Your heaven can be as close or as far as you make it

🪨"What Grace doing? Question."

🦊"Having a momement."

What have you been up to? Um well it's getting warmer so I've been having to brush my cat every day.

Like no it's not that interesting of a thing to say. But now they can respond to it. They could say, man yeah it really is heating up, I've been trying to think of things to do inside more often. Or, oh you have a cat? What's their name?

simon calling grace, ya know. Grace. because he thinks it's a title or a measure of Goodness and not just a last name. simon, who comes from a religious cult and almost dies and is (usually) severely unwell when they meet, hearing that this impossible man is called Grace and thinking "of course he is grace, you have to be a special kind of person to rescue someone like him."

but yeah :)

Bc rocky can hear fucking everything, right? As Grace says, privacy is at a premium. But there would certainly be things that the two of them want to talk about without Rocky overhearing. And obviously a lot of that is probably when Rocky is asleep, so they don't need to worry about being overheard, but WALK WITH ME.

Grace scribbling something down on a piece of paper and sliding it over to Simon. Simon looking at it for a minute before writing something else and sliding it back. Rocky watches this go on for a few minutes before he goes, "What doing, question? Talking without Rocky, question? Talk about what, question?" Him getting annoyed and a tiny bit petty about it bc new human is STEALING his Friend Grace >:( and they are talking in SECRECY

Now Ryan.

“Talk to disabled people the same way you talk to children”

Should be

They said, "Just remember to speak to them like a five-year-old, that's how old they are mentally." All I could think was, "You are a professional, and you've still managed to degrade both children and disabled people, in one breath, two of the most marginalized groups, like it was nothing."

I don't mean you can't get good at things through repeated practice. You can do that, I have done that, but I don't trust it.

I was driving this morning and thinking about how I have never developed the blasé contempt for it most people seem to despite never having caused an accident in 20 years because my sense of time is such that I might as well have been driving for a week. I'm a good, safe driver, but I do not have a heap of confidence in my driving despite having regularly done it for two decades because my sense of time is such that those two decades may as well not have happened.

I finished editing a novel today. When I publish it, it will be the 64th novel I have published in the last 10 years, not counting ghostwritten work. You'd think after a decade and 63 novels I'd be confident that I was capable of writing, editing, and publishing a novel—even be confident about the timeline for this—but no. No, I feel like I'm doing it for the first time, every time, and I was surprised to have finished the editing at all, let alone on time. Because those other 63 novels were published in a past I have a vague at best concept of. I have a record that says it happened but I do not feel it.

I cannot trust my future behaviour because for me there is functionally no past. I know it occurred, I have records, but I don't feel it the way people without this kind of memory issue do. I feel inexperienced at everything I've ever done and I cannot accurately estimate my skill level at anything, particularly not on the fly.