the new normal
Apr. 11th, 2024 07:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitBack again after yet another longish disappearance (sorry). It's been a tougher adjustment since my car got stolen than I was really anticipating, and I feel like I'm only starting to emerge from a fog of tiredness and deep but indistinct distress.
1) There's more physical exertion in my days now, due to all the walking. And the commute that used to take 10-15 minutes each way is now close to an hour each way. Less time, more tiredness.
2) I'm more anxious. Right after my car was stolen I started wedging a chair under my door at night, because I'd had a spare apartment key hidden in the car. By now it's pretty clear that either nobody found the key or they didn't care, but I'm still blocking my door. I've also had a spike in "Did I turn the oven off? Really? Really really? And did I lock the door when I left? I find I have no distinct memory of locking the door, so maybe I didn't." I was always a bit like that but it's worse now. Unless I deliberately, consciously check as I leave, I worry about it all day.
3) I'm mostly through it now, but having to find new ways to do things was miserable. I don't like changes to my routine. I didn't like having to learn how the apartment complex's laundry rooms work, after years of just taking everything to the laundromat. (I especially didn't like having to download a goddamn app in order to do my laundry--the machines no longer accept cards. The app has its advantages--it tells you whether there are machines free, so you don't have to waste a trip--but I still resent it.) I didn't like having to figure out where the bus stops are. (You would think that it would be easy to tell this via bus maps, the bus system website, and signage. You would be wrong.)
4) Then there's the surprising humiliation of car-lessness. I never felt that when using public transportation in Minneapolis or Washington DC. But here in Santa Fe, public transport is so inadequate that nobody uses it unless they've got no choice, and wow does it feel stigmatized. Every time I wait at the bus stop, I feel like passers-by are giving me wary and speculative looks. (Santa Fe has really shocking levels of visible homelessness, often including in/near heavily touristed areas. I can't blame people for being a bit wary--one of my first days taking the bus, I was hassled by a mentally ill homeless man and it scared the hell out of me.) I keep wanting to signal in some way "No, I have a job and an apartment, I'm not going to ask you for money or start ranting to you about the CIA." Which is possibly shitty of me, I dunno.
5) On the brighter side, the insurance has officially conceded that my car was stolen, and is prepared to pay up to the tune of about $4300 (less my deductible, so about $3800). That's about twice what I was imagining as a best case scenario, so that's good.
6) Despite all of the above, I'm still not planning to buy a car until October-Novemberish. We'll see.
7) I scheduled a day off today, despite feeling like I should save all my PTO for whenever I can actually manage to get top surgery. (Which is a whole other can of fuckery. Losing my car stressed me out and fucked up all my health habits, which brought my A1C out of the acceptable range again when it was tested in late March, after having been well in range at the previous test in December.) I could use about another two weeks off, at least. I was already sidling towards burnout at my job and none of this has helped.
8) But in the last week or so I've felt steadier, a bit less fatigued, a bit less emotionally awful. Hopefully I am indeed settling into the new normal.
I have done other things besides mope! Sort of. I've been reading! For instance, I've read Barbara Hambly's Sun Wolf and Starhawk fantasy trilogy, about which I have complexly mixed feelings that I won't go into here on this already-long post. And last night & today I read K J Charles's latest, Death in the Spires. It's a bit of a departure for Charles in that it's almost not a romance. (There is a love story, but it's not really central; one interesting detail is that this book has no explicit sex scenes whatsoever.) Formally it's a mystery, but really the mystery elements are pretty perfunctory. What it actually is, or wants to be, is a crime novel exploring a group of friends and how that friendship fails in various ways both before and after the crime. Charles tips her hat textually to Sherlock Holmes, but the influences I felt at work were different: Barbara Vine, Tana French, perhaps Donna Tartt. To be clear, Charles's reach exceeds her grasp here--the novel needed to be longer and to explore the characters more, particularly by giving our protagonist clearer and more consistent motivations. But my sense of Charles's most recent, oh, 6-8 books is that she's been straining at the limits of genre romance for quite a while now, and I'm happy to see her try for something beyond them. I'm curious about where she goes next. I'd actually love to see more of these characters, but I don't see how Charles could get another book out of them without abandoning even the pretext of male/male romance. I guess we shall see.
And I'm watching Taskmaster S17. Not loving the cast so far, but sometimes it takes me a while to warm up to them. And S16 is going to be a hard act to follow.
1) There's more physical exertion in my days now, due to all the walking. And the commute that used to take 10-15 minutes each way is now close to an hour each way. Less time, more tiredness.
2) I'm more anxious. Right after my car was stolen I started wedging a chair under my door at night, because I'd had a spare apartment key hidden in the car. By now it's pretty clear that either nobody found the key or they didn't care, but I'm still blocking my door. I've also had a spike in "Did I turn the oven off? Really? Really really? And did I lock the door when I left? I find I have no distinct memory of locking the door, so maybe I didn't." I was always a bit like that but it's worse now. Unless I deliberately, consciously check as I leave, I worry about it all day.
3) I'm mostly through it now, but having to find new ways to do things was miserable. I don't like changes to my routine. I didn't like having to learn how the apartment complex's laundry rooms work, after years of just taking everything to the laundromat. (I especially didn't like having to download a goddamn app in order to do my laundry--the machines no longer accept cards. The app has its advantages--it tells you whether there are machines free, so you don't have to waste a trip--but I still resent it.) I didn't like having to figure out where the bus stops are. (You would think that it would be easy to tell this via bus maps, the bus system website, and signage. You would be wrong.)
4) Then there's the surprising humiliation of car-lessness. I never felt that when using public transportation in Minneapolis or Washington DC. But here in Santa Fe, public transport is so inadequate that nobody uses it unless they've got no choice, and wow does it feel stigmatized. Every time I wait at the bus stop, I feel like passers-by are giving me wary and speculative looks. (Santa Fe has really shocking levels of visible homelessness, often including in/near heavily touristed areas. I can't blame people for being a bit wary--one of my first days taking the bus, I was hassled by a mentally ill homeless man and it scared the hell out of me.) I keep wanting to signal in some way "No, I have a job and an apartment, I'm not going to ask you for money or start ranting to you about the CIA." Which is possibly shitty of me, I dunno.
5) On the brighter side, the insurance has officially conceded that my car was stolen, and is prepared to pay up to the tune of about $4300 (less my deductible, so about $3800). That's about twice what I was imagining as a best case scenario, so that's good.
6) Despite all of the above, I'm still not planning to buy a car until October-Novemberish. We'll see.
7) I scheduled a day off today, despite feeling like I should save all my PTO for whenever I can actually manage to get top surgery. (Which is a whole other can of fuckery. Losing my car stressed me out and fucked up all my health habits, which brought my A1C out of the acceptable range again when it was tested in late March, after having been well in range at the previous test in December.) I could use about another two weeks off, at least. I was already sidling towards burnout at my job and none of this has helped.
8) But in the last week or so I've felt steadier, a bit less fatigued, a bit less emotionally awful. Hopefully I am indeed settling into the new normal.
I have done other things besides mope! Sort of. I've been reading! For instance, I've read Barbara Hambly's Sun Wolf and Starhawk fantasy trilogy, about which I have complexly mixed feelings that I won't go into here on this already-long post. And last night & today I read K J Charles's latest, Death in the Spires. It's a bit of a departure for Charles in that it's almost not a romance. (There is a love story, but it's not really central; one interesting detail is that this book has no explicit sex scenes whatsoever.) Formally it's a mystery, but really the mystery elements are pretty perfunctory. What it actually is, or wants to be, is a crime novel exploring a group of friends and how that friendship fails in various ways both before and after the crime. Charles tips her hat textually to Sherlock Holmes, but the influences I felt at work were different: Barbara Vine, Tana French, perhaps Donna Tartt. To be clear, Charles's reach exceeds her grasp here--the novel needed to be longer and to explore the characters more, particularly by giving our protagonist clearer and more consistent motivations. But my sense of Charles's most recent, oh, 6-8 books is that she's been straining at the limits of genre romance for quite a while now, and I'm happy to see her try for something beyond them. I'm curious about where she goes next. I'd actually love to see more of these characters, but I don't see how Charles could get another book out of them without abandoning even the pretext of male/male romance. I guess we shall see.
And I'm watching Taskmaster S17. Not loving the cast so far, but sometimes it takes me a while to warm up to them. And S16 is going to be a hard act to follow.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-12 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-12 04:53 am (UTC)Laundry is supposed to run on quarters and shlepping! An app feels insulting as well as dystopian.
I am glad your insurance is willing to cough up for your car.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-12 05:12 am (UTC)Good that the insurance has finally decided they can't wiggle out of this one and is paying.