cosmolinguist | [83/365] big day, big headache (Reply)

At 8pm, Gary the Wonder Dog was mithering me to go to bed with him.

It started, for me, with some power tool making a godawful noise outside my bedroom window, waking me up at 7:30 on a day off when I'd hoped to sleep in. As always with my sleep-maintenance insomnia, once I'm awake no matter how tired I am I struggle to get back to sleep.

But I started a new library book (The Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki) and when diffrentcolours's alarms started going off he ended up awake enough to snuggle and I got to be the little spoon which was nice.

But it was there, held tight against him and reveling in the coziness, that the Things started.

mother_bones texted us to say the cleaners were on their way. She'd expressly asked for afternoons, this is really hard on our household. Gary needs a lot of managing and there's all the chores to do ahead of time. I had to spend longer than usual tidying my bedroom, eventually putting a basket of clean laundry inside the bigger basket for dirty laundry... And I put the dining chairs on the table, I helped dismantle Gary's pen, I opened windows for ventilation (thank goodness it's a nice day today! but mother_bones still gets cold very easily), all that stuff.

I made tea for everyone and we all sat in the living room while the cleaner did the upstairs. This part was surprisingly cozy actually. Gary was delighted to have all his humans together, after his initial sleepy confusion -- he'd been turfed out of his little bed in mother_bones's room, earlier than he'd have liked just like all the rest of us, and with even less idea what was going on.

And eventually MB could go back upstairs to rest. D and I stayed with the dog, who was in a rare cuddly mood so he just endlessly demanded pets and scritches from me. D took cute photos of this.

One cleaner on her own takes twice as long as two, so my nerves were pretty frazzled by the time she left. I had an annoying appointment a couple hours later and I wanted a haircut, and I dithered about whether to try to fit the haircut in first or rest and do it after. There was probably enough time to get to and from before my annoying appointment, but not enough to have a break first and I really wanted one. But I also was so wound up about this appointment that I figured I'd just want to be Done after it, so I should do the haircut first.

And I was right.

The haircut long overdue anyway -- with hair as short and fast-growing as mine, a busy week or two can lead to intolerably much hair! And that's what's happened this time. I needed it done from a sensory perspective, and I love haircuts so it's like a little treat for me, but also tomorrow I'm taking part in a photoshoot to get stock photos for the local LGBT charity to use of disabled people, so I really wanted to look less scruffy than I was.

By the time I got home I didn't have long to get my ducks in a row. I had to do a DBS (background check) for something I volunteer with: fine. But it was immediately unsettling because I'm not really out to them as trans, they all know me as Erik and of course here I'd have to go "funny story, that's not always my name..." And people do not understand that. I figured people here would be fine with trans people but they don't know why you don't just change your name, deed polls are easy and cheap. I get sick of having to explain the whole immigrant/it's not that easy everywhere thing. And I shouldn't have to. Either explaining or not is tiring.

Anyway, the person I had to deal with for this (not any of the people I usually volunteer with, an admin person) was clueless in that benign cis way at first but I kind of ignored that and she stopped. I quickly found other things to be annoyed about in this process though: she needed to see my passport (fine) and "another form of legal ID" which... I don't have a driver's license. And things like birth certificates and marriage certificates had to be issued in the UK. Just one of those times when being a blind immigrant sucks, even before I get to the trans stuff...

But on a last-minute careful read of the list of "acceptable" ID, I noticed it said "any current and valid passport" so...could I use both of mine?! I had to try.

Then for proof of address I tried to print out a bank statement, which meant I spent ages on my bank's not-very-accessible website trying to figure out how to do that, then the printer didn't work, so I had to interrupt D and ask him to do this for a meeting that was by then in two minutes... So infuriating, to have to print something out to hold it up in front of my computer for two seconds and then have to shred it anyway.

But I did it. And both passports was fine (I still think this is ridiculous!). So the meeting only took about five minutes, and half that was technological fail -- I had so many problems with the webcam!

Then the three of us determined we could cut Gary's nails. This, too, had been waiting all week for everyone to have spoons. No one was sure we had them now, but MB had noticed one of his claws looked broken, not in a way that hurt him but in a way that meant this needed to be done.

It's always exhausting. And this time MB managed to cut the quick of one nail so he really squeaked then, I ran for another towel and some corn starch to help stop the small amount of blood, and MB felt really distraught because even though she knew he was fine, of course it's always upsetting to hurt or distress the poor little guy.

When that was done she wanted to do something else to use up her nervous energy, so we assembled a raised bed she'd bought the other day. It's a cylinder of corrugated metal, it came in sections and just needed to be screwed together. There were a lot of screws. She helped me get it just enough together that I could peacefully go back and do all the rest of the screws while happily listening to a baseball podcast.

Then I was really tired. It was about 5pm, I hadn't stopped all day since I got up in a rush, and I had a stabby headache. I've been having them all week, not quite migraines but with similar symptoms: nausea, sensitivity to light and sound, fun stuff. They're related to menstruation for me, a thing that turns up only a few times a year thanks to meds I'm on, and now it seems like each makes me more dysphoric than the last. So it's been a fun week. Luckily the other symptoms seem to be gone now, just the headaches remain. That's more than enough.

So we got takeaway for dinner and watched Nunkie's "Lost Hearts" on the anniversary very day the story was supposed to take place (and the same date he got the first two children, something I hadn't noticed until now), and then Gary said he and I should go to bed. So we did!

Phew.

My head is still killing me.