juushika

so we're ... starting house buying in earnest? to have finished the stressful "arrange money; attain loan agent" and the somewhat more arbitrary "find a realtor" (we went with the lady that I found via tiny regional life/housing in Olympia YouTube videos that I used when researching Olympia itself. and they must also be effective advertizing, because she was the first name we thought of! and she was so easy to get ahold of and left a good positive first impression, unlike any of the others we called. so YouTube lady it is; it only seems like the lazy choice, you see.)—anyway all of that does feel like an accomplishment, although when I say "we" did this what I mean is that I did most of the research and Devon did all of legwork.

but to have accomplished that and now, officially, be in the stage not of preparing or of browsing homes to understand the region/market/what sort of home we'd want to own, but to be in the stage of active searching, of "if I find the right house I can turn around and tell my realtor and maybe start the whole process of buying" is uhhhhhh surreal and incredibly fucking stressful. it means suddenly knowing the difference between "maybe this would work/maybe I could make these compromises" and "I will spend a ton of money on this specific house and then, like, live there? I guess?" Devon remind me that the realtor's literal job is to be a middleman to field questions and concerns about a property, because listings are just so garbage. I don't care if your 3D tour or floor plan is accurate really; I know they're expensive and that's why you want to avoid them; but literally I cannot tell how these rooms connect to one another so, please, I'm begging, give me something. when buying from out of state you can't just pop by a quick open house. so that's what a realtor is for! but it's like someone just said "let me know if you need anything!" to which the only correct response is "I have an anxiety disorder so I will never, ever ask for help on literally anything." but even if I do step forward with "I am 95% sure we want this specific house, let's start that process" it will still require requesting help from someone, so fuck me I guess.

I don't like it, it's not fun window shopping anymore, it's an active decision, a big decision, requiring interacting with others and spending a lot of money. that's bad.

⁂

anyway, feelings-vent in Toki Pona on approximately these same things, written last night. particular thoughts:

mi as universal first person pronoun, that is to say, including both singular & plural, is especially productive here. it's possible to specify we [mi mute = many mi] but not necessary; it's already part of mi. and eliding the things I did/the things me and my partner did to enable the thing I/we can do now gives me a sense of ownership & accomplishment. see above caveat re: research vs legwork: "mi" consolidates that. money stuff is really hard for me, really this whole process is "things specifically where I have no confidence and feel like I have little agency." so anything that keeps me grounded is helpful.

still-evolving thoughts about "ike" as bad/negative vs complicated/complex because the ike part of house hunting is pretty equally "this [spending big dollar on big investment] is innately stressful" and "it requires learning things and talking to people and making arrangements that are complicated, effortful, and therefore bad". ike and pona are not antonyms but the extent to which pona is that which has a pona-fying effect feels true re: ike. ike is that which ike-fies; complication and complexity are not innately ike but when their effect is negative then they are part of ike's semantic field.

⁂

( tenpo suno ni la mi open alasa esun e tomo. )

( toki sewi kepeken sitelen pona. )

Both cats went in for a teeth cleaning + extraction yesterday. August had some teeth removed 5 years ago and was having the same problems with some remaining teeth now, so she lost some molars and a few incisors. Gillian was showing fewer/no symptoms except very! stinky! breath! but actually lost more teeth, but he's never had dental care so this is unsurprising.

I'm glad Devon and I are at a point where we can do complete teeth things for both cats at the same time without panicking about cost. (Taking them in together requires slightly more during-vet wrangling but significantly cuts down on post-vet wrangling of separate foods or "the other cat smells funny therefore I hate them!!!")

So yesterday was awful! But it was the least-bad version of awful that we could make it. Devon took the day off* (I'm also grateful that he has unlimited paid time off, to help transport but also look after me). I woke early to take the cats in, but was able to get a fuzzy desperate nap in while they were at the vet and thus I slept through the designated Anesthesia Panic Hours (no matter how mitigated are the risks, it's hard to get over the fear of anesthesia as a former small animal owner) and woke to news that they had both come out fine and were being held for post-anesthesia observation; we picked them up in mid-afternoon. They've both been easy to medicate and are so excited about wet food that it's overriding any unwillingness to eat. August came out of surgery first and was "spicy" when they tried to put her in her carrier; her post-vet still-drugged state was clumsy and attention-seeking and weirdly high-energy, but she's acting normally now. Gillian came out of surgery second and had a slower recovery in general; he's 14 now, which is decidedly old-man territory, so I'm not surprised. He was worryingly standoffish and congested yesterday, but I think it was just sleep and drool; at 3am he woke from a very long nap, obviously feeling better because he decided it was Do Things time and Attempt to Yell (Quietly) time, and he's been acting perkier since.

I had to take pain meds and anxiety meds to wind down from broken sleep/lingering anxiety and make it through the night, but eventually we all slept together and this morning everyone is fine.

I also started them on fish oil and glucosamine after the initial vet visit, since Gillian definitely and August maybe (she's 9 now) have arthritis and preventative/general wellness things are my jam. Let it be known that I hand-feed August a few kibble at a time for each meal so she can't overeat until sick, and I have to lock the water away overnight so Gillian doesn't drink himself sick while I'm sleeping, and now I add to that fish oil + chewable glucosamine once daily and pumpkin puree every other day, and this is all a lot! I mentioned to the vet that getting to a vet can be hard but I'm very on top of things like micromanaging food/preventative health/grooming/nail trimming/anything I can do at home, and the vet said "I can tell!"

Vets I feel more than human health professionals do a better job of reward and encouragement, and I don't know if that's because the vast majority of vets I've interacted with are obviously doing it for love of the animals (and sure as hell not for the money) and/or if it's because the majority of owners need to be gently cajoled into spending any sort of time/energy/care and/or the owners who do do anything are a relief.

(That said I'm not enamored of this office, for reasons various. The actual people seem fine and I'm happy with the care the cats got; the way the business operates and the tinge it gives the experience is less lovely, and their online communication sucks.)

Anyway: big busy expensive day, Juu recovering, cats recovering; anticipating not having the urge to hold my nose when cats groom in my lap; time to play Pokemon a lot and not think about things.


* Devon is also the one who set up the initial vet appointment because I just couldn't start the process even though August was clearly uncomfortable—and then I realized that the last time they needed the vet was when my dad was dying. It's such an arbitrary and specific overlap of memories: morphing into a responsible adult to take the cats in, gritting my teeth through "how are you guys today?" small talk with vet techs; morphing into a grieving daughter but also semi-caretaker but host when visiting my dad; the gaps in between when I would hide at home and crash—and the duality of localized, fixable anxiety that required my immediate effort and a looming, existential loss that ... also required my immediate effort, vastly different in scale but both important. So much of my coping has been to not think about it for the last year, striving for distance and dullness, and that's worked to an extent. But the most mundane things can have interconnections that bring it all back.

( Non-detailed headcold talk. )

* * *

I've also been having hallucinations for the last week or two?? I'm hesitant to call them hallucinations because they're very much that thing where your brain tries to pattern match for partial information. But it's been happening a lot. I've seen gray blur = greyhound, dot of light = glowing eyes of a black dog, moving dot = spider (this one a lot! why!), black blur = cat, and heard a man say, "hey, what's up?" so distinctly that I had to make sure I wasn't in voice on Discord.

In the past I've taught myself to interpret similar stimuli as my black dog beastie, to help build & reinforce my comfort/nightmare/embodied metaphor. So in a way this feels like a success and is more interesting and reaffirming than it is scary. (Except the spiders.) But it's still for me super unusual to have this happen more than once a month or so. I chock this up to significant stress compounded by fatigue.

Is this what a hallucinations are, or do they need to be more concrete and sustained? What's the link between hallucinations and aphantasia—the interpretations are definitely brain-side, and what I'm actually seeing is peripheral blurs or movement, but where are those elements coming from? Is it just the result of slow processing (on account of stress, etc) that makes my eyes confused and provides inadequate information to my brain? ?? How do brain work?

* * *

Because of Dev's work scheduling, we're doing the actual move on Friday (the 5th) instead of our move-in date of Wednesday (the 3rd). This is the right call—it gives us three days to do a lot of errands/loading/driving/unloading/errands instead of something like one day in the middle of the week to try to manage an impossible number of things. It was still crushing to realize I'd spend another two days here. But the cold is a blessing; it makes time move in an endless long blur—not faster, but less real.

But that feeling that things are so close to being done except for this last hurdle, this one more delay just ... haunts me until the very end.

Devon and I have been rewatching Star Trek: TOS for no particular reason other than to gently spite Star Trek: Discovery; today was 1.9 "Dagger of the Mind." I like to imagine an alternate-Trek (aside from the always-superior DS9*) where all the throwaway arcs/reveals have lasting consequences, like a Voyager where Harry Kim has to process the profound trauma of "parallel-me died and then I took his place," facing his mortality, his sense of alienation—which would be significantly less fun than already questionably-fun Voyager, but would bring such depth to his character! Likewise, a TOS where Kirk is still and forever in love with Helen Noel, but she's lost to him in multiple ways: the implanted memory of losing her, but also the conscious knowledge that even his love was implanted. He's grateful when she leaves the Enterprise—it can't really make him more sad, and it alleviates at the least the awkwardness—but he never forgets her. He has many other relationships, some meaningful, some not at all; and his dedication to the Enterprise takes priority over everything, which causes no end of internal conflict; and his relationship with Spock is as profound and as conflicted, complicated here by Spock's Vulcan identity. It doesn't end his life or his relationships, but Helen Noel in the background of everything, the one that got away whom he never had in the first place.

An easy canon solution is that before leaving Tantalus V he has someone use the same machine to correct his memory, but my version has a lot more angst and self-doubt and questions of identity/memory/relationships and is therefore superior.

When I first watched TOS some few years ago, I read along with the rewatches on Viewscreen.com. I'm only glancing at them this time, but it was a fantastic experience then & I still enjoy them now. The mix of trivia/minutiae to summary/off the cuff reaction to social commentary/media criticism is strong, in a readable, casual way. Torie Atkinson's sections are especially fantastic, and helped me contextualize my complicated responses to dated-but-progressive media. To accompany TNG and DS9 rewatches I just read the Memory Alpha pages; that's also satisfying, but is a) way more spoiler-y and b) heavier on the minutiae. Glimpses into production/actors enrich the text in interesting ways, but it's not quite on par with that feeling of pseudo-conversation that comes with a watch-along.

* Although DS9 would also hugely benefit from this! Imagine Jadzia Dax in particular, and Dax in general, who's always willing to disregard convention and society to fulfill a strong personal desire, but in particular falls into "leave the rest of the world behind to live in a pocket dimension/go into exile" love multiple times. These all function as once in a lifetime romances, True Love, etc.—then 3.8 "Meridian" and 4.6 "Rejoined" are never mentioned again as per Star Trek's episodic tradition, and Worf becomes the One True Love. But imagine the Jadzia who not only carries many lifetimes of romances, and struggles with the reassociation taboo, but also is in love, passionate life-altering-love, with multiple people, some she marries, some she can't see again; a Jadzia grieving and loving and missing in overlapping and simultaneous intensity. Alternately: she doesn't change her life for these life-changing loves because the show needs more continuity than that. If not for that limitation, how does she pick—is it first come/first serve, pocket dimension/exile? is it wrestling with Klingon courtship practices while exiled from your homeworld? These are some great tensions & I wish DS9 could've had them.


* * *


Asides:

1) I'm trying to work on my Best of 2018 list with mixed results re: wowowowwww this year has been seven years long, and there was great media, and many forgotten media, at at least one favorite thing I forgot to review, and I want to make none of these trips down memory lane because it was also a phenomenally awful year. It's exhausting to write.

2) My sleep schedule has flipped around and/or is walking around the clock, external factors (like screaming cats/visitors to the house) excepted. I find it easier to stay distracted at night, and have more co-dependent anxiety when waiting for Devon to come home in the afternoon. Things are up in the air for us right now as he makes applications, and I dream of moving to Canada/Sweden/the Moon ( Read more... ) and we wait for the future to happen. And in the meantime, this between-time, the end of the year change-time, my anxiety is particularly bad. So in many respects this makes sense—waking at 5p is productive, even healthy/ier than alternatives! despite the forever-shame that comes with weird sleep habits. It's still surreal, to nap at sunrise, to sleep through the middle of the day. The cats don't enjoy or understand it, but then they haven't liked any damn thing about this living arrangement except that Gillian believes Devon many times more interesting and better for cuddles than I am.

3) Via minutia_r, in one of the more delightful "I saw this and thought of you" that I've ever received: Okay, it's time to tell a Story: "how cannibalism was just a normal thing for Victorian sailors & how it was only in 1884 that it was made clear to everyone that it wasn't legal to eat people no matter what the circumstances, and how the Victorian public were Very Angry about it."

I hadn't heard of this case before and it's as fascinating as expected! Further reading via Wikipedia: R v Dudley and Stephens.

Critical Role Campaign One, ep 86-The End.


( Eps 86-94, arranged again by subject, yes spoilers. )


( I have been super duper unwell, no-energy-for-liveblog unwell; apparently, however, not too unwell to write a lot of paragraphs about gods (and also Scanlan, I guess.) Critical Role eps 95-104. )


( I have never in my life been so called out as by Critical Role 112 )


( Brief & scattered Critical Role notes for 105-112. )


( Logistics: a followup. )


( Finishing. )


( Play DnD with your friends. )


That's it! That's The End! apologies for the dash-clog.

I went to another of the play reading with my folks last week, this time with preemptive intent and on an intentionally-purchased third ticket. It was a double bill of one-act plays: Aria da capo by Edna St. Vincent Millay and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. Dad asked me to make a list of future play readings I wanted to attend with them; simultaneously, I had a catastrophic breakdown.

I acknowledge 1) that breakdowns are going to be par for the course—they always have been, even during my better periods, and this is not a better period; and that 2) hormones may have contributed to this one. But this felt so inexplicable, until I got the email saying he'd purchased tickets for all the readings on my list: this is a Thing we are doing Together to have Quality Family Time Before Dad Dies.

Which, to an extent, is what every social event in the history of family interactions is—all that sets this apart is timescale. My anxiety and introversion mean that I'm not good at "just hanging out" togetherness, so the plays are a great find: I love artsy fartsy shit, I write essays for my folks after the plays (sometimes literally: an email about the character of Joseph Garcin/Vincent Cradeau in No Exit, exploring adaptation, parallels to Sartre, and the Nazi occupation of France, all because my father wasn't sure why the character had been executed—my dad called it an "the extensive followup"! it was not! it was the highly edited version!), it's an engaging social thing. But the overt indulgence of it, of "we'll stand in line to grab you a third ticket," of "I bought tickets for all the plays you mentioned," was the reminder of why it's so important to capitalize on these opportunities.

Things are good, my dad's doing well. Treatment so far has had the best possible outcome, and they're looking at plans for what's next; he has symptoms and side effects under control; he's making longer-term decisions re: work, etc. Things are about as good as the could be, which, admittedly, is a low bar. But things are okay.

And I was okay, again by relative scales: I never forgot what was going on (how could I?). But I'm excellent at burying feelings under media consumption; I couldn't sustain that unmitigated misery into months and it became other major depressive episode; I was sleeping during the day so that I could wake when Devon got home—which didn't make him any less busy, but made the loneliness easier to deal with. The houseguests even left (although things are still set up for them to return, so I guess I just get to hang on tenterhooks re: that, indefinitely!), although this is counterbalanced by every fucking thing going wrong (my ereader cover broke! audiobooks are making my tablet crash! my life is a tragedy of errors outside my control!). But then my sleep started to degrade into three-hour snatches that made the edges of the days fuzz and blur; I hovered in panicked stasis until Devon came home, but then broke down or passed out as soon as he showed up—

There's no especial value in recording the sequence of a breakdown, and I'm not sure that doing so benefits me (what is the balance between self-knowledge and wallowing, between honesty and shame?); but things got bad and I didn't know why, until the email about tickets yesterday, and then I realized afresh that my dad was going to die. I had some more, big sad; I took my anti-anxiety meds and then slept for a really long time; maybe putting the pieces together has allowed me to go through and out of this particular episode. Maybe I'll relapse when this initial sense of rested relief passes. Absolutely things will get bad again in the future, because surrounding circumstances won't go away and can only get worse.

But right now, in a cold clear morning after many consecutive hours of sleep, I have a certain amount of closure about this particular episode.

It always makes me angry when the good things trigger bad times, It's frustrating and unfair. But the good things are still worth it—quality family time! the plays were good!—and the bad times are inevitable. (That's also frustrating; also unfair.)

LJ's recent ToS update and the final, for-real-this-time exodus hit me harder than I expected, for one logistic reason (my list of book reviews, which I reference a lot for personal use, links to LJ posts, and I will never be arsed to manually replace >600 links), predictable comment- and community-related nostalgia reasons, and vague "the intrusion of the current world climate into my personal bubble" reasons. The compromise? solution? I've opted for is to turn off crossposts and make all of my LJ entries private; I have indefinite, personal access to the comments, but if my LJ is deleted or it becomes wiser to do so, so be it.

A while ago I made a trip down to see Devon which ended up lasting about a week longer than normal. When I see him, a lot of my crazy comes to a head because my subconscious decides the make-it-better person is present and I should therefore provide all the icky things for making-better purposes; as such, I tend to have ironic mental health crises when visiting; as such, I generally make those visits sort of ... vacations from reality, since they're also vacations from my 1.5 responsibilities. So I just ... switched off the politics part of me when I was there, and I was there for ages. And when I got back, I never switched politics back on.

And you know what, I was pushing myself far beyond my limits. So now I'm one the other side of the same debate: I'm not doing the work I deem important, I'm filtering what I expose myself to which, there's inevitable unfilterable intrusions that really bring it home; I'm less crazy, less anxious but more depressed, cognizant always that avoiding the world is only possible because I'm so crazy as to not have a life; I know it's a long game and I can resume my role in it later.

And LJ manages to be simultaneously a petty nothing and emblematic of all of that.

In 2010, September, October, the rise in queer suicides among students and the It Gets Better campaign hit me in a personal and unproductive way—my intersection with those groups and experiences compounded preexisting mental illness and left me ill and non-contributive, in general but specifically in my attempts to aid those groups I was part of and sympathetic to. I wrote about it here.

I feel like my response to this election is a larger version of that, because while I fall into some marginalized groups I am not visibly marginalized except in my assigned gender and I'm living in a relatively safe area of the country (the occasional celebratory firework not withstanding) and (for aforementioned "not a real person" reasons) I won't be directly effected by most changes, and there are marginalized groups in present and future danger, some without a safe place to fall to pieces, who need people to self-educate and provide support and not co-opt their experience. But I am doing my good god damnedest to fall apart, I tell you what; I am high anxiety fending off major depression and my agoraphobia is vast, firm, unrelenting.

I've been keeping myself so desperately busy, exploiting the anxious energy to fend off the point where anxiety tips into panic; I vacuumed everything, I baked more apples, I'm reading a lot & catching up on Critical Role & playing Stardew Valley enough that my wrists are acting up, I'm not sleeping much. I feel like I am courting a major depressive episode, and I don't know—I've never known—when "self-care" is or isn't indulgence, and if I can create my own depression by accident or in search for validation. Experience this trauma and grief now, people write, so that you can limit its extent and enable yourself to move on to activism—but what does that mean when mental illness makes it impossible to process and heal? What is activism when you can't leave the house or interact with people, and have no money?

But Devon wrote to me:

I'm sorry. I don't know.. I think you can contribute by voting and we have lots of opportunity to fight the system with that in the next bit. there will be elections for senators and elections for house of reps people and we need to get Democrats in those positions to balance everything out.
and that's about all anyone can do at this point unless they're in a place where they can contribute.
I'm sorry that things are so rough for you right now.
I really am.
and I know that doesn't really say much, but I know that this whole thing is terrible and you have the right to feel hurt by it all, everyone's interactions are different.
I love you lots.

and I think it's all I have right now. There will be things I can do, even if they are the barest possible minimum for a decent human being, but there is right now nothing I can do except hold on, because I am not doing a great job at even that.

(All of this is compounded by the recent suicide of someone in the LJ community, someone I did not know but only knew of, but whose situations and motivations run parallel to my own; it's a discomforting mirror and a reminder of the validity of this experience, while somehow managing to feel like yet another pain I am co-opting. I'm not sure what to do with these thoughts, all of these thoughts.)

As a Christmas gift (which I picked up belatedly, since I skipped Christmas) my parents got me tickets for their Ashland trip to see Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and The Wiz. I used to make at least one yearly Shakespeare trip with my family, and miss it fiercely; it was particularly painful to see these plays on their calendar, because they're personal favorites and because we saw them together once when the Shakepeare trip was to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. So when they told me I was invited, I actually broke out in tears.

Of course, as the actual trip approached I remembers to be consumed by anxiety, because I'm not good at a lot of uninterrupted public time, especially without Devon with me, so I didn't know how I'd fare in three days company with my parents. But not only did I survive, it was a lovely and storied journey. I'm not going to write about the plays in detail here (that will be in the next post); this is a recap of itinerary, weather, and food.

We left noonish on Tuesday, June 14. It's a ~3h drive. I requested no news coverage in the car, as this was two days after the Orlando shooting and I just could not deal; instead of a few uninterrupted hours of repetition and Islamophobia, my mum put on the Hamilton soundtrack. I was aware of Hamilton and had heard a song or two, but had never listened to the entire thing. It is such a productive, powerful way to spend that time.

We got a divided room at our favorite hotel, which meant one king bed and sofa bed, separated by privacy curtain. For both mental and physical reasons, I'm a troubled sleeper—but the accommodations plus the bedding and hotpad I travel with, and the hours we kept, worked beautifully; I was surprisingly comfortable there. We also kept a two meal/lunch and dinner schedule, which is what I prefer.

Hotel wifi was speedy and stable (!!!); I used VoIP to catch up with Devon every evening (because normal people have cell phones but my particular anxiety means I don't), and that worked beautifully.

Tuesday dinner was Standing Stone Brewing Company. I got nachos; greasy, sometimes chewy chips, which was unfortunate, but the rest was flavorful and had good texture. Huge serving portions. Mixed bag, but, like, upscale tasty nachos, I can't complain about that.

The ongoing problem with eating in Ashland wasn't finding vegetarian options, but finding vegetarian options that had at some point rubbed themselves against a form of protein. I eat significantly more protein than most people, so perhaps this only bothers me—but while vegetarian (and vegan, and gluten-free) options were often exhaustively labeled, the first two were "normal dish with meat removed." I forget how spoiled I am by meat alternatives in Portland and even Corvallis.

Tuesday evening was Hamlet, in the open-air Elizabethan. Rather than raising an American flag, they raised a pride flag to general cheering; it was striking against the gray sky of dusk, and a heartening public gesture. It sprinkled just enough to warrant rain jackets, and got cold enough to demand one more layer than I wore, but neither required modifications to the play. I would rather it be a little chilly than horrible and hot while I'm traveling, I thought! Oh, little did I know.

Wednesday and Thursday brunch was Morning Glory, which is twee (a bit like stepping into a Mary Engelbreit illustration) and crowded and overpriced, and doesn't accept substitutions which is hard for me as a vegetarian/picky eater. On Wednesday I had a fantastic open-faced egg sandwich, but on Thursday I tried an omelet which was overly full, too strongly flavored, and had an awful texture. Mixed bag.

Wednesday afternoon was Twelfth Night in the Angus Bowmer. Afterward, my father and I went to the Q&A with Ted Deasy, who played Malvolio—what a marvelous experience. The volunteer introduced him as one of their favorite actors in the company and said that, after this talk, he would be one of ours too; absolutely correct. He had active, informed insights to his role, the play (esp. how it handled gender), and acting, with some particularly thoughtful anecdotes about how playing two characters in a single season forces those roles to inform one another, often in unique ways. (The particular anecdote about an audience member from a previous Q&A like this one asking, "I saw you in X play and Y play this season; why do you perform both roles the same?" which prompted a season-long bout of self-doubt, do I play these roles the same? why? should I? that lead him to realize what similarities united the roles, and then to be increasingly aware of how the overlap was both strengthening and muddying his performance.) The occasional talk by an actor devolves into them advertising their independent projects, but most are equally as compelling as the plays—and this was one of those.

Wednesday dinner was Caldera. A tip: when possible, eat as early as possible and/or drive outside of downtown; no waiting for a table and less rush. The dishes weren't particularly strongly flavored, but were robust; and one appetizer was a baked avocado, which isn't even that different from a normal avocado except for being warm and with a somewhat deeper flavor, but was still somehow a revelation: I can love avocado even more than I already loved avocado. Desserts, by contrast, were bizarrely strong in flavor.

Wednesday evening was The Wiz in the Elizabethan. Learning from the night before, we had stocked up on extra layers and a blanket. This helped somewhat, but not an awful lot, because it rained. It rained almost torrentially until intermission, and then only sprinkled while growing increasingly cold, "I know I probably won't die of hypothermia in the two hours' traffic of our stage, but I'm a little worried" cold. About two thirds of the audience left, and we toughed it out in part because you don't go to Ashland to bail on a play and in part because the cast enthusiastically toughed it out, too. Half of them wore ponchos, I'm sure some choreography was modified, and the adlibbed responses to the weather were delightful. Certainly an experience! But, as we commiserated after the event, by the time they made it back to the Emerald City we were all three of us thinking, "click your heels, Dorothy, just click your fucking heels."

Anxiety is a strange monster. On one hand, it well prepares me for this sort of thing, because I know to bring my suitcase full of comfort objects and I know to always have a book to read so that I never have unwelcome idle time which is my surefire way to begin panicking (and there's a lot of downtime in car rides/waiting for tables/before plays and during intermission). On the other, it infallibly makes me assume things will be awful, while things are not infallibly awful. It turns out that, given a busy enough schedule that we are either completely occupied or crashing during all available downtime, even I can do things for three solid days without a nervous breakdown.