British Summer Time GMT+1

complete and utter lack of oomph

the tremendous pain and emotional exhaustion is one thing. tight, pulsing pain at the base of my skull; crying because half of a cherry tomato fell out of the toasted sandwich i was making for my partner; a curdling feeling in my plasma; not knowing if i’m upsetting people because my sense of their feelings has been cut off. those are, like, intense and present.

ever-surprising though is the complete and utter lack of ümph. like, do you ever… you know when you… it’s like inside you you have a match hanging, bobbing against a spinning disk of coarse sandpaper and at some point it bobs enough that the match lights…. like, you have an idea like “i’d like to make a cup of coffee” and you put it in layaway until you have a spark of energy and you grab that and jump up and go do. a small spike in your fluctuating will power that’s enough to ignite you. and your inertia is no longer such that you can’t start, but such that you keep going.

well that’s missing.

i have been, since 8am, trying to take my half a hormone (none yesterday) and make coffee and gashouse eggs. or even just any one of those things. but i can’t get up. i can’t actually move. and if i put things on layaway they never get picked up. i’m going to have to synthesise willpower from something else. maybe i can imagine that a large rodent has been dropped on me, or that the house is burning down. i think if the house was burning down i might still just lie here. maybe if i just,,, lean to the left and roll off the sofa onto the floor then the jolt will shake something loose

maybe i could order some coffee to be delivered, then hopefully my pathological desire to never be an inconvenience to anyone will mean i get up to get the coffee from the hallway so none of the neighbours have to be reminded that i exist

if only abe was awake asking for eggs, then i could use that as fuel. okay, i’m going to try again. i’ll close the laptop and i’ll synthesize willpower out of something. maybe if i throw my vape onto the laundry basket then eventually the power of nicotine addiction will overcome the frozen executive function

— chee (hi@chee.party) 2020-06-11

British Summer Time GMT+1

reduced capacity

i’m having a really hard time atm

hormones postage has been delayed and i’m running out, down from 6mg a day to 1mg every 2 days, and will soon (3 days) be on 0mg a day

it’s better to have a little every couple days to suddenly have 0 for a week

i learnt that in the winter we stayed near the ice skating rink

my skin feels like it’s being scraped off from the inside with tiny forks

and i’m tired and exhausted and can’t think straight or do anything right

they were ordered in April, and they left Vanuatu on 11th May on a fiji airlines cargo plane

apparently Royal Mail is taking a long time to process international orders

i tried to make a gluten free hollandaise sauce for breakfast, but instead i made a pot of yellow brains. that was about 100 times fancier a breakfast than i should have tried. i tipped the pot into the trash and somehow missed the bag and had to pick it all out of the sink with a wooden spoon

the pharmacy made an agreement with Vanuatu Post to pay an extra fee so they can ship via a fiji airlines cargo aeroplane, it’s some of the only mail going out of Vanuatu

they aren’t passing these extra shipping costs onto the customer, which is great of them

but they’ve said that if you’re in the United Kingdom (i’m in the United Kingdom) an order might take 4-8 weeks to arrive.

some people started receiving their May 11th orders on 28th May

but it’s up to luck really, about how good the route is for the package through Royal Mail to your home

and you don’t get shipping updates, because it’s on these cargo aeroplanes, not ordinary mail

i had a shower today

i’m going to shower every day, get smooth and clean, and accomplish 1 (ONE) thing every day, and eat 3 meals a day, and sleep before midnight

and when i wake up i’ll drink a glass of water, fizzied up with 2 alka-seltzer and a berocca

i will be strong girl

British Summer Time GMT+1

a bought a compact cassette recorder.

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the little box for the Sanyo TRC-1148 Compact Cassette Recorder

it’s a Sanyo TRC-1148.

features:

  • built-in speaker
  • built-in mic
  • mic port (jack)
  • ear port (jack)
  • voice-activated recording (you can arm the tape to record and have it not start rolling until it hears a loud enough sound)
  • a 3-digit tape counter

tape is warm

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a tape of circus music “MUSIC FROM UNDER THE BIG TOP - The Circus All-Stars”. there is washi tape over the write-protect holes.

the seller didn’t mention there was circus music inside

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the 3-digit tape counter reads 978

it’s a great album. if you wind to the end of the first side and reset the tape counter, then rewind until the counter reads 978, there is about 54 seconds of blank tape.

i’ve made some music with the tape recorder and the OP-1

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the tape recorder and the op-1 (and the pocket operator k.o. and the a notebook and a pen and some gay headphones)

it’s good

— chee (hi@chee.party) 2020-05-10

British Summer Time GMT+1

dvd

i remember this man who worked in the hardware store who had a scar that some people said was a lobotomy scar he liked me, he was not very smart he sold pirated DVDs and he had a folded up list of them in his pocket his friend made them, and he sold them for his friend i had a fast internet connection at home, i didn’t need pirated DVDs i don’t think i even had a DVD player but i’d buy them sometimes he’d come up to the trade desk, where i worked, and he’d say “i have new movies” and i remember one time very vivid, he came and he said “there’s a new one called.. ‘no country few(???) old men’ or something” and he kept saying it: ’no country’ then he’d pause and say ’few?’ then he’d pause and say ’old men or something’ he took the list out of his chest pocket and pointed at it and said “few old men?” and i read it out loud, i said “no country for old men” and he said “it doesn’t even make sense… no country.. few old men??” and i said “i’ll have that one” and gave him £3.00 i’ve still never watched that film

i think that as you go through life, more and more things have memories attached to them and it becomes too exhausting to do anything, because of all the memories all dates are anniversaries every verb or noun is about someone or something and it becomes too much work to do anything, because of having to process all of the past and that’s what kills you

but then i guess people with no memories would never die

— chee (hi@chee.party) 2020-04-15

Greenwich Mean Time GMT

Winter books

Over the winter holidays I read some novels. I don’t normally read fiction very often. Angus Croll says that life is too short to read anything but fiction, I’d like to agree with that but I have that thing where if I’m not actively working on something Death is in the room.

Over the winter holidays, though, I made an effort to read some fiction. I got a little pink-and-white ebook reader (a rakuten kobo) and I decided to read a book.

When I was 17 or 18 I got a job in B&Q. B&Q is just like Home Depot, except it’s in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I was living in Northern Ireland at the time, in my parents house, and it was my first proper job. I saved up my pay and took a trip to America. I got a flight to Chicago and a flight home from San Francisco, and traveled on the Greyhound bus through Des Moines and Denver and Las Vegas (where I was on my 20th birthday).

The men at the Trade Desk had taken a liking to me and they asked the people at the front if I could be made the permanent checking staff at the Trade Desk. The front accepted, and I was moved to the back to the Trade Desk. It was good there, there was a little room and I had access to the Trade Door where I could escape at lunch and go to the local electronics store. It only got busy a few times a day when tradespeople would come in and buy concrete and bricks.

One day when I was at the electronics store I saw they had a netbook computer available for like £30 and I was really interested. A tiny little computer of my own. This was 2007.

The person in the store told me “you don’t want that, it’s not a real computer”, i said, “i do want it”, they said, “it doesn’t run windows”, i said, “i don’t mind.”

Soon I was meeting wpasupplicant and installing hundreds of tiny linux distributions on the netbook’s tiny flash disk and having a great time. The screen was bad, the keys sometimes snapped off the keyboard. It was the first computer I truly owned.

Up until then I’d been teaching myself to write HTML and CSS on my father’s old Dell desktop computer (he’d recently obtained an abandoned eMac from a friend who taught at a school), and also on a computer that was right there at the Trade Desk. The Trade Desk computer didn’t have an Internet connection (but I did find a lot of fun intranet pages). I’d save the web page I was making on a first generation iPod Shuffle that appeared to Windows as a removeable disk. They were all bright pages full of large block text, with different CSS on every page and quotes from books or intrusive thoughts.

A few months later, I’d settled on some tiny linux distribution or another for now and was browsing the web on the 1-degree of viewing angle the screen had. It was around this time Cory Doctorow released Little Brother under a Creative Commons license. I was hugely into Creative Commons and other licenses like it, and still to this day release nearly everything I write or make under an open license of its kind.

I downloaded the book, and I read it during the many hours when the B&Q trade desk traded nothing. I had it on my iPod shuffle too, so I could also bring it up on the computer beside the till and read it there.

I bought a DRM-free copy of Little Brother on the Kobo over winter, and I started reading it. I only got as far as the first dedication (every chapter is dedicated to a different book store) which mentions the book Little Fuzzy. I stopped and bought that.

Little Fuzzy

This is a good book about the nature of sentience. An influential book, in the public domain. There are little furry people in it, the word-to-word writing is pretty good and the story is good too. I read Little Fuzzy and its sequel, the only ones released in the author’s life.

I enjoyed them but they had so much gender, implicit and explicit society gender all over them as far as the eye could see and nose could smell.

Content warning

Some of the content is a little rough.

  • It’s pretty pro-colonialism, kind of nostalgic for the East India Company
  • The one time someone’s skin colour is mentioned, it’s pretty racist
  • lots of basic gender bullshit
  • lots of use of “males” and “females”
  • men writing women. women walking boobily down the stairs.

Tensorate Series

After reading Little Fuzzy, I wanted to try something with less basic gender bullshit. I started looking for some fiction where I, a smol enby, could finally relax.

I opened duckduckgo and I typed “books with non-binary characters” and “sci fi non-binary character” and opened up some tabs.

On one of the lists, at the top of the list, was a series of books called “The Tensorate” by JY Yang. the description included the word “SILKPUNK” and the author was a person with whom I share pronouns. I was excited.

JY Yang is a Singaporean non-binary person who writes very nice prose about a vivid world.

The first book was The Black Tides Of Heaven. In this world, gender is not assigned at birth but is chosen later. Some people choose not to choose.

Over the next 10 days I gobbled up all 4 books in the series. The Black Tides Of Heaven, The Red Threads of Fortune, The Descent of Monsters, and Ascent to Godhood. The magic in the world, the way it is described, is so tangible. I know what it feels like to perform slackcraft.

You catch the larger story in glimpses between the faster paced stories of humanity, and you can feel and smell and taste the world. Plus, it’s gay.

— chee (hi@chee.party) 2020-01-02