We made it through June!!
And I for one have been heartily enjoying a June of TINY TITS
June also marked my first Big Outing post-surgery. I can't remember how much I've talked about this here, but since July last year, I have been working 1 (now 1.5) days a week for Geeks For Social Change, and having a thoroughly good/interesting time doing so. Studio Lead Kim is an old friend, and my main motivation for persuading them to hire me (or perhaps more accurately, them persuading me to be hired) was my desire to do more actual, tangibly, meaningfully 'good' work. I also am a big Kim fan more generally, and could see them starting to flail at the prospect of managing a rapidly growing workload/studio/team and wanted to chip in. (It also offered me an avenue to quitting my previous part time job, but that was not my main motivation, honest). I started off as a general design dogsbody — muddling my way through Adobe XD to help redesign the main GFSC website (still to be unveiled), making our funding bids, reports, zines, pitches for work and so on look nice. However I'm also delighted to have started taking on more project management and client liason work, plus the chance to start pursuing design research again more meaningfully for the first time since my MA.
Anyway that's probably all a bit of uneccesary context but I guess this blog is my 'here's what's going on in my life' space, so it feels important to mention that I'm doing it and that I'm having a nice time. Kim was invited to speak at EMF festival, about our work at GFSC. They got two free tickets, so they and I headed over, and we bought tickets for two of our other GFSC studio colleagues, Katja and Aster. Because Kim has various health issues, and I was relatively recently post surgery*, we got an Airbnb a few miles from the festival rather than camping, thank goodness. (*The main reason I got in on the Airbnb is because I HATE CAMPING and after I split up with Ava I promised myself I would never camp again for any reason :)
We arrived into Ledbury on a gloriously sunny afternoon the day before the festival started, and found our wonderful airbnb was absolutely surrounded by cool animals. The owners had seven or eight lovely dogs, and over thirty (!) peacocks. They were mostly cool, and in full plumage, though it's mating season so they were quite noisy...
EMF Camp feels like something kind of hard to explain if you don't know what it is. I've known about it and wanted to go for a number of years (and am friends with some of the organisers!) but my hatred of camping put me off. I am extremely greatful to Kim for enabling. I guess I sometimes summarise by saying it's 'a festival for people who like tinkering with electronics', but it's a lot more than this, because that's not me, and I had a great time! The website describes it more broadly, as a festival for people with 'an inquisitive mind', and it certainly is that. The schedule is fully blocked out with talks from everything about how to hack train tickets, to the economics of popular video games. From how to build an electronic hurdy gurdy to the current state of tech in the sex industry. Some talks are serious, some are funny, some are both. There are also myriad workshops (I went to two very crafty ones — cyanotype printing and making a macrame water bottle holder), plus loads of random art and tech installations, many of which you can interact with. My personal favourite was a rigged xylophone which would play with more and more intensity as you exposed a piece of radioactive rock to power its automaton. As well as this, every year they create a weird, wild nightclub space with rowdy beats until the early hours. Some highlights from my first day were the lockpicking tent (I was very sad I didn't make it back to this again when it was open as I found it SO fun), getting my face painted with some equations in the maths tent, and the aforementioned cyanotype workshop. I was then extraordinarily glad to return to a REAL BED, REAL SHOWER and REAL TOILET at the end of the day :)
Loads more fun on the second day of EMF, I particularly enjoyed artist Tim Murray Brown's interactive AI piece, powered by the motion of audience members in front of a camera, with imagery sourced from his own extensive photography library. (You can see it in action here). As always when travelling these days, I took my ipad to do these visual diaries, so it was fun to be able to do a 'painting' like this. I also did some lino printing in a phone booth, played loads of fun games, saw a man with a top hat that contained a flamethrower, and pet several robots.
Kim's talk was on the Sunday, which was a bit of a shame, as after heavy rain overnight (lol, glad I'm not camping for the millionth time) lots of people decided to pack up and leave quite early on the Sunday morning, so it wasn't quite as busy as it might have been. Still, there were probably well over 100 people in attendance, which was fun/stressful! The talk was called "Why is it so hard to do nice things, that make a difference, with other people", and you can read a blog version of it here (I illustrated it!) It was fun to get to help Kim out by designing the slides, controlling the slides, and generally guiding them around the campsite while they tried not to panic about giving the talk. As soon as they were done, I too packed up and left, and got a shockingly packed train back to London (on which I caught something that apparently wasn't COVID but felt like it).
Mols and their partner Alex were visiting London all the way from Maryland USA! They took me to an extremely cute British tea shop which had loads of cats just hanging out. I had a fancy cold tea cocktail and it was all extremely wholesome.
Occasionally I look at my google search history and I'm like 'wow, what is life' (This omits all my stupid searches for how to solve puzzles in Skyrim or lists of the bugs and fish in Animal Crossing)
I haven't started going back to the gym yet (but I must?! Soon?! Now my boobs can safely jiggle again) but I have been trying to take long walks most mornings to make sure I get some exercise. Despite it being quite close, it had been a while since I walked through the new Battersea Power Station development. It's simultaneously really nice and really gross (really nice because it's so clean, it looks great, and it's well designed) (really gross because it's just made for rich people).
Railroad Inc is a really cute, fast lil boardgame that you should check out if you like a) trains, b) map building games, c) puzzles, or any combination of the above. It's super easy to pick up and teach, and you get to draw on the boards!
Oh there's that lurgy I mentioned. UNFAIR!
A goblin
At around 11.00 at night, just as we were falling asleep, we were awakened to the sound of banging right outside our second floor window. I opened the blind to find myself looking directly at a man in a cherrypicker hammering at the streetlight outside my window, trying to get the entire top of the thing off. He then replaced it with a fancy new LED version which, I'm not gonna lie, has totally harshed my vibe. I never minded having a streelight directly outside my window, in fact I'd often leave the blinds partly open because I liked the orange light. But this one is nasty white light and it's way less bright (I LIKED the light pollution in my room, okay?!), and it's totally changed the vibes of my room, and the street. I am mostly used to it now, but it does feel weirdly like the end of an era as these orange lights are gradually phased out.
Moving through the cold phases to SNOT DAY! (Still testing negative for COVID though it's hard to test when your nose is full of snot and the throat swab makes you gag, but I did my best)
Obivously my partner got the lurgy too.
Luckily feeling mostly better (and still testing negative) for a long awaited trip to see Ralph Fiennes in Straight Line Crazy, a play about notorious (ly racist) mid century New York urban planner Robert Moses. Kinda wild to see a play about urban planning tbh, and I'm a big nerd about that kind of thing, so it was really fun, and I actually wished they'd gone harder on the detail in that respect, but then maybe it would have been less appealing to a mainstream audience. Ralph Fiennes was obviously great and so was everyone else. I'd recommend it, but it's over now, alas, I just caught the end of the run!
Sun's out, BOOBS OUT!
I feel weirdly un-shy about illustratively flashing to you all, now that I have no nipples. Kinda wild. (I am SO glad I went no nipples, I know most people think this is weird but I just feel so liberated being without them). As part of my surgery recovery I bought two hot/cold compress things from Boots, to make them cold you just put them in the fridge. I didn't really need them as part of my recovery as I didn't end up suffering that badly, but they are soooo nice to get out of the fridge and drape over yourself on super hot nights, like a reverse hot water bottle. Highly recommend
One thing I'm finding weird (though I guess not surprising) is that I'm still kinda self conscious about actually 'getting them out' — mostly because I've spent a lifetime dressing to minimise and disguise my chest. (As one friend said, "I don't think I've ever even seen any flesh below your neck") So when I wear a low cut top now I'm like 'is this too much?!', but then I go out and I see other women living their best boob lives and I'm like 'Huh I guess it's not'
Chase doesn't like it when it gets too hot (but actually I think it is good for her achey joints?!)
I was dubious but I got one of these fidget toys and it actually has made a big difference to my ability to focus in meetings! (When I actually use it...)
I was doing a Samaritans night shift (10 – 2.30) on the night of the solstice, and because of the train strike I decided to walk there (near Oxford Circus) from my home in Battersea. The weather was lovely and I hugely enjoyed strolling through central London as the sun went down.
Doing my best at being a goth but sometimes I slip up a lil :)
I can't be trusted
In further delightful June things, a weekend in Margate! My friend Jade managed to get a table at Margate zine fair and invited me to share it with them, which was an absolute joy — I hadn't tabled at a zine fair since before the pandemic and I've missed it so much! We decided to treat ourselves to an Airbnb together which made the whole thing feel like a cute lil mini break (originally Jade's partner and dog were supposed to join us but they couldn't make it in the end), and helped us avoid the train strikes.(Solidarity with those striking, obvs! More strikes! Longer strikes! Let's do this!)
I travelled down early on the Friday because I wanted to go for a nice hike — all the way from Broadstairs back along the coast to Margate. It was absolutely gorgeous the entire way (though long and at times somewhat precarious). I have missed being by the sea SO much, and it was so good to see some beautiful cliffs and weird cliff infrastructure and beautiful cerulean blue sea.
The zine fair the next day was great fun too — it was at a really cool venue, 'Elsewhere' in the centre of Margate. I sold a bunch of zines, met some cool people, got to pet some visiting dogs, and got a stick and poke tattoo! Yeah apparently 'getting a tattoo spur of the moment in a sticky basement at a zine fair' seems like a reasonable thing to do to me now :) (It's only little and I'm really pleased with it!) I also went out and had an amazing Po Boy for lunch, which was very delicious but very difficult to eat with any dignity.
We headed home on Sunday (and I got another po boy), but not before visiting the Margate Crab Museum. I will not tell you anything else about the Margate crab museum other than it's extremely good and you should go, and it's probably not quite what you're expecting.
I really enjoyed the process of having a stick and poke tattoo. The artist was really nice, and it felt a lot more intimate and soothing than a machine tattoo (though I never minded those). It also healed WAY faster, which was pretty cool. (And no mother, it did not get infected, everything was actually very hygeinic considering it was done in the basement of a nightclub)
The tattoo is of a creepy little eye on a long flower stem, and I love it so much I kind of want to commission another tattoo artist to create a really big, realistic version of the same thing to get done somewhere else on my body
I guess I'm having a good time at the moment. Feels kinda weird to say given how truly terrible the world is. Whenever I look around me and think 'this is nice' something in my brain goes* 'when the apocalypse has come and you're fighting for your life in whatever the wasteland looks like, you'll look back on these as some of the last good times'. Maybe this is cynical. Maybe we'll all be fine. I am going to lean into being happy where I can, because it gives me the energy to (hopefully) do more good with my life/work. Plus it feels like about time, after a difficult several years.
(*Something else in my brain also often goes 'I see you're having a nice, carefree time, so here's a flashback to the moment you found Charlie dead' which is something I am still really struggling with, but I've mostly managed to find ways of pushing those thoughts aside when I need to. If anyone has any advice on stopping intrusive thoughts though, it would be appreciated.)
ANYWAY, all of that aside, this is a drawing about how much I am enjoying my work at the moment. Being a freelancer is always somewhat precarious, but it has been a long time since I've had anything close to a 'bad month', and I now have enough work that I can start saying no to the jobs I don't like, which means my work is both more ethical and more enjoyable. (Any clients reading this, please keep hiring me, ily, thanks)
I have worked hard to become my own boss, and sometimes that means long hours, sometimes that means frayed nerves, but that also means that I can (sometimes, not too often), just say 'fuck this' at 4pm and stop working to play video games, or spontaneously take the Friday off to go walk along the Kent coastline.
There's probably an upper threshold to how much I can earn as a freelancer in this role that still means I'll never be able to afford a house (in London? Anywhere good?!), but it has given me enough to pay for my surgery, have a few takeaways a month, and buy one (1) item of clothing from Cos per month, should I desire it. And what more do I really need?!
(To start paying into a pension probably, lolsob)
Talking of spontaneously taking the day off... My old friend Reggie was in town and he's always a good time, so I dropped everything to go out for lunch with him and get taken along to a recording of the Late Late Show.
TV is really wild — if you're in the audience for these things you have to be constantly ready to lose your shit. Holler and scream and clap and generally act like you've never had a better time in your life. After a while, if you're susceptible to this kind of nonsense (which I am), you genuinely start to believe you've never had a better time in your life. John Boyega makes a saucy joke and you howl like it's the funniest thing you've ever heard. The hype man tells you to dance and you DO IT. Some guy does an obviously set up magic trick and you GASP and SHRIEK with shock and awe. All the while this perfectly choreographed team of camera men, audience organisers, directors, sound guys, make up people and more just glide around making everything work. It's like a masterpiece.
Reggie's the band leader, and he and his band are seasoned improvisers so it all just feels effortless. At lunchtime I told him that my parents live in Chichester. 'Oh, Chich?' Well, apparently the locals call it 'Chi'. He thought that was really gross, and during the recording of the show, sung a lengthy song about Chichester which probably baffled the entire audience.
As I say, always a good time.
So yeah. Life is nice right now?! Except for the fact that I am doing ABSOLUTELY NO EXERCISE (apart from my lengthy morning walks and the occasional hike), and I'm really starting to feel it. The trouble is, all exercise takes time, and despite what some people say, I have absolutely not once in my life experienced these supposed 'endorphins' that happen after you work out. Exercise takes time and you feel awful afterwards, and when life is busy, literally who has time?! Anyway I am trying to figure out how I can make time for something that doesn't make me hate existing within a body, and I have a feeling a solution is about to present itself... imminently...
Anyway, on that mysterious note, it's nearly July, so I will see you on the other side!
