yrieithydd

Counseling today was all about trying to make my body feel safer amidst all the mental/emotional stuff going on.

My counselor said some bodies need stillness some bodies need movement. I think mine is the latter.

She also suggested

• getting people to spend time with me
• gentle conversations about not-stressful things
• familiar media
• nice sensory stuff? (scents/textures)

Thinking about this tonight, she suggested I try to remember it all week.

Nearer to "home" for me, this story from St. Peter Minnesota about local cops actually blocking the kidnapping and murder squads from kidnapping someone made me have lots of feelings. All cops are bastards because it's the job and not the individual that sucks, but it's different in small towns. "It's believed to be the first time a local police department in Minnesota intervened in a federal law enforcement action since the surge in immigration enforcement began two months ago," the article says. And it's clearly because they were trying to kidnap someone whose husband knows the police chief (though that's easier in small towns), has a lawyer, knows that ICE aren't allowed to search his wife's car without a warrant. But it seems to have made a hell of an impression on that police chief; here's hoping it's able to affect his work and his colleagues for the better as well.

V watched a video about it (they follow a few YouTube streamers, including at least one who happens to live in Minnesota, so they're getting lots of video clips of this kind of stuff) and said an ICE agent was stomping up and down the road having a tantrum because he wasn't allowed to steal somebody.

A friend of mine in Minneapolis has found a way I can help from here. It meant I did an onboarding call this evening. It's nice to be able to contribute. It was nice to hear familiar accents again! I think even that is enough to calm my lizard brain a little bit.

D's nexus of skills and experience is incredibly relevant right now too, and I'm so proud of him doing what he is good at.

D sent me the link to Bruce Springsteen's new song "Streets of Minneapolis" about half an hour ago.

Both emails in my inbox since have been about this.

All that D told me about the link he sent me was "Well here's the most Erik thing ever." Apparently my friends agree.

One of them is also in Minneapolis and says ICE is on their block today.

At work this morning, when a colleague said they were off on holiday and worried that they were changing places in the U.S., my manager took the opportunity to tell me that for all that's horrible, Minneapolis and Minnesota are showing the world how to handle a thing like this and I must be proud of them.

And I am. I nearly choked up at that.

But also, I wish they didn't have to be. Normal life hasn't been possible in Minneapolis for months. Fundraisers I've contributed to have sometimes had grim updates about people who've disappeared, either directly to ICE or by having to make the horrible choice to "self-deport" which is another way the fascists are getting what they want.

I have to save reading Margaret Killjoy for when I have tears to spare. Some of them are happy tears, some are accompanied by real laughter and knowing smiles (having to bring the car battery in the house overnight like it's a baby animal!), but so many tears.

The shortest version of what I saw is this: a few thousand federal officers are occupying Minnesota right now. They’re in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the suburbs, and even some of the smaller towns. No one wants them there—I’ve never seen a community half so united as the people of the Twin Cities.

ICE is there to kidnap black and brown people. They’re not subtle about their racism...

In response to this, many vulnerable people have essentially gone into lockdown... The networks that are looking out for them are far and away the largest, most organized, and most successful networks like these I’ve ever seen.

Since abductions happen quickly—often stealing people in two or three minutes—the response needs to be just as fast. And it works because when people hear whistles and car horns, they start looking out. They come out of their houses.

It works because everyone knows what is happening is wrong, and everyone is willing to risk their lives to protect people.

Time after time, ICE has tried to abduct someone, only to be scared off by Minnesotans in pajamas and crocs.

But this spirit of “if your car is broken by the cold, strangers will save you” was presented to me by multiple people as the spirit that animates the resistance to ICE. Some people are trapped in their houses, so other people try their hardest to help them, whether or not they’ve got enough experience, whether or not they’re ready...

This style of organizing works because the overwhelming majority of people in the city are very actively opposed to seeing their neighbors kidnapped. There is no shortage of people willing to yell at ICE.

Today I:

• woke up late. I, very unusually for me, was so tired when my alarm went off that I set a new one. For some reason, I decided to make it five minutes before my first meeting, my team's usual check-in. So yeah, I did not make that.
• got dressed and downstairs eventually, triaged email and Teams messages.
• did my morning chores: open the curtains, empty the dishwasher, make breakfast for me and a pot of tea for the household...
• got halfway through the dishwasher when my work phon rang. Actually rang, not a Teams call. How odd!
• remember as the guy starts talking that I agreed to do an interview but forgot to put it in my calendar
• the interview is with rail industry press rather than my usual audiences of general public or politicians, so I got to drag some of the technical vocabulary out of my brain.
• had a little cry at lunchtime about Alex Pretti
• had two absolutely brutal meetings this afternoon, for a total of three hours: more technical stuff. I have looked at so many diagrams of train stations...and there weren't any breaks in that 2-hour meeting!
• walked Teddy with V, as a nice antidote to all the thinking and trying to decipher engineering diagrams (some of which were labeled by hand).
• made dinner by chopping all the veg in the fridge that needed using up and roasting it (some wrinkly peppers, half a head of rubbery broccoli, a few carrots I didn't know we had, mushrooms that were best before last week...) into a serviceable dinner
• helped D do a Tesco order for tomorrow
• read too much news
• had a shower
• went to bed late and now can't sleep

I went to lift club this morning and left it not feeling briefly euphoric as usual but instead nothing at all. I had seen cool people, I'd done the best exercise my body has available to it, and all this only got me up to about neutral.

I went to the RNCM, for the first time in at least five years but probably longer, to see a brass band with angelofthenorth. It was such a treat thar she'd sorted this all out for us. Great to have someone to talk with afterward: we had practically opposite rankings of the four pieces we'd heard which amused me. As she was listing hers, someone a few rows ahead who was also getting ready to leave overheard and said "I thought exactly the same!"

I told her that I didn't feel like I was thinking a lot about Minneapolis but looking at how poorly I'm functioning at everything, it's clearly taking up a lot of my usual abilities. Background radiation, she said, and yes that's it exactly.

This afternoon, V filled their pill boxes for the upcoming week had noticed that they didn't receive more of something that they thought they had. (They're so contentious but with so many prescriptions -- especially when they're low on spoons for an extended period (flare? new problem? just coincidence? no way to know!) -- it's easy for something like this to happen.) And of course it's one with hideous withdrawal symptoms. And of course it's the weekend.

I was fully prepared to leave D to make dinner while I was on hold waiting for NHS 111, but I found out you can do this online now! So I spent a relatively painless few minutes typing things into the website and then D drove us both to the pharmacy. After a bunch more questions, which luckily I was prepared (enough) for, we emerged victorious with three days of meds, enough to get us to a weekday when this can be sorted out properly.

We had takeout for dinner.

And then I saw that ICE have executed someone else. My brain and body seem to have shut down at this news.

I'm very glad that V has their meds now. They were so stressed and miserable at the thought of having to go without them. They take them in the evening so I'm glad we could figure out a solution before the meds were even overdue.

Tomorrow will be a busy day being helpful to V's relative who's clearing out his mother's house. I'm looking forward to the physical labor for something I'm not emotionally invested in.

I hope I sleep.

I finally got around to watching the gay hockey show.

Highlights from my social media thread:

First impression is how nice it is to hear some people who talk normal! Aww, some Canadian raising! When I write smut about gay linguists north of the 49th parallel, I'm gonna call it Canadian Raising.

Okay yes it's nice to see some butts and clavicles and forearms and all that, but also this is just making me miss my BlackBerry.

I watched this with a friend who'd been told that stuff doesn't start happening until episode 4. So by the end of episode 1 he was like "What the fuck happens in episode 4?! What is my friends threshold for stuff happening?! Because this is my threshold!" I replied: "This is more stuff than happened to me in like the first thirtysome years of my entire life."

omg why has being that awkward never gotten me that...result [I relate to Kip a worrying amount] Why isn't someone else the one saying "can I be too intense for a bit" to me for a change?

Yeah it's hard when you can't be out. You can't even like go fuckin... art shopping or whatever. It gets everywhere, after a while. This is what homophobes don't get: they think gayness can just be hidden like evangelical hypocrites hide it, just a behavior that stays dark and shameful. They don't know what it's like when someone makes you light up and you can't put a bushel basket over that.

Do they get a gay sports bar?? I want a gay sports bar!

I want a Canadian boyfriend with a cottage!

I miss loons.

We watched the whole thing and it's exhausting. So many big feelings!

Also I read a Margaret Killjoy thread that made me cry (content notes: ICE, Minneapolis). But also laugh. Especially this bit

Another person put it: "we're Minnesotans. We're excited to get out our real winter gear out of the box for the year."

Because I can absolutely hear this in my dad's voice.

I kinda wish I could have a day off for the strike tomorrow, but instead I'm gonna have a particularly stressful day at work! And then get a train back to Manchester! Bleh. I am donating money to various things -- here's another collection of links -- and I will be following on social media and trying to support my friends as much as I can from a distance. But I feel really weird being expected to have a normal day.

A Minnesotan friend read out to me a social media post that went something like "If you know any Minnesotans, you'll know that we take every opportunity to bring up Minnesota and Minnesotan things." The next sentence started something like, "If we manage to expel this ICE invasion..." but I don't remember properly because by the time I heard that much of this sentence I was already sitting up from where I'd been lounging on the couch, so when the sentence ended with "...you'll be hearing about it for the next twenty years."

"Twenty?!" I said. "We're still talking about the Halloween storm of 1991 and that's more than twenty years ago! I think people will be hearing about this for, more like two hundred years."

He scrolled down and chuckled, read out a comment that might not have been understandable because he was still laughing, but I knew what he was saying "This comment says, 'I remember the Halloween blizzard of 1991.' "

Speaking of October 1991, I was just thinking the other day we'll be hearing about the World Series of 1991, and 1987, at the very least every time it's another 5 or 10 years after those dates, for the very least as long as any of those players are still alive.

I said that I remembered hearing about, like, the 5-year-anniversary of that time there was a raccoon on the MPR building.

We are never gonna let you forget, you'll be hearing about this for ever. I guarantee it.

I can't wait (to be talking about this in the past tense).