The day after my gig, I went to the South Bay to meet some people, including my tax accountant. I took the train down from Berkeley to San Jose, where it depositted me next to the Sharks Arena at Diridon Station. I biked several miles to my friends house in Los Gatos, on the far side of Lake Vasona.
She told me to take the Los Gatos Creek Trail, a bike route that runs next to the creek, through several natural areas and some large parks. There arent that many dedicated bike trails in the states. This one was exceptionally nice, as it rolled along next to the sleepy creek.
I passed the native and invasive plants whose names I learned at childhood summer camps, but which I no longer remember. I played along a similar creek when I was 11, trying to catch minnows and chewing on fennel. As I biked and looked at the lazy water, I smelled the fennel plants, baking in the sun and I was transported back then.
Ive seen lots of greenery in the world, but that smell, so specific to this one place, made me feel so happy. And then I passed a space where a skunk had been startled within the last day and then, in the park, tanbark baking in the sunlight.
Tan bark is the shredded bark of redwood trees, used as mulch. Its distinctive. As for skunks, they dont smell the same here as they do in other places. The reason that some marijuana is called skunk is because it smells like the skunks that we get here. The smell fades quickly in direct sunlight. So if your dog tries chasin one, you get an overwhelming weed odor that goes away within a couple of days. (In connecticut, it smells like that plus burning tires filled with boiling vomit and lasts for months.)
I met my friend – actually the girlfriend that I dated in highschool and we talked and picked fresh peaches and tomatoes from her garden. Later in the evening, I went to another friends house and had food cooked from garden fruits and vegetables. Everyone there was old California: families from Silicon Valley when it was still known as Santa Clara Valley and from when we grew fruit on the richest farmland in the world. We talked about what was in season, what was growing well this year and splitting cots. (Cutting apricots in half and removing the seed in preparation to dry them.)
Today, I went to the Grand Lake Farmers Market in Oakland and got fresh local zuccini, heirloom tomatoes, peaches, anaheim peppers, all this fabulous fresh produce.
I could live here. I could live in Berkeley and plant fruit trees in the yards of friends and grow tomatoes outside my backdoor and ride the train to some technichal job and bike everywhere and take my dog to the park at the marina and have warm, sunny days 300 days a year.
When the Spanish arrived, the came to the San Francisco Bay and it was too shallow to sail their ships into, so they went down the coast to the Baja tip and did not sail all the way up. So they thought they had found an island. They gave this new island a name from a work of fiction. There was a popular book about an island paradise. So they named my state for the fictional island in the book. Where everything is beatuiful and grows and lovers can pick low haning fruit from trees and swim in the ocean and ride their bikes amidst baking fennel and semi-friendly skunks.
I could stay in this land of mythically good weather and food with the people Ive known my whole life (and some who knew my mother and grandmother) and live only a few miles from where one of my great grandfathers grew cherries and another practiced dentistry. Or, I could go back to England, the country which the cherry-growing great grandfather fled.
I had this idea of an ancestral homeland, but it was romantic and uninformed. I come from California, from the farming and land, from the chip fabrication plants, (alas) from the software industry, from Castro Street and the White Night Riots, from the Free Speech Movement. All of this – the Black Panthers, the growing Trans movement in San Francisco, the constant social tumult and change spanning at least 150 years – this is home.
But Ill go back to England in a few days and stay there to finish my degree. Maybe my home will decide to catch up with the 20th century and fix some of its political problems. The other day, I saw a weeping woman begging for spare change and it shocked me. She so clearly needed help and there would be none forthcoming. All the fine weather in the world is no substitute for food, shelter and healthcare. How far are any of us here from weeping on the street? A few paychecks? A lost job? A bout of depression and no help to vanquish it? How can some place so idyllic still be so fucked up?
The things is, that political will and work from the people can fix the problems of unrestrained capitalism. All the protest in the world cant make perfect weather or rich farmland. So I hold out hope. I already see positive changes in the space of the last year. One day, Ill come home again.
Tonight!
Hey folks, I’m playing in San Francisco tonight in the Edgetone Summit. Show starts at 8PM at the SF Community Music Center on 544 Capp Street. X-street is 20th. I’ve been informed this is directly in between 16th St BART and 24th St BART, only one block of of Mission. Also, very conveniently located if you want to purchase illicit drugs or sex on the way. Save a Hamilton for the $10 admission, though.
Polly Moller and I will be doing a work for lie detector. So think up some yes or no questions to put to Polly. Has she ever cheated on her taxes? Does she still beat her dog? If terrorists were going to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge unless she fellated Dick Cheney, would she do it?
I’ll be moderating, so if something is in bad taste, I will smack you down!
There are some other exciting people on the bill also. The summit goes on all week.
The WSJ on Social Structures in the Loo
The Wall Street Journal waxes poetic about the ladies’ loo. It starts with, “It’s a good thing office lavatories aren’t coed.” This is more or less the crux of the article. Why is it a good thing? Well, the author never actually says, she just hints. The reason, of course, is that it’s a holy temple of feminity. A safe space, for gender normative women. For others?
Not every woman, of course, wants to join an office ladies’ room club. Some undoubtedly think there’s more to be gained snagging lunch dates with staff several rungs above them than exchanging advice with women colleagues. Others simply don’t feel comfortable sharing confidences in front of toilet stalls. They wash their hands in silence and, while they’re present, conversations around them halt.
And this has nothing whatsoever to do with gender presentation. The reason that women have always fallen into icy silence when I tried to pee near them wasn’t because I was too butch. It was because I was a stuck-up bitch who scorned their advice. Who knew?
Oh, but what about the mens? Well, this is the WSJ, so we can’t focus on women’s issues, even when they’re as normative as possible. “Still some of my male colleagues, who describe their exchanges in men’s rooms as monosyllabic at best, tell me they want to join the ladies’ room club. To which I say, come on in — but listen.”
To which I say, give me a fucking break.
Ok, it’s nice that women can get a break from men and have some of their own space. It’s valuable for minority communities to have such spaces. But these informal clubs cement power in conforming members and exclude non-conforming. Also, access to toilets is a biological necessity, not a luxury. Bearded ladies need access as much as those who might want to deal with “ripped panty hose.”
Fuck the ladies room club. Move it someplace else.
Moby Dick Monday!
It’s the, um, late edition! My plan is to look at a chapter a week. Maybe two in some weeks as there are 135 chapters. None of them are especially long. This book is in the public domain, by the way and can be read at google or downloaded from many websites or purchased from a bookstore, etc.
Chapter 1 – Loomings
“Call me Ishmael.” It starts with what it probably the shortest sentence in the entire book. It’s an introduction, in every sense of the word. The book is really conversational. Bloggy almost, with it’s wild digressions and occasional bizarrely misinformed informational treatises.
As for the first chapter, Wikipedia summarizes, “In Chapter 1, ‘Loomings’, Ishmael introduces himself. With a mixture of chattiness, seriousness, and humor, he speaks of his temperament, the call of the sea, and contends that every man wants at least once in his life to leave the land behind for the ocean.” This summary touches on something of a theme in the book. The book is supposed to be allegorical, and employ symbolism and whatnot, which would seem to imply a universally applicable message of some kind. There’s a continual striving for universality that becomes apparent from the start. It’s not enough that Ishmael wants to set sail. This desire must be universal. Every man must want to set sail. That is ‘man’ as in masculine, not ‘man’ as in some sort of generic term for human. He’s only willing to extend his universality so far.
He starts by saying he wants to sail and then goes on, “If they
but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or
other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the
ocean with me.” He comes up with more and more spectacular and dubious examples of a desire for ocean voyages: people go to the beach, therefore, they yearn for the sea. Until the presence of water in landscape paintings must also mean that men want to head out on a boat.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest,
shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic
landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief
element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a
hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within ; and
here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle ; and up
from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant
woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping
spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But
though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-
tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s
head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed
upon the magic stream before him.
In other words, landscape paintings are crap without water scenes. Therefore, I want to take a boat. Melville needed a blog.
This highly suspect reasoning starts to seem like a straining for justification. It’s not just a flight of fancy for me to want to do this. Everybody wants to do it. Therefore, it’s reasonable that I should do it.
He carries on in his chatty tone to overly explain why he wants to go as a crew member and not a passenger – want of cash, largely. And finally just ascribes his desire to go whaling in particular as fate, “Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage
managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of
a whaling voyage,” I can say why whales are cool. Which he does, and then the plot-part starts in chapter two.
So chapter one mostly functions to introduce the narrator as a highly literate schoolmaster/sailor who likes to go on at length. And it sets up the tone of the novel. Funny, poetic, sometimes silly, but seeking of universal truths. Looking, almost, a bit too hard for them.
In the KFJC Pit
This afternoon, Polly Moller and I went down to Los Altos Hills to play in the KFJC pit. KFJC is the radio station at Foothill College, a community college. I took classes there during the summer when I was in high school. And I listened to that radio station when I was a teen, but I’d never been inside of it before.
They lead us down to the “pit” which is a room full of CDs and records with enough space in the middle for a small band to play. I was looking at all of them, since I listened to this station so much when I was a kid. On one wall was tubs full of 7 inch punk records. I saw Bratmobile sort of casually stacked at the edge. These records changed my life! These actual records! Not, like, a different instance but the same pressing, but these actual physical pieces of vinyl opened up my world when I was 16 and then I was in the room with them.
They started calling up sound engineers so that somebody would come over. One finally did, so we did a sound check. There was so much hum and the right channel was out on my headphones. So the sound guy jiggled the headphone cables and I separated the audio cables from the power cables, as they were all snuggling together. Then we improved for about 25 minutes.
I played my “Simple Sample” program. I didn’t know I was going to be playing this ahead of time, so I played the version I had put together for the ETC gig. It has joystick control. It also has a bug in the timing thing that I need to find and squash. Polly played flute and also toys. She read text from a spam message. The text is totally bizarre. I hope she posts it so I can link to it. It has some really disturbing images that come up in it, like with some sort of giant bug, ala Naked Lunch. I sampled her and mostly just played it back, since she wasn’t into the pitch shifting. I added a garbling thing that I originally wrote to mangle Bush, (which I played at ETC along with porn samples.)
I haven’t started officially live coding yet, but I’m at the point where I will confidently modify a program during a sound check. The coming lie detector piece is written to allow live code modification. Because I’m lazy and it’s easier than making buttons and stuff to change states. And that piece is why we were at KFJC. We were there to promote the Edgetone Festival. So after we played, we were interviewed. Well, mostly Polly was interviewed because she is on the board of the festival and because she already knows those guys and finally because I was struck shy by being some place so cool.
Then we packed up and went for food.
The set seemed ok, but Polly was sad because yesterday would have been her 11th anniversary with Paul if he were still alive. It’s the first one she’s marked since he’s gone. She got a tattoo on her back yesterday in honor of him. It’s the Two of Cups, which is a tarot card that had special meaning for them. She spent 3.5 hours having needles pushed into her lower back. It was intense. The tat looks cool, though. It still needs some color work. Her artist is really cool. Seeing that happen really made me want to get another one. A tuba to go with my bass clef? A modular synth front panel? (yes!!) A bike gear and chain? A trans pride symbol? A peace symbol? All of those? (yes!!!)
M ex has a peace symbol around the same spot I would want to put mine. It might be a little weird, but it’s hardly unique for a Berkeley radical to display a peace sign, so I think it would be ok. I’m leaning towards the trans pride symbol, but also wary, in case I want to go stealth or something. Which is stupid, because I’d have to go into hiding or something and give up my career and it would still only out me to people who know this symbol.
Um, anyway, my time is mostly scheduled with practicing for our show on the 23rd. Which you should come to.
Edit
The lyrics are now in the comments for this post.
Moby Dick
I’m reading Moby Dick. I’ve been meaning to for years, of course. I had downloaded it as an e-book. And then i purchased a print copy in an airport. But i had never started reading it until poor planning and a long wait caused me to turn to the ereader on my umpc. All i had in it was Moby Dick, so i finally started it.
I’m not far in now, only like 170 pages. This book is so long, Captain Ahab hasn’t even made an appearance yet (I’m assuming he’s not a Gudot). The introductary chapters are amazingly funny. They’re also exceedingly queer. Ishmael forms a fast and deep friendship with a bed mate. Indications strongly suggest that they’re lovers.
So, despite being barely at the start, i’m considering some projects around this book. Maybe a blog feature: Moby Dick Monday. Maybe a theatrical / musical piece. The book would seem to lend itself to opera. But the humor + the queer makes me want to camp it up. I have an ensemble in mind which would be too perfect if it could happen: The Nuclear Whales Saxaphone Orchestra. One of my high school music teachers plays in this group. They can do camp, for sure. I have an image of them on the stage playing some of the dramatic parts as well as their saxes. Their contrabass sax would, of course, play the whale.
In adittion to the ensemble, of course, i would need a librettist. The ideal candidate would have a campy, queer sensibility and a familiarity with musical concerns. He or she would have experience either writing librettos or, at least, genre fiction. I would attempt to enlist sophie, the genre fiction writing, queer studies, conservatory drop-out, shares my sense of humor buddy, but i think she’s probably busy.
I anticipate a few challenges for the librettist in that this can’t be a cut and paste job at all. From the first chapter, “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” Ok, that’s really fantastic writing. The imagry is evocative, memorable and wry. I’ve had days where i just hoped somebody in the street would hassle me, so i could attack them. Ishmael wants to go a step further and be the agent that starts the fight. This is a potrait of doom, but it does lend itself to camp with the Harry and Maud-esque joining of funeral processions and pausing in front of coffin stores. However, for all its poetry, it is not concise. The whole book is full of witty, wry, long winded passages. This is the sort of thing that librettists are for, though. I mean, obviously you can’t set every word or you’d have a cycle that made The Ring look humble and Einstein on the Beach seem short of text.
Librettists feel free to contact me.
Live on the air
I will be playing a live gig with polly moller on kfjc. But i can’t remember what date, even though she’s just told me, because i am drunk on a friday night. So hopefully polly will leave a comment and you will know on what day to turn your radio to 89.7 fm or point a browser at kfjc.org.
Oh my goodness, i listened to kfjc for hours everyday during my teen years. I remember staying up all hours of the night to listen to them play noise music. I got my first bikini kill album at their record swap. I remember listening one afternoon when i was 14 or 15 and they played “Lecture on nothing” on the radio. It was like nothing i’d ever heard before. Like being struck by lightening. I remember the first time i heard nirvana when they played “Smells like teen spirit.” I remember going to see the mermen play live on the air.
This radio station defined me musically during my formative years. What i like now is from what i heard then. I can’t believe i’m going to be improving live on this station. It’s like unbelievable. Man, i really love you guys.
The latest
I’ve finally gotten occupancy of my new flat. The landlord got out very late on tuesday evening. Moving is a drag and he left a harried unsweptness in his wake. I can’t complain as I’ve done the same. Nicole has been cleaning and organizing everything. She will make for a radical librarian. She’s been shelving my books. The travel books are all together. She has placed my guide to belgium between the guides to france and the netherlands. Next to the netherlands is germany and boredering on the german guidebooks is one to deenmark.
This flat doesn’t have cable. The landlord has left a tv, but my primary concern is for internet access. I foolishly told the landlord that i wouldn’t need a landline, so now i am trying to get it reconnected. British telecome is experiencing a glitch the last few days which prevents them from enrolling new customers. I have no internet, but i can stroll around the estate and chance upon open networks and update my blog.
There is some possibility that my american homeowners insurance will cover my bike. I’ve been glaring suspiciously at anyone who rides by on a brompton. Mine had a weird rear bolt and a trailer hitch, but, obvoiusly, i haven’t seen it. I have recently noticed, though, that while bromptons are extremely popular in london, i never see them locked up outside. People keep them in sight and bring them indoors. Nicole saw a woman place one in a shopping cart. If i get insurance money, i’m tempted by the titanium frame. The steel frame is a bit heavy to drag everywhere. If i don’t get money, well, i still kind of need a folding bike to commute to brum. I have a fabric shipping bag that nicole made for bromptons. I have two bags designed to attach to the luggage rack scheme specific to this kind of bike. I even have standard pedals for one. So it would seem logical to get the same kind of bike again. And one of those locks that comes with insurance.
In other news, i’ve now switched from american-style t to eurostyle. I’m on something called sustanon. The way american t works is that it’s in castor oil (which does not actually come from beavers) -an impossibly thick oil. You inject it into a muscle and it slowly leaks out. It peaks after a couple of days and leaves your body after 10 – 14 days. By comparison, my sustanon is in peanut oil, which is much thinner. It has multiple types of t in it, all with different half lives. So as one is disappearing, another is becoming bioavailable. The standard cycle for this is 4 weeks, but i’m at 3 because i hate the gap at the end and i’m sometimes a day late with a shot. Like last time, for example.
I looked at the drug information booklet. Normally, i try not to or else i start imagining i have all the bad side effects. But i looked this time and it said to alert your docyor if you’vee ever haad bone cancer as this could cause a problem. Well, i actually had a tumor in a bone about 12 years ago. It was benign, but the surgery was really painful. I wonder if i remembered to tell the endocrinologist? Is this specific to sustanon? I don’t want to have more tumors in my bones, but it would really suck to have my voice and chin hair frozen at 15 year old boy. Maybe i should call my old doctor? I’m sort of between them right now.
Finally, i’ve just gotten conformation of xena’s kennel booking. I fly to california on monday. They want her to have been vaccinated for kennel cough several days ago. This would have been a good thing to tell me over the phone when i said her vaccination for that wasn’t current. And they’re not answering their phones.
To wrap up: all my stuff is in boxes. I have no internet. My t might give me cancer. The dog boarding i have lined up won’t take my dog.
Things tend to go the same amount of badly whether i plan in advance or not.
Second Guessing
I have a real problem with second guessing, which makes it extremely difficult to make decisions. I read something recently about how brain scans show that we decide immediately and rationalize later. This might be apocryphal, but if it’s true, it means that I’m just messing with my decision -making process and probably not getting better results. So when it was time for me to decide where exactly I was going to be removing my stuff to the next morning, I was paralyzed with indecision and changing my mind at every moment. I barely slept. I woke in the night and couldn’t feel my hand, not because I was sleeping wrong on my arm, but because of how much I was tensing it.
I finally reasoned to myself that it really didn’t matter which I picked, I just had to pick something. Within a few months, I would have had something positive come out of it and decide I’d made the right choice. I’d say, “well XYZ sucked, but if it hadn’t happened, I never would have met ABC and then JKL wouldn’t have happened, so it’s really great I took that flat.” Both would therefore be the right choice. So I went with the better location because I didn’t want to have to call the landlord and then go get my stuff back from him.
I let a SUV thing. It was my first time driving on the left side. I loaded it up with stuff and then struck out on the motorway and then drove through central London, getting extremely lost. I’m glad to have a GPS thingee. I almost hit one other car once, but they honked and danger was averted. I probably was also too far over to the left, because of being used to seeing the road from a different perspective. Anyway, I arrived and stuffed all my belonging’s into a closet in my new landlord’s flat and then retired to Paula’s flat, as my new landlord had not yet vacated the flat to be mine. He’s an ok guy, but dealing with him is kind of strange, “oh, look, my cheques say ‘Ms.’ The bank must have been confused because my name is a girl’s name in England. heh. I’ll need to ask for a new checkbook.” Being stealth without any kind of legal status or anything except T and bravado, is well, it helps being foreign because it gives cover to any off mannerisms. And anyway, I went to stay with Paula, but not before I backed the rental car into a bollard and took out part of the rear light fixture. I sprung some extra £ for zero deductible on the insurance and that was money well spent. But it’s still highly displeasing to back into something and hear breaking glass.
Paula’s flat is ripped to hell because she’s remodeling her living room. This timing is just bad. So Nicole and the dog and I went to Brighton and camped. Brighton is a cute beach town. It rained one of the days, but was largely ok. We’d been talking about doing a bike trip, but I just felt stressed and wanted to relax, so the only biking we did was between food, the beach and camping. We came back on Saturday for gay pride and marched with FTM London. It’s really weird being at pride – or especially in the parade – and not knowing anybody. But there seems to be a good trans community and I’m looking forward to getting involved in it as I’m hoping it will be a major source for my social circle as it forms.
Originally, my new landlord said he would remove himself by this weekend, but that changed to Tuesday. So I’m still without a flat. Nicole and I were talking about biking to (or from) Oxford as a nice way to fill the time of homelessness, but it’s scheduled to rain the entire time and I was extremely tired after camping and then being in a gigantic crowd of strangers – not all of whom are entirely in favor of the whole LGBT acronym. I wanted to nap. So the bikes stayed chained up and I napped. And then we watched TV and were generally as lazy as one can be in a flat with no living room. This lack of space is kind of trying. I’ve been attempting to avoid second guessing. If I’d taken the other room, I’d be moved in and unpacked and working by now, but it will all be equal soon, so who cares, so stop thinking about it. Things can’t be changed now, so deal.
This evening, somebody rang the bell to ask if we were the owners of the bikes that had been chained to the doggy ride were no longer there. Indeed, my bike and nicole’s bike have both been nicked. The dog trailer, however, was left behind. somebody with a lot of patience sliced through both a chain and a U-lock and made off with two green Bromptons, neither of which I will ever see again. They also got my tire patching kit, an extra headlight and my clips.
This move has been suxxors. If I were somehow transported back in time to re-decide, I would go the other way. Man, I loved that bike.
I’m flying back to the US in a week to play a gig. I need to do quite a bit of work on the piece, but I don’t have a flat. I don’t have my bike. I am displeased.
Too much of a good thing
My friend paula let me know that one of her nieghbors might be searching for a subletter. It was kind of uncertain. Would he go? When would he go? I went to look at a flat in Lewisham that day and agreed to rent it because it was the first place that would have me and because it had many advantages.
Then, i got a call about the subletting thing. It’s an entire flat, right by the tower bridge, for not much more than i was going to pay for a room to the south. The location is astonishingly good. The rent – given the location – is astonishingly reasonable.
So, despite that i have to be out of brum <em>tomorrow</b> and despite having given a small deposit to the lewisham landlord and etc etc etc, i went this morning to look at the tower bridge flat. And i told the guy yes and even left some stuff there, but i am completely uncertain now that i’ve stepped away.
Whatever i do at this point, i’m flaking on somebody. I should have told him that i would let him know in the morning, but the timing is insane and i’m not exactly military-grade when it comes to dealing with pressure. So i said yes, but now i don’t know and i need to know by tomorrow morning, because i’m going to rent a station wagon and i should have an idea to where i’m driving it. Also, if i flake on tower bridge guy, i need to let him know that before he goes to the bank and sets up the direct deposit.
So, lewisham is not as central. The tower bridge is unthinkably, i-can’t-believe-it central. I say i want to do urban living, and that often means one bedroom flats in big buildings. It means taking the dog to a park and not having a garden. It means, often, living alone.
I’ve never had a hoisemate/ living situation ever get quite as disfunctional as the one i’m leaving. I’ve never lived alone either. Alone would be an improvement, for certain. I don’t want to get all Bridget Jones, but i do wonder sometimes: if i died suddenly, would anyone even notice? I mean, i certainly don’t want to suddenly keel over dead, but if i do, i don’t want to think my corpse would go undiscovered for very long. I mean, my dog will need to go for a walk. So, alas, i’m kind of afraid of living alone.
I kind of want a garden, despite my urban affectations. Also, the lewisham landlord’s daughter makes extra cash dog sitting. I would likely not need to find a kennel in july. I would have housemates. A huge, sunny room, a garden, another dog to keep mine company. And no gap.
The tower bridge guy is not leaving until next weekend. Paula has recwntly torn her living room to bits. She’s in no mood for me + dog + girlfriend. However, its what there is. Or a hotel. Or camping on a hastily planned bike trip while my maps are packed someplace.
So living right next to Paula would be awesome, as i’m very fond of her. Otherwise, i’m about 30 – 40 minites away. And my commute to school is also lenngthened. Or i could have an awesome location for an amount only slightly beyond my budget. With no dog sitting. No garden. No idea where i will spend tuesday night.
Also, i’ve been stealth with tower bridge guy. I can say that documents say ‘miss’ because of confusion around my name. But if he sees my passport or something . . .. In addition to everything else, i was stressing about this too.
What would you give up for location? This whole move is about location. About trying to be in the middle of things. But also about trying to find community and feel less alone.
I’m stumped. I have 12 hours. I’m a terrible flake.