In which I have thirteen inks!?
Well, this is my fountain pen ink collection. I don’t think I realized I had so many!
The hues I have are these:
Grey, horsetail brown, tundra green, teal, damson purple, rouge opera red, black, violet, apple green, orange yellow, rose pink, lavender blue, and syrah red.
The syrah and the tundra are both subtle and muted, and look great together — would be amazing for Christmas cards.
The J. Herbin inks are cheery and bright. (I haven’t tried the perle noire yet, but I expect it to be a true black rather than a grey, based on the swatches I’ve seen online.)
The Diamine grey is really light with an extra fine nib, so I’m going to put it in a pen with a broader or even a stub nib. Imagine it’ll look antique.
I love the horsetail. It’s an amazing, rich brown. It’s probably my favorite color; it and the syrah.
Haven’t tried the teal yet; need to clean a pen! Bought it to put in the swirled teal Wancai Mini:
(I also have some cartridges—a couple colors I purchased, and the rest that came packaged free with pens: black, black brown, black blue, blue, and red.)
I was just surfing for fountain pen inks, but I guess I don’t actually need any more! And I certainly don’t need any more fountain pens, but I have half a dozen cheap Chinese ones arriving next week anyway.
In which I whinge!
My feet hurt.
I’m glad of my new job because it forces my lazy self to move around, but MY FEET HURT! I just worked a seven-hour shift (wearing compression socks and squishy shoes, even) and MY FEET HURT!
My feet hurt! OW.
I did get a delicious sandwich half-off, though, so that was lovely. Oh, and I get a booze discount, too, so I got some Bailey’s and am totally gonna have Bailey’s in my coffee tomorrow!
In which there’s a repost, because I liked what I wrote.
My dad, no idiot, who has told me about his own experiences of the ineffable (while yet confusing “religion” with idiot American Christianity and considering himself an atheist), posted this on Facebook:
This was my reply:
Seriously, though, who believes in a God as a separate, remote, all-powerful entity in the ceiling, and not the whole of distributed consciousness? (We’re not the ancient Greeks, for fuck’s sake. We call it “weather” now, not “Zeus.”)
Children do, maybe, ideate such a “God” briefly, and also the pitifully indoctrinated, and the ignorant. Have pity on these, as you would on the idiots and the damaged, as you would on those who believe in ghosts or magic. They will either come to know better in their time, or are incapable of knowing better. Either way, let them be. (Unless they vote. Hah.)
Most atheist memes are raging against a “God” nobody worships, because truly that “God” is well known to be a caricature of a symbol of an icon of an idea of a koan, weakly and vaguely representing that inexpressible, ineffable state every conscious being knows intimately and yet seeks endlessly: love.
The truth is that the entity whose duty it is to feed those hungry and protect those kids and women from idiot ego’s bottomless and selfish hunger is that one who can perceive such suffering: You.
Me.
Us.
Every one of us.
We’re conscious, we’re consciousness; we’re consciousness embodied, distributed, and rarified, and WE’RE what’s capable of perceiving suffering and acting upon it.
We’re “God.” Us. We, alone (as far as we yet know) among all the elements of the manifest, immense, infinite physical universe, are the only ones who experience refined intelligence and consciousness. (Barring ET and cracking superluminal travel, of course, but I digress. So far, it’s just humans.)
In brief, bitching about suffering — and raging at some one-dimensional cartoon “god” nobody credible actually believes in — is really no more noble than ignoring suffering altogether. The problem is not with “God,” it is with that ridiculous definition of God as a thing apart from the world, an individual entity like our minds, separate and finite, capable of selfishness and laziness.
God is consciousness, or love. And infinite. This is plainly stated in most scriptures, but one has to, you know, actually put in the study time, in earnest, to learn it. Figuring out what “consciousness” means apart from our finite minds, knowing what the mystics know, takes time, introspection, and intense self-discipline.
I guarantee no earnest seeker thinks God is a white dude floating in the sky like a Marvel superhero.
TAT TVAM ASI: thou art That. (Or, as I learned it, lifted from a Beach Boys song: I am That, thou art That, all this is That.) Figuring out what that means is the only meaningful journey.
In which I’m blogging because I’m not scrolling Twitter.
TWITTER:
I waste a remarkable amount of time on Twitter. Used to enjoy it, but now it’s more a habit than a pleasure. Sometimes it’s fun, still, and there are quasi-meaningful interactions with other users, but most of it’s just crap: the absurdity that is the White House, the bad performance art that is Fox news, international news of wars, crimes against humanity, the occasional interesting tidbit about an old word or some science. But most of it is really just unadulterated crap: recycled jokes, married women saying mildly clever coquettish things for male attention, pet pics, ads, and vitriol.
Now it’s been “improved” into a site that does not show you content chronologically; you see others’ Likes in addition to their Retweets; and the mobile app some months ago started refreshing to the top on its own, hiding older content and re-displaying seen content.
That was annoying, so I’d switch to the site in a mobile browser. But now the browser version has started doing that, too. You’ll be reading a tweet, and the thing will just reset to the top on its own.
Too annoying. Tab closed.
GERMS:
It’s been, oh, around 72 hours or so since a co-worker showed up visibly ill and breathed all over everything, and I now feel what may be the beginnings of Coming Down With Something.
Am I irritated as fuck? Why yes, yes, I am! Stay home when you’re actively shedding goddamned germs, people, especially if you work in public!
There are people out there, like me, who JUST DON’T LIKE BEING SICK, thank you, and worse, there are those who will FUCKING DIE FROM THE COMMON COLD, and you might be breathing on their caregivers in your public job, so do your best to stop it from spreading. It’s your civic goddamned duty. If you can afford to work in Uptown, you can afford a couple days off when you’re contagious. Working while sick is not a praiseworthy sacrifice indicative of a good worth ethic, it’s rude and, at a stretch, quite possibly involuntary homicide.
BIRTHDAY:
My birthday is Saturday. I’ll be 50. No friends or family in the area, so no party. At least I won’t have to put up with macabre black bunting and balloons and over the hill jokes, but also, nobody’s planning shit, so, yeah? Not gonna say I’m not disappointed about not celebrating my big five-oh with a proper party. Nobody cares about 38 or 47, but 50?
It’s looking most likely at this point that I’ll be snot-filled and bed-ridden for the day, but if not, I’m considering requiring I be taken on a date to a jazz supper club about twenty minutes away. Wear a dress, some makeup, a cocktail ring, eat a $25 plate of food, come home. Sounds fun!
DISHES:
I have to do dishes at work now, so doing them at home is making me mad. I grumble about it under my breath.
It’s sorta like my internal monologue when I was married and infuriated, except my current partner actually, you know, supports me, so mostly I just want a professional sink and sprayer setup because domestic dishes are stupid.
CHILI:
I made three bean vegetarian chili today in the Instant Pot. Came out yummy!
WEIGHT:
Having a job that requires me to move around has not only destroyed my feet (ye gods they hurt!) but I think might be helping me lose a little weight. I haven’t taken my measurements or anything, but my gut seems slightly less gigantic.
At the very least, my Google Fit app pings me each shift to congratulate me for taking my 10k steps for the day! I mean, it’s not like I’ve become sporty, but compared to the nothing I’ve been doing the past three years, it’s an improvement. A painful one for my feet, sure (ye gods they hurt!), but hey.
WEATHER:
It cooled down from the 90’s! Wore a hoodie and a scarf the past two times I walked to and from work; tonight it’s rainy and cool and I have the window open and it smells nice!
PHONE:
My phone, which works excellently, is doing that things all phones do after a couple of years: it’s telling me its full.
I have a massive SD card in it, but apps bloat endlessly. Apps also flat-out refuse to work if they get old enough, so you have to let them update in order to even use them, and then one day your phone’s full.
App bloat pisses me off. I remember when devs would try to keep code small and efficient, but the expectation now is of endless hardware and processor improvements, so nobody cares. In a few months, my phone will start telling me it can’t update installed apps, and then I’ll spend half a year deleting things until I’m down to a quarter of what I’d actually like to have installed, and then I’ll need to buy a new phone.
Cell phones are marvels of technology, they truly are, but the expectation of endless hardware upgrades is just humanity being fucking wasteful and dumb.
CLINGS:
I cannot wait until next Monday because I’m going to put THESE up!
I adore me some holiday window clings, I truly do!
HOBBY:
My traveler’s notebook/fountain pen thing is still going strong. I have a dozen (cheap Chinese) fountain pens now (anybody who’d drop $700 on a pen is a weirdo), and a half dozen bottles of ink.
Look at this precious little lipstick-sized swirled teal mini fountain pen!
Occasionally I go over to the Java Hut and practice calligraphy over a latte, though only for fun; I have no intention or expectation of actually mastering it.
It’s pleasant and distracting; much better than scrolling Twitter!
In which I vent about the strange side effects of surviving for five decades.
I’ve been unusually healthy most of my life, I think.
Always felt robust and fine the majority of the time, barely even noticed my body. Had one surgery, wisdom teeth out, and a root canal. A ganglion cyst on my left wrist that cleared up on its own, as they do. No major broken bones or ER visits or in-patient hospital stays, or anything, really, beyond colds and flus. Have never had a regular GP my entire adult life.
I’ve felt truly fucking miserable, yes, but save the puke-inducing pain of a prolapsing uterine tumor it was always the mental pain of panic/anxiety rather than genuine physical malfunction.
Well, now my whole body is turning strange and foreign!
I have actual pain, low-level and fairly frequent: feet, knees, hips, and back. Usually from strain or extra activity, but sometimes just because I slept or moved weird. My hands have ached since I started banging them around at the cheese shop, and now I find it hard to squat during a 6 or 7 hour shift because it actually hurts to stand back up.
My hands and lower legs swell, especially at work (but also in a fairly predictable way throughout my cycle these past few years), and I now wear compression socks.
Today I walked home from work just past four o’clock — it’s a five minute walk, about two blocks — and, even though it’s mid-September, it’s 91F and humid and very sunny. The side of my body that was both sunward and exposed/not covered by my dress is burnt. Burnt! In five, six minutes! My left forearm and the outside of my left hand, and my neck and upper shoulder on the left side are red and hot and sunburned!
I mean, I do have very oily skin, and I’d just been working food service for seven hours so I’d been perspiring and was additionally covered with mist and damp from doing dishes, but damn! I used to tan; had to be out for hours to burn.
The other day I thought I had had an allergic reaction to some cucumber-aloe facial mist, but now I wonder if it might have been a reaction to the sun? I sat in the sun outside the coffee shop to write in my notebook, and was dark red everywhere the mist — and the sun — had been when I got home. (I rinsed off in cool water and the red cleared away, but now I’m not so sure it was the mist. I really don’t want to develop allergies; they sound like a pain in the ass.)
Aging is so, so strange. Total lesson in non-attachment, having one’s reliable, rarely-changing body come up with new and strange ways of being. I remember the first time my lower legs and ankles decided to swell up toward the end of my cycle (it was in my early 40’s), how freaked out and distressed I was at the idea that Something Was Very Wrong; now I’m used to it, more or less, I guess, but it doesn’t look particularly attractive.
And now instant sun burns? Really?! What the hell.
I’m also slowing down! I’d rather get up earlier and plod through my getting-ready-for-work process than haul ass through it, and I never thought my Type A ass would ever turn into such a person. And at work, well, now I’m glad I’ve always been focused on efficiency because I need that efficiency more than ever now. I find it hard to really rush, at least in a sustained way. (Most of my cheese shop co-workers are older folks, thank God, because I don’t think I could keep up with a bunch of 20-somethings anymore, and MAN is it fucking weird to say that.)
Being lazy and maybe working a bit slower than one should or could: that’s a decision. Now, my very best rush, when making sandwiches, for example, is not what it used to be, even if I do have a big cup of coffee in me. I have a hard time hauling ass like I used to, because I end up dropping shit or being messy and also I don’t really have the energy or ability to fully do so like I once did.
Then there’s also the questions of genes — how much of my experience of aging is just how this body is programmed to age — versus the decisions I’ve made: everything from vegetarianism to never being particularly physically active to partying to smoking for 31 years. Like, if I’d eaten a different diet and worked out, and never gone to Dead shows on LSD, would I still have these cankles? I’ll never know, since this body is the one I live in and there’s no control body to compare it to. But I do wonder, though.
Anyway, I don’t think I’m dying or anything, but I’m more aware of the body than I’ve ever been because it does stuff now, stuff it never used to. It reacts to the world in sudden and mildly alarming ways! It swells up, gets tired, aches, gets varicose veins (!), gurgles, and wakes up four times a night for no fucking reason at all. I think I’m getting a mole on the back of my left hand (?!), and probably age spots. My skin is thin and odd. My right eyelid sags. I might need a dermatologist for possible nascent skin tags on my throat. I may be too thin-skinned to do dishes at work without gloves; I suspect it can no longer tolerate the industrial soap, sanitizer, and bleach.
It’s just weird, getting older. That’s my whole screed: it’s just weird.
In short, I’ll be turning 50 in two weeks, and I totally feel it!
Update: So I’ve put a wet cloth on my burnt neck and after an hour and a half in the air conditioning the red’s nearly gone?
In which there was spaghetti for dinner!
I made tofu “meatballs” today. (The recipe is here.) I’ve never eaten actual meatballs, so it was a strange exercise, but hey: I had all the ingredients on hand and needed to use up the tofu!
Alone, they’re really bland, but in sauce they’re fine. (I didn’t make the sauce the recipe calls for because I didn’t have tomatoes; just grabbed a jar of mushroom marinara at the gas station.) Decent texture and remarkably filling. Himself said they were “really good,” and cleaned his plate, so: well done, tofu recipe!
Somewhat labor intensive to make, what with needing blender, bowl, plate, tongs, and pan, but it would be worth making a batch and maybe freezing them. Throw a few in a pot of sauce to heat up while the noodles cook, and you’ve got dinner on the table with very little effort.
For dessert, there was caramel cookie crunch Talenti gelato!
I’m so full.
In which I was able to quit a job I very much did not enjoy and replace it with one that involves CHEESE.
I applied to, like, between 17 and 22 jobs over about a month’s time.
Two declined via email; none of the others even responded, save I think one that sent a “we received your application” message. One called me back for an interview. One.
Luckily, the one job I interviewed for hired me on the spot, so now I have a lovely P/T job right here in the neighborhood! It’s a one-block walk to work! The pay’s the same as the last job, nobody screams at me, and I get to taste yummy cheeses.
I work in a cheese shop inside a big liquor store. We make and sell sandwiches, sell cheeses and a few meats, jarred things like marinara, honey, salsas, bulk olive oil and balsamic vinegar, sweets, crackers, chips, olives, dolmas, pâtés, pastas, martini shakers, bottle stoppers, and baguettes. It’s a really fun little shop featuring a lot of local items — the sandwich breads and baguettes are baked a block away, and there are multiple Minnesota cheeses — plus a bunch of imported European treats.
My job involves customer service, sandwich-making, dishes, cashiering, sweeping and mopping, slicing meats and cheeses, weighing things and putting stickers on them, and keeping cold case temperature logs.
It’s so much better than taking calls for Comcast! Nobody yells at me! I get to eat cheese! I get sandwiches half off when I’m on the clock, and an employee discount on booze!
It’s so great. And I totally need the physical activity, so I basically just look at is as paid enforced exercise with some free socializing thrown in.
Plus: cheese tasting!
All the people I’ve worked with so far are lovely, the work is hard but not that hard (it’s not endless, cascading, unsolvable systemic customer service failures, but my feet do hurt), and I think my training is coming along well. Mostly I just need to memorize the sandwich recipes so I can make them more quickly without having to refer to the directions.
Oh, and tips! Not much, got about twenty bucks my first week, but it effectively made the pay rate a skosh higher than my previous job where people screamed at me half the time and all the employee-facing policies were hostile.
So: whoo! New job!
Yay!
In unrelated news, I went to Planned Parenthood on Monday for a UTI I think I’ve had for a month or more. The last time I had one I didn’t even know until the nurse called and demanded to know why I hadn’t told her I had a UTI two days before a surgery, so I guess my symptoms are typically mild? The dip was negative (they sent my sample off for culturing), but they gave me some pills anyway which I picked up across the street at Cub. I read the insert when I got home and was too freaked out to take them for two days because WHAT IF I’M THE ONE WHO GETS THE POTENTIAL SIDE-EFFECTS. (Anxiety is so stupid sometimes. Also, the last time I had a UTI was when I had that uterine fibroid, so I’m half convinced I’ve got another one, because ANXIETY IS SO STUPID SOMETIMES.)
Took my first two doses today, and believe I’m already feeling better, but I also think my period just started, so that’s another layer of feeling weird to confuse the symptoms. Who knows. Twenty-three day cycle, egad.
Aging while female is really no joke, no, not at all.
In which I bitch about the job market.
I work for a distributed call center. (Yes, I’m white trash like that. Ye gods.)
A year ago, I moved off phones into a chat pilot, which was great. They made us take three chats at a time for awhile, which was fucking insane, but chats are chats and not calls.
Well, it’s been cancelled.
No more chat pilot. Finis. (Actually, it’s been turned into a proper department, so that’s why the pilot is over, but the contract to work it was given to another call center in Mumbai.) So, tonight, I was moved back, by my call center employer, to inbound phones.
It fucking SUCKED.
Taking calls for Giant Cable Company’s home security product is rough:
– One guy was a dick to me because he failed to pay his bill and got disconnected. This was somehow my fault.
– Another only responded to 40% of the things I said, and was unintelligible when he did respond (because the mic on his phone was garbage). He grunted and panted a lot. I was not able to solve his issue and he refused a tech visit.
– Another claimed slow internet (that diagnostics did not support; I think the real issue was a virus-infested laptop). Did the troubleshooting, issue not resolved, offered to send a tech. Caller was enraged that there weren’t any tech appointment times she liked, took it out on me.
– Another person was pissed because an install appointment had been moved for no apparent reason, which I completely understand. My department doesn’t handle installation appointments. Customer demanded a call back from the appropriate department the next day. Well, I can’t schedule callbacks from any department, not even my own. Sorry for the frustration. (You’d think they’d build a tool for that, but no: customers can schedule callbacks on the website, but it’s automated and just throws them into the goddamned queue with everyone else. It’s a raging insult, but hey, that’s corporate American customer service for you.)
I’m nice to people. I listen and empathize. I mirror. I try. I have very little ego left about any of it and don’t really take it personally when people are mad, but there’s so little I can actually do to help. I get paid (very little) to be ineffectual, replaceable, and to get yelled at. That’s how my job is designed. And it’s disappointing and frustrating for me. I used to be a fucking sysadmin. I had root on boxen, FFS!
I don’t have any authority. I don’t know the why or how. The company is too big, too broken, and too greedy. I am a cog; I am replaceable. Anybody who can sit in a chair can do my job. Turnover is fantastically high and the job is designed to take any warm body. I am expected to have no expertise.
The job itself is hostile: by the time my extension rings, the customer is already pissed off about navigating the IVR, authenticating, and long hold time. Tools don’t really work, I can only support some things and not others.
I have to say “I don’t know” a lot (but I’m not supposed to because the Quality Assurance document says “take ownership” right on it). Volume is always really high, because that’s how call centers work: they have historical call volume for this half hour on this day for the past decade, and never over-schedule employees. The majority of items tracked by metrics are hostile to customers and employees both (the shorter the calls, the better? really?) but are measured anyway and treated as real data.
You can’t say “deliver world-class service” and “keep your calls as short as possible” and mean both.
There’s almost nothing that isn’t terribly, terribly broken.
I do get to work from home, braless and shoeless, with no commute. But I also get shit on by both sides: tools that don’t work, problems I cannot solve, angry callers rightly frustrated by standard corporate American bullshit.
Obviously they told me chat was going away, so I’ve been job hunting. (Turned out it went away in 4-6 weeks rather than 4-6 months, but they did tell me, damn them to hell.) One place turned me down, twice, no idea why. Three others didn’t even acknowledge receipt of my application. A few national work-from-home places that say they hire in Minnesota have no Minnesota positions available, likely due to a minimum wage hike (expected in four years, if I understand it correctly).
I live in Uptown, so there’s work in the neighborhood but it’s mostly food service. I applied at a deli and a coffee shop; neither replied. I’d never get a front-of-house job because I’m no longer young and hot, don’t even want to bake pizzas, I haven’t waitressed in decades, and the office jobs want young, enthusiastic, hard-working college kids to work shit hours for ten bucks an hour, or people with obscure licenses.
I’m feeling like shit about it. I hate my job and want a better one, but work, as I’ve been saying for years and years, is awful. Low pay, awful hours, and this horrific expectation of total devotion to the job on the employee’s part, with nothing whatsoever in return from the employer! Random scheduling, uncomfortable environments, no bennies, no holidays, no hope of promotion. You’re just supposed to bust your ass and say thank you for the abuse. It’s a shitshow.
I don’t want to get abused by angry callers five nights a week. I don’t want to apologize for shit that shouldn’t be broken in the first place. I don’t want to pretend my audits aren’t ridiculous, nor do I want to pretend enthusiasm for a shitty, hostile position that has never given me a raise or a holiday off.
But I also don’t want to get an equally shitty other job, with a commute. Working from home means you don’t have to spend a dozen hours every week getting ready, dressed (fully suited up in wintertime just to step outside), walking, bussing, and walking, just to get to and from work. Working from home means you have half as much laundry. My work-from-home job is awful, but it’s at home. I can forgo makeup. I can not wash my hair for a week. I can wear what I slept in.
I want a job where they appreciate me for being useful, intelligent, dependable, and friendly. I’d like to work efficiently, do well at it, and feel decent about it. I’d like to make more than ten bucks an hour. I’d like my schedule to be the same every week, or get a decent amount of warning when it changes; I’d like to get holidays off. I’d like to do this work in a reasonably comfortable environment, with, like, climate control. I’d like to be able to walk there, or take a single bus. I’d like to have tools that work, I’d like to be able to actually solve problems or produce measurable output. And then I’d like to go home and not think about work until it’s time to go back again the next day.
How the fuck is that unreasonable?
And yet, it is. If you’ve read job descriptions for non-specialist work in the past ten years, apparently it is.
(What I would give to have my old U-B job back! It was part-time, I had a desk, it was 5 blocks from home, decent pay, and I got most major holidays off!)
In which there’s a thought.
You know, if you’ve found some old post here in which I’ve said stupid shit, please feel free to ignore it.
Over the course of keeping this blog, I’ve thought a lot of stupid shit, and I can almost guarantee that whatever it was I eventually got over it.
I used to be anti-vax and pro-homeopathy. I used to think shit about feminism and transgenderism I no longer think. Various opinions and feelings and thoughts about a lot of things have evolved. I’m a work in progress.
In other words, I’m too lazy to dig through seventeen years of posts to update or correct things I was thinking through; most likely, if I’ve written something dumb, I’ve gotten better since then, because I’m always learning. And writing out long screeds helps me to do that.
Cheers.
In which a favorite author has died.
Several writers have said today that they think they’d have been afraid to meet Harlan Ellison.
Well, I’m not a writer, so I guess I don’t have a writer’s fear of having my work critiqued by Harlan goddamned Ellison, but I’ve been around smart, mouthy men, and if you feel you would have been afraid to meet Harlan, you haven’t learned how to tell people to shut the fuck up.
Which, if you’re a fan of his, you should have learned from him. Ellison was basically a walking master class in how to tell people to shut the fuck up.
The way you do it is this: when smart, mouthy men say or do stupid shit, you say, “Shut the fuck up. Jesus. Are you even listening to what’s coming out of your mouth?”
And if they’re smart, and you’re right, they will.
The only time it gets uncomfortable is if they’re dumb or you’re wrong.
I never met Harlan, of course, but I don’t think he was dumb. I mean, not that my opinion matters in the least, but it never once occurred to me that anybody’d be afraid to meet Ellison. He looks like he was an unmitigated hoot.
