juushika

( CW food. )

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As I've mentioned, I've been borrowing video games from the library. The holds are long and the checkouts are 7-days, so only certain titles work and it creates a unique gameplay experience. It's perforce a title I'm not hugely invested in, something with a limited length, something not worth owning—but then I play the whole ~35 hour game in a week, with more focus and therefore immersion than I might give to a title I purchase and play for longer. I played Let's Go Eevee that way, which tbh is the only way to play the game. Most PKMN games are for me 200+ hours because I'm big into breeding and shiny hunting, but the central gimmick of Let's Go leans heavily towards overpowered single-Pokemon team and the shiny hunting mechanic is cute but the endgame is otherwise shallow; it's very much a 35 hour game.

And I just finished Super Mario Odyssey, which is my first Mario title! and which I only played because it has assist mode! which mitigates health management and largely does away with dying to void-outs. I love Nintendo's gentle/exploratory platforms but hate actual platforming because I can't spacial reasoning or operate under pressure, that's just not fun. So bless assist modes & may this be a thing in all future titles—it's never the wrong time to increase accessibility. 7 days were just enough time to do 500 stars worth of exploring with that satisfied feeling of every curiosity and corner offering a reward, and the due date came when I was hitting hard, unfun content I didn't want to play anyway.

I still contend that core franchise Mario titles are ugly AF with bad world aesthetics and (non-musical) sound design, and that the way gender issues are handled in the endgame cinematic is the worst of Nintendo's too little, too late methodology: something about the high-rez art style makes the forced marriage & objectification of Peach even more glaring, and you can't do that—play it straight, play it at length—for the entire game and then critique it in endgame and expect a cookie for your progressive vision. (The high-rez style also makes the cap-control mechanic feel weird, like ... it's an innately ridiculous game, I shouldn't be considering issues of consent and autonomy, and yet here we are.)

Petition that the next Mario title pulls a Metal Gear Solid 2, opening with Mario in the tutorial levels and then staring Peach for the entire rest of the game with no option to switch characters. Maybe she even rescues him, tbh I don't care. I hope the fanboys will be as mad about it as they were about MGS2.

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The pattern of playing a lot of condensed game leads naturally to not playing almost anything afterward, to recover from burnout and rest my wrists. I've been reading a lot! Some very good books! But I'm fatally behind on reviews and honestly should be writing those right now, not this.

It's funny that after reading so much last year, I'm not burned out on books—just on writing about them. My reading distinctly hasn't been a passive thing, lately, in no small part because discovering OpenLibrary/the Internet Archive has made accessible some of those obscure feminist SFNal works which have been on my TBR for years and years. It's active, sometimes even combative reading, but that means I exhaust my reading-energy both in that engagement and at the mere thought of trying to write all of it down. Not writing reviews isn't an option for me, but as well as relearning the art of longer, messier reviews when a condensed one is impossible, I should also embrace the adage that anything worth doing is worth half-assing (rather than not doing at all) and just ... not write book reports, maybe even of things that deserve them.

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Incredible and borderline-unmanageable spike in back pain over the last ~2 weeks. This flare is remarkable in part for its duration, which is generally a sign that it's not a flare but a new plateau in my fun experience with a degenerative condition. Also remarkable because it's been interfering with sleep, particularly waking me up after ~4 hours & sometimes making it impossible to go back to sleep. That combo is utterly terrifying. I already do seven million things manage pain for sleep, so there's nothing I can do to improve things; sleep is already hard because of my brainweird; poor sleep is a trigger for ... more pain.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

These plateaus are always worse when I'm still adjusting to them. In a few months, it'll be background noise, just ... noisier noise than the old noise. But when I frequently don't feel pain, only symptoms of pain—when the bar of "distressing" and "disabling" is constantly shifting upward to hover at whatever level of pain I've grown used to—it makes me wonder: what is a pain scale, objectively (is there such a thing as "objective"); where do I fall on it; when will I tip over to an un-adjustable level. I hope this isn't it.

I fell down a rabbithole that began with "crosspost my Corpse Party liveblog from Tumblr" and ended somewhere around "crosspost everything of substance that I've ever written." Some of these were added to old posts, including archiving favorite quotes alongside reviews; the rest were posted directly to my DW (not to reading pages). Some highlights include:

Interpersonal relationships, trauma, hurt comfort, and socio-political commentary in CJ Cherryh

A recommended list of recommendations lists (of books)

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, particularly OT3 feels

"Apocalypse" in The Path (some of these posts are super old, ergo poorly written; I also like to reference my own essays like the big loser that I am. they're important writing, to me)

AI, bond animals, and the relationship between technology and projection

A lot of feelings about Deep Space 9

How to write fourth-wall-breaking meta game narratives

Too many things about books, featuring mental illness as plot twist and James Tiptree Jr. and Joanna Russ

Cosmic horror in Mass Effect and breaking down the divine in Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

The optimism of Dark Souls's pessimism

In further blogkeeping, I'm tempted to add by-author tags; an intimidating prospect because I have a lot of backlog and when I set out to organize, I tend to be exhaustive in it (although if that's the case, I should probably also update links on my list of book reviews which I ... very much have not done). This is a project I will schedule for another time, because there's a lot of projects right now:

Yuletide releases! Flight Rising's Night of the Nocturne, which is yearly my favorite festival and which this year has fantastic apparel. (Speculating the day before it started, I told Devon I hoped it was something with ornate jewelry—and then we got exactly that, with bonus! semi-transparent, layer-able pieces.) Overwatch """holidays"""" event, which has still yet to give me either of the skins I want! I & my overtasked wrists are busy enough.


Christmas was about as hard as I should have expected, had I thought about it in advance. My dad's birthday was the 21st; they did a friends-of-the-family get together thing, very casual, a sort of mini-wake I suppose; I didn't get an invite, but more because they knew I didn't want to attend wake-like things than because I was forgotten. Mum & Allie & Devon & I did homemade pizza Christmas evening, which is the traditional family event food, but this was the first time making it entirely without Dad there. It went fine, and panicking while practicing a skill for the first time counterbalanced the mourning and sense of absence to relative neutrality.

But Dad always liked Christmas as a family event, and his absence was noted. And as I recoil more and more from Christmas in this, our era of cultural Christianity and fascism, while I come to terms with which experienced I've granted/denied, and why, I make Christmas increasingly non-joyful—but I still have cultural expectations that it's supposed to be joyful and that if it's not, it's because something is Wrong. Things are wrong! things are very wrong, on multiple axes, only some of which are "because I'm being sort of silly about it." And it's made a season already prone to melancholy and navel-gazing that much more so.

A pity, too, because winter in itself is as always fantastic. I love autumn, but appreciate almost as much the apparent-endlessness of winter's cold, the constant sound of rain, the want (human-body and cat-body alike) for blankets and snuggling, the cold walks and cold fingers, the excuse to live in my ragged hoodie. This year I've managed even managed to pick up winter-set reading in the appropriate season! So Christmas is as always is problematic, but there's always the long cold of January.

There's something invigorating and optimistic in the Tumblr exodus—a feeling helped along by nostalgia which I've been trying to rein in (not only can you never return to the good old days, there are no good old days, not really), but which has been counteracting the low-grade anxiety that always comes with thinking about social media & the role it plays in my life. (Agoraphobia/anxiety I think makes me especially vulnerable to the dangers of parasocial relationships and the dopamine hits that come from microblogging platforms—it's easy for me to expend my limited social energy in ways that don't provide adequate returns. It's still a double-edged thing, because mindless/more passive distraction has value. Thus the answer to the perennial question, how2socialize?, forever evades me.) Tumblr dying doesn't fix anything, but it may be an improvement, and it's certainly hilarious to watch it all fall down.

My visits home for Hanukkah have been low key, mostly in positive ways, excepting one overlapping visit from a goyim family friend—still low key, but it did prompt a "the story of Hanukkah from a poorly-educated non-observant Jew" moment which illustrated all the complicated feelings I've had about cultural Jewish identity after the death of one's Jewish parent. Everything secondhand, everything imperfect; and the light in the window to show the world that we are still here is particularly bittersweet given that we are not all here. The cancer in my family is BRCA-related, which particularly affects Ashkenazi Jews, so these things, death of a Jewish parent, Jewish diseases, Jewish holiday, feel pointedly entwined. This is not how I wanted the universe to validate our identity.

Devon has been working to give this Hanukkah positive associations despite everything by reviving the one small present for each night tradition that I grew up with, albeit gifts of better quality that the famously shitty things my grandparents used to pick out. So far, most of them have been the mini Overwatch pachimari (Pachilantern, Pachiking, Pachilover, and Gingermari), to add to my growing collection of soft nerd items.

Excepting literal apocalypse, Devon's last day of undergrad is tomorrow (now today, Friday). He has a potential job available if he wants it, and has been working there very-part-time in these last few weeks of school. It's not all perfect; no fulfilled fantasy, yet, of moving to Canada, Sweden, the moon; to distant places where the live I've had until now stops being real. But he's almost free—we are almost free—and that's so huge that I haven't yet internalized it. Taking advantage of the increasing financial freedom to indulge in stupid presents is, however, concrete & comprehensible. And working! I don't know how I could survive any of this without him.

TW emetophobia, pet injury, cancer, death, suicidal ideation, fucking hell what a really optimistic opening to a post!!



A belated but sincere thanks to those that commented on my post about my father's cancer; that I haven't responded is just because talking (in general, but about that in specific) is hard, and not especially personally productive. But one-sided condolences are. Cancer has been the worst thing in my life for too many years now—

which is such a truism: cancer, this one equalizer, this pinnacle of disease; I've never read it and now you could not pay me to do so, but I always hear in my head "the emperor of maladies." Not because cancer is worse than other diseases, but because it's so prevalent and diverse and always life-changing. It killed the first pets I ever looked after on my own (rats); killed my grandmother, killed my family's dog, killed Mamakitty; changed my sister's life; and now this. It's so common as to be memetic, which rouses its own sort of anger as I transform into the person whose anxiety is triggered by "this post is giving me cancer" jokes

—so it helps to have it validated as being as awful as it feels. I mean, I know it's awful, insofar as I can internalize anything. But validation and confirmation helps, even (especially!) from halfway-strangers who have no reason to lie to me about how awful cancer is.



Cancer on the day-to-day is pretty unremarkable, though. Chemo is going; I'd hesitate to say "going well" because my dad doesn't cope well with discomfort and has always aggressively treated his health concerns, and now here's something effectively untreatable where discomfort is a baseline. ( Borderline navel-gazing re: chronic illness. )



We had a traditionally non-traditional family homemade pizza night for Thanksgiving; my uncle flew in for the weekend. And because literally nothing can go right, Devon got sick that evening with a stomach flu! and then I caught it a few days later, despite that we spent like four days in separate rooms with zero in-person contact and I was really lonely. Mine was comparably mild; either way I think we both prefer this to a chest or head cold. Throwing up sucks, rather a lot, but there's almost a sense of pleasurable privation to be limited to broth and eggs and crackers, and being able to breathe while sick makes it far easier to sleep it off.

Prior to that, Gillian had bitten his own damn self while going after a flea (and I knew cat mouths were full of nasty, but had somehow assumed that they were immune to their own nasty even though that makes very little sense; and indeed, I was hugely wrong because) and gave himself a huge abscess! which cleared up on its own, and in fact the vet didn't even treat it*, just the fleas (thank goodness, as Frontline/Advantage weren't working); so while the bald patch is now growing in beautifully and the fleas are almost dead and none of the cats are, my summary here is

could unrelated things stop being shit for, like, five minutes

we are all very tired, all the time.



* The vet ripped out mats and with it fur surrounding the wound, ripped off the scab that was forming, and said that because it was plenty open and the tissue looked healthy we could let Gillian look after it just like cats had been doing for thousands of years, not even an ecollar required. A vet after my own heart! as I am also of the school of "supervision is good but nature knows best for dumb stuff like this".

There have been a number of interim posts since my last post that have not been written outside my head, because I am a perpetual bundle of busy and tired, consistently overstretching my limited capabilities to do politics and be scared about the state of the world.

One post: I did skip Thanksgiving, and my parents didn't come up after because inertia is a thing. But Dee went up to Washington for the holiday and Devon did drive up to see me for the day, just for a few hours. We made in-no-ways-traditional vegetarian hot dogs and mac & cheese (with hot dogs in it); it wasn't enough, but it was significantly better than nothing and I'm grateful.

Another post: practicing by doing the easy political phone calls on answering machines does (barely) make it easier to call real alive people. Somehow, that doesn't make it any less terrifying to forget about time zones and call places which are still open and unexpectedly staffed by alive people.

Another post: I have managed to leave the house, once or thrice. Snow helped (as sidenote: cats staring at snowland), because I missed the end of autumn and refuse to miss winter, too. We had snow + freezing rain, but then snow that stuck around, approximately pristine, for a few days. The latter was lovely.

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Today my parents came through Portland and had lunch with me; they're headed northbound to spend the holidays traveling, including a trip to see my sister in Seattle. It was exhausting but in productive ways, almost entirely my fault—because over coffee I nonchalantly asked why I had which aspects of Jewish upbringing and how my extended family/various cultural aspects affected it, as one does.

I have, for obvious reasons, but especially as Hanukkah approaches, been thinking a lot about what it means to be Jewish and particularly to be Jewish in the face of forced assimilation and, you know, facism (how are these are sentences I'm writing and why is this the real world and can it stop), and also of the narrative of "Hanukkah isn't our most important holiday, and its cultural importance is actually a symptom of forced assimilation, but this year it certainly has extra thematic relevance"—because I was raised with Hanukkah and Passover and not much else, although my parents say there was an occasional Rosh Hashanah, which I think I remember; for me, there was no "more important holiday." It seems like some of that was because of how things lined up with Christmas/Easter and thus with school schedules, but it's also because that's what my father grew up with; his experience was inconsistent (Sabbat sometimes, but not always; Hebrew school and a bar mitzvah for him but not his brother; Hanukkah/Passover/Rosh Hashanah was all he celebrated, too) which has passed through the generations (Allie and I never had any formal religious education; our cousin did).

I grew up on the opposite side of the country from my Jewish grandparents, who always wished they could see us more often, who tried to cram a lot of Jewish Things into the whatever contact they had; they sent me Jewish novels and celebrated holidays with us less, I think, because those specific things were important—they weren't religious, their own practice was inconsistent—but because the identity was important.

White-passing half-Jewish cultural Jew is approximately as distant from the thing as one can be, and I understand the factors, the time, the literal distance, the way that assimilation works and why I have the background that I do. But I also have that identity, and its ... cultural expectation, I suppose, of persecution and persistence. My ancestors came from Russia, and immigrated before the Holocaust; that was not their personal story but it was their cultural story, and they taught me that, too.

I suppose I wanted an easy answer, an, "ah yes, your grandparents always wanted to practice these aspects of the faith with you, and you can now cling to them at least for their cultural significance even if you don't believe." But I didn't get that, I didn't get a "more important holiday" that can enable to me a real Jew. And I don't know where that leaves me, except that this diaspora experience is as real for me as it has been for my father and for his parents, and they are real Jews, so, maybe, I am too.

We also talked about how, for me, politics et al. isn't something to be countered by optimism or hope; that I live within communities where everyone will not (and has not) survived difficult times, and that but for the grace of Devon and August and my parent's financial support that could include me; and I think it's the first time I've ever mentioned suicidal ideation to my parents. My sister's cancer changed things for my family; we've learned to proactively accept and value of each other as we are, and the way that's effected how my parents view me—that they take me at my word when I talk about my experiences and health—as been huge. These are not things I would have felt comfortable sharing, years ago. I'm glad I can now, and the conversation wasn't all politics and Judaism and fascism, I also told them about Dare's antics and Dad showed me this video of him falling off his bike on the way to work. It was a worthwhile afternoon. But I am now very tired, and nothing really feels better.

I'm headed down to Corvallis soon, but we put it off a day and Devon is coming to get me, at some crazy early/late hour when we can skip holiday traffic, so that I can still see him and get my gifts without trying to navigate Amtrak/exhaustion/crazy.

I had a dream last night that I made a deal with a witch so that she would spare my family, the price for which was unrelenting pain in my lower back, like the witch's thumbs digging into the muscles at the base of my spine, a localized, piercing, unremitting pain. (Last night was also the onset of my period; cramping means the first 24 hours of my period is reliably my worst back pain of the month.)

1) This is beautiful imagery; it's not actually how my pain presents but my internal mythology still wants to internalize it as a metaphor for my back pain, to live alongside the black dog as a metaphor for my crazy. 2) But if that's the case, what bargain did I make and why have I not got shit from it? 3) I suppose this is the thing about chronic conditions: to assign them meaning seems to give them purpose or justification, but the valid truth is that they have none—and pointlessness is a big part of the experience. 4) Apparently Hexenschuss (literally: witch shot) is a German word for lower back pain.

I had a quiet Halloween: I took Odi for a walk while listening to Tanis, and on the way home we passed a lovingly-decorated yard, including a cluster of human-tall handmade carnivorous plants; someone was out finishing the decorations and I was able to compliment them on it. We only had four groups of trick or treaters, and Dee answered the door. One day I'd like to be energetic enough for Halloween as an event, I suppose, but I've grown content with Halloween as a season, September through the start of December, and then the long dead spread of winter after that.

My only regret, then, will be watching social media make an immediate left turn to Christmas Town. I think stretching out festivals of light (especially in modern times) deadens their effect, and would much rather embrace the dark seasons so that they have something to contrast. There's still so many haunted stories for this time of year! Sleepy Hollow's bare branches and leaf litter is best in November; there's so many books about the punishing, barren wilderness of winter (the second of Cherryh's Finisterre books is waiting on my shelf for then).

What is it about the holidays that inspires an intense heartsickness? Hanukkah is arguably more important to me than Christmas—it feels more intimate and profound—and yet I take some issue with how my family's come to handle it, growing lazier, we don't even make our own latka anymore; and whenever I go home, I realize how distant from my family I've become. My sister's been living there since her diagnosis, and she's always been more comfortable in that social setting. They're noisy and casual and gossip about people I don't know or care to; I go home to feel like an outsider, and to half-ass something important to me.

It makes me want to reclaim the holiday, to learn to make my own latka, to replace what's gone missing—but the very nature of the holiday season means I'm spoon-bereft. I put the average introvert to shame: I rarely socialize, but I rarely feel like I lack anything for it. Except now. This is the only time when I feel like I am actually missing something, that I'm denied something by my sheer inability to ~people~.

On Thanksgiving, Dee's immediate family came into town; they made stuffing and gravy the day before, then left on Thanksgiving itself to visit relatives. I was alone overnight, watching two dogs and four cats; I pulled out the couch and made a big nest of animals, and we watched TV and I ate stuffing and gravy. (Pics or it didn't happen.) It was perfect—enough socialization on either side, but the day itself was stress-devoid and I could actually enjoy my comfort foods.

And between the two, the quiet frustration of Hanukkah and the perfect day that was Thanksgiving, I'm tempted to spend Christmas at the house alone, watching the cats in quiet while Dee goes up to Seattle; but I worry that that tends to far towards not celebrating the holiday at all, and because I can't reclaim it and engaging with it as-is seems unpleasant I'll just ... let it pass me by, which is almost worse.

There are other, personal frustrations which are piggybacking on to this sense of heartsickness, homesickness, longing. I don't have a resolution for any of it.

Most memorable Hanukkah event so far thus year: Loki the kitten jumping up on the menorah windowsill the first night and (harmlessly) singeing her fur. She gets locked in her bedroom for candles, now.

I'm still amazingly unwell. Every few years I lose the holidays to my illness, because I don't have the energy to engage as giver or receiver—so I'm sensitive about how this season intersects with my mental health, which predictably increases my anxiety. I'm so stressed and exhausted that I keep forgetting things, like eating and lighting the menorah.

Between the genetic aspect of my sister's cancer, and my grandfather's Alzheimer's, I'm very aware of my Jewishness right now. Being half Jew, especially through your father's side, especially when you're cultural/non-religious, is a tenuous thing. I'm white-passing and not-Jew in the bulk of my life, but the Jewish imprint lingers—and it's frequently an unpleasant burden, an inherited pessimism, a culture of Exoduses and Maccabean Revolts and Holocausts, a presumption of suffering. And right now it's also BRCA mutations and Alzheimer's.

I don't look very Jewish, I don't act very Jewish, but lighting the candles makes it real. It makes cancer and Alzheimer's real; it's an acknowledgement—but despite all the negative connotations, that menorah is also my light in the dark. I don't know why. I suppose it's enough to validate and memorialize something, that that act has meaning. But this is the most sacred Hanukkah that I can remember.

My father gets back from Florida in a few hours; I'm meeting him at the airport to drive with him down to Corvallis, and spending a few days with Devon and my family. Just arranging it has been exhausting, but I'll be glad to be there.

(Raise a toast to my boyfriend, who buys me a Hanukkah gift and a Christmas gift, because he knows that Hanukkah matters and deserves its own special recognition.)

My grandfather's funeral was a few weeks ago. Everyone in my nuclear family went but me; I went to Corvallis to watch my parent's house and the family dog while they were away. My impression is that this is the best decision I could've made; it sounds like the funeral was a minor nightmare, too much alcohol and grief and drama in one place; I would have found it extremely stressful, and that's not how I want to remember my grandfather. Jamie and I meanwhile had a fine few days of watching bad TV and walking in autumn weather.

Hanukkah began the night before Thanksgiving this year—very early! I was down in Corvallis Wednesday/Thursday/Friday last week, and then came back up so that I could watch the house and approximately one thousand cats (kittens, man, they're like a dozen cats in one small cat body) while Dee went up to visit her family over the weekend and Devon did Thanksgiving with his extended family on Saturday. My family and I had latka for the first night of Hanukkah, traditional French Toast on Thanksgiving morning, and a very relaxed Thanksgiving dinner that night. The weather has been starkly cold, dry and bright and on the edge of freezing, just what I needed to clear my mind in between too much socialization. The menorah has been burning each night both at my parent's house and at Dee's house here in Portland.

Hanukkah's early date has made me extremely sensitive to how easily it (the holiday, Judaism, take your pick) is overlooked—that sense that with Thanksgiving passed we're all now preparing for the "holiday season," but half of mine is nearly over, and so "holiday" obviously reads as "somewhat secular Christmas." I celebrate secular Christmas, too! with enthusiasm. But the erasure is needling me, this time around.

I think it's reasonably safe to say I've been in another depressive episode these last few months. Given the accommodations in the rest of my life, these episodes are mild now—pedestrian, even: something between ennui and anxiety, a suffused discontent and sadness with the catharsis of a breakdown. The best recourse is just to try to stay out of my own head, thus the constant reading and TV watching and gaming. I got worse and better—see: the catharsis of a breakdown—while in Corvallis, which was expected because even family stuff stresses me out. Been listening to Kelli Schaefer's Black Dog when I'm hopeful; Nick Drake's Black Eyed Dog the rest of the time.

I just returned from Corvallis today; came back to Portland to a very excited dog and two! cats, which I don't yet take for granted. August was not her usual snuggleself on my return home; she was preoccupied by Gillian, by how his presence changed our interactions. (She is still, always, my favorite; she knows that.) But five minutes before I sat down to type all this, they were playing with the same piece of ribbon.

I went down to Corvallis for the start of Hanukkah. My sister was working late on the first night, so I just lit candles for the family. She was home all day on the second, so we did latkas and a family candle lighting and half of the holiday gifts and then I decorated the Christmas tree while listening to Christmas music, as one is wont to do during Hanukkah. They bought new lights this year, LEDs in a crystalline white, so I went out of my comfort zone for a light, white-toned tree (I tend towards red and brass, with a preference towards a wooden cranberry garland and wooden amanita decorations). I don't have pictures—my sister took some, but hell if I know where they got posted—but consensus is it turned out well.

Devon rearranged his work schedule during my visit so that he was home by sundown, bless. I also had some simple, precious downtime with him. For Hanukkah he gave me a Kobo Mini, which is my first e-reader—I still prefer traditional books, but this opens up giveaways and more library lending and lots of free classic literature, on a display I like and without any icky Amazon ties. My parents gave me a remote for my camera, which lets me add myself to the pictures of my cats if for some reason I'd want to do so.

(Devon is also giving me a Christmas gift—the way he's distinguishing and celebrating each holiday this year means a lot to me. I'll probably see my parents around the week of Christmas, when they make a day-trip up to Portland.)

(I gave my sister Beats earbuds, which turned out to be quite timely as her earbuds had just been damaged. I gave my mother The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which I've wanted to give her since its release; I gave my parents a pair of ceramic bird garden sculptures by a local artist. Devon's gift is his when he comes for Christmas; Dee's will be here when she gets back from visiting her family at the same time. I'm rarely a good giftgiver, because I am chronically low on spoons and have no money to my name; sometimes it just doesn't happen. This year it's all working out beautifully, everyone is getting the perfect things, and I'm so glad.)

It was bitterly cold last night, and after some back-unrelated (the worst canker sore I've ever had—my pain tolerance is exceptional but this was one of the worst things I've lived through) reliance on pain medication I'm back to being med-free and I spent last night with the sort of stabbing back pain that can only be brought on by insomnia and shivering, and I still don't mind. It's cold and crisp followed by bouts of slate-blue rain; it's coffee-drinking weather, and in the dark nights we raise shining lights. I took the train at 6a, which is my favorite time to ride it (until 7a, when the loud gentlemen got on and seriously, dudes, shut up), I took a nap with my cats, I lit candles and Dee gave me a fantastic and immensely useful pair of fingerless gloves. Winter has always been a strange time for me—through my childhood my extended family wintered in Texas and Florida, which are decidedly non-wintery places; as a young adult I've spent years bouncing between locations and living arrangements and multi-family gatherings of mixed success; always as a cultural Jew who celebrates Christmas it just becomes a bit ... strange. I hate Christmas as a multi-month institution, and would never want to do something extravagant for any of the winter holidays. But while autumn is my season, there is something so powerful to me about the symbol of a light in the dark, of lit trees and menorahs. I don't begrudge winter and I don't fight the night; I like the contrast, and what it means to flock to the comfort of that light.

So, yeah. It's a good time of year.

(Many thanks for all of the Kuzco-related condolences. I've had some good time to reflect, if not overtly grieve, and am gaining some distance from it; I'm really doing fine.)