cw: I’m talking about tracking my health data, and also about spiders; you can skip around or just skip this one in particular, no hard feelings xoxo
I live in Australia now, and I have been acclimating to much hotter (and dryer) air temperatures. It helps that I went and stayed for almost six months in Thailand this year; there’s nothing like VERY heavy humidity and heat all day and night to adjust your body to that kind of nonsense.
I am also getting used to referring to temperatures in Celsius, although I do still calculate them in Fahrenheit to grasp the physical and emotional weight of the heat sometimes, like for example today’s predicted high of 37C. This is the equivalent of 98.6F, which is the body temperature that I was taught as a child was “normal.” Above 98.6, you might have a fever. Below 98.6, maybe you had a naturally lower temperature, or maybe you had hypothermia. Or you were dead! Whichever.
My normal body temperature has always been below 98.6, and here in Australia when I take my temperature and it shows me in Celsius what it is, it hovers between 36.0 and 36.8, which makes sense to me. I don’t think it means anything, but it’s interesting.
Anyway, it’s going to be really fuckin hot out today.
name and gender marker changes
In Victoria (the state where I live) it is now free to change your gender marker / sex at birth, and you can also change your name for free if you do it at the same time. I will be able to do this myself here within a year!! DO YOU UNDERSTAND, THIS PROCESS IS TRICKY AND COMPLICATED IN THE STATES!!! It involves legal paperwork here too, of course, but it is not difficult or impossible; it’s just paperwork. And I can do paperwork. Boy howdy, I have been doing paperwork for decades now. Nobody prepared me for how much paperwork you are always needing to do once you become an adult.
No quicksand, but lots and lots of fucking paperwork, and usually it’s paperwork I already did before.
So, I have the better part of a year to decide if the name I legally take is the same as the one I’ve been going by. There is a secret extra last name that I may add to it, but I’ll decide for sure later.
this ring doesn’t give me superpowers at all
I have a new health tracker ring (they were on sale) so that I can start keeping track of my health data again, which actually means something given that I have established medical care here now. One of the things it does is track steps, but not very well–yesterday I drove an hour and a half into one of the nearby cities for a family member’s medical appointment, and an hour and a half back, and my ring data is positive that I walked (very fast, I guess?!) over 1600 steps while I was, in fact, driving the car.
The other thing that it does, which I need it to do, is track how I am sleeping, because my experience of sleep is pretty shit most of the time. The first night I wore the ring, it said that I slept all of 2 hours 26 minutes. It didn’t even register the first several hours of sleep before I had to get up to go to the bathroom, or the fitful hour or so after the second bathroom trip at 6am. The second night, it had no sleep data at all. I went to bed with a migraine and apparently my body never relaxed enough (based on temperature and heart rate mostly, I think) to register that I was asleep. I certainly did not feel as if I had slept; it was more like I was unconscious for several hours and regained consciousness when I needed the bathroom. I have body temperature and heart rate and blood oxygen data, just not sleep data.
Last night (the third night), I managed to get 5 hours 44 minutes of sleep before I was up early for the bathroom. Hooray for me! Ash is pretty sure that I need to do a sleep test, although we are both also pretty sure that I will fail it. At least I finally got some fucking sleep. It’s going to be hot tonight and hopefully there is enough cool air in my camper from the air conditioner unit that I have a chance of sleeping comfortably.
spiders georg
spiders Georg tumblr meme originally posted by Max Lavergne
As I keep bringing up (annoyingly, perhaps), I now live in Australia, famously the land of everything that is trying to kill you, and also spiders. There are days when we need to remove/re-home multiple spiders from various places inside the house, and occasionally from inside my camper which is where my bed is and also where I keep my stuff.
Most of these are huntsman spiders, of which I now (upsettingly?) am familiar with several species. Some of the spiders we find in our living spaces have deceptively bland names like ‘house spider,’ although we also have orb-weaving spiders, wolf spiders, and daddy long-legs in and around the house on occasion. I’m sure some of you may have seen photos or, unfortunately, VIDEOS, of Very Large huntsman spiders the size of an entire wall, but the ones around here are approximately fist-sized. That’s including the legs, so it’s not a fist-sized body and then a massive amount of pipe-cleaner legs. Although they do kind of look like pipe-cleaners, or like they are wearing corduroys, or stripey socks.
If they weren’t so inherently startling to me, they would be awfully cute. I have tried very hard to learn not to be so immediately frightened of them, because none of them are running at me waving sticks or screaming. Sometimes a spider that needs to be moved is very determined to stay where it is, and we have to cajole them into the large bucket that Vincent uses to safely capture them for relocation. I am almost positive that several recently relocated spiders have come back into the house and needed to be removed again. I do tend to anthropomorphize things quite often, but it seems to me that those spiders have been noticeably peeved.
If I can’t see them (even when I know they’re there somewhere), or they aren’t 1) crawling on me, 2) sitting on any of the things I identify as My Stuff that I Need To Use, or 3) building webs in places inconvenient to me [like doorways], I don’t mind if they are just doing whatever they are doing. I’m not here to kick them off where they live, I just want to be a good roommate to what already lives here. In return, I try to make it obvious that the space I want to occupy is where I’m spending my time, so that it makes sense to them not to try and hang out or live there.
Also: we have a snake bite kit in the big first aid kit by the main door, because it is also Snake Season now that it is quite hot and getting into summer. And we all have health insurance and know what the emergency number is.
it doesn’t feel like christmas to me
I have been emotionally disconnected from the holiday season (Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year in the states) since last November, and maybe the November before that one back in 2023.
The only reason I know that this is the time of year when there are snow days and Christmas trees and holiday decorations on main streets back where I grew up, is that I see social media posts by my friends and acquaintances who still live there. There are no snow days here but there are decorations and Black Friday sales, which feel odd to me because of the emotional disconnect–and additionally odd because it’s 37 Celsius today but there are Santa decorations for sale in the shops and Christmas-themed baked goods in the grocery store.
how to measure time
Maybe when we move to Ireland, into the same general latitude as the one back in Michigan, I will feel the overlap of cold weather and twinkling colored lights and wrapping paper-covered gift boxes and remember what it feels like to celebrate those holidays in a happy and nostalgic way. Right now, I live in the desert, in a bright and sunny and windy place where my family also lives, and it’s been summer or nearly-summer or recently-summer for me all year because I also was in Thailand for half of it.
The sky at night is brilliant and the moon is bright enough to cast shadows from its first quarter phase through the full and last quarter phase. I don’t know the stars well enough to identify where in the seasons I am based on what I can see; what I see is a vastness, an endlessness, which is strangely comforting and feels perfect and good, but it does not coincide for me with any experience of where I am in time.
Time here, for me, is measured in moon cycles; in the span of a week from Sunday to Saturday; in how much recovery time I need for the effort I’ve spent; in weeks between water deliveries; in library book due dates; in the regularity of the six-year-old’s bedtime every evening; in how many doses of a prescription I have left before I need a new script from my GP; in how many minutes or hours or days it’s been since I last kissed my girlfriend.
ephemera:
my spouse StarChild has started writing at a new blog 👉
Cain Culto has a new song with Xiuhtezcatl, ¡BASTA YA!; it is AMAZING, do recommend!!
I’ve moved from Spotify to Tidal, although I haven’t decided yet if I’ll stay there or go to Qobuz; but for now, I have 2 months and change of listening history, enough for a 2025 Rewind, which you can see here 👉
sometimes when the six-year-old is emotionally dysregulated, this Stray Kids music video helps when we watch it 2-3x and also sing all the English lyrics and some of the Korean ones (deong gideok kung deoreoreo)
I feel tired and it’s only 1:55pm. This is what happens when you get up early!! You need a nap!!!
I hope your days are not too exciting nor too boring. I hope you have shelter and sustenance. I hope you get hugs sometimes. And I hope you don’t have to dissociate too much today in order to make it through.
xox,
Nix
