Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

Pulled up HARD from a "you're back in high school and everybody hates and bullies you" dream — I remembered partway though, oh, riiight, you graduated ages ago, you're just a tourist here!

So I wandered off and found a beautiful spot by a water feature (that my real HS def did NOT have) and met a woman who was a stranger to me, but after we swapped stories, she absolutely insisted I'd met her years ago on a beach. We got naked and cuddled, totally platonic and innocent, with not a hint of mistrust or fear between us.

She reminded me of Plum the Merewif from Bravest Warriors— a charmingly untrustworthy flirt. She was almost certainly my brain recognizing that Peg was right next to me in real life and everything was kinda safe and OK. <3

She also shoved me through a portal into another dimension and laughed. Yup, that's Peg all right.

@LeDiva where's the caramel?

@troodon eff him >__<

@kistaro I'll make a note of it! For now, I'm content to wait and see if it all does actually resolve itself as easily as they keep claiming it will. But I'll probably fire off some kind of post-mortem, good or bad, to that link when it's all over.

Still really strung out tonight. I feel like I'm trapped somewhere between two aspects of myself that make me feel really ashamed and uncomfortable—to put it in Goddamn Furry terms, the Tigress Jerk and the Fretful Clingy Little Jackalope.

I love the little jackalope. He's a good little bunnybuck. But he's so childlike and fragile I feel like he's a burden to everyone I know, especially a Semi-Reformed Spike Queen like Peg.

She wonders sometimes why I put up with the Transliminal folks for so long, and that's kinda why I guess. They were terrible to the Tigress Jerk, even when the Tigress Jerk was doing her god damnedest to be a good kitty and not knock stuff over by accident, nor eat anyone who didn't seem to be volunteering to be eaten. But they were some of the only people I've ever met who knew how to be kind to the jackalope. Them and... yeah. Another person who ran screaming from me, although they loped away far more politely, gently, and comprehensibly.

I dunno. Don't get me wrong. I fucked a lot of things up. The Jackalope is cute at first, but after the tenth time they've knocked on your door crying or giggling at 4 am, they're probably a lot less cute. And the Tigress is, well, a jerk. She can be a magnificent, funny, fuzzy jerk and a powerful friend, but even at her best she's kind of... loud.

There are other parts of me, that are probably a lot better company for someone who seems to really just want to be Left Alone And Art Or Something... but they're the two in charge today, and living in a shotgun house, I don't really have a good place to hide them.

Plus, I gotta work. The Lynx doesn't have time to babysit these two. Once again, I guess I just act like the shittiest Headfriend Parent on earth and put their needs off for another day, in the name of... getting by.

Seriously, I don't blame anybody if they didn't slog through those toots about my insurance woes, but there's one thing I want to emphasize:

I can't recommend highly enough that whole technique of "if something is stressing you out, fire up a notepad and write down every detail of it."

Maybe it wouldn't work for everybody and it's just the way I'm wired. An ADD thing? But it's incredibly comforting for me to know I have all my thoughts pre-organized in case I ever need to dig in & fight...

Also, god fucking damn it, would easy access to weed... but not TOO easy... make this all a lot less difficult to manage. Maybe now that it's almost-quasi-para-legal-or-something in Louisiana I should invest in a big ol' bottle of CBD or something.

Failing that, I might just maul a whole bunch of pedestrians and devour their flesh. It would not surprise me one bit if that carried a lower legal penalty in this tropical Confederacy-reeking shithole. =>_<=

Was driving myself, and obviously also Peg, crazy by stewing over the insurance thing. Technically, I'm no worse off than I was after my first phone call to these people, so... I dunno.

It just fucks with me to be given 5 different stories and left with ZERO faith that things are actually OK, as opposed to these CSRs just not getting paid enough to check my account for some hidden subtle weirdness (of the sort I seem to be REALLY good at accidentally generating).

So I took the initiative and made myself an Evernote with a list of every detail of every version I've gotten from every CSR, just in case I still haven't heard anything by end of month and I have to go to war.

I'm feeling a bit better. Also helped that I ran into another potential bureaucratic nightmare— replacing my tattered birth cert copy for State ID— and it actually went really well. Thanks Ohio, for... well, basically for not being Louisiana. -_- (No offense, Peg. Everything BUT civil society is pretty good down here.)

I think I've almost got myself back to the point where I have enough spoons in the drawer to actually get some work done. But not enough to do work AND fix any kind of complicated dinner, so... yeah. I have made a judicious and studied decision to order delivery food and binge eat as soon as possible.

So, the stress from the insurance thing really disproportionately got to me somehow, and I took a long nap to try to reset myself. But I woke up even more anxious than before, and was wondering why...

...until just now, when I remembered that I'd been dreaming I was in some kind of tour bus that went off an elevated highway in (!!METAPHOR ALERT!!) Washington State that just kinda... stopped. In the dream, they were built such that you were supposed to just kinda aim right and (!!METAPHOR ALERT!!) land on another highway on your own. But it was "okay" because if you missed, you "just" went straight into the water. But we missed and we went falling.

We all got out of the bus OK, but I got separated from the rest and got to the surface while the rest were lost in some weird flooded bridge/tunnel underpass. But I didn't have a phone, and the only other people around looked really sketchy and dangerous, so I just ran on home as fast as I could and didn't even think about the others until I got back. I felt super-guilty and just curled up into a ball and worried for a while.

I think that's where some tiny conscious fragment of my brain kicked in and went "wait, this just isn't gonna work," and pulled a deus ex machina. This turned out to be a lovably degenerate mirror-universe version of the crystal gems who, instead of being based on precious stones, were all named for various bits of refuse: "Soot," "Dirt," "Trash," "Detritus," and so forth. Detritus, aka Scuzzy Fake Peridot, was particularly ratty-adorable. They had saved everyone after I bolted.

So I think it mostly worked out in my favor. Thanks, brain, for the last-minute save.

Listen, I don't ask much out of government bureaucracies.

I could even almost deal with the fact that FIVE different CSRs at the healthcare exchange have given me SIX contradictory sets of details about the status of my weirdly-delayed application.

I could deal with the fact that all those conversations have basically ended in "It's fine. I'm sure it's fine"—despite each one telling me a detail of the previous CSR's version was NOT fine.

I could even deal with the fact that the one I spoke with on Saturday told me all I had to do was call BC/BS and pay my premium and it must have just been an oversight that I was never told to go ahead and make payments... but BC/BS had no record of me whatsoever.

But it would have been really nice if, after waiting 10 minutes on hold for her, the ACA operator who I thought had JUST reassured me everything was going to be fine, and I'd basically satisfied all the deadlines, even if it took longer than that to process my documents... had not contradicted herself and told me I might need to call for an extension on my enrollment the day before it ends.

IN THE SAME FUCKING BREATH, DURING THE SAME FUCKING SENTENCE in which she told me I didn't need to.

In the meantime, I guess I'm having a look at gofundme. Juuuust in case. >____< And maybe also at the contact page of healthcare.gov and some glitter-and-fish-guts shipping agencies.

We have the world's first transgender billionaire. Sounds like she wants into the club, so... bar the door and load the rainbow-enameled shotguns.

I'm fucking sick of these Newly Woke ex-Republicans who only start caring about social justice the moment it affects them and theirs.

I'll welcome her into the community the moment she lifts a single goddamn sclerotic finger to disburse her unearned, ill-gotten fortune—not a trickle of "philanthropy," but every penny she doesn't need to live on—to her starving trans brothers and sisters.

And then I'll still want to throw a drink in her face for ever enabling the King In Orange in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Pritzker

"a copy of Atlas Shrugged stuck so far up his ass, you can see the letters 'AYN R' at the back of his throat when he talks"

I wonder if I'm gonna be getting kicked out of my family home again tonight? Last night, it had something to do with a quest to find a lost episode of The Tomorrow People and not being home when I was supposed to. The night before that, it was because my mom and I argued so badly in a shopping mall that I dangled her over a railing with a 30' drop. The night before that... well, there wasn't a reason. It just kinda happened out of the blue over what I thought was a pretty minor difference of opinion.

For the record, in real life, my mom and I get along pretty great, actually. These dreams all feel like textbook Freudian displacement of the trauma and guilt I incurred during The Thing. >_< Except for the Tomorrow People thing—that was just a pisser, because the fucking episode turned out to be a big fake.

Huh. No, come to think of it, that might have been a metaphor too. >_<

Huh. Add "Benson, Arizona" from the Dark Star soundtrack to the list of songs that can reduce me instantly to blubbering. I'll have to move it to THAT playlist.

If you think this might be your fault, it probably is, but I still love you and often miss the hell out of you. ❤️​♠️❤️​♠️​

@001zlnv No! They're all actually Janets from The Good Place. That's where they live.

I'm stressed out about a bunch of things— family health woes, ambiguous looming bureaucracy, a really busy workweek, guilt over snapping at Peg for trying too hard to help with the above, and a weeklong streak of face-kickingly brutal low-self-esteem nightmares — and Tigress Jerk is awful close to the surface today. So I'm mostly laying low.

There's a time and place for that sort of bad behavior, and it's called Reddit. Bast suffers the Pepes to live for a reason—and it's so her angry stripey children have a place to sharpen their claws and make the fun blood stuff go all over like splat. 🐯​

@anthracite *waves hand*

She's talking about me folks. :D I had a somewhat difficult Father's Day call to make this morning (my stepbrother is in the hospital, long ongoing story, call and hospital visit went OK) and stressed out at her real bad when she tried to offer advice and distractions.

The good news: I did my penance to her by improvising my own Broadway showtune about my woes. She seemed to approve. I love this dragon. Her whimsy just... kinda takes the edge off everything. 😻😻😻😻

i feel like tuca & bertie is really calling me out here

@Aradia (Peggy also needs breakfast, but given her dining habits, she ALWAYS needs breakfast. I think she's about 30 or 40 meals behind. >_< )

@Aradia WHAT?! HOW DARE YOU GENERALIZE YOUR EXPERIENCES LIKE THA...

Huh. I *do* need breakfast. Thank you.