"Well kiss my physics!" as read by Alan Rickman

Could not be more perfect after my last post. Maybe I should do this every week...

1. What made you happy this week?
   Greens winning the by-election for my new MP.

2. What made you sad?
Remembering random things from my childhood that involved my grandparents looking after my brother and I, and being the only person who's still around to remember those things.

3. What made you angry?
The U.S. and Israel making the lives of people in Gaza as well as Iran harder.

4. What are you looking forward to in the next week?
In a way, I'm looking forward to D having a medical thing done next Sunday, even if it'll mean some discomfort and disruption for the next couple months. Because it's been going on for years and could've been sorted ages ago. But now it finally will be.

5. What are you not looking forward to?
Going back to work after a week off that felt more like three days off.

I started getting a migraine halfway through lift club this morning.

I ignored it of course -- just the aura, at that point -- knowing that I'd have a while before it got, y'know, debilitating.

I enjoyed the rest of the exercises. I did nearly fall both at the beginning and the end of the escalator I took to get from the tram to the train, oops. But also I got home fine, via B&M for medicinal snacks -- mostly sugar, which I often crave during migraines, but also one particular 59p instant ramen thing that I suddenly needed, and enjoyed very much for my lunch.

It was that rare rough day for the whole house: D's IBS was playing up and he had to make his brain work on paperwork so much this afternoon that when he finally emerged I wondered if migraines were contagious (luckily he perked up a little after eating something). V slept through all their alarms and so has been off-kilter all day. I slept for four hours this afternoon and after that reached the point where I felt okay unless I tried to move or even think too hard.

Then we watched a Starfleet Academy episode and as soon as Sam mentioned Our Town I was like ...you come to me, on the day of my migraine, and now I'm gonna have to cry? (Crying is fine but a physically unenjoyable experience for me at the best of times. Which, we've established, today is not.) (I got a tear in my eye, but even that was only at the very end.)

Like I've said here, Our Town is largely responsible for why I write almost every day here. "I can't look at everything hard enough" fucking haunts me (of course we heard that line in the episode), and it's important to me to look at things as hard as I can while they are happening.

tl;dr: People are actually bad at predicting how much they'll enjoy reading back what they've written about their lives! Writing about the ordinary experiences of your life can be even more cheering to you when you go back and read them than the extraordinary ones.

A nice reminder on an excessively ordinary day.

I've accrued a simply horrifying number of open tabs, and I'm finally able to whittle them down a bit.

I'm finally able to read a few of those I've accumulated about Minneapolis/ICE. Here's my favorite one so far:

I feel more from Minnesota than I’ve ever felt. is a great quote -- even from four thousand miles away I feel more from Minnesota than I ever have, but this goes on:

But now I know as I’m walking down the street that I have hundreds of people who will swarm to help me if needed, and that I will swarm to help them.... It’s like building a muscle of solidarity across race, across class. It’s something the Left talks about a lot, but I’ve never experienced it like this. And it’s truly ordinary people — it’s not majority organizers or activists. It’s people who’ve never organized a day in their lives but know something wrong is happening and want to do something.

And on dealing with the fear:

it starts really small, and then the small things become more risky, and you don’t want to give them up... So now the people delivering groceries — which, again, is a very low-risk thing — have been trained to know that in case ICE grabs them, they should never write the list of addresses down digitally. You write it on a physical piece of paper, and if ICE grabs you, you eat the piece of paper. ...[D]elivering groceries shouldn’t be high-risk. It violates people’s sense of dignity and basic rights, and that’s what creates courage.

The whole thing is so good, it's well worth a read.