Soon
I'm heading off in a while here to visit Unagi, who lives in Seattle. The last time I was in Seattle, I was 15 years old and visiting my dad's first cousin with my family. I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag in said cousin's home office. Even at that age, I was a world-class insomniac and there was a bookshelf and it didn't take me long to find the stash of Playboy magazines.

It was in that city, in that home office, where I realized in a profound way that my issue wasn't that I was broken, but that I'm a lesbian. My friends were all pairing up with boys and making out at parties and I just didn't understand what the draw was. I flipped through those magazines and a switch went off in my brain. I finally understood why my friends wanted to be with these boys and why I didn't.

My feminist politics are such that I'm not thrilled that porn is the way I figured all of this out, but it is what it is, and there's some sort of beautiful design to the fact that I'm going to reclaim Seattle as a fully formed adult, who will be traveling to see the woman with whom I am falling in love.

Testifying about the past
I spent my morning in court, testifying before a judge to try to convince her that a loved one needs psychiatric care that she is unable to secure for herself. This person believes people are trying to poison her via food (so eats only packaged items and is ingesting around 800 calories on a high-intake day) and her laundry detergent and water. She thinks that a famous man is stealing her work and passing it off as his own. She cannot hold a job--she lost one not that long ago because she wouldn't sign the electronic device indicating that she'd received a package because she was concerned about being watched. She periodically thinks that parts of her body are melting off, sometimes because of the laundry detergent poison, sometimes for other reasons. She is scared and small and vulnerable.

The judge did not grant our petition, based on her right to liberty. And, you know, I understand that, but I also believe that this is a death sentence for her.

Part of me feels as though I betrayed her profoundly when I stated my name for the record and talked to that judge. I know that I didn't, that we did the right thing, that she needs help and cannot see her way out of this on her own.

I doubt I will have more news of her at any point--the ties are too distant and she hasn't trusted me for a very long time. It's a loss I'm not sure how to process, but I know that I will, with time.

As seen on the campus bookstore marquee
I Like Used Books and I Cannot Lie

An update of sorts
Things are going well for me, overall. I'm happy in my job. Unagi is amazing--funny and sharp and kind and celebrated her new degree with fresh ink and an eyebrow piercing and at least once a day, I wonder where the hell she came from and how I got so lucky.

The cats--I have five, again, as turtle's living situation changed or something and her dad brought Sam, Lorenzo and Tamarind back to me--are doing all right, though the endless establishment of the pecking order gets on my last naked nerve. Lorenzo has a big scab on his chest and Kissa is just a damn maniac, stalking him around the house and yowling. I'm hoping to rehome Sam and Lorenzo, I'm just looking for the right place.

Last week I returned from my visit with Tali the Cute to find a stray cat with a badly injured back leg on my deck. I talked to him, he warmed up and I stuffed him in a crate and surrendered him to the vet. They told me that I could call the following day and check up on him, but I didn't need to--they called me about 90 minutes after I dropped him off to say that he'd tested positive for FIV and between that and his leg injury, they'd have to euthanize him.

Please keep your cats indoors--better for them, better for the environment, better for the songbirds, better for my heart.

What I did on my second summer vacation, by frog

I suppose it's a good thing when the most complicated part requiring the most input from others is choosing her screen name
I'm sorry for the long radio silence, here, but I have a Very Good Explanation. There's a new woman in my life--we're going to call her Unagi, in honor of that Friends episode that cracks my shit up and her love of that particular kind of sushi.

She's lovely. Curly red hair, freckles, a killer smile and gorgeous eyes (I'm a sucker for beautiful eyes, I'll admit). She loves her work, which is catching babies (she's a midwife). She loves her kids, who are seven and almost three.

We met online a year and a half or two years ago at a gigantic message board. I didn't really know here there, but it turns out that she followed the ttc saga. We connected for real at a smaller spin-off board.

After hours of phone calls, hundreds of emails and even more texts, we met for the first time last week.

I will call this state of being Cautiously Optimistic.

She's really wonderful--my friends who have met her think she's lovely and she likes them. The Small Friends who love turtle are uncertain, which is to be expected. People who have seen me when we're together, without exception, immediately comment on how happy and well I look.

But the real clincher? Mason loves her.