Greenstorm's Journal

The most interesting thing about it right now is the way it bends reality. For instance, the mouse pointer stops moving across the screen. Is this:

1) Because the mouse device or software is not working?
2) Because my arm isn't moving anymore?
3) Because I'm operating the mouse wrong and forgot that there's a button or something I need to be pressing at the same time as moving it around?
4) Am I sure it isn't moving and I'm just not mentally picking up on actual movement that's occurring?
5) Am I sure it isn't moving and my eyes are just losing the motion in the screen-flicker?

It can take several minutes to troubleshoot before I realize that yes, it is the software, and I need to reboot.

Surreal.

Ok, well, whatever is in those birth control pills they definitely make me much more tolerant of sweet things and general US-type snacks (chips, candy, ice cream). Now that I'm off it I'm back to normal again, which is too bad because I still have like 1.5 pkgs of oreo cookies and a thing of ice cream and half a bowl of chips. Oh well.

Definitely being low on calories is a mood issue. Not "hungry" but "below 1500 calories for a couple days in a row" or whatever. It's surprisingly hard to eat enough home-cooked stuff to meet that threshold; my pork is super fatty but my body doesn't want a ton of it, and I honestly struggle to eat three meals a day. Soylent is helpful there but it would be nice to find something more, I don't know. Cheaper would help for sure. I'll fill the calorie gap with fruit if it's available but it has to be good fruit, and that's so seasonal.

Watching hydroponics videos lately and pulled my hydroponics stuff out. I have 41 tomatoes in pots already and 160ish in the ground, so I guess I need some planted in another way?

I'm resigning myself to needing ~12 hours of rest per night. There's less time to do things, obviously, but being in less pain and not feeling dead is pretty amazing. We'll see how long this whole thing persists. At this point I should probably have a thermometer in the house.

As I think I mentioned when talking about poetry, phrases come into my head and float around or recur for days, months, years. It's not usual for my thoughts to have words associated, so it's kind of neat when they do. And since I gave up on moving I have these flashes where I'm doing something, often petting the cat or planting something in the garden, and I look around and think, "what if I'm happy?"

Tucker mentioned something about how the spaciousness in their life is healing and regulating but not possible to maintain while working etc. It's so healing, and it can't be permanently maintained, but I think it can be a baseline I return to and where I most often rest. I think I'm surprised to find happiness here in this sort of minimalism. I know I can find happiness in people and being full of connection, and it seems I can find it elsewhere as well, in company with myself.

Gotta decide what to do with my couple hours of good time today. Planting things seems good for solstice, as does making soap. Whatever I do, I'll do it while feeling grateful. This self I have is very, very tricky but it's there for me with kinds of defense and support other folks only dream about.

200 tomatoes and still planting. How would I ever have thought I'd achieve this sort of joy?

Tucker left town this spring. I've been up here on my own for several months now, long enough to begin setting patterns in my mind and behaviour.

My social footprint is spread out. I talk to people, some I know well, some I don't, some over the phone, some in person. I still watch shows with Tucker online, and we talk about those shows and analyze them and relate them to things sometimes, but I don't have much in the way of life conversations with him. He is certainly not in on everything that happens in my life. I talk to Josh a bunch on the phone, as I did before, though more erratically. It'll be good to see him up here. But basically now I don't have one person I talk to about most of the things that happen in my life, and a great number of the things I experience and think never get noted with another human at all.

There is no one who knows me except myself.

Recently my mind took a couple months off thinking. I did things, but I didn't perceive myself doing them or think beyond what was necessary to accomplish the tasks at hand. I was inside my experiences in a way that I consider to be my summer self.

Now I seem be to conceptualizing again. The experience of thoughts in my mind catches my attention and I linger on them for a little while. The patterns around me are perceived intellectually rather than through my behaviours. I consider this to be my winter self, and it's interesting to watch it line up with the seasons again. It's been a number of years, maybe even a decade, since these shifts aligned.

In many ways I'm losing my ability to be purely embodied in favour of being caught up in thinking. I also have a great deal of time and my focus seems to be coming back in little bits.

This is not co-thinking, as in a conversation, and it isn't externally-presented thinking. It's just there, as an inquiry or exploration of my surroundings and linkages. My mind might linger on the extremely weird accretion of policy, rules, and behaviours around our work bathroom post-covid, for example, or grope along the constellation of uses, history, and social impacts of synthetic fabric. It's like looking for the spiderwebs spun between all things, the way you might run into a single strand on a path and step back to see where the rest of the web is.

It's a very private feeling.

There's a luxury to having things foreground themselves, to forsaking the mental discipline required to shift the world into important focus objects and into background that is thought of mostly through logistics. Any conversation with humans needs this shift, since words are such a narrow conduit and connections are too wide to fit through except dismantled, piece by piece.

I do seem to be losing stamina in externally presenting things to other people, and other people aren't much in the business of drawing things out from me right now. Just writing this I feel done, my mind wanting to go back into some physical tasks to rest, perhaps like seeding some tomatoes and setting them to ferment or walking the south edge of the property and imagining where the daffodils will go.

And there isn't much reason not to let it, though perhaps I'll find something work-adjacent to guide it into.