my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

So first of all it is pretty great to start my mornings to wake up at 5:30ish, work for an hour, and then go take a one to two mile walk, and then go back to work. Like, seriously. This lifestyle, I like it, even though it is ludicrously wholesome; it is just too warm for extended walking in the afternoon when I am done with work at 2:30 or so. Well, technically, Rik and I went out a couple of times even though it was in the 90s and did long walks, but we brought a ton of water and also I was kinda zonked afterwards. A mile or two in the morning is refreshing and almost upwaking like a shower would be, which is pretty great. I don't know if I will be able to spare the time for this when I am in school again, but on the other hand going to school gives me structured exercise in the process of biking there, so probably it is okay? And I will still have weekends.

I just got back from Boston, where my schedule looked like this:

• Attend the first day of Steer Roast. (a party thrown by my old dorm every year, which does involve roasting a steer but I completely ignore that part; alums way older than me, as well as a lot of friends of mine from ten years ago, come back into town and we all hang out and it's awesome)
• Skip the second and third days of Steer Roast to work on final papers.
• Attend a conference for work, taking a training for advanced users of a software package I had never seen before; this was both really challenging and really rewarding, in that I mostly caught up enough to get a lot out of the training, even though there would be a lot more work to do if I were going to deploy this thing. But I have books, and a dev environment set up on my machine!
• Spend two days catching up on work, seeing a small fraction of the people I would have liked to see, and having an extremely pleasant Providence double-date with my girlfriend, her wife, and her wife's girlfriend, during which we concluded that the worldBoston is extremely small as we all knew all of the others' friends in like four different ways.
• Spend the greater part of the weekend bridesqueering [0], including both fun parties and a bunch of carrying stuff, and helping to make sure two of my dear friends wed without troubles.
• When I wasn't doing that, three(!!!) people drove in to see me from different states, which was pretty amazing. outstretched  even did my nails! [1]

Okay so that was the Boston trip. Now I have this whole summer stretching out in front of me where all I have to do is work my job. I have a bunch of things planned, of course, but none of them are for school, and that is amazing. (I'll be talking about school in a different post.) My plans include doing some art, meeting more people in Tucson by actually going to events and doing activities [2], traveling a bunch (another wedding, Anthrocon, Pokémon Nationals, seeing Rik, work might send me to Singapore?), continuing to groove on how awesome living with krinndnz  has been, reading books that are not assigned by a professor, and spending a lot of time out in the desert. This plan is, I argue, pretty awesome.

In a bunch of ways I am still kind of getting back into my own head after the debacle that was my year in Indiana. There were awesome things there --- I met some great people, I learned a lot of things, I feel like some aspects of my lifestyle changed for the better --- but between the breakup and the overwork and the comparative loneliness, I sort of worked my way out of my head to go live somewhere more nebulous, and that's not actually what I want. One of the things I'm trying to do both in my academic practice and in my practice of living is to take myself more seriously as part of the process of taking others more seriously. It's had really interesting effects on how I think about species, which obviously is part of my academic project but at least as importantly affects how I interact with myself on a day to day basis. I'm not quite sure how to express this yet other than it's good. But... it's good? It's good.

Any of y'all have exciting summer plans? :)

[0] Bridesqueering: Like being a bridesmaid, a bridesmatron, a bridesman, or a bridesmotherfucker, but with one's gender or marital status expressed as some combination of "none of the above" and "none of your business." Unrelated to bridequeering, where you try to get the bride to make out queerly at the bachelorette party.

[1] You can see an awful picture here. It looks better in person, but even in this photo you can tell it matches my color scheme, and color scheme trumps gender stereotypes for what I do with my appearance, so I will probably keep doing this.

[2] other than Pokémon ^^;;

Hey all, I'm working on my annual end-of-year email (yes I know it's late) and am asking in advance: Would you like to get a 5000-10000 word email about my life? No is a fine answer, yes is a fine answer, "yes but I probably won't read it" is also a fine answer. If the answer is yes or yes-but-you-won't-read-it, and you don't already know you're on my mailing list, please let me know. The mailing list gets two to four messages a year with things like "I am moving to Arizona" or huge rambles about the state of my life that are too long for LJ/DW. No problem if you don't want to get them! Comments are screened so you can provide your email address if you do. Please actually give me your email address if you do this. :) I hope to have the email done in a couple of days? I'm... on the fourth section of my outline? ^^;; seriously folks these messages are long

Also, I know a lot of people missed the news because it happened while we were all like "AHHHH FINALS" or "AHHHH HOLIDAYS" or both, but there was a horrible typhoon in the Phillipines and relief efforts are ongoing. Here is a list of charities that come recommended by folks who have thought about this more than me (although it sounds like the Red Cross may not always be the best choice); it would be hard to go wrong with any of those. Alternately, if you are the sort to participate in fandom auctions around this stuff, help_mindanao over at this link offers the opportunity to either do things for people and have them donate to charity, or to donate to charity in exchange for people doing things for you. I'm currently in the more-money-than-time camp and haven't been able to look through it much, but if you're not, or want to encourage people who aren't to help out, this is a pretty great way! (Also, these cookies are liable to be great. Just sayin'.)

...it's supposed to be three things that make a post, right? Uh? You don't get a third thing, sorry. :)

okay so I owe y'all updates about eighty gazillion things in my life and I also have a whole lot of things I want to process out in my own head but today let's talk about: ANOTHER SEMESTER OF GRAD SCHOOL. For those playing the home game, this was my 9th semester of grad school: six at UMass Boston getting an MA in English, two at IU working towards a PhD in Gender Studies [0], and one at UA working towards a PhD in Gender and Women's Studies. This semester I only took two classes, both of them required courses, and now my grades are in. I haven't gotten feedback from my professors yet, but here is how they went:

• Feminist Theories 1: I was initially worried that this would mostly be a repeat of things I had already read and talked about. There were a few readings that more or less worked like that, but because so much of my Feminist Theories class at IU was "Butler and Butler Butler with a side of Butlering Butler," actually a lot of this stuff was new for me. Particularly I hadn't really stared down Marx and Marxism in any sustained or structured way. I'm still not quite sure who won that staring contest, if anyone, but I think it was worth doing. Things from this class that I particularly found useful: Althusser's work on ideologies and interpellation, Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection for thinking about depictions of violence and trauma, Hartman again on the way racialization happens, Derrida although I still don't think I actually get it in any real way. My final paper here was about how furries are constrained by but also rupture capitalism, which took me into the professor's book Against The Romance of Community as well as the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham, both of which I want to follow up on. I'm honestly not super-happy with how the paper turned out even though I spent a lot of time on it; I am not sure if that's because I spent enough time and did enough revision to see how much more there was to do, because I was panicking at that point in the semester, or because it just actually wasn't very good. I got an A in the class, so it can't have been that bad, so I'm guessing it was a little of all three. (There was some of the just not very good. Oh god I struggled to find a coherent voice when I was unwilling to just be like "arglebargle I am the author look at what a furry I am." This is a longer-term thing to think about actually --- some of my work only makes sense with me in it, but for the stuff that doesn't work that way, what should I do? Dunno.)
• Feminism and Related Social Movements: I was super excited about this class and in bits and flashes it even exceeded my expectations but in other places class discussions just didn't really get going. (For a lot of folks it was their last class of the week and you can kinda tell when people haven't done the reading? It's frustrating but them's the breaks. With the way grad students are overworked I cannot blame them. I would not do the reading sometimes, except the horrible pangs of guilt I experience sitting in a classroom unprepared are way worse than just not having fun for however many hours it takes me to do the homework.) I think that I could have approached the readings with a different set of questions in mind from the beginning of the course and gotten more out of them; the way I was thinking wasn't really a good model for dealing with the subject matter I wanted to work with, and I could feel it chafe with a lot of the texts. A couple of them I revisited and got a lot more out of; others maybe I will, maybe I won't. Things from this class that I particularly found useful: Rereading Chela Sandoval's Methodology of the Oppressed with an eye toward the first two chapters instead of the later chapters (that is, considering her actual practical argument rather than crazy Barthes love ramblings, which are basically one of my favorite things), Deborah Gould's Moving Politics for how to write about a movement you are deeply embedded in [1], Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages which is super helpful even though sometimes it frustrates me through its bleakness, and even though I didn't like it I want to come back to Grace Hong's The Ruptures Of American Capital because even as I was reading I could tell it was doing something on a level I just hadn't figured out yet. A conversation with the professor helped me see it as an alternate avenue to writing about social movements directly, and I thought that was really interesting, but I still don't 100% get it.
• Anyway, my final paper! On a different bullet because that one got super long! I started off with an outline and a bunch of notes and actually I wrote a few pages and then I looked at it on Monday, the day it was due, and said "Rachel, what you are doing here would be exploitative and misrepresentative of yourself and of people dear to you. It's pretty awful frankly. Stop this nonsense at once." At 11 AM on the day the paper was due, I deleted everything I had written and started completely from scratch. ...And got an extension to Thursday morning. I wrote about furries as producing self-knowledge primarily in opposition to what is said about us in the media or on the Internet by trolls, and suggested that furries needed to consider Sandoval's differential consciousness, moving between different methods of knowledge production depending on what is most useful at the time. This is actually really hard for a large group to do! But I think it would be way better than focusing on negative publicity and then trying to fix it through a particular kind of positive publicity. I mean, I am a person who believes very seriously that they are a fox, at least when I do not think I am being completely ridiculous. I don't want to be arguing about whether or not that means I am more likely to be a homosexual, or more interested in sex than the average college student. I want to figure out what it means that I'm a fucking fox, holy shit what is that. We need to try lots of different methods! I don't even know all the methods we should be trying! I'm considering trying to work this into something I can internet-publish for furries because I think it's important but I'm not 100% sure yet. I'm waiting to get feedback from my professor on it before I figure out next steps. Again, I got an A in the class, so the paper can't have been a complete and unmitigated disaster. (Also my advisor smiled when she listened to me talk about it, which only for sure means that I was super enthusiastic as I got into it, but that on its own is a good sign.)

So next semester there are two things I am doing for sure and then other things I may do:

• Feminist Theories 2: THE REVENGE! okay it's not actually called THE REVENGE. But it will be more contemporary feminist theories and I look forward to it. I don't have a particular approach to this. It's a required course. So... I will take it!
• Independent Study with my advisor: I decided to do this. At first I was like "uggghhhhh I don't know if I have time" but I had a super useful conversation with Ruth who was all "Hey, how excited are you?" and I was like "hella excited, I moved to Arizona to work with her, the reading list she put together for a colleague was amazing, I'd be doing a variant of that." We talked about it and yeah it will be a lot of reading but it won't have a final paper and it should be OK. Plus, as described, hella excited.
• Feminist Knowledge Production: As far as I can tell this is the revenge of the methods class I took at IU. I'm hoping to transfer out of it because (a) I've already taken a very similar class and (b) I don't feel like I got a whole lot out of the methods class at IU. Not that it was terrible or anything, just that it was very breadth not depth and I am at the point in my graduate career where I need some depth please thank you very much. I will almost certainly not be taking this unless the chair advises me that there will be no way to transfer this in, since it won't be offered again for two years, and at that point I would like to be either done or verrrrry close to done with classes.
• Chican@ Literatures: I can't get the official title of this class because our scheduling system is down and I don't have a syllabus kicking around. I would be taking this mostly for the requirement, but the professor seems awesome and I have friends taking it and I think overall I would dig it. Plus hooray more use of my actual English skills! ... well disciplinary-English versus language-English. Arguably I'd be better served by language-Spanish. (Is there disciplinary-Spanish?) I'm prrrrobably going to take this, which will put me at three classes, but my schedule will work like it does this semester more or less. I am still waffling slightly. If I get the syllabi and it looks like a disaster I will go down to two classes. Or if the administration won't let me do the independent study because I am deciding too late, then I will just take this and do some of the reading for the independent study not-for-credit.
• Outside chance of some anthropology or geography class instead

Other academic things to do as the semester starts:

• Follow up with the Rhetoric professor and advanced graduate student who were all "dude, your project sounds amazing" and meet up and talk about working together on stuff
• Apply to conferences: this one is due Dec 31 and this one is due Jan 15, though it is a less good fit. ...and they're both on the same weekend. Huh. I hadn't noticed that, which suggests I have been distracted. PERHAPS BY GRADUATE SCHOOL
• Follow up with the costume designer who had the car accident and was thus out of touch
• Follow up with the person who did Second Life classroom work
• Follow up on Geography contacts to talk about research methods
• Send an email to Liz Kennedy I guess?

Yeah so I should be busy. But that's good! I have stuff to do in school that I am excited about. FUCK THE HATERS. RAXOLOTLS GONNA RAX A LOT.
[0] Technically I took reading credits during the summer semester. The end result of this was (a) me reading some books and (b) one part of the university giving a few thousand dollars to another part. Whoop-de-do. Before I was sure I would get into UA, let alone accept their transfer offer, it seemed like a good idea to have the option open. I can't transfer them, so it matters not at all now.

[1] With bonus points for being able to say "also we were all sleeping together" without having tenure yet, and winning awards! Someday that will hopefully be me. ^^;;;

DECEMBER 17TH, 9 PM -- PARTY-LATE
135 DORE ST. APT. B, SAN FRANCISCO, CA

Most years there's an exciting invitation here. Uh, grad school,
sorry.  You are probably already either planning on attending, in
which case great!, or planning on not attending, in which case I'm
sorry to be missing you. But if you're not sure, you should come! If
you know individuals who would be excited about this, please pass on
the invitation! If you can think of groups or mailing lists who might
be interested, please ask me about it first.

Trust me: There are lots of incredible things on tap for this party. Hope
to see some of you there! And expect to hear more about my life... later?

I am not just a machine that does tasklists, I promise. Of course this post is also a list, but it's not a tasklist, so at least it's something?

• School: Is going better, overall, at least for me. I'm excited about my final projects even if they weren't what I initially hoped to be doing, and I'm seeing people on campus I can build alliances with. I'm also getting excited about theory again, which is never a bad thing. Occasionally I say things that make me sound a little crazy: "Yes, but I want to be interpellated as an animal by the state," but I'm actually being challeged in really productive ways by one professor and I appreciate that a lot.
• Work: Remains... workly? Distance is beting harder these past couple of weeks than normal but after this weekend I will be less of a stressball and have some plans for trying to work on that. I'm getting some longer-term stuff done and that always feels a little more distancing because I am not talking to people about it every day. That doesn't mean it's not important.
• Pokémon: I'll be in Providence playing competitive Pokémon this weekend. A: This is awesome. B: How is this my life. I don't actually think I'll do very well, because I've been putting my free time into school, work, and relationships rather than obsessively testing things in a card game. I am OK with this. It should still be fun.
• Relationships: I got to see Ruth recently, which was great and amazingly stress-reducing and involved a lot of exciting cookery. (Getting together with people I am involved with or attracted to almost always results in our producing lots of food. I ... do not know what to make of this? Except mmmmm, seitan.) It looks like I will get to see her more often in a few months, which is even more exciting! Also, we're coming up on three years. Holy crap. Also, I got to have Rik over for like eleven days which just... wow. At first having both Rik and Krinn here was super confusing, but once I figured it out, that was really nice. It's amazing to feel so supported and to spend time with people who I love dearly. Also Rik made me a cake when I turned 27 again. <3 Clearly I need to trick everyone into moving to the same city in five years. The distance is hard, and having Rik leave Monday and then tomorrow leaving Krinn (who is amazing and wonderful to live with and I am sad when she leaves for work in the morning which is not to say that I'm unhappy that she has a job but that I would like to be sufficiently spoiled as to have someone to lean on at all times) to go to Boston is currently feeling way harder than I expected it to. It's kind of a crash. But Boston is Boston, so I think I will be OK.
• Real estate: Pending extreme fuckery, the house in Bloomington will be sold as of tomorrow. That was an expensive mistake. Live and learn? Or maybe "make sure your advisor is happy somewhere before you buy real estate there?" I don't know. I'm not sure what the moral of this story was other than "ha ha sometimes you get fucked over by things that have nothing to do with you." I already knew that lesson, life. Why the repeats? Lucky for me, I am in a good enough state that getting fucked over only makes me sad, not in any sort of serious danger. Go team Nokia bought my startup I guess. When it's all over and done with, I am ritually washing my hands of Indiana.
• Pronouns: I'll be writing another post about this soon, but my preferred pronoun is now "they." I'd appreciate it if you used that pronoun when referring to me. If you could hold your questions until the pronoun post, which I hope to write right after this one if work stays quiet, I'd appreciate it.
• Overall: I am happier in Tucson than I was in Bloomington; I feel safer in Tuscon than I did in Bloomington; I am glad that I moved here. I still need to develop more of a local social group, but I feel better equipped to do that here and I've made some progress. I have friends. Who are not students. This rocks. Living in multiple time zones is still weird --- half of my clocks are set to Eastern time for work and half are set to local --- but it's producing interesting shifts in my thinking that I don't know how to express yet. I'm a huge stressball right now but I foresee things getting better; I have all of my hard assignments done except final papers and those are fun because I get to pick the topic and write about the stuff I've been thinking all semester, and I have some vacation days to actually use and have my time in California in December be calming. And some projects for fun that I am working on that are silly but fulfilling. So: Yay!

• Realized this morning while talking to Krinn that I am simultaneously very stressed and not depressed at all, which is unusual for me. It's kind of amazing, because I am not depressed, fuck yes. But in the past when I've been super stressed the depression was kind of a coping mechanism around not caring that much because, you know, nothing really matters. (Anyone can see.) And so why bother engaging with the stress? Right now, I care, dammit. I want to do well in my classes. I want to do well in my job. I want to support my friends and loved ones. And daaaaaang that's a lot of work. I will take it over the alternative, although I really want to reduce the stress, because I can feel it weighing on me (and I'm grinding my teeth in my sleep a lot, ugh --- this is something that has happened intermittently to me since I was small, and tends to go away when I get my stress levels back down to manageable, although apparently it has been pretty consistent lately; at one point I tried a mouthguard and it stopped the grinding but also caused me to wake up all the time, which was not worth it). 
• Grad school: Classes are getting better, which is pretty great, and I am enjoying the majority of my readings a fair bit, even though occasionally I look at something like Descartes and think "While I understand that I should have read this in order to get a PhD in something humanitiesy, this is so fucking dumb." [0] I've also been spending time meeting faculty from other departments and traversing the academy in order to find people to work with on my research. I'm not quite sure where this process will end up yet but if nothing else the conversations are really exciting and fun. I actually found someone in academia who knew what a furry was! That was pretty awesome. There is also stupid departmental drama but it does not merit my or your attention to discuss further. [1] Overall I am feeling more excited and motivated, which was good, because I was at a really low point like a month ago.
• Work: Has been slow this week, which is nice because I had a paper due yesterday. This working 6-2 or 6:30-2:30 thing is a little crazy, but ultimately works out. In general work is pretty awesome. I need to figure out when I next go and visit them; sometimes the phone can be a little tough. On the plus side, I am actually helping customers do real work of value, which is a hard feeling to beat. And I have metrics! And I do well at them! Oh, if only gender studies had metrics.
• Pokemon: This is sort of my main leisure-time activity? I played in some tournaments, came away with one Championship Point (if you get enough, you get an invite to the World Championships), and most importantly had a lot of fun. I got a little down at one event where I made a stupid mistake and lost a chance at a very high place because of it, but what can you do? ... If you are me the answer is apparently "play a bunch of games of speed chess afterward to calm your nerves." One of the people I played with said "It's cool, dude, this is just for fun" and my response was "This is how I have fun." He gave me a look, which was fair, but I wasn't joking. I will be going to a Regionals tournament, which should be much bigger and allow me to meet lots of new people. It's sort of like meeting new people through chess, except everyone isn't either a middle-aged man or a nine-year-old prodigy. [2]
• Tucson: Making friends is slow but proceeds apace; feeling enmeshed in the community will take some more work, which I hope to put in over time. But oh my god the climate, the geography, the materiality of this place are so perfect for me. I love the mountains. I love the sky. I love the air, I love the bike lanes, I love the plant life, I even love the terrifying peccaries who show up in packs and hold my house under siege. (Seriously. Pigs the size of small wolves.) I wish I had more time to engage with it all. I need to prioritize engaging with it all. I, just, it's mid-October and the high today is 93. HOW DID I EVER LIVE ANYWHERE ELSE.
• House in Bloomington: Is pending a sale with a signed offer. I am not counting my chickens until they hit puberty, but this is promising. I will be losing a ton of money but I am just, barely, by a finger, in the range of acceptable losses.
• Friends and loved ones: A lot of people very dear to me are going through some really bad shit right now, and that is part of why I am so stressed. There's not so much I can do about it, but I do what I can; if there's something I can do for you that I don't realize, please drop me a line. I don't have a lot of temporal resources, but I have many other kinds. And I care. <3
• In conclusion: I'm a stressball (oh god am I a stressball, fur flying everywhere) but I am nonetheless happy. Reducing stress levels is probably important longterm, but I prefer this situation to a whole lot of recent alternatives.

[0] Terrifying thought: Do other people think this about the authors I like??
[1] It is based on real issues and has real effects on people I care about, and thus is worth mentioning, but the way to deal with that is not to rehash it all on LJ.
[2] This is sort of an unfair characterization --- in particular there were a couple of awesome women who were also very strong players in the Boston chess scene --- but it's how it feels at large events especially. And I'm being nice to Pokemon; while there are a lot more women in the game overall, the top levels are still mostly male, and a lot of the online community is awfully... representative of structural gender inequalities and biases. So far though tournaments and leagues have been super pleasant, and the only person I've seen do something obviously sexist was a twelve-year-old who shat a brick when I called him on it.

Not crossposted because of polls. CGR Six (holy wow) will almost[Poll #1782624]

So I got my copy of the Silicon Dawn Tarot today. (You should all go buy one.) Because I'm having angst over this lately, I decided to ask it about graduate school --- how it was going, why am I here, what am I getting out of it. I realized that rather than traditional tarot spreads, most of which other than three-card draw I've never really liked, I should use an arrangement of cards that meant something to me personally, a means of organizing information that felt natural to me.

Thus, the Pokemon Spread was born.
( cut for huge image and tons of text )

Hey all, remember how I used to post notes on readings I did? I'm gonna try to do that sometimes again for things I am doing notes-aside on rather than notes-annotated. Don't expect quite as many as last fall, but hopefully these are still interesting to a few of you!

( Critics occupy a position both inside and outside of the public. )