Let me just tell you how my afternoon’s been.

The popping out of the house for a bit wound up taking a bit longer than expected. We were heading to Shepherdstown, after a friend of ours had told us that they have a decent selection of men’s pants. Jack has been looking for more that will fit him, as his waist has shrunk a bit the past few months, but he doesn’t want to buy a bunch of new clothes while his body is still changing shape. We didn’t find anything that fit him there, though I did find a cute red hat that fit me surprisingly well (it didn’t look like it would).

That’s jumping ahead. It took a bit longer than expected, as I said, because we found ourselves on a winding country road behind some large, slow-moving vehicles used for repainting the lines on said road. The day was nice, though, and so was the company, so I didn’t really mind going 10 mph for a good portion of the way there.

The hat was a good find, and it happened to coordinate really well with what I was wearing today, so I took that as a sign and got it.

We headed back to town and stopped at the mall, because Plan B on the pants situation was trying to find some cool suspenders. Jack had a blood sugar situation on the way into the mall, so we popped into a candy store to see if we could find something with a moderate amount of carbs, something to get him pepped up without swinging too far in the opposite direction. Score: something called Gardner’s Candies had a roasted almond chocolate bar that had 11 net carbs per half-a-bar serving. Even better, the bar is divided into easy break away squares, six per half a bar. That’s less than 2 carbs per square.

So that was a nice find.

They have a website. This is the ordering page for their chocolate bar, which has different options; all the non-almond ones had around 50% more carbs, probably because they didn’t have almonds taking up space. Disappointingly, their “nutrition information” link takes you to a PDF that contains a single page on which is written a 1-800 number to call.

Jack did find his suspenders, and he got a new hat, too. I’ve also updated my Facebook profile pic to one that he took today, of me in my new hat.

Nice afternoon out, all things considered.

I started off yesterday feeling pretty low, and ended it feeling pretty high. Immediately after my first blog post of the day, I broke down a giant pile of empty cardboard boxes that have been cluttering the end of our upstairs hallway, and throughout the afternoon I unpacked three boxes of dishes (mostly coffee mugs and a few other cups) that were packed up from Jack and Sarah’s apartment but never unpacked or put away, then destroyed even more cardboard boxes. Since we only get recycling pick-up every other week and we’re only contracted for one bin, I’ll probably be putting those boxes out well into June, but they certainly take up less space disassembled and flattened than they did as boxes.

I was hoping I’d wake up today feeling exactly as awesome as I did in the afternoon yesterday, but that didn’t happen. Ah, well. At least I have yesterday as a shining example of how the beginning of the day isn’t necessarily a prophecy about the whole of it.

Well, as you may have noticed, I got in at around 1 in the morning last night, following a day of travel and my usual pre-travel night of not much sleep. Hence, today has been a slow and quiet day of reflection and recovery.

It was a very bittersweet trip. I got to see a lot of family unexpectedly early, including my now six-and-a-half-week-old nephew. My grandmother’s passing came at the end of a long decline, so there’s not a lot to process there. I’d said my goodbyes and made my peace with the end of the person I knew long ago. The reflection to which I refer has to do more with the people who are still here, neither least nor most of all me.

I didn’t take my computer, as I’d suggested might happen in my post last week. I did have some actual notebooks, my phone, and my tablet, but the majority of my energy and time were focused on other people. That’s not to say nothing creative happened; I basically can’t stop my brain from working on something in the background. But in times of stress and feelings of powerlessness, it tends more towards system nerdery and game design than stories. They’ll be more on that in this space sometime in the near future.

This was my first trip back to Nebraska with Jack where I felt 100% comfortable just being with him, like there was nothing to prove (or avoid inadvertently proving), no pitfalls to sidestep, etc. I know that depending on what kind of a mood they read this in, both members of my family and Jack himself might look at that and wonder what’s wrong with them that I’d ever feel that way, but honestly, it’s not about anyone else, it’s about me. Social anxiety doesn’t go away just because you’ve known someone all your life, or all of theirs, nor does it go away because it has no rational basis.

I’ll posting more “worky” stuff tomorrow, though I make zero predictions about what’s actually going to happen. It’s been a very haphazard week. We didn’t have food in the fridge when we got home.

Obviously it’s late as heck, but after my last blog post last week I wanted to let everyone know that I did make it back okay from Nebraska and all is well here.

My grandmother passed away last night.

This was the end of a long decline, and it wasn’t wholly unexpected. My aunt, her primary caregiver in her sickness, had been keeping us updated about her entrance into hospice. Of course, you can know that something is coming any moment and still be caught off-guard by the particular moment when it does. Just about every horror movie out there relies on that premise.

I’m flying back to Nebraska tomorrow. Due to uncertainty in the timeline when we were making plans, I’m going to be gone five days, inclusive of the travel days. I haven’t decided if my laptop is coming with me or not, but either way I am apt to be spending more time with family than online during the interval.

Well, this has been a week of technical difficulties. I kind of spent Monday decompressing and adjusting to the reality that I really didn’t have to keep calling in to the jury scheduling hot line, then woke up Tuesday morning, ready and raring to… walk straight into problems with my browser, tablet, word processor, and websites.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to log into this very website. There’s a thing that happens sometimes when WordPress updates where the backend gets caught in a loop of updating the database, and it happens often enough that I mostly know how to fix it but not often enough that I don’t have to refresh myself. It also requires me to use an FTP login that I don’t use very often and which doesn’t always seem to work, even when I’m sure I’m doing everything right.

I’ve been having a lot of problems with using Word on my phone and tablet (and thus moving between them and the computer), which also seemed to be related to updates.

I’ve been very excited about Word lately because they have finally updated the mobile version to persistently and automatically save what you’re doing to the cloud; the fact that it didn’t was basically a fatal flaw in the mobile (or at least Android, I don’t know about other platforms) versions of it; you’d change screens, or sometimes even just let your device go to sleep, and when you went back to Word, you’d find it had dumped the memory and put you back on the menu screen.

Google Docs has some stuff going for it, but it gets less usable the bigger and more complex a document you’re working with. The two things that kept me from doing all of my stuff in one place was Microsoft not giving the same editing features for mobile (stuff like text styles) and Microsoft not having a persistent autosave. Both of those things have been fixed now.

I have been working on a couple of things I’ll be talking about in the coming days and/or next week. This will (hopefully) not be my only blog post here today, but I wanted to start the working day off by just dropping a line to everybody watching that I’m okay, since it’s been a few days.

So, as of today, I am officially 100% done with jury duty. Tuesday wound up being the last day I was actually in the courthouse, but there was a slim chance I could be called up any day through today, the official end of my term of service. I’ve had a hard time relaxing fully or focusing on anything else even on days when I wasn’t scheduled. That’s over, though.

The whole process went about as I expected, in that 90% of it was being available and 90% of what was left was just showing up. It didn’t go as well as I had hoped, in that I never actually made it to the jury box, and in fact, never made it closer than two numbers away from being called to stand up front for lawyer approval. It went much better than I feared, in that I was never challenged, expelled, asked to explain myself, or worse.

The thing that people who don’t have a serious risk factor when dealing with officialdom don’t get is that there is a difference between fear and expectation. I knew it was more likely I would have a neutral or at least not overtly harmful experience than a seriously negative one.  I didn’t expect to run into problems for being trans, but I had to prepare for it. Making it through the process okay doesn’t mean I was “worried over nothing”; it means the worst didn’t happen.

When one bigot with a power trip can ruin your day, it only takes that one bigot. The odds might be 1 in 100 or 1 in 1,000 or even lower, but if you get that 1, you’re stuck with it.

When I talked about my anxieties over the process, I got comments from people on Twitter and Facebook who don’t understand that I was speaking specifically about a trans experience here, and who tried to minimize it by telling me I was worried over nothing. They told me not to sweat it, and gave me their best tips for getting out of jury duty. None of them understood that I didn’t want to “get out of it”, I wanted to get through it.

One congenitally clueless commenter told me “Just dress like you dress for cons and they’ll send you home for sure!”, which made me feel super awesome since I usually dress a little extra nicely for cons, the same as I would for court. I felt better when I realized that the clerk of the court and the court reporter basically have the same sense of style I do; my “comfortable but conservative” dress mode is apparently exactly the level of decorum expected for court.

The thing is that to me, bragging about getting out of jury duty is a bit like bragging about getting out of an election. If I’m ever sitting in a courtroom participating in a trial by jury on either side, I would want someone like me to be sitting there in the jury box. I therefore owe it to everyone else like me to give my best shot at getting into the jury box, which is what I did.

The whole process was very painless. Everybody involved with whom I interacted or observed—with the exception of one public defender who seemed to have a very low opinion of the public—was friendly, helpful, and very cognizant of the fact that most of the people in the court on whatever business were doing so for the first times in their lives. There were signs posted everywhere, no one minded questions, the jury pool mailers included very helpful FAQs assembled by the clerk, and a full hour of the two hour orientation day was more Q&A and very helpful hand-holding by the clerk.

Despite all the stereotypes about the experience and the many knowing tips about how to “beat the system”, it turns out it’s not that hard to get excused legitimately. Half of that hour was over what to do if you can’t make it, if you have family obligations, children without a sitter, or even a vacation. Coming up with a slick system to get out of it on some pretense is basically the equivalent of doing commando belly crawls and acrobatic flips down an office hallway to the water cooler so “The Man” won’t know you’re taking a hydration break; i.e., you aren’t actually that slick. Everybody knows what you’re doing and no one cares.

The most interesting part of the experience for me was that first day, when we went through orientation. We’d all receive multiple mailings including helpful informative pamphlets and the aforementioned FAQ, and basically every document we had referenced the expected dress code and mentioned the jury schedule hotline that we were instructed to call the Thursday before each week of service to find out when we were scheduled, including our first week (the one that started with orientation).

And when we reached the Q&A part of the presentation, fully half of the questions were in the form of guys—all white guys, all guys who were at or just below the minimum standards of the dress code—raising their hands and saying, “You’re telling me I’m scheduled this week?” and “I didn’t see anything about calling  any hotline.” and “This is the first I’ve heard of any phone number I was supposed to call.” and “The only thing I got said to come in today and I’d be done.”

As I observed on Twitter after that first day, you can learn a lot about socioeconomic privilege in the United States by telling a diverse sample of people that a person who has the power to throw them in jail if he thinks they’re contemptuous would really appreciate it if they would all dress up nice as a sign of respect for his office, like they would for a job interview.

The result was a lot of white guys in jeans and short-sleeved shirts, a few in jean shorts or cut-offs and t-shirts, a lot of women who were dressed business casual. Some of them had very clearly pulled out their nicer jeans and nicer short-sleeved shirts, but there weren’t a lot of collars. The only visibly Latino guy was in a three piece suit. Black women were uniformly dressed for the boardroom.

I, the white trans woman who doesn’t often clock as trans to people who don’t know, was somewhere in the middle, hitting about the same level as the women who work there. My main goal was to give no one any reason to notice me and look closer.

Anyway, that was my experience with the… experience. It went like I expected it would, not as well as I’d hoped and not as bad as I’d feared, and now it’s over. I’m writing about it in part because one of the things I did when I got the first letter was go searching online for other trans people’s experiences with it, which did help put my mind at ease.

So, immediately before I posted this, I wrote a blog post and then put up a brand-new Sad Puppies Review Books installment by our old friend Mr. John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired). Both of these things happened because the first thing I saw this morning when I got on Twitter was an excerpt from a blog post by one of the Sad Puppy standard-bearers, Ms. Sarah Hoyt. I found I had things to say about it, hence the blog post. When I was finished, I found I had more to say, hence the book review.

The paragraph about Nazi and Soviet collaborators in the review is taken verbatim from Hoyt’s post, minus the bit that’s about the turtle. I say this because my experience last year was that the parts of the reviews that were taken directly from the mouths of pups, as it were, were the parts most often singled out for being unfair and too over the top to be believed.

I don’t at this time have any intention of resuming the SPRB column as a regular thing. At the time I first did it, it arose quite organically from the ideas bouncing around in my head and the things I was seeing. At the point where I found myself seeking out material and chasing down ideas, I retired it. There will be more reviews if and only if I keep seeing things that spark them. It’s not enough for a Puppy to say something wrong or terrible. It’s also got to make it into my orbit, and it has to spark an association with one of the many children’s book shelved in the library of my mind. If I have to start casting around for a book to make the comparison, it’s just not a very good comparison, nor a very good joke.

So the plan regarding SPRB is there is no plan.

Other plans are… evolving and in flux. There was some bad news on the international front today and tremendously good news on the family front. I’ll probably blog more about what I’m doing later. Right now, my head’s a jumble.

So, yesterday I wound up crashing pretty hard in the afternoon. Combination of poor sleep the night before (anxiety = insomnia), getting up early to make sure there no rush in getting ready and reporting at the courthouse, continued anxiety, then coming home and having a bit of a disquieting internet interaction while I was trying to unwind. I slept for most of the afternoon, which didn’t make last night’s sleep situation a whole lot better.

Still and all, it wasn’t a bad day, and today’s not a bad one for the slow start.

Okay, so today was jury orientation. I had some trepidation about this… I was 98% sure that I would be just another number and a face in the crowd, but it’s the 2% that I always have to worry about. Of course I don’t know that it’s actually 2%, but that’s part of what’s worrying about it.

The short version is that it went well. My appearance was not challenged and my identity not questioned. We were assured that the court does not ever refer to jurors by anything other than our numbers (I had assumed this would be the case, but when I Googled it before I found that different jurisdictions do this to differing degrees). I was not the only (or the most) visible queer person in the room, of the few hundred people who were receiving their orientation. There was a moment where I was glancing around the room and for faces that look like “family” and I saw a person doing the same thing, and stopping on me.

Jack (who was waiting outside on a bench) later described the same person as having excitedly told her partner “I’m not the only lesbian there!” At that point, there weren’t a lot of other people she could have meant. It’s not quite accurate, but it’s always nice to be clocked as queer without necessarily being clocked as trans.

I do have to go back in later in the week for my first day of actual service, which could be over very quickly or last all day. It’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility it could last more than a day, but that seems unlikely.