You Don't Live Like I Do

I can see a little, so I do care a lot about light and contrast and things, so I'm not in the exact situation that a Blind online acquaintance describes here, but so much of this resonates with me. Especially as we're under increasing pressure to have cameras-on internal meetings at work.

"I am an unwilling cameraman, shooting an obscure documentary about my own face" resonated so hard with me!

My own parents are the even worse about this, though. As per entries passim, I talk to them every week. The only comment I've heard them make about my visual appearance is excessively unkind to say the least if not overtly transphobic, so it's not as if I'm motivated to share my face with them. Yet recently when my webcam was broken for a couple of weeks, my mom could barely carry on a conversation because of how distracted she was by this.

And her language is so telling. It's not "We can't see you" it's "We don't have you." It makes me feel so trapped -- pinned, like a bug in a collection.

It's the same as Robert describes his friend: ""Oh, You're gone! Where did you go?" I don't go anywhere! My mom says "Are you there???" even while I'm already talking. Like he says, " I didn’t go anywhere. I am right here. I did not teleport. I am still in the same spot I was just a few seconds ago."

My new webcam is a nightmare. It doesn't even show my whole head on the screen if I have the monitor as close to me as I otherwise went it. It has way too high a resolution: I've never seen all my facial features this sharply, and I'm very distressed to start now!

Being able to see a little means I am aware of how I look, and you know how people hate the sound of their own voice on recordings because that's not how it sounds to them? I feel like that about seeing myself on video calls. (I actually mostly love the way my voice sounds on recordings, heh.)

"As we prepare to go out of radio communication, we're still able to feel your love from Earth," pilot Victor Glover said. "And to all of you down there on Earth, and around Earth, we love you from the Moon."

Artemis is just so wildly different from previous moon missions. I love it.

I got that quote from this lovely piece on why we go to space.

NASA's budget is not the reason gas costs $6 a gallon, or why we don't have universal healthcare or pre-K. We don't have those because those in charge, and the people who voted for them, have chosen for us not to have those. It is a false binary that we even have to choose at all. The U.S. is the richest polity that has ever existed; there is more than enough money to go around to satisfy basic human services while still funding spaceflight. The people denying us those basic services would very much like for you to identify NASA as the culprit for its $24.4 billion budget, which represents 0.35 percent of all government spending, at the same time a pointless and purposeless war costs us a billion dollars a day, and the government seeks a $1.5 trillion defense budget.

Last night I dreamed that I lost my glasses, so all day I've been weirdly grateful that they are where they should be.

(In the dream I lost my shoes too. And both in such an obvious metaphor for migration -- on leaving an airport, I had to go through something that was half playground tunnel/slide and half like the brushes in a car wash -- that even in the dream I was like "oh, this is a bit heavy-handed and obvious!")

Not before breakfast, but also I felt like I was doing the impossible things, not just thinking them...

Work was a lot; I had meetings all afternoon, overrunning into each other, beset by people missing the point. I think another way the power dynamic of people with no (disclosed) disabilities who have to consult disabled people for their work... sometimes someone missed a crucial bit -- we're not just ranking these on their effectiveness but also their difficulty of implementation -- and sometimes one person thinks we need every detail of the specific symbols on the Berlin U-bahn and/or S-bahn maps (this is a breach of the maxim of quantity: as much information as is needed, and no more).

That latter person talked so much at the end that I missed the first train home that I wanted.

And as these meetings were going on, I also had to get something to my manager (artificial sense of urgency!) which I was really unsure of, something I've never done before and am not sure I'm doing right, so that was stressful. I almost think it was easier trying to do it at the same time as the meetings, since it kept me from being able to get too anxious about it; I just had to go "good enough!" and send him the documents at some point.

By the time of the second one, V had put dinner in the oven which meant I didn't have to cook, which was nice (we keep frozen meals around for precisely this kind of day; D was sleeping and V had already used a lot of spoons they didn't really have today and I wasn't home yet).

I just had time to eat that and watch the first inning or so of the Tigers-Twins game (which I didn't have high hopes for because it was a Skubal start, but it apparently went well! (has something happened to the Tigers?? silveradept, you doin' okay?)) before it was time to go help angelofthenorth get two heavy pieces of furniture down two flights of stairs.

I figured it was the kind of thing that would either be pretty quick or pretty grueling, and it was pretty quick. We didn't break anything, including ourselves. I rehydrated a little and walked home because buses are disappointing that time of night; the walk was actually nice: it was still warm even after dark (I'm not used to that yet!), it was clear and quiet, and the exercise was probably good for my muscles. I still struggled to even get myself into the shower when I got home though, heh.

And now painkillers and bed!

Very sad to realize that I have to start caring about bedtime again.

I've had a pretty great bank holiday weekend though.

• Tried to skive off work a bit early to go for a drink with D in the sunshine. It ended up not being that sunny by then, but we had a nice time. And I got us ice-cream cones from an ice-cream van as we walked home!
• We did indeed go out for Best Friday, which was lovely if slightly overdoing it for D
• I made it to transgym, sent good wishes back and forth between D and the gymgoers, and got my gloves back that I accidentally left in a friend's car when they gave me a lift home...and then proceeded not to see said friend for the last couple of months. I've been thinking about those gloves every so often: I got them in Stornoway so they're nice and warm, fair-isle type colorwork, and most important for me fingerless. I don't need them now but it's very nice to have them back!
• our friends Alex and Ian came over that evening, yay. It was so so lovely to see them. We got pizza.
• We were invited for afternoon tea at angelofthenorth's yesterday. Little sandwiches and sweets and many pots of tea (and I had coffee), beautifully showed off her new table and chairs!
• We bought some more plants, and when we got home I did some dad chores: added air to the car tires that needed it, cut back a tree that's overhanging from the neighbor's yard, started in on the ivy that has already claimed a couple of fence panels, and then sat outside with a book and a cold beer, in shorts and sandals (it's only about 60F, but thanks to testosterone I've become the guy who needs to wear a sleeveless top and sandals and shorts when it's 60F...)

Storm Dave aside, we had good weather this weekend, even great today -- and this is the opposite of what bank holiday Mondays are usually like. And it's not even dark at 8pm now; I'm so relieved.

Well, as I'm always saying at work -- and I learned this from trans activists, if you don't have access to public toilets, you don't have access to public life.

This article, no doubt among others, points out that if we don't have access to space toilets, we don't really have access to space.

It’s very funny, because toilets are funny, but I also find it touching because it’s so relatably human. Space missions are filled with impossibly genius men and women achieving scientific feats far beyond our intelligence, discussing them with indecipherable jargon and initialisms, and then they’re talking about toilets. Hey! Toilets! I use those things too. Everyone needs toilets. ...

It took NASA six years and $23 million to design the Universal Waste Management System, and it was first installed on the International Space Station in 2020. The UWMS—invariably referred to by everyone at NASA as simply "the toilet"—uses suction to keep waste from escaping, and captures and filters the urine it collects to return to the craft's water supply. Just as importantly, it is capable of handling what NASA calls "dual ops—when they’re doing both defecation and urination at the same time,” said Melissa McKinley, the toilet's project manager.

I'm charmed that the toilet status is right at the top of this pleasing website where you can track the mission.

Before the crew settled in for their first sleep, ahead of a perigee burn Thursday morning, Koch called down with a question: The astronauts would like to pee before bed. Are you sure this thing is safe to use? Houston offered reassurance. "Christina, you are good to use toilet all night."

It's so lovely go to bed knowing that the toilet is there for you, any time you need it.

My crash nap yesterday after work meant I was still awake when the Artemis 2 launch window opened. I'd gone to bed but hadn't been able to sleep so figured I'd come back downstairs to watch it with D, but he came up with his laptop so we could watch it in bed on a biggish screen. Which worked out great: it was very fun to watch it snuggled up together.

My Apollo-era space nerdery and his experience with Kerbal Space Program mesh into an excited understanding of, at a generous estimate, half of what is being said on the broadcast. I imagined clutching a phrasebook as we toddle around the land of spaceflight, garishly dressed tourists trying to look in every direction at once in both excitement and confusion. ("PRM" is an acronym I'm used to hearing at work every so often, but in my line of work it doesn't mean perigee raise maneuver!)

An online pal said "I am clearly not the only one looking up 'perigee' on Merriam-Webster's website lol" and shared a screenshot of a list I immediately fell in love with: that dictionary's current top lookups were

1. Artemis
2. apogee
3. perigee
4. Godspeed
5. nominal
6. how
7. verklempt

It just gets better the more you read -- even the random how in there is somehow part of what makes it so delightful.