Off the prompt "cuddles."

You may or may not have noticed, I've been posting to dw a lot less lately. I'm probably not going to go back to posting daily grumbles and random thoughts to dw, and if that was something you were interested in, or if we're friends enough that you'd want to keep up with me day-to-day, a lot of that kind of stuff is getting dumped into decontextual now. At first it was just going to be a "random shit people say" amusement ground, which is why it got named Out of Context Theatre, but then I started following some fannish accounts and I got weirdly social what the hell ever: I'm decontextual on twitter. Over here on dreamwidth I will probably be posting more essay-like content, things that have been percolating a while, as well as fanfiction and vids. If I ever finish any ever again.

Right, so that was online housekeeping. Moving on. Disjointed thoughts to follow.

Working was fucking nuts (redacted)

On Thursday I am flying out for the long weekend to see echan and jetpack_monkey (and diannelamerc and lizbetann). If there is anyone in the LA area who would like to meet up with me and/or them while I'm visiting, HOLLA.

I have this I don't even know, it might actually be a disorder, but apparently I am more likely to feel things are right with the world if I move all my crap around every year or so (if I'm not actually moving from one house to another). At present I'm considering essentially switching the TV/guest room and my bedroom--because my bedroom is bigger, and I want to turn the TV room into the VIDDING ROOM, and have my desk and vidding computer in there as well as the fiendishly clever ikea sofa bed the TV. While it would make it difficult to vid from bed, it would make vidding a) potentially more social, as covidders could hang out and clip from DVD or betas could hang out and watch random crap until needed but, like, in the same room and b) more likely to happen from some members of the House of Torres who don't like climbing over my endless piles of laundry to get to my vidding computer.

I measured everything and found a decent free designer online, floorplanner.com, and then took some screenshots:

( probably only interesting to people who will actually spend time in my house )

My to-do list is full of boring, grown-up things like endless piles of laundry and car maintenance and shoes. My plotbunny list lately is all:

--Harry Dresden is Not a Lesbian (Harry always-a-woman AU, ( spoiler cutting here for echan, who's only read to like book 2? but this should be safe for ysobel, who said she's up to book 4 ))
--WHERE ARE ALL MY PEPPERBOT NOTES, DAMN IT THIS NEEDS MORE PLOT, hahaha Steve is all "cool! the future is awesome! who else is a robot?"
--These Mistress Pepper notes are surprisingly complete, hahaha Steve is SO confused by them switching between Mr. Stark and Miss Potts and Tony and Pepper, because it's a scene/not scene thing that they're not copping to
--somewhere in the corner, Ivan is hiding from me all smug. I'll get you, my pretty.

My day was long. I did much, but not as much as I feel I should have, and I spent significant amounts of time wanting to stab people.

Tomorrow shall be much of the same, but at least with different people to want to stab.

( things to do tomorrow )

The last ... two weeks, I *think*, have been a roller coaster of what the fuck, what the fucking fuck, how the fuck is this my life, can this be fucking over now, I can't fucking breathe.

Today I:
--woke up at conhq, having defaulted to crashing there after spending a few hours of yesterday feeling fairly awful both physically and emotionally
--slept in
--watched TV
--metaphorically climbed out the window and drove halfway across down before calming down enough to go be a human being
--had lunch with traykor and jetpack_monkey
--declared intent on a video project for the semester, which I still can't decide if I want to mark as fiction or lonelygirl15 up.
--slept, felt like for really a long time, I think it was about three or four hours though?
--watched more TV

It was almost a successful day of relaxation.

One of the temps at my work this season, back from last busy season, is an old, retired guy who works seasonal jobs because he's bored, as far as I can tell. Within the first two hours he was back, he called me Girl, Honey, and Babe. I am not a manager, but I close the store, and I have been a permanent employee for four years, which makes me like five echelons higher than him. Our relationship is not close. He has no reason to think he should be able to--or should be able to get away with--calling me these things.

I couldn't make myself tell him to his face not to do it. I don't know why. I feel like I should have been able to just tell him to shove it. Five seconds after, every time, I wanted to. I did not. What I did do was bitch to my coworkers and bosses, none of whom particularly wanted to confront him either, but the store's 2IC (and highest-ranking male employee) did call the old guy into the office and tell him that in our company's work environment, Honey, Sweetie, Babe, etc were not appropriate and he needed to use his Misters and Ma'ams. I was there for this reprimand, although my boss didn't point me out as the person who had complained against him, and the office is fairly open and full of people in and out.

All in all, I am happy with that outcome. From everything I have discussed with my coworkers, I was not the only person this man was making extremely uncomfortable, I was just the only one who was willing to complain to management about it. I'm not sure everyone understood my problem, though, because I have had to listen to a couple of rationales for this guy and because the treatment I received after from regular coworkers I consider friends pissed me off.

First:
"Oh, he's old, of course he'd call you Girl." Uh, no. I recognize age/experience as a valid social disparity but in this environment I am professionally his superior. You can argue that these equal out, and I am fine with that: he could treat me as an equal and call me by, oh, my name, maybe? I do not believe that his age is worth more than my job title. I definitely do not feel that his age and his sex are worth more than my job title because I do not believe that men should be privileged above women and I think this is goddamn relevant, because the names he was calling me made the issue very much that he was a man and I was a woman. He's made male coworkers of mine uncomfortable as well, but not using the same terms. Girl. Honey. Babe. These are belittlements to be applied to women, in assertion of male privilege.

"But I call you Honey all the time!" That's nice. However, you and I have known each other for a couple of years now, so you have earned some familiarity with me. Also, you are a woman, so I do not feel you are asserting male privilege when you call me Honey. Also, you are both older than me and in a higher position at our workplace than me, both of which are disparities I recognize the validity of. If you were (female,) younger than me, and, say, a mere cashier, I would probably think you were a sassy little punk if you called me Honey all the time; since you are not, it passes by me as unremarkable. Because you are female and not male, I do not feel as if you are perpetuating male privilege by calling me Honey.

Second:
So I do have informal relationships with most of the regular employees at my job. We call each other a lot of things. There's one cashier who calls me Bitch. Today she called me Honey, and when I jumped a mile, she told me I had to be expecting that today, given I had called out our sleazeball temp to management. What? No. Then my boss (female one, not male one) called me Sweetcheeks, continuing in the vein of mocking the situation. I said no, no that's not how it works, no: you should not be shaming me for calling out a harasser. If I was the only one who felt secure enough to complain formally and get the guy reprimanded, I, who couldn't make myself tell him off to his face, what kind of message do you think it sends to everyone who wasn't brave enough to say anything to anyone, for you to behave like this? If you shame people who speak up about harassment, even in jest, you make it so no on wants to speak up. You contribute to an environment of harassment, genuine, non-jesting harassment, because your actions serve to silence victims of harassment. I wasn't pissed off for myself, I was pissed off for the context and the people around me. I don't care if you're my friend, it is inappropriate to shame someone for stopping harassment, so you will not say these things to me.

I was not this eloquent at work. I wish I had been. I think I managed to get the message across, though.

Sigh.

Whilst discussing potential lengths of wedding dress:

echan: Everyone knows the patella is sexy.
jmtorres: Is this one of those weird straight people things?
jetpack_monkey: I'm for it!