#because i'm close to 2.5 years now and i find people five years or ten years or EIGHTEEN YEARS (wow) to be... reassuring

[uncanny-tranny]

For TST, it's still Thursday now for me at least: I've been on T for 6 years + now, and I've noticed in the past few months that I'm finally in a place with my body (and my mind) where I don't worry that other people can "tell" just by looking at me. And it's so nice to just exist without worrying about whether they "can tell" or not.

Holy shit, six years sounds so long... do you know how much I look forward to being where you are? I know people longer in transition aren't inherently inspiring nor should they be expected to be so, but I still find it really heartwarming and hopeful.

[cel-aerion]

When you get this, please respond with five things that make you happy! Then send it to the last ten people in your notifications (anonymously). You never know who might benefit from spreading positivity. ♡

Thank you, stranger who I totally don't have a guess as to who you are!

I, um, got more rambly about these than I anticipated.

Chatting with friends online. Mostly on Discord, because that's where most of the people I chat with are, and the singular person I currently talk with the most is on there, but like... any chatting. I also want to be talking to someone else basically all the time, so technology that enables that has honestly been phenomenal (even if I can't always do this because I'm just awkward and horrible at carrying a conversation before I'm familiar with the other person).

Theorist videos. The various MatPat channels have been my comfort media for... I think it's getting pretty close to a year now (although in those first months it overlapped with James Acaster stuff). 2.5. Honorary mention to James Acaster, since I'm on the subject. Even though I'm not seeking out his stuff as actively lately, it still makes me happy to watch. And also, like, he has given me Memories that I will not forget until my dying day (though I'm still not sure whether that's good or bad).

Escape rooms. Escape rooms always help me unwind, I wish I could be doing them basically all the time, but they are expensive and also most don't allow just one person, so with few friends who live nearby to me I am SOL. Alternately, as a substitute, I wish I knew more good point-and-click escape games. Zero Escape was fantastic, Rusty Lake is always phenomenal... If I could find more like those (like as far as difficulty in solving), it'd be awesome. Anyways tldr is that I love having puzzles to solve.

My family. Maybe this is like an "absence makes the heart grow fonder" thing, but like, now that I've moved out, going to visit my parents, I always feel so refreshed after. I'm honestly grateful I have such a great relationship with them. ...although I also just got off the phone with my mom in what was supposed to be a "quick" call that ended up being an hour, so I'll admit there are moments when I'm still heaving a deep sigh about them. 4.5. Obviously family includes pets, both the ones in my house (my snake and hedgehog), and the ones that are technically my parents' (dog and cockatiel), but I spent years living with them and referring to them as "mine" and I don't care to break that habit.

Stuffed animals. Plushies. Give me all of them. Also blankets, which aren't really the same but are both in that "snuggly" category and I'm on the last number so they're being shoved together.

Special mention to "whatever the current hyperfixation is". Right now I'm kind of between interests, and kind of just jumping around in different things and seeing what sticks, but usually there's some huge thing that I'm thinking about like 90% of the time because I don't know how to consume things in moderation. So like... when I do have one of those, whatever that thing is is a thing that makes me happy.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

“Not everybody is as nuts as I am about writing and stuff, I understand that, I’m not prescribing what anyone should do. I just can’t relate to it when people will Tweet, going, ‘Well I’m in Hull for my show tonight, and it’s lunch time, how am I going to kill these five hours?’ And people will Tweet going, ‘Why not see a film?’ And not that you shouldn’t see a film, not that you shouldn’t do anything. It just astonishes me that someone would every have five hours, and their thought would be, ‘How can I make this time expire? How can I bring myself one day closer to the end?’ It amazes me. I’ve never understood boredom as a phenomenon, unless you’re in a job where you’re forced to do something shit and you have to concentrate on it. Of course I understand that. But I’ll see people going – social media’s bad for it, because people often express these sort of sentiments, I’ll often see people going, ‘I don’t know what to do today.’ I just don’t understand it, because quite apart from anything else, you used a computer or a smartphone to put that on, so there’s a hell of a lot of things, like I don’t know, just Google Bolivia, and find out some stuff about it. Christ, just go onto Wikipedia and use its random pages generator. When I’ve had no ability to write or to work, I’ve had plenty of happy times just acquiring three or four pieces of random knowledge. It’s not some sort of lust for knowledge, even, you don’t have to retain any of it. The world is just so complicated and interesting. And I understand that if you’re depressed, or… sometime you don’t feel like it. I do understand feeling sluggish or washed out about life, everyone has that. But if you’ve got plenty of energy and you’re feeling fine, but you just don’t know what to do with yourself, I just don’t understand that.” - Mark Watson, Made of Human/Who Hurt You podcast, 2017

Holy hell, he just summarized so much of what I think. Something that has set me apart from so many people I know for pretty much all my life. I remember first articulating it when I was about ten years old, and explained to my mother that “bored” doesn’t happen to me when I have nothing to do, only when I have something to do. Like I hated math class so if I had to focus on math homework, which I found boring, I’d be bored. But sometimes I heard other kids complain about being bored even when nothing was happening, and I didn’t get that. Because if nothing’s happening, you’re free in your own head. You can daydream, making stuff up, brainstorm for stuff you’re writing (yeah I wrote poetry when I was ten, this fact will not surprise anyone who’s ever met me).

And that was before I had constant access to the internet - I used the internet on the family computer for a limited amount of time per day, but I didn’t have access to the internet in my bedroom. What I did have was a non-internet-connected computer on which I could type things, a collection of books, and my CDs and boom box. And that was more than enough! I could read and write and listen to music or just sit down and think of things. But now that I have the internet, there’s even less reason to be bored. There’s so much in the world. Sometimes I think of how even within my niches, I’ll never really scratch the surface. I’ve spent my whole life being into Canadian folk music, and there’s so much Canadian folk music I’ve never heard. I'm a Canadian political news junkie, I listen to way more CBC news than is good for my health and I don't know have more than a surface-level understanding of the majority of issues in the country. I’ve spent 2.5 years on this British comedy thing, and I joke about having watched/heard/read all the comedy in Britain, but I haven’t come close. And obviously I haven’t done that with all the comedy in Britain, but that’s true even when you break it down into smaller niches. All the panel shows on one channel or all the political satire from a specific decade or all the work that’s available online by stand-ups from something called the Chocolate Milk Gang who performed at Edinburgh in 2004. I’ll never find it all. And sometimes that thought seems overwhelming, but it means I’m definitely not in danger of boredom, as long as I have access to a phone and a podcast app.

But even without it, I still don’t get bored. After the bit I transcribed there, the podcast host Sofie Hagan asked Mark what he’d do if he were on a plane for 8 hours with nothing to read or listen to and no pen or paper and no phone. Mark replied that he’d be mad at himself for getting into that situation, which is also relatable - obviously the actual answer is to prepare better than that. But his answer for what he’d do in the hypothetical situation was the same as mine would be - think about stuff. He even specified that he didn’t mean in some meditative “let the thoughts come” way, which could get boring, he’d be systematic and write stuff in his head and try to figure things out. Which, yes, exactly! I’m quite confident that if I had to I could keep myself entertained with nothing but my brain for eight hours. Not because I could be relaxed, but because I wouldn’t be.

I like that he said it’s not specifically a lust for knowledge either. I think I am an intellectually curious person, but I also feel weird claiming that label because I don’t think I’m the same as people who are truly intelligent and want to be experts on the world. I just like to know stuff. In the last couple of years, I played geography games until I can label a blank map with all the countries and most major cities in the world, and all the regional areas of England and Ireland and Scotland and Wales. Because my brain just likes to know stuff, and it’s bothered by the massive quantities of things it doesn’t know. But that’s not the same as being a real intellectual. That’s just gathering information.

This has so often led to disconnect when I talk to people I know, and realize most of them fundamentally see things differently than I do. My mother’s like that, she gets bored so quickly and I don’t understand it. Or my friends who said there was nothing to do in lockdown. I definitely understand struggling mentally in lockdown - I did, we all did - but I struggled from missing things and people that matter to me. A lot of my friends struggled with just not knowing what to do with themselves, and I wanted to tell them... there’s an internet. You know there’s an internet, right? All the information in the world is out there and you’ll never know a tiny fraction of it but why not try? Pick a niche that interests you, and see if you can find a sub-section of it that’s small enough so you can scratch its surface.

Most of my friends and I had one big thing that occupied all our mental energy before COVID, running a team together and thinking every second about how to do its next steps. The difference is that when that shut down, I was able to jump onto something else to find interesting, because the world is infinite. While so many people I knew just didn’t know what to do if we don’t have this one thing that requires physical interaction and a whole system to keep it in place. And still other people I know, the few who were outside the bubble of that sport, never had a thing like that to begin with. They just always spent their time working and then figuring out how to kill time (note that none of my friends have kids, I suppose it changes things when that happens). I don’t understand how that happens.

Anyway, while I’m quoting from this podcast that I’m listening to, here’s another thing Mark Watson said in it, which I found hilarious because it’s an amusing thing to get competitive about. Listening to lots of the Comedian’s Comedian podcast lately, briefly getting into Britcom Twitter, and other things where comedians talk about their own careers, I’ve often seen comedians complain (usually half jokingly, or in the guise of a joke but clearly actually annoyed about it) about how they’re more [something] than other comics who get more credit than they do for being [that same thing]. It’s very on brand for Mark Watson’s version of this to be bragging that he’s more physically incompetent than other comedians:

“I lack confidence with physical tasks, I can’t really do, like, DIY or anything. I’m doing this charity rowing thing and I have to do extra classes because I’m so shit at rowing, and I hate being that clumsy. There’s a certain kind of lovable schtick that goes with it, a lot of comedians talk on stage about being sort of cheerfully incompetent and a bit dysfunctional. And that is all fine, but I think I’m the real deal. I’m a lot more dysfunctional than, you know, Seann Walsh or whoever else is claiming to be a dysfunctional white male.”