jkatkina

I'm feeling more myself today, the last day of my three-week unpaid holiday (lol), which I'm going to stubbornly take as a good omen. I am afraid of the change going back to working full time will wreak, but I am firmly putting that fear aside for now. I'm sitting on a sunny hillside listening to some plinky guitar music and all is well in the soft animal of my body.

Dreamwidth in particular is where I've been coming to get away from the rest of social media and let my sphere shrink for a bit when I need that. It's impossible to not want to be involved in trying to right the racist wrongs currently happening -- to somehow be supporting, rallying, mourning, donating, amplifying voices of colour. I do my best. I've been trying to engage with my more racist relatives on Facebook when they post bullshit "Jesus sacrificed himself because ALL lives matter!!!" memes. I haven't been out to a physical protest here in Vancouver and am beginning to realize that may not be a way I can contribute, at least not regularly, which means trying to triage what kind of online "help" actually helps and what's just privileged noise, and then executing on what I can. It's a lot. It needs doing.

But I may not post a lot about it here. At least the outward work. I'm trying to dig inwards, too, which does fit into the wheelhouse of this blog being unrepentant navel-gazey.

Anyways, we had DnD yesterday, and everyone in our group seemed to need it. Marla is coming over again today since the seal has been broken, and I'm glad of it. She's gone near full nocturnal and apparently stopped eating for three days last week, and I will not stand for this. She will get fed, she will get a bit of social contact, and if she feels like it she will get some things off of her chest. Honestly I wish we could have her just come stay here for a bit so we could keep an eye on her and help out, but I'm not sure where we'd stash her if she's sleeping in the day and I need to use my office for work.

So, holy shit, The Sound of Music is very strange to re-watch right now.

I learned that TL had never seen it, and I remembered it being a lovely movie with a generally good message, although rooted in the times particularly with some of its treatments of women and romance. I wasn't wrong -- it's still a gorgeous movie and I love the music.

( content warning: fascism, and specifically nazis )

When you are not the one directly in the crosshairs, it is imperative that you help the person next to you who is.

When the crosshairs then turn on you, you hope to god that the next person down the line helps you in turn.

So today I learned that if the squash is too bitter, it'll put you on the shitter, and in some rare and alarming cases, in the grave. This is after choking down a fair amount of very bitter baked delicata, because I was hungry and peevish at the notion of having to throw out half my supper.

Well, lesson learned.

If the squash is too bitter, quit'er.

So we ended up hanging out on Zoom, which was a good compromise, although Mat is clearly chafing really hard to, you know, actually have people around. We're all clearly frazzled right now, though with them it's because it's really tough with two young kids right now, and two jobs.

We did chat for two hours. I love those folks, and it was nice to get some grown-up time -- usually these days when we are with them, it's largely with their kids. But boy am I tired. I'm so tired.

I had a minor breakdown today over the idea of things going back to normal.

( Precipitated by Mat telling us, it's high time for a hangout, don't you think? )

Even aside from the family stuff, though, I desperately don't want things to go back to normal. I don't want to be in a big warehouse painting in a cold room five days a week, with an hour transit either way full of strangers and through a sketchy part of town. I don't want my weekends to be full of social obligations that eat up all my time.

I don't want that crushing guilt over not being enough to return, but it's already coming back, and there's nothing I can do to stop it.

eta I suppose the upshot here, the tl;dr if you will, is that I have been enjoying my time completely cut off from people outside my household. Whatever horrible things that says about me. Because fuck personal preference, right? You're only good if you can exist in the ways other people want you to.

Today I went on a walkabout. It's been years since I'd been on one -- since last time I was jobless with no need to job hunt, actually, which was in Calgary almost a decade ago, so I hadn't done one proper in Vancouver yet. Wanders, sure, long ones, sure, but a walkabout has several basic components that should be considered:

You must have no plan for where you are going

You must pack water and snacks and prepare for the elements

You must have music

You must not have a time at which you need to be home

You must go somewhere you have never been before

You need at least three of these for a proper walkabout. The objective is to let your feet and curiosity lead and the rest of you follow, and then find your way home from there. Cities are good for walkabouts, as you can get lost in a city and find your way again more safely than you can in the wilderness (unless you know that wilderness well).

( Things discovered )

My feet hurt, my calves hurt, my thighs hurt, my butt muscles hurt, and I am happy.

Finished another art today!

( how do you feel about...... tiefling booty )

Atypical measures of time passing:

Fortnights

Number of times nails have needed trimming

Animal Crossing moon phases

How much salt is on the jade plant

Batches of kefir TL has brewed (a remarkably accurate measure for a day)

Cycles of optimism and exhaustion

I am no longer used to the physical proximity of other human beings. We had a friend over (my wife's computer collapsed entirely and our friend is an IT wizard) for the first time since before this thing started, and I stress-ate nearly an entire jar of olives.

( art )

I had this dream a few months ago, but it keeps coming back to mind, for reasons that I can guess. There is a slow story in there somewhere, if I can tease it out.

I am slightly drunk and very silly.

Tonight has been an unusually sociable night. It is TL's birthday (happy birthday to the best wife!!), and I got to give her a cake (covered in the fated buttercream) and a DnD sourcebook.

Otherwise, here are such things that have happened today:

My brother and my two nephews stopped by outside our house to wish TL a happy birthday, through a window, for a solid half hour. E, our older nephew, demanded that we come to his house immediately afterwards. Unlikely, although darling; it is lovely for our presence to be so desired. we plan to stop by tomorrow and shout-chat with him and the rest of the fam from the sidewalk. Poor kid is so sociable; clear signs of stress at having Auntie Time diminished.

My work put on a digital Happy Hour at six. I almost didn't go but I am glad I did; it is easier to socialize with my coworkers from the comfort of my pyjama pants than it is to stay at work until 7 and not get home till 10. We did about a dozen toasts to different parts of the production team, since our current production is wrapping up, and it was sweet af.

We played some Jackbox games with our dear friend M, from DnD, and a handful of other people I'm loosely acquainted with (mostly from the ten-years-ago school days). I am glad she put these on; she came to drop off a gaming system and games a few days ago, with proper social distancing established, and she seemed to be doing pretty badly. She got dumped by her good-for-nothing BF in december and had been struggling a bit, and I think the total isolation is getting to her. I love her dearly, and wish I could do more -- it was good to hear her laugh today. We'll hear from her again tomorrow with DnD at least.

It's a strange time, but it distills the love we have for the people in our lives. I am not strictly the most sociable person, but I find myself feeling strongly about the people in our lives that mean the most.

Check on your folks, folks. Everyone needs a little extra love right now.

Let me tell you a tale of defeat and victory, my friends.

It's my wife's birthday on Friday, and our nephew's birthday today (kid's gonn have a fun time in college with that). TL declared that she wanted a cake for today, so we could skype in with our nephew and his cake and pretend to be there with him. I said okay! Excellent, sounds good, can do!

And then I made hummus, and ended up with some extra aquafaba. And then I discovered that Aquafaba Swiss Buttercream Icing is a thing.

Now, I am not a baker. Last time I tried to make buttercream icing, with actual butter and, you know, all that, it curdled and I couldn't fix it. Grainy misery. Delicious but just awful-looking. Don't use raspberries in buttercream, folks. I am also subject to a wide and interesting array of dietary restrictions, including such baking all-stars as eggs and milk. I stick with my meats and my veggies. So, buttercream icing? Not my bailiwick. Not my wheelhouse.

But I am a stubborn bitch, and last night after a cider and a half I got out my chilled, sugar-laden aquafaba and my hand mixer, put on Tim Sutton's Marble Hornets rewatch stream, and I started in on the task.

Friends, I have made mistakes in my life. Here are some that I shall share with you today:

Hand mixers were not made for buttercream, even with whisk attachments. We kept having to ice it as it overheated. Hellish for us and embarrassing for the hand mixer.

The chemistry of buttercream icing is precise and unforgiving, and does not allow for such travesties as COLD BUTTER.

The (substitute, vegan, of mysterious ingredients that I don't ask about but never came from a cow's tit) butter had somehow made its way into the fridge. I did some googling, and despaired. Butter must be room temperature, they said. This is non-negotiable!! they said. Then one sneaky, deceptive little bastard of a website said, here's a way to room-temperature your butter in TEN MINUTES! and like a rube I believed it.

Thirty minutes, a damp microwave, and lukewarm butter later, I'm exhausted and in the first stages of being hungover (I'd been beating that aquafaba for hours by now), I make the executive decision to well-fuck-it-it's-warm-enough.

It's not warm enough.

My aspirational buttercream, after another twenty minutes of beating, looks like wet cottage cheese. It's not going to emulsify. I'm near tears, because I am a dramatic binch, and the internet offers me the excuse I need to go to bed. "Let it sit for a while and then try again!" OKAY. GOOD NIGHT.

Now, during isolation I basically have been rolling out of bed and immediately getting to work. It's great; I can leave work earlier, and it ensconces my grumpy a.m. hours in solitudinous labour. It does mean I got up with intention not to touch the curséd buttecream stew until noon at least, so I shuffled off to the computer mines to paint some space ships.

Maybe forty minutes into my workday, I hear sounds coming from the living room. TL has put on a full, noisy choral rendition of Hallelujah. I wander out, =___=??ing... and she shows me a bowl of. Perfect. Smooth. Silky. BUTTERCREAM.

Folks, leaving it overnight worked. She whipped for like ten more minutes by hand and bam. Magic.

Now we have too much buttercream, and I couldn't be happier.

First, some Tuesday vibes.

Small (and big, sometimes simultaneously) ways daily life has changed during quarantine, recorded for posterity:

Grocery stores only let you in a few folks at a time. Most have started delineating lineups with six-feet gaps, the media of the day being chalk and tape. These impermanences must be refreshed periodically, and I think speak of how ephemeral people hope this thing will be.

People in my city have begun applauding at 7pm, out of their windows and off of their balconies, to show appreciation for front-line workers still out in the plague. This is, of course, no substitute for actually paying them right and taking good care of them -- so many of those still working are working because they are hostages to their wages in this city with a high cost of living. That said, I think the applause is as much for the applauders as the applaudees -- it creates a sense of community, just a little bit, every day at 7. Also it's great fun to smash pan lids together to make as big a noise as I can.

The air is clear. I smelled the ocean from home for the first time the other day. Canada has pretty good air quality, so our change is not as dramatic as other places, but there is still a shift. It's heartening, but also stomach-droppingly scary -- are things going to go back to normal after this? I don't want them to. Our normal is sick.

I have started joking with my brother over text. Just a little, but humour has not been a part of our relationship previously.

My nephew's birthday is next week. Poor kid loves having people over, but they can't, so my brother and sister-in-law are organizing all his friends to walk by the house at different points in the day. We each have a half-hour allotment in which to arrive, wave hello through a window, and move on in good time so we don't crowd the next folks. Later in the day, TL has organized that she and I will eat cake on Skype along with my brother's family so we can be "there" in a way.

TL's birthday is next week, too. I'm not even sure what we're going to do. How strange, how sad -- our first wedding anniversary passed last month with little fanfare, in quarantine. I had been hoping to throw a party before the world ended.

My favourite nerd pub, the Storm Crow Tavern, is closing for good because of this plague. It won't be the first or last little place I love that will close because of it. Let this be a lesson: always order the Vader helmet booze bowl while you still can, because you never know when the Vader helmet booze bowl will go away for good.

People seem to be feeling the impulse to contribute, as they can. The number of folks I've seen starting to sew masks en masse is an impulse I understand, but haven't personally been able to summon yet. There seems so little of real impact to do, but also I'm tired and afraid and that makes doing things difficult.

Interesting times. Some good, mostly bad.

Some days I struggle with self-isolation, but it's interesting: it's the same way I struggle with weekend days without plans even when the world isn't ending. There's a pattern to it: I get up, sit around on the computer, feel unable to do anything active or productive, and just spiral down from there into frustration and anger and feelings of self-worthlessness. Or I am gentle with myself and let myself do nothing, and I.... do nothing. I end the day feeling groggy and a little bit gummy.

Or on days when I actually get things done, I struggle with the manic sense of "today's a GODO DAY gotta KEEP DOING THINGS while I can". I'm getting better at letting go of that, but it really feels like some quirk of my psychology has set it up so that I just can't win.

Part of it is that there's a little, tiny extra barrier-of-entry to doing anything creative when there's someone else physically in the room with me (or on bad days, in the house with me at all). I feel obliged to keep track of the emotional state of anyone I'm with, just a little bit -- and then also, I feel like if I start doing anything, I'm going to get interrupted, which is an immediate frustration spike. The thing is, this is true; I get interrupted a lot when I'm with other people. It's all well-meaning, but it deeply constrains what I can feel safe doing with my time.

I'm sure this is a problem other people have conquered. It's a deeply banal human issue, exacerbated by anxiety and circumstance. Not everyone struggles with it, but boy howdy, do I.

I guess quarantine hasn't really changed my day-to-day all that much, except to make it more of itself. Go figure.

The "this feels like a holiday" portion of the ride seems to be over. I'm so tense I'm making myself a bit dizzy.

( To get it off my chest )
In summation, economic insecurity is a fucking bitch and now is a very bad time to have a contract coming to the end.

We as a society are seeing now just how shitty our social safety nets are.

Okay, so, ( Southern Reach trilogy speculation (and spoilers): )

Also, I'm working from home now, for the next week and a half at least. Probably longer, but we'll see. Honest to god, I kind of love it.

So I did the lightly-unthinkable and actually wrote the skeleton for that pitch idea I was angsting about a couple of weeks ago.

I'm erasing any expectation of finishing it -- at the very least, a good friend of mine said that a good pitch usually takes about a year to put together anyways. For me, that would probably mean three, so I'm sticking to just enjoying how good it felt to get things written down.

well -- good afterwards. I tend to have panic responses while trying to do creative things at home. It feels like nonsense, for someone who makes a living off of drawing pictures, to freeze up when trying to do it at home, but there we are.

In any case, if I'm even going to entertain the pretendy-funtimes notion of ever pitching this thing, I had better get used to giving other people a look at it. If anyone's curious to take a look at a pitch skeleton just barely past metaphorical conception, pop me a message and I'll pop you a link. It's utterly unfinished, but it might be a lark.

The COVID-19 sityation is genuinely freaking me out. It wasn't -- until today when it got declared a pandemic. It probably isn't as scary as all that, but -- but. I have two hours of public transit per day, and work in a workplace that is pretty unforgiving when it comes to requests to work from home.

I'm not in the age group where it'd be utterly terrifying, but I'm in a high-risk bracket for my age group. I've got a shitty immune system and asthma. (On a purely personal note, all this hand-washing has been hell for my poor, eczema-ridden hands. ugh.)

I think this is also one of those side-effects of getting involved in The Cause of unionization. I'm aware of how things could be, how they should be -- and how absurd they currently are. There's no good reason not to let us work from home. They just care more about coddling their clients than they do about keeping their employees healthy. It fills me with a largely impotent rage, which in turn magnifies my fear.

Ah, I'll be okay. But I'm hella activated right now. Not fun.

Also waiting to find out if my contract gets extended, so like, stress all around. whee!

Animation in Canada isn't unionized at all; animation in the States is somewhat hit-or-miss. The studio I work for has branches in three cities. One of these branches is unionized. They make way better money than we do up here, and not just because the American dollar is stronger than CAD.

There are rumblings of unionization in my studio. I don't often get involved in causes -- I'm a very private person without much extra energy -- but this is one with the magical combination: I feel the pull to get involved with it, and I feel like I have something meaningful to contribute. I am, in the end, a good arguer.

We, as in myself and several coworkers, met with an intermediary organization (not the union reps, but a group of animators who had formed a pro-union organization in order to facilitate interest) a couple of weeks ago. The folks from the organization were articulate, fiery, and driven, and the union cause is one that I was on board with even before this meeting.

Apparently, animation is one of the few creative industries that isn't already unionized in my city, and the major creative union organization has its eye on us as a feather in its cap. I'm slightly skeptical of this -- it feels as if it's not being done for our benefit, necessarily, on our part -- but it does mean we come from a strong bargaining position. Egos can be manipulated.

It'll be interesting to help this pan out.

Art Babbitt would be proud, I think.

There's a spiral of pork belly and herbs behind the sneeze guard of my favourite cafe. I'm staring right at it, and it looks delicious, but I've never asked for it, or even what it is. Because who asks those questions? Who can concieve of asking these questions?

I came out of work today mortified. I tried to make a connection with someone important, and it flubbed. I embarrassed myself -- or maybe I didn't? -- I felt embarrassed. I have no read on what the other person felt about the situation, because panic overrode my ability to read people. Which, when I'm calm, is pretty good. When I'm panicky, I'm realizing, it's terribly, terribly bad. So if I think I read disappointment, confusion and dislike off of this person, I can't trust that.

I can't. I keep telling myself that.

So much of my life is paralysis. My studio recently made a big four-year deal with Netflix, which means we're going to have steady work for a while. Well, "we" as in the studio, not "we" as in the employees. Contract work is a bitch. But in any case, it's a good time to make a pitch. Any pitch that gets made will make it in front of Netflix execs, and if they don't take it, someone else might.

I have a good idea for a pitch. I think it's a very good idea. Compelling, complex, visually striking.

Apparently people who announce their New Years resolutions are less likely to fulfill them. I don't know if that's causation or simply correlation, but it does not surprise me. You feel the pressure. You feel the scrutiny. It's paralyzing.

I'm tired of not achieving my goals. I have to trick myself into doing anything. It's tiring.

I won't make the pitch, but I will dream of it. I know myself too well to get excited by this.

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jkatkina

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Art Babbitt

a stream of consciousness.

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