I wrote that last post with all the hopes of reassuring myself that I am cool and nonchalant and totally okay with not being in control of things, because when you are okay with not being in control that is just like being in control.

Facts are facts- I'm not quite panicking. Quite.

But there are some lovely things that sustain me, and that's a good feeling. Permit me to share a few.


My Gentleman has a job that he loves and it pays well and gives him health insurance, and when we get hitched it will give me health insurance.

We live in a safe and comfy apartment and have all our needs for food and shelter well met.

My bad tendon in my foot is getting slowly better as I work on it, and it feels less hurty all the time.

I have gotten a haircut short enough that the back of my neck is no longer a mullet.

My family is all in good health and employed in jobs that they like and they're doing okay.

Cooking is both necessary and relaxing, so doing it doesn't really count as procrastinating. I have learned a new way to cut up an onion that is much much faster, so I cry less on the whole doing that.

I will be moving out of this apartment in the summer, rather than the freezing winter, and I will be able to see the new place and make judgements on its kitchen.

Apropos of nothing but Dirty Jobs.

I'm at my parents' home, which entails all of the usual adjustments of going from MY HOME to living in someone else's. I am, at best, curmudgeonly towards my parents' cats- they moved in last year around this time, but I only met them this summer. They like to knock over things that I own and I really cannot predict at all where they will get into- it's like living with squirrels.

My brother, the major reason for the cats' existence in this home, will be arriving by plane in the next few hours, to my joy and amusement. He's delightful, and I've only seen him in once in the last year- not okay. When my Gentleman got home from our joint visit to my parents (with HIS parents as well, big big deal), he found a birthday gift from my brother waiting for me. My birthday is November 23rd. :D

I have had a long and annoying struggle with upgrading my internet, or should I say, helping SOMEONE in his mad scheme to get faster internet over the pokey but reliable internet that already worked.

I could go on, but it would only swiftly become a rant with no redeeming humor. It's the same old story of "We thought this would be simple and nice to have, but it's hard to get and not worth the effort."

The end result is internet that, while hooked up properly for the first time in two weeks (after six technician visits and two days of my time), is now noticeably slower than the "slow" internet setup we had before that took no installation and had worked for two years. And technician #7 will be showing up later today.

However! On the redeeming side, I finally got the intestinal fortitude to put my foot down and make that SOMEONE be the new pointperson for handling this, so while the internet might be going in and out again, I don't have to deal with it firsthand anymore. (I actually got a call a few hours ago, that AT&T was running ahead of schedule and could they come earlier? Nope! I have planns, suckers! which I will not be canceling for you, unlike the first two times you decided to drop by and stay for four hours.) I'm willing to call that a win at the moment. I expect that by the end of the day we will get back to the first service we had, if possible, and that will be the end of that.

In other news, I'm learning Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian to impress the future in-laws and it's going quite nicely. I think that the class introducing more grammar than they need to, right off the bat, but I've got German, Latin, and Greek under my belt so the stuff that is throwing other students off is old hat to me.

I have a thesis that I need to work on, but it's not happening today- the internet is too pokey for me to be able to do the kind of heavy research that I need to do.

Well, I waited to see how the new Delicious owners would handle the service, and wow. It's pretty awful. So, to Diigo with my bad self, and we'll see if I've screwed up my bookmarks after all.

The pace of my grad school life tends towards intensity with periodic moments of panicked relaxation. I've gotten so used to being pushed to my limits and the corresponding thrill of learning and doing so much in a short period of time that taking a break requires re-learning how to slow down.

This summer was much the same: my summer gig, being a chaplain at a very very poor hospital, pounced on me just hours after I managed to finish my final papers and shoo my in-laws-to-be out the door. Just before the end of that, the Boy started his permanent (ihopeihopeihope) job and I had to start cooking for the two of us. I got about two weeks to myself, mostly for vegetative purposes, before rocketing off to my family home for a week to do some wedding planning at breakneck pace.

And now, school is about to start up again- my last year looks like it's shaping up nicely, but I'm currently trying to get my ducks in a row in terms of health care before the quarter starts up. I've some sleeping to do, which always seems to come best when I end my day totally exhausted and need to be in shape to get ready for the next incredibly difficult job. The breakneck pace has gotten to be a habit, and while I sometimes hate it, I just enough rope not to hang myself.

Does cooking drive anyone else mad? I've just cooked (rather hectically) a dinner for my Gentleman's birthday- it went over quite well, but in the last minutes of wrapping up his present while he hid in the kitchen, I left the first batch of rice to burn and undercooked the bok choy. (In my own estimation- the Gentleman approved of them.)

I don't get this way when I cook for myself, but on the other hand, when I was for one, I hardly ever experimented. I defaulted to humus and veggies or pasta more often than not. But when other people are involved I feel pressured to book more and better, and to try new things.

I've been obsessing and gathering data about make-up in the last month or so. It's a pattern: Around finals time every quarter/semester, I develop a creative obsession to allow me to ignore finals. Baking! Origami! Watercolor painting on very small paper! Bookbinding!

So, I've been poking through a lot of cosmetics companies' websites and product descriptions, comparing them to the recommendations of actual humans, and wading through the bullshit. It's been a fun run, because I get to play with pretty colors and brushes! And feel pretty!*

But I've noticed quite a bit how there is a clear discrepancy between the cosmetics websites and the actual human reviews and make-up vids. The vids contain humans performing femme (all cisfemale as far as I can tell/they're willing to tell) of all shapes and sizes and races. Particularly, there are people of color in RL vids, comparing notes and talking about techniques that work well with the range of skin tones and facial shapes associated with their own race.

But on the corporate websites? I have found one website so far that has any vids especially by/for POC's. ONE. (BareEscentuals, if you care.)

At first I was like, yay! Good job, BareEscentuals! I was just kind of happy that they noticed that hey, not everyone trying to buy makeup from [insert company] is as white as KitewithFish! Just pleased, really, I was.

Except that I shouldn't really have to be this pleased by such a little thing. I should think this is standard. Because it should be standard. Unless a company wants to have their slogan be, "[Insert company], cosmetics for Whites!" just as some companies really have made similar slogans about marketing themselves specifically to people of color.

My mind is trying to make me go to an angry place about this, because I've always associated the kind of passive attempting-antiracism mindset that notices the lack of POC's in the big make-up companies' mind with a kind of righteous rage about it. But more honestly, my first reaction is to just be sad. It just makes me sad that this thing that was just fun for me is hurtful and erasing to other humans, because I have to go shopping for clothes and find out that no-one had someone as short and as fat as me in mind when designing clothes and I feel erased and hurt, so I turned to make-up to be a one-size-fits-all-and-looks-great-doing-it solution, only.... not so much.


*Which goes to show just how deep the whole performing femininity thing goes, yes, but also works with my growing sense that I get to play femme my way, rather than the way I was told to back in eighth grade. I play with femme with the parts of femme that I enjoy, like choosing "girly" clothes, high heels when I want to bother, thinking about making my body look as good as I feel, picking out jewelry (or accepting it with pleasure as a gift), and playing with make-up.
Hair? bah, not my thing. I'd consider shaving my head again this summer but I think that I'd get more flak on that than I am willing to deal with. So I have some hair at the moment, but it's about an inch and a half and I've not done anything do it-just let it grow out from my peach-fuzz cut and washed it as needed. It's not a part of femme I feel like experimenting with right now.

Kind and gentle folk! Some of you are wearers of makeup!

Kind and wise elders, TELL ME WHAT YOU USE TO DO MAKEUP ON THE GO!

Background: I'm seeing someone regularly, which means we're living together in two apartments. I frequently get up from spending the night at his place and head out without stopping at my place, which means that the makeup that lives in my purse is the makeup that I put on regularly.

Right now, that means: a set of two cheap little eyeshadow brushes, a cream blush from Revlon with a little mirror in it, a dark brown powder that doubles as eyebrow liner and eyeshadow (from an Etsy vendor), and an eyeshadow compact with several complementary colors, from Revlon.

What works for you? What do you advise against? What's a great product that you can sneakily use for two things (cream blush and lip gloss!)

Random Dresden Thought-
Harry's father did not die of normal means. Instead, he was drowned in Lake Michigan, and Harry can summon up the elemental power of the lake through the blood and bones of his relative. Bonus points for apparitions of his father.