#hank talks

-when someone asks Murderbot why it won't make eye contact and it grinds its teeth so hard it loses performance reliability and

Waterboarding is when you put a cloth over someone's face and pour water over it so they gasp in air THROUGH the soaked cloth thus aspirating water droplets and causing a great deal of pain and drowning slowly.

Gale and Astarion have their toxic old man yaoi thing going on and can't stop preening and puffing themselves up real big like angry cats as soon as the other one comes near.

Shadowheart and Lae'zel are literally trying to kill each other.

I want to go get a vape. There's a shop just on the other side of my house, and people leave their vape boxes in the alleyway all the time, making me think "Fuck it would be really nice to just walk 100 meters, spend thirty bucks, and have some delicious nicotine all to myself. I'll just vape until this urge is sated." ok great. And then what?

Then I have a vape. One of those stupid disposable ones that are INCREDIBLY strong. That are so moreish that I find it hard to stop. That give me head spins. That would last just long enough to completely reset my physical addiction to nicotine and make that itchy feeling in my brain ten times worse. Either I smoke the thing until it's finished, which would be habit-forming, or I just smoke it for an hour. AND THEN WHAT? Get rid of it? Throw a live battery in the bin? Wait until I see one of my friends that vapes and palm it off to them? Go for a walk and leave it on a bus stop bench somewhere (which is what I used to do.) Then I've just thrown thirty bucks (possibly fifty, idk how much they cost anymore) into the BIN for an afternoon of nicotine that makes my head spin.

So the seductive little voice that says, it would be so easy, we're just going to do it a little bit, it won't hurt, you can go by a vape... it doesn't have any good answers to "AND THEN WHAT?!" And so asking that, allows me to urge surf and get through it, because whilst I might want the hit of nicotine, I don't want all the shit that comes after it.

I have the same little story to "and then what" when the urge to get a box of 50 nangs hits me as well. Funnily enough, my addiction gremlin can't convince me that there's anything good after a box of fifty nangs. It's amazing the way that my pathways have been rewritten and my strength and resilience has grown. Because there was NEVER a good tale waiting after I got high. The "and then what" answer was ALWAYS "you'll feel a whole variety of shitty things," but I just wasn't able to GET to that answer, the screaming addiction urges didn't CARE how I was going to feel on the other side of being high, they just needed to be high NOW.

Finished up my prison class (have been doing a program for 3 months where I go and study comparative criminal justice in a men's max security prison with half the students being from my uni, half of them being guys on the inside.) did our group presentations at the visitor centre in the prison, lots of speeches, got to meet some of the guys' family that came along, and then said goodbye forever to a bunch of ppl that I've had a really formative experience with that I'll never see again. (they were very strict on no sharing of personal info, no becoming pen pals etc, to keep the program from running into trouble down the line.)

It's so wonderful and bizarre to me that the men's max security prison is one of the first place that I have felt male acceptable and comaraderie. Most of the other uni students were women, sub-25, and I'm in my thirties and got "he" pronouns the second I walked in the door. (funnily enough we didn't do a pronoun circle at the prison and I didn't bother correcting anyone.) so being read as male meant I got a different regard and comfort from the guys inside than the girls did. I even got the masc hand-clasp/chest bump hug goodbye from a lot of the guys. One of them called me "The brightest guy in the program." I've never been in all male spaces before that weren't queer and it was incredibly heartening to know I'm not doomed to be read as a freak. (they undeniably clocked me as gay but it didn't seem to be an issue.)

And then instead of getting to integrate these feelings, I jumped in the car to a message from a roomie that they've got scabies, which is a "hot wash and dry everything/treat the household" kinda bug. I drove the 80 mins home from the prison and spent the afternoon stripping, washing, spending seventy bucks at the laundramat, going to kmart to replace pillows so I would have something to sleep on whilst I bag up everything that can't be washed for at least 3 days.

And I had to cancel seeing the Lover, and then THEY and their household need to do the same thing, and not for a second did I get to process the morning, or the last three months. I also have an assessment today that I'd planned to spend the arvo doing readings on, not helping the household (I am the only one with a car) wash every bit of bedding and linen etc.

I managed to sit down at about 7pm, absolute wrecked, and with every pillow in my den and couch bagged up and my mattresses all bare, called the Lover and just bawled. I just wanted to be able to be comfy and in their arms and process, and instead I was aching and wretched on a bare mattress having held it together to do all the tasks that needed to be done. I couldn't even look forward to going to sleep because all of my fav pillows were packed away, and I had two cheap shitty ones I'd bought from kmart in a haze.

I managed to get myself showered and coated in the treatment cream. (I'd seen Mama Kink the night before so she needed to treat as well, and brought me over the cream, as well as a couple of little treats, thank fuck.) I remembered that I had a pillow in the garage and a smaller weighted blanket in the hall cupboard, as well as my camp doona. I'd wanted to call the Lover again and talk to them about prison class but I was toddler tired, unable to rationally talk about anything without crying. They offered to be present with my crying, which was sweet. But I called it and went to bed, treating myself to a whole valium (thank fuck I have a spare shakti mat, I always lie on it before sleep.)

I'm on the train this morning to my assessment, where I'll just need to gasbag/do an interview about feminism and queer theory, and hope that my 12 years on tumblr is enough prep to get me through.