly hear what he was saying after that because I was doing that wheezing, disbelieving laugh that I associate with Michael Hobbes being on a podcast where he's just been told something that a fascist has said. I was actually speechless. It actually knocked the breath right out of me.

People just...should not talk to each other like that!

I just hung up on him.

In the process of treating me like a Victorian schoolboy who was about to get beaten for making a mistake in his Latin, he'd inadvertently reminded me of something that would actually help me address the problem, so I hung up and did that.

But at 10:30 this morning I still hadn't gotten any work done because I had to log back into everything on my phone since I'd changed the password again, and process all the emotions I've been through before I'd even had a chance to make tea... It took most of the morning to do that, make breakfast and settle down to my task. I didn't manage to empty the dishwasher or give Mr. Smith his meds or get my laundry out of the dryer or anything else I might do in a day. I barely managed lunch.

But! I sent off the much-awaited long-overdue first draft to my boss and his boss, the next stage, at 16:44 today. Is it a good first draft? No! Is it done, 16 minutes before the end of the last possible work day I said it'd be done for after pushing the deadline twice? Yes!

Bless the bus driver who is not making me pay £2 for a bus that leaves at 9:29 when my disabled pass means I get free bus travel from 9:30. (I don't have to pay at home but I'm outside Greater Manchester for once, and it works within England but only at the statutory minimum times, between 9:30am and 11pm).

The driver said "I set off in one minute so in two minutes you can tap your pass." So I went and sat down and he said "alright mate, scan your pass now!" and I got up from my seat to trot back to the front of the bus and do it.

Between these two events, someone on the bus sneezed (yet more reason to be glad I wear a mask on public transport!), and someone else further back the bus shouted "bless you!" People are so nice here (I'm in Chester).

Though I did feel a bit out of place for thanking the driver, which is pretty normal here but no one else getting off the bus did there. And it was an unusually heartfelt thanks too, he really had helped me out!