The Alternate Lexicon
Currently viewing the tag: "melbourne"
It’s almost the end of the year, and I’ve done a rather terrible job writing and updating. I played with the layout a bit, but I’m not sold on it as a permanent fix. The 2012 layouts should be out soon, so I’ll hold out and see what’s coming and how I’d like to play with them.
Melbourne continues to feel strange, home and not-home all jumbled up together. The past month has been harder than the ones before it, as I find myself missing Stina and Dylan badly even as I’m growing into more and more of my own person. I read somewhere recently that it’s not unusual at all for autistic people, but especially autistic women, to lack a strong sense of self and identity–it’s something I definitely identify with (oh, irony). I have been so defined by that friendship for so much of my life, and all of my adult life at that, that I have of course been confused and lonely and unsure of how to go about being me separate from them. I’s been a good thing to mull over, thinking about how to deliberately choose who I am and who I can become.
I know 2011 hasn’t been particularly great for many people in my life, but it’s been positive on the whole, for me. I’m happy to be here. We’re in discussion with our immigration lawyer to begin my trek towards permanent residency. I have a job, albeit a terrible temp one, and make enough money to live comfortably and save for said immigration. I have grown infinitely more comfortable with both my autism and my gender, and my metacognition is much happier than it was a year or even two or three ago. While I am still sad because of Stina and Dylan, I am feeling like I am going to be okay.
Next year is going to be good. There are lawyer appointments and immigration agents to meet. I’m going to have a booth at a local artist’s market in January, and if it goes well I’ll sign up for more times in February, March, and April. I have insurance that will pay for me to get a massage every once in a while. There is a very, very strong chance we will get a second kitten to keep crankypants happy and entertained. I’m going to Port Fairy. Kate Miller-Heidke put us on the guest list to come see her for free, because we’re awesome. I’m considering scraping together the cash to take a course in Auslan (Australian sign). I found a choir I want to join. Maybe we can talk Hez into visiting. I’ll try to write more here, not just reblog on tumblr.
I think it’s going to turn out just fine.
Well. Maybe a latte instead. I love you, Melbourne coffee.
Melbourne can’t work out if it’s beautiful or the dreariest, coldest fog bank this side of the Pacific. Both make my current job temping at a giant insurance agency somewhat unbearable, as it is either all sparkling sunlight from the roof of Southern Cross catching my attention and begging I go play, or the sort of chill that makes getting up at 6 in the morning intolerable. Despite my protests to myself that I’ve gotten up far earlier for work, it was in a job I enjoyed and valued. This job is sending rejection letters to people who just wanted some massages or glasses or anesthetic for their brain surgery and who, for a host of reasons from filling out the forms wrong to simply not being insured, I must cheerfully and politely deny. Previously, I thought my job in Staunton, working with mentally ill kids who needed hugs, not locked rooms, was the most evil job, but this might actually be worse because it’s dissociated from the pain I know I must be causing.
It turns out that what I thought would have been a good environment for me, a quiet office with cubicles, is utter torture. I have spent much time lamenting the noise levels of previous jobs, and how standing all day hurts my legs and feet, but sitting all day in one spot has me a fidgety, stimmy mess. It’s blissfully quiet, except for the other hundred people typing and sighing and making far more noise than seems reasonable. I could tune out others’ conversations in the bustle of work before, but now they are bright spots in otherwise uninterrupted tedium.
So I need a job on my feet, doing things with my hands, even the same boring thing over and over. Soon, please. It’s getting hard to pass off the stimmy stuff.
There is a kitten next door. He’s maybe 8 weeks old, and it’s pouring rain. He turned up sometime yesterday and has been crying nonstop since then. He does not have food, water, or appropriate shelter. He’s a little ball of fluff that’s been soaked down with the rain. He comes to the fence if I speak to him.
Prosper is in quarantine. He has a little cell about 4′ by 8′, which is actually not too terrible at all, and he’s finally started to eat (according to the quarantine staff, he’s “picky”–what, I precisely, does it take for a cat in that situation to be called picky? I can’t think on it too much or it makes me scared.). He let both Kit and I pet him and tried to chomp, a sure sign he’s feeling more like himself.
I can still hear that kitten.
I am on the edge of tears, worried about that kitten and about my big kitten, and how scared they both must be, feeling abandoned and hungry. I can’t focus on anything else, filled up with worry about a kitten that theoretically belongs to the house next door (though they’re doing such a shit job taking care of him, I’ll call the animal shelter to report them for animal cruelty if they don’t take him inside as soon as they get home–who the fuck leaves an 8 week old kitten outside while they’re gone all day?!). I think my empathy is working just fine.
Been in Melbourne for a while, now. I have a temp job lined up to start this week. We have a lease that starts a week from tomorrow. Prosper is starting his trip tomorrow (miss the cat, so much).
I found these delicious things at the grocery store here:
I found these on a lamppost:
This has been an update.
In two and a half weeks, I will get on a plane and cease to live in the US, for permanent as far as we can guess.
When I land, I will be a new person. I will be neatly crafted, all smooth lines and invisible joins, not cobbled together of hurts and fears and sinew like I am now. A clockwork person; a robot made out of human bits of bone.
I will be Eliot, sometimes. I will be trans without being ashamed, or anxious, or both. I will be openly, joyfully queer (and if the immigration stuff goes easily, maybe even poly). I will be proudly autistic, honest about the disabling bits and all the good things. I will be clever and quick and funny and obsessive. I will make friends.
At least, I’m going to try.
Moving is really fucking hard when you have executive function issues.
You know that time suck that happens where you get on the computer and look at something, and then six hours later you haven’t showered or eaten? My whole life is that time suck. My to-do lists consist of one thing per day, usually the most difficult thing I’d like to accomplish. Everything else is a bonus.
I’ve been trying to coax my brain into the right space to work out costs for international moving for about a month. I managed to contact an international moving company, who sent a brochure, and that was great (though I now believe I cannot afford them). More important than moving my table and chairs, though, is moving my cat.
[Image: my cat, looking pensieve]
I finally contacted one company yesterday and…$3995. WHAT IS THIS I DON’T EVEN FOUR GRAND TO MOVE MY CAT? THAT DOESN’T EVEN INCLUDE THE QUARANTINE FEES AND PAPERWORK FEES AND WHAT THE FUCKING WHAT. THAT IS MORE THAN ALL OF MY PERSONAL MOVING COSTS PUT TOGETHER (except furniture transport that looks increasingly unlikely as this was the company reccomended by the movers).
So then I spent the past three hours alternately crying and sending out pleas to other moving companies. I think I’m aiming for less than $2000, which is the lowest price I’ve seen advertised so far. This throws off my budget drastically (I’d planned for his cost to be abouit $750, plus vet, import, and quarantine fees, which sounds reasonable given my human ticket is about $1000), and now there’s a panic attack. I don’t know how we’ll afford this–it eats up a lot of money I’d planned to put up for rent and bond while looking for a job.
Thanks to perseveration, I will probably continue having small panic attacks until this is resolved.
Awesome.
