joshuazelinsky

I am at Pinewoods!

It feels nice to write that for this, the first time in 2025. I am at Pinewoods and I am sitting somewhere quiet and alone and I am about to take my covid test.

(Where that place is? Somewhere with enough wifi to make my computer go. What are you, a cop? If you wanna find all the places at camp that have wifi, you are welcome to, but I'm not gonna make it easy for you because I am a Jerk, tm.)

Anyways, it's just me, my covid test, and a chance to write my words and this is a pattern I got into in 2022 and have never really wanted to leave: the quiet joy of enforced time _by myself_ where I can write my words in the middle of the day instead of trying to do so very _very_ late at night.

I am at Pinewoods for the first time of the year, and I am quite happy, even though it's a different set of people than I mostly know and even though the weather is very damp and kinda grey. But the place is still good. I have chased some dragonflies to try and paparazzi them, I have had good mealtime conversations with people I know and like.

And I have done work, because this is a work weekend! And because I am very good at what I do¹, I got assigned dishes, as in, "wash all of them". Or nearly all of them, we are skipping the camper dishes which don't want to have to be spread out to dry in the same way everything else does because jegus what a pain.

So I did two shifts today with Brenda, who is going to be the Dishwasher for the summer, and it's her Very First Year doing so! She's been a camper dish-helper before (I remember working with her and being pleased) and so it's gonna be a good move up. I think she has a great attitude for it, and got the hang of a lot of things very quickly.

I interspersed actual work things with various ideas and advice as I thought of them, some of which were like "this is technically potwasher advice". And I ran...golly I can't even begin to approximate how many loads through the (only sorta working) Hobart. The Hobart wasn't sanitizing, so part of her clean-side duties² was to run everything from clean-side over to the potwashing sinks, all three of which had been turned into sanitation sinks, and to constantly drop stuff into the solution, and then run it all around the kitchen and stack it...virtually _everywhere_.

It was a lot of fun and we got _so much_ done. Maybe six total hours work? And I got to listen to my music in the first half and her music in the second and that all felt great too.

Of course, having done such an impressive job today, there's hardly any dishes left for tomorrow, so I'll probably be back to normal work weekend tasks, opening cabins and the like. Which is honestly fine, I quite like doing so! Lots of dusting, and wiping things down, and SWEEPING, and if you're lucky, getting to do a windows run.

I'm not sure what the plan for the rest of the night is. I am feeling a little people'd out, which means I don't necessarily want to be SUPER SOCIAL for the entire evening. Maybe I will read a book in a corner, maybe I will draw more pictures (yesterday I drew a dog, link is to Bluesky)

Maybe I will go for a nice stroll between now and dinnertime (which is over an hour, jegus, so late!) because if there's anywhere in the world I enjoy just prowling around by myself, it's camp. Bring my camera, look for bugs, visit Kitty Alone, see the new bathrooms, check in on El Nino, there's lots and lots of good things to do at camp!

Another day and a half of this, and I'm very happy for it. I hope wherever you are, you are also happy!

~Sor

MOOP!

1: I am using this (very common Kat-phrase) as a double meaning right now. Because first I am literally quite good at washing dishes, and second, I am good at working my way into the hearts of The People In Charge in order to get to do the things *I* most want to do. I mean, it helps that the things I want to do are often things that other people don't, but dang, I get away with a lot of special privileges just by being very open about my wants, and wanting weird stuff.

2: Of course I was working dirty side, I nearly always work dirty side, my absolute single favourite job in all of camp is dirty-side at the window as a camper helper. See footnote 1.

Content Warning: non-detailed allusions to my shitty abusive ex and the shitty relationship we had

I have been working on the Inbox0 project, which sorta has two modalities:

First, the banality of daily life. Unsubscribing from things I don't care about, and mass deleting the bulks they have sent in the past. Meeting notes and invitations and preperatory emails that can safely be labeled ("highland ball" got a workout today, from when I ran it in 2017) and archived. Going through the 50 most recent emails in the inbox and trying to at least first pass all of what's happened lately.

Second, the weight of history. I have had the same email address since 2005, so that sure is, uh, twenty years since January 15th. It's not everything I've ever gotten (see above about bulk-deleting bullshit) and I do have like, a more professionally wallet-named account, but even that sends its email into the main box.

And the weight of history can be _exhausting_. That's part of what makes this game difficult, trying to motivate myself to be exposed fully to some of my worst ADHD sins, or the parts of my personal history where the Big D went on the word depression. Have I mentioned lately I went through an abusive relationship for most of the year 2007? Yeah, uh. That still has bits and pieces lying around it sure does.

But mannnnn one of the benefits of hindsight and being an actual friggin' grown-up and stuff is the ability to look at some of those bits and pieces and see just how much I have grown and improved and gotten better. I can have a lot of grace for myself (I do genuinely like myself, regardless of how much I whine I am a really spectacularly awesome person) and part of the reason is that recognition of the work I have done to reach better and better heights as time goes on.

Or, like, to read an email in which this guy I was totally into was basically breaking up with me, in part because he was not interested in being in a polycule with my shitty boyfriend. Boo hiss, this should be real sad. But it's _not_ because it's been twenty freaking years, that guy I was totally into has developed a lovely sounding life for himself on the other side of the world and I've made a polycule that has an absolute dearth of shitty boyfriends anywhere in it. And so I can read stuff like this...

However, I talked to ksatyr....he is *way* over-reacting. You think you're not ready for a relationship? I'm sorry, but this is a demonstration of not being ready for a relationship.

...and scream lovely modern "YASS QUEEN SLAY¹" because BOY HOWDY it is good to remember that there were people who were willing to say to my face "yeah, your boyfriend ain't shit because shit at least provides fertilizer and causes growth²". I mean, I didn't listen sufficiently at the time, but it turns out it never gets old to listen to folks drag my shitty partners, even if I didn't necessarily realize it at the time.

So yeah. The history is rough but it's also nice to see the growth that goes alongside it. And it's nice to get reminders that however fucked up current-right-now Kat is, they're not (correctly) getting dragged by a twenty year old for acting like a sixteen year old³.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: This is almost certainly ironic as it's not language that has actually gotten into my lexicon yet.

2: Okay sure, I suppose you could argue that kSatyr caused growth _in me_. As a different shitty ex once said "-99 points for everything, +1 for making a better Kat for the rest of us". But just because it causes growth doesn't mean I particularly want to be covered in shit. :P

3: September party! I will finally be the age my abusive ex was when he dated me! WOOO!

I have a cold or allergies or something and it is making me cranky.

(I don't normally have allergies, but because I did so much cleaning on Saturday, I did stir up a fair chunk of dust. So like...maybe that's some of the problem? I did take a covid test Sunmorn, I should probably take another one in a day or two. Wastewater data is pretty low right now, so I'd be surprised if it was covid (I am still masking everywhere as per usual))

But yeah, my nose is either congested or runny, which is very annoying. Probably one of the solutions is to drink more water, sigh. My current main water bottle is full of flowers from the brunch last weekend. Which is very nice, but probably I should've gotten a vase in the first place.

Sidebar: I have seen the writing on the wall and begun writing on the new/current version of 750words, as the old version becomes increasingly deprecated and buggy. I hate it, so much, because interacting with things that are different is Wrong And Bad and also I am unthrilled with how excited Buster is about the concept of using AI as a cool assistant who will give you lovely reports about your writing. Honestly gross, if I want to go through my writing and see how things are different, I am perfectly happy to just literally do that. I do not need robots to tell me how to feel about the changes that have happened or to find the patterns that are occurring. Anyways, there's a nonzero chance I might abandon the site entirely and just start tracking my writing in .txt files on my laptop, which would be annoying in different ways.

Anyways, all this most recent complaint is because apparently the new site does not respond to ctrl-z. What, I say as heartily as I possibly can, the fuck. Like I know some of my crankiness is just your classic neurospice "things are different [and that's bad]" but I'm going to legitimately flag this as a Poor UX Choice.

At least he did make it so that you could type in plaintext instead of horrible automatic markdown bullshit that thinks it knows what you mean when you type *emphasis* _like this_ and quite probably thinks those two things are the _same fucking thing_ which I assure you they are *not*. Also, both of them are different from italicising or bolding, those are additional *different* forms of emphasis. The fastest way to make me stop using a website is to assume you know how I wanted to say the things I said.

(It's a fun game to take a chunk of text that has auto-formatted, like in Discord, and to attempt to put back in the proper emphatic markers. The best part is that I am frequently --I'd say between two-thirds and seventy-five percent-- correct if I later go through and edit in a way that shows me the original. No one else can probably tell the way my voice is supposed to be, but I usually can, and I like that fact about myself.)

Everything in the world is cranky because it is the end of the school year and I am burnt out, and I'm not actually a fan of this way of being. So how about this: There are these flowers that grow in big weird purple balls and they're extremely keen. Aliums, I think? Anyways, I've been seeing those pretty frequently out and about in the world and I like them quite a bit.

(it is a well established fact that I like things that are round, known also as "the strongest I've ever been fuckored". I also like flowers and bright colours! So these are very good. I will try and take a picture sometime soon.)

Okay, I am in the library for extra math help (and I have a kiddo! even if it's not my kiddos who I was expecting but some strange lovely kiddo from another class, that's still quite good!) and while I'm not actively helping kids, I am either going to play Balatro or try and work on the Endless Email Project. Wish me luck, it's been a while!

~Sor
MOOP!

Numbers are all meaningless. I'm a mathematician so you can trust me when I say there's nothing more significant or special about one-thousand over nine-hundred-ninety-nine. Or one-thousand-one. In the grand scheme of things, they're all "approximately that much". (in the grand scheme of things, every number you can name is in the same bucket. That's just peanuts to numbers, etc.)

So yeah. 1000. It is just a number and there is nothing special about it.

I'm a mathematician, so you can trust me when I say that there is something special and significant and glorious about every number. One thousand is the first of the four digit numbers! It's 8 in binary! It's 10^3! It's very nicely round appearing, with all the zeros, and it's pretty fun to say. "thousand" is a great number to throw in if you're exaggerating something or engaging in pleasant hyperbole.

It is the number of days, inclusive, since August 22nd, 2022. Meaning, if we call that particular date, arbitrarily chosen, "day 1" then today, May 17th, 2025, is day 1000.

***

I have been thinking a lot lately about secrets and privacy and the ways in which I talk around things when they're too big or complicated or different or weird for me to state outright.

This has been extremely relevant lately because several months ago the choir director at my school sent around an email to all-staff saying "hey, the students are going to do Vivaldi's Gloria as a masterwork, and I'd love to have some adults join in" which means I performed in my very first concert _ever_ on Thursday. As of 48 hours before the concert, I had told exactly the following people I was doing this: my mother. At therapy, I mentioned it fast-casual-offhand and it did become the entire focus of that session. Called mom and talked to her about it for over an hour more. Did manage to tell Austin about it that evening, which was hard, told Maia the next day, have started to vaguely mention it in general through the actual day of the concert. Why didn't I tell anyone in February when I started rehearsals? Because things that my brain decides as secrets are big and complicated and different and weird and I struggle to say things aloud about them sometimes.

Anyways, the concert went well! It was nice! There's no reason anyone can figure out why I didn't talk about it earlier (there are actually several, if anyone cares ping me and I'll make it a separate post). It's not like the other thing I haven't been talking a ton about, there's a _reason_ I'm not talking about that one, and it's fear of This Country. Remind me in late August if you want to know.

But yeah. This is apparently a thing in my heart and brain, that sometimes I decide to keep things secret, and then I am just fucking weird about them for no good reason.

***

The last day I missed writing 750words was August 21st, 2022. 1000 days ago.

It's just a number and it doesn't mean anything at all. It's just a number and it means everything.

~Sor
MOOP!

I am le tired.

But I think I am happier when I actually write my words, all artisinal like, and I also think I simply have not been doing that lately --I've been getting wordcount, but it's been a lot of collections of notes from meetings, or emails home to parents, or significant bits of chatlog, or comments to other people. I'm not really...writing, mostly.

I think I think "Blues Clues" is twee, but also jegus fuck, what else am I supposed to call the repeated mounting evidence that I'm only just surviving right now, and nothing close to thriving. I am so tired, and so burnt out, all the time. It sucks, and yes there's a light at the end of the tunnel when which I get to recover, but it's called summer vacation, and I have a huge amount of stuff to get done Before Then.

(And as summer approaches I need to be Making Summer Plans, like visiting my mom in June (and maybe going on an adventure to NY with Tues's family?) and visiting MD again in late July/early August, and that thing I'm doing in mid-August, and also HELLO I HAVE WRITTEN MY PINEWOODS PROGRAMS BUT I AM NOWHERE NEAR READY TO TEACH MY CLASSES YET.)

So here's some assorted updates on assorted aspects of my life:

*Dance is obviously busy as hell. (I say obvious, but like, I'm not posting here so who is supposed to know anything?). I am teaching at Cambridge Class this month, which is...fine. It's nice to have a big crowd, and I'm very good at what I do, but it's disheartening that last week basically the first thing that happened was someone crankily requesting that I not use "bird words". I told them "nope, I'm gonna try and call mostly positional, but if I need role terms, that's what we use" and then found something else to do with my energy, but it still set the month to be emotionally costly.

I called the Highland Ball welcome dance this past Friday, and that went surprisingly well --I say surprising because it was a hell of a program, written by not-me, and I was very anxious it would be Too Complicated. Certainly it was a lot of words. But the words disguised dances that all flowed very very well, and I think I felt good about things ultimately. I got some compliments, and that was good, I think.

And I'm still running my class. Oh, I need to write a program for our party in June, crap. And I need to email exec to ask for a music subsidy. And at some point I need to write a report for the AGM. Huzzah.

*Work is also busy as hell, as we approach the MCAS tests and the end of the year. I am very very burnt out, which is making me a less good teacher. This turns out not to matter very much, because all the children are also very burnt out, which is making them less good students. We are all trying to be patient with each other and it's mostly working.

I got my assignment for next year today. Similar to what I've been doing, all Geometry again, but now I will be co-teaching the inclusion 10th grade geo, for students who require higher-than-usual numbers of supports. I am actually looking forward to this, which might be a horrible mistake. We'll see. At least all Geometry again means I shouldn't have any (many) repeat students.

*Separate from work is union stuff, and jegus, that has been _busy_ as hell. I shouldn't say a lot more in a public post, because I continue to pretend that it's a secret which district I work in, but yeah, I'm on the bargaining team, and that's been 3-5 hours of work every week since December. We're part of a whole little coalition with a bunch of the other local districts, which is keen, but our particular city is ~not interested in funding education~ which is significantly less keen. Ping me if you wanna hear more specific cussing.

*I have lost absolutely all motivation for general life maintenance, which is bad and just going to continue to be bad. My room is a fucking catastrophe and I don't know how to make it not be, because any time I go to be in it, the general malaise and burn-out from the rest of my life slam against the freeze-in-place overwhelm of looking around at my disaster area, and nothing gets done.

I have finally started reading dreamwidth again? For like, three days in a row now, over breakfast, like I'm supposed to. So that's nice, it's nice to find out what y'all are up to, a thing I haven't actually known since mid-April or so.

*Partners are good and I love them, but I don't feel like I'm doing a good job at being present for any of them because busy and _fucking busy_ and burnt out. I am maybe seeing Tuesday this upcoming weekend, but we haven't made proper plans yet. Austin and I are trying to do weekly dates, but teaching dance is throwing it all off, and this week I have a TMC meeting and blahahhhhhhh. mek and I have like seven episodes of OFMD to watch.

And then like, I completely slept through my weekly taskmaster-watch with Tailsteak last week. Like, was asleep, woke up at 9:15 to be all "shit, sorry I'm running late, lemme log on", immediately fell back asleep. Woke up at 10 at least to be able to be like "yeah, I'm not dead, and I am so sorry". Sigh.

***

I dunno, there's maybe other things too, but they're mostly video games. Gonna post this and go put my dance shoes on so I can teach a class and stuff.

~Sor
MOOP!