with fall travel and work soup mostly over, it's time to take a crack at finishing moves for ye goosebook. i have yet to pop out of bed in the middle of the night to jot down couplets, which is frustrating, but i do think i get what needs to happen even if i can't make it happen just yet. i wrote the maybe-editor this week to schedule our next meeting and she hates my face and/or got laid off and hasn't written back, or it was the week of halloween and she works with children's books and has a young daughter. that came out as "week of thanksgiving"–my sleep has not been consistent! on our five-day lightning cruise to canada and back, i slept so poorly that on our last night when i was rushing to pack my suitcase and fling it in the hallway for pickup i missed a whole dresser's worth of clothes, which left new york harbor a few hours later and have been sailing around the canadian maritimes ever since. i wrote out and submitted an intricate description of said dresser in the stateroom and the sweatshirts, celine dion concert tee, and black underwear it contained, and after a fortnight or so i got a letter congratulating me on the 73% accuracy with which i told the story of my shit (the percentage!) and offering me the opportunity to pay a $150 idiot tax to get it back. i have tender feelings about that shit (which might even be worth more than $150!), i paid, and now i wait. i hope celine has been enjoying the impromptu repatriation.
i've trained and signed up to protect the election on thursday, which feels pretty unnecessary–probably no one is out to terrorize or benight lower east side voters, and i've been an actual poll worker a few times so i already know how it works–but it's a charm that's easy to perform, not unlike this morning's shift. a call for more volunteer clinic escorts went out earlier this week on the last-call channel, but by the time i accessed signup there were already 8 participants. if my last shift and what the group leaders said of the weeks since are seasonal indicators, though, there will be several squirrelly groups of antis there this morning, and we'll need all the bodies we can get. this group does clinic escorting rather than defense, which means we focus on the patients and don't engage with protesters–in the years i've done this i've never spoken to a protester, and i've gotten better at not wanting to over time–but they clearly feel emboldened to harass patients and break laws when their numbers exceed ours. there were probably six mornings earlier this year where they didn't show up at all and i got to go home relatively early, though the hour i spend on the train each way makes that kind of a wash, i guess. i pre-partied for what i'm paying now. i appreciate the nonengagement policy, both because i'd rather not incur the psychic damage, dungeons and dragons style, of arguing with evangelical bigots and because from what i've seen of clinic defense at planned parenthood's facility in nolita it's all too easy to develop a spy vs. spy, neverending escalation loop with an actual two-way scream tunnel. no one could have frightened or wheedled me out of my procedure when i was 22 in san francisco, but i appreciated the empty hospital i found all those years ago; i was fairly vulnerable to psychic damage then as well, though i didn't really know that.
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