This game-slash-livejournal-entry ends with hot hot kitchen makeouts. Because that's what happens, because that's what we do. Darius and I make out in our kitchen a lot, we did it in our previous kitchen, we will do it in the metaphysical motionless kitchen of the mind when we are both dead and reborn as objects in Ian Bogost's house. \n\nWe had a fancy somewhat oldish wine lying around for a special occasion (a 2008 Chateau Neuf du Pape, which taught me that I really do not give a fuck about merlots anymore, if any other wine jerks are out there) and I optimistically had bought champagne a few days before Just In Case Things Actually Turned Out Well. And we made meat CSA-provided steaks and drank fancy wine we'd been hanging onto since well before we got married and slowdanced in our kitchen and the only person to see us was our cat.\n\nWe danced with the cat a little bit too.
(have you noticed yet that this isn't a game? oh but wait it IS because you're choosing to keep clicking! ...isn't that the snake oil they're selling these days?)\n\n(every time someone says "we can use games //for// [something else]" I die a little inside and feel more certain that the current landscape of "games" needs to be burned to the ground)\n\n[[Games don't need to do shit for you or humanity they owe you fuck all.|Eight]]
Mom texts me three hours after I texted her, to tell me that the move is over and the movers had to haul her couch over the balcony because they couldn't get it up the stairs.\n\n(If someone ever wanted to do a targeted marketing campaign in Boston for their moderately-priced sofa, "It actually fits up the staircase!" would not be a bad slogan. The only sofas I haven't had to hoist through a balcony were Ikea sofas that you can take apart with an Allen wrench.)\n\nI still don't believe my house is my own -- I've never lived there without our basement full of all my mom's things, our attic acting as her bedroom, half the pantry and fridge full of someone else's food. I kind of want to take a half-day just to go home and stare at empty rooms.\n\n[[That would be ridiculous though.|Seven]]
A very nice thing about my office is that we all have desks that convert between sitting desks and standing ones. So on days when I overdo it at the gym (as I did today), I can just stand instead of having to sit & stand over and over.\n\nI then send my boss an email in response to a legit work problem and tack on a PS about desperately needing coffee, if and when she feels like making it. My boss makes coffee for several people in the office because she likes making coffee the way I like organizing other peoples' closets. I think she's a little baffled as to why we're all so grateful, since she sees the whole process as an opportunity to play with her various flavored syrups and extracts and spices...meanwhile, if she ever decides to open a coffee bar, I'm throwing every penny I have in as an investor. I have no idea what is IN my coffee, but it's always far better than what I get handed anywhere else in exchange for money.\n\nWhen you don't drink caffeine very often, you can actually use it like the drug it is, and get a rather sustained high off it. This allows me to move around and use chairs and whatnot long after the Advil wears off.\n\n(I realize this all sounds like my boss is lacing my coffee with cocaine or something. I can't even be like, "oh no, she certainly isn't doing that", because I've never done cocaine so I have no idea what that'd even feel like.)\n\n[[Enough about my gym-induced pain management.|Four]]
This is the last week of the vegetable CSA for 2012, so I take an inventory of what we haven't cooked yet from previous weeks and what we just got, to try to sort out recipes we can make over the weekend.\n\nI also take the opportunity to marvel at the fact that I have an entire fridge now, instead of half of one. I also stare at the blank shelves in the pantry. I start to do a little dance, and then I feel like I shouldn't be this happy, and then I feel weird for feeling weird about being happy.\n\nMy mom moving out is a no-loss situation: she gets to be on her own again, she gets access to all her things, we get to be alone, we don't have to maneuver around all of her things.\n\n[[I still feel weird and guilty for being so happy, though.|Eleven]]\n
My spouse comes home and gleefully examines our empty attic, our empty basement, our empty shelves and coat closet and refridgerator. He says, "woooow", a lot. Drawn out, as if he's forgotten what word he started out saying in the first place.\n\nI feel even more guilty and break down crying, apologizing for putting us through this. For not drawing better boundaries. For letting my mother control as much as I let her control, because I was used to it and I didn't quite let myself see just how bad things were.\n\nYou guys, it was the worst thing. \n\nFor a great deal of the one year and eight months my mother lived with us, I dismissed the faces people made when I told them my mom was living with us. And then once an end was in sight I started to let myself see it. And I became very angry. It's very strange to be so mad at someone you're also genuinely very happy for. I want nothing but good things for my mother. I am mute with rage at my mother.\n\n[[Whatever at least she doesn't live here anymore|Twelve]]
Don't get me wrong, I still believe in vote-with-your-wallet. I don't shop at Urban Outfitters or Anthropolgie or Free People anymore because the owner of all three of those companies gave Rick Santorum tens of thousands of dollars in the 2012 primary cycle.\n\nNot because I think it'll change anything. But because I find that disgusting, and I'm happy to spend money on silly clothes elsewhere.\n\nLikewise, we pay for vegetable and meat CSAs because they're convenient, delicious, and within our means. But fuck anyone trying to walk around and judge people for NOT doing that. Our vegetable/fruit CSA alone is about half a mortgage payment, and that only covers six months of vegetables. Who the fuck thinks that the majority of the country has that kind of cash on hand up front? Did they live through the same economy the rest of us just lived through?\n\n[[I know none of us are doing enough because things aren't better yet.|Ten]]
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I shower at work, and let me take this opportunity to complain about my office's showers. They're dismayingly mediocre, a word I'm not used to associating with my job.\n\n(I have a theory, which I share with/possibly stole from a formerly close friend, that all job advice works for dating advice and vice versa. I ran away from the game industry officially in October and I'm still very much in the infatuation stage with my new employer in a way that is possibly unique to dating an adult after dating a horribly immature person.)\n\nAnyway, the showers at work are //weirdly// uncool, kind of gross, and lacking in towel service. This is one of those complaints I only make when drinking wine in certain kinds of parties (Rich People Problems), but -- secret time -- I'm drinking wine right now.\n\n[[Oh geez I have to actually use my legs to walk around.|Three]]
Twelve of Twelve
I actually drag myself into the gym. Holidays plus injuries plus I don't know life I guess have gotten in the way of my gym schedule.\n\nNot today! Today I go, I lift a lot of weights and do a lot of exercising. I forget to bring a Moleskine to write down my workout numbers, again. I still like the idea of using one of my stack of Moleskines for tracking this sort of thing. (People keep giving them to me...what are they even //for//?)\n\n[[And now to get through the rest of the day.|Two]]
I wait as long as I can and then I text my mom. My mom is moving out of my house today. I feel like I'm going to die from the stress.\n\nChange, even good change, is kind of difficult.\n\nSo I text my mom to "check in" but I think at least part of me wants to make sure the movers showed up and this is actually happening. I am paying for the move. I have paid for a lot of things, and will continue to contribute financially. To help.\n\nI'm not sure who I'm helping. I'm pretty sure if someone else told me this story, I would advise them to do a lot of things I just cannot do. But what I //can// do is hand over my credit card, so I've done that.\n\n(I don't believe in miracles, because I don't believe in "god", but I don't know what else to call it that I've managed to somehow find someone who knows how to be in love, and treat them as well as I can, and have that actually work and be loving. If you can imagine it taking 31 years to pull a blindfold off someone's eyes, that is how tedious I feel my own feelings are about my relationship to my parents, and the sorts of relationships they taught me (inadvertantly and actively) are normal for grownups.)\n\n[[Essentially I'm just so glad I didn't have to date as a single mom in the 1980s.|Five]]
Today is #12of12. A social group that I used to be in was Pretty Into taking twelve pictures of their day on the twelfth day of the month.\n\nThe first month I tried to participate, I found out my contract at my then-current employer was being cancelled.\n\nI am intentionally bad at #12of12 out of an irrational superstitious fear that bad things happen to me when I try to participate in it.\n\n[[But I guess I'll make a game about it.|One]]
I go home early, but not so early it's a half day, so I can pick up our CSA veggie share on the way. \n\nCommunity-Supported Agriculture.\n\nVegetables that are very fresh, locally grown, in season, didn't cost a lot of carbon to transport, free of whatever they're supposed to be free of (depending on the growing practices of the farm). The idea is that it's better for you because you can actually know where your food comes from.\n\nIn reality, it's more expensive than a discount grocery store, possibly as expensive as a regular grocery store (depending on many factors), but cheaper (possibly) than a farmer's market...but as with MANY THINGS, it requires you to have a lot of cash up front in order to save money in the long run. \n\nIn reality, your financial transaction with your local farm doesn't do shit to change the food subsidies structuring of the US government, doesn't do shit to change the food distribution/access/cost to the OVERWHELMING majority of the country, doesn't do shit to change the budget or spending choices of public school lunches, doesn't do shit in general.\n\nIf you follow that line of reasoning, if you are willing to call bullshit on your own personal vote-with-your-wallet "impact", you might accidentally end up questioning capitalism, though.\n\n[[And we can't have that, right.|Nine]]
I started work two and a half months ago, so I'm just now at Peak Uselessness, at least based on what I've failed to get done this week. I went through several weeks of training, and now I've had time to forget all the information I don't need to use every day, and now I'm working on projects that require me to know some of the finer points that I've managed to completely forget.\n\nThe sensation of having once known how to do something is not pleasant.\n\n[[I don't even know what I did today at work I just know I existed there|Six]]
December 12, 2012
Courtney Stanton