landingtree

This week one of my flatmates and her boyfriend crossed paths at at art exhibition with a tourist from Sydney who was diagnosed with Covid days afterward. So we've all been withdrawn into our separate rooms, while, in the tourist's broader wake, events are cancelled across Wellington, and supermarkets institute one-in-one-out policies again. It doesn't take much not seeing other humans to make me remember how badly I do at extended periods of it; but, today flatmate and her boyfriend both got negative tests back, so we can provisionally relax. And since my flatmate is a usually-overworked schoolteacher, the remaining days in which she has to isolate despite being probably fine sound more like an opportunity than a problem.

I'm not sure I ever posted here about having moved in with my sister? I did! It was very nice, great improvement over the previous flat of strangers (not that they weren't perfectly nice people, but we didn't particularly fit together: I want to be thinking more than, "Well, they're perfectly nice people," day in, day out). Now my sister has moved herself, to live with a girlfriend, which is happy-sad, but I've settled in well with the other two flatmates (and now a third), and it feels like home. Though still a home in flux. No one's plans are very steady. Myself, I'm still standing like a donkey between various haystacks, my native indecisiveness given amazing new scope to chip away at me.

In the meanwhile, for a brief, shining moment, I have enough bookshelves! This means I can put my shoes in the nook by the door (where there used to be boxes of books) and can put the breadmaker which won't fit anywhere in our kitchen on top of my wardrobe (where there used to be boxes of books). I've also finally hung my ten pendants on my wall, where they look decorative instead of spending most of their time entangled on the desk.

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I've belatedly discovered Spotify, i.e. now for the first time have a convenient way of saving song recommendations and letting the algorithm point me at new songs. One of the things I like about this flat is how often we have background music, which hasn't been a feature of anywhere I've lived in a while. Currently I'm having fun making a playlist for Axica, our Quiet Year city, full of terrible events and terrible predators in a terrible power structure, yet somehow also host to comedic heist sequences. As a result, I've had fragments of Tom Waits stuck in my head all day.

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Currently reading:

The Monster Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson. Someone tells protagonist Baru in the first book that her great weakness is forgetting that other people also think of themselves as protagonists; this second book follows up on that by picking up many other perspectives, as Baru herself arrives at more information about the terrible colonialist society she's destroying herself in order to destroy. I liked the first book, in a suitably, "No, no, no, this is not okay" kind of way, but it felt almost like a diagram of itself in places. So far this has the opposite of middle-book problem: it goes back and fills the diagram in.

Also various mountaineering books recommended to me by Scintillation discord folk, for story research, and Foucault's The Order of Things, because flatmate's boyfriend S. wants someone to talk to about it. I was not raised to respect the Continental philosophers, as a category, but Delaney has softened me up on this one, his language and thought are quite Foucault-ish. I'm still only a few chapters in, because it's beautiful writing but only when I have a lot of energy to pour into it.