(no subject)

Today is our anniversary. We've been married for 15 years. It both doesn't seem like that long and is hard to wrap my head around the fact that there was a time before we got married. From my point of view, Scott belongs in my life. He's such a major component of my world concept that my brain stutters when I try to envision my current life if I'd never met him or loved him or... It's a little easier to conceive life without Delia, and that's not easy, either. She's omnipresent.

We probably won't do anything to celebrate our anniversary today. It's not convenient given that we're at Origins, sharing a hotel room, exhausted and have Delia constantly with us. We had a quiet, child-free night in last Friday as a pre-anniversary celebration. I'm going to look in the dealers' room to see if I can find something Scott would like, both for the anniversary and for Father's Day. I think that will work. I may have to drag him along as I have no real concept of what he'd like.

(no subject)

So, we're at Origins. Scott and Delia are over in the kids' room, playing games with Delia's best friend (or mostly best friend. Delia changes her mind about who's her best friend fairly often) and her father. I'm in the hotel room, feeling cranky. A bout of IBS has me stuck for a little while. With luck, that'll finish up in another half an hour to an hour, and I'll be able to go to the convention center.

There's part of me that doesn't want to leave the room at all. This is a strange place, and I'm going to be alone or with just Delia a lot. I'm very glad that I'll have a scooter even though that makes some logistics more complicated. I discovered last night that walking around in a place I don't know is more exhausting and painful than walking around somewhere that I know well-- We went out to dinner with dagoski and his wife. It wasn't too far, two very long blocks that probably come out to four blocks by downtown Ann Arbor standards. I should be able to walk that. By the time we got there, my hips and feet hurt. By the time we got back to the hotel, I was ready to never move again. (I did do more walking later when Delia was refusing to sleep. I had to leave the room so as not to escalate the problem. Anything else resulted in her pushing harder.)

I suspect that the heavy humidity and my new shoes played a role in the pain. The shoes are good ones, but I haven't had them even a week, and they're still not broken in. I miss the previous pair (same size, same color, same brand) that I'd had for four and a half years.

Those two things can't be the whole cause, though. I've walked that far in that sort of humidity before, many times (living in Michigan has to be good for something), and I've been wearing the shoes off and on for days. I suspect that the stress of being in a new place is ratcheting up my anxiety, my fight or flight instincts, even when I'm steadfastly not looking at the anxiety so that I can function.

I'd rather have my mind working moderately well and my body working badly than the reverse, but I wish I didn't have to make the choice. Not that it's a choice any longer. I don't do it deliberately. I suppose it's part of the arithmetic of anxiety when combined with physical disability. My body's never going to work really well, so I trade a bit more function for sharpening my mind. Sharpening my mind makes the anxiety a little bit more powerful but also makes me feel more like I can handle things that the universe throws at me.

The IBS isn't entirely a surprise. I'd been expecting in since yesterday. I am a bit worried about it, though. ( Cut for TMI about IBS. Definitely TMI. For my reference. )

(For anyone worried, I feel fine, for me, given that I'm not at home and only got about six hours of sleep last night. I'm going to see if the hotel shop has Tylenol at prices that don't constitute extortion. If they do, I'll take that. If they don't, I'll deal with the pain and use Vicodin if I absolutely have to.)

There were tornado warnings in Columbus last night, starting about 11:30. The front desk called our room three times to tell us where the shelters were, a meeting room downstairs and the bathroom in our room. The sirens and thunder were enough that I couldn't sleep through it, even without the anxiety of wondering if a tornado would hit. The adults in the room discussed the matter in the way that people who've been briefly asleep or mostly asleep do. We decided to gamble that we'd be fine. I ended up sitting up and playing computer solitaire while periodically refreshing the NOAA website.

Scott has been cranky since we started packing on Tuesday. I'm not sure if he realizes how cranky or just how much that pushes my anxiety to new heights. I'm actually at the point that I'm reluctant to ask him to help me out with anything because I'm afraid of making the cranky worse. Intellectually, I know that it's not me and that there's no risk of driving him away or provoking him to worse than crankiness, but I don't respond rationally to such things.

I don't think Scott understands what him being cranky and snapping does to me. I hesitate to try to tell him because it's horribly unfair to tell someone that they're not allowed to have a bad day or to be upset. Nobody can manage that, and it's damaging to try.

Packing for a trip is harder with a child. If we, as adults, forget something for us, we do without or scavenge a substitute. For Delia, it's harder. When something she expects isn't there, she doesn't really understand why Mama and Daddy can't magic it up. Plus, we want her to be comfortable here. She's not at all sure that being here is a good thing. She alternates between excitement and wanting to go home.

Scott's also realized that he didn't bring enough cash. He got some out of the bank last week and then spent quite a bit of it before we even left home. I have none. I trusted him when he said he had it dealt with (the whole not driving thing means that I have to beg a ride to go to the bank). I get the impression that, on some level, he counted on me having cash. It's silly of him because he never got me more after we spent the last of mine last Friday evening. He was there for that.

We got lost on the trip down. It was spitting rain, and there were a lot of trucks on the road, so we had a constant layer of rough water over the windshield during a critical bit of the trip. We missed seeing the turn we were supposed to make and weren't certain that we'd missed it until we hit the Columbus city limits. As it turned out, the road we were on came down here anyway. It just wasn't as efficient in terms of time because it came through town at no more than 20-30 mph. Still, Scott had quite a long period of utter terror that we were lost, that it was his fault, that things were going horribly wrong. He had trouble taking simple steps to deal with it and snapped at me and Delia a few times. (We did stop to try to buy a Columbus map. Sadly, the place we stopped only had Cincinnati and Dayton city maps. We have no understanding of the logic of that.)

We arrived an hour and a half after Scott had planned. I don't think he got over that until after dinner. I think he's fine now, but he's also very focused on not letting anything disrupt his time away from home. He's worried about me, but he's not sticking close. He came back once to get his game books. I think there was some element of checking up on me in that, too, but I'm not sure how much.

(no subject)

During the drive down, Scott and I talked a bit about my problems with board and card games. I have a near phobic reaction when I try to play them. There are one or two that I'm okay with, things I learned to play as a child and know really, really well, but I can't learn new games. I also can play solitaire games of various sorts without trouble. I start to shake, I feel sick, I get a headache, and I have no fun at all. Role playing games, tabletop or LARP, seem to be utterly different for me. This puzzles some of our friends, and I've never quite worked out the whys of the situation. I just know that it's true.

Some of it is that LARPs and tabletop RPGs map to a different sort of activity for me. They're storytelling, improv acting, writing, performance, all things that I enjoy doing. Card games and board games are rules, right and wrong decisions, complex things built of little pieces that matter and that can't be altered after the fact. They involve interacting with other people on multiple levels that I have trouble handling. The competition doesn't work well for me. I find it impossible to relax at all while doing it. (I suspect that part of my reaction is a weird form of stage fright. I don't get it over performing on a stage, GMing or public speaking. Instead, I get it over this more intimate and choreographed form of performance.)

At any rate, in our discussions yesterday, Scott and I concluded that my big problem with board and card games is that I get obsessed with the form of what's going on. The details capture me, and I *need* them all to be right. I respond to every tiny details as if it's a matter of life and death. My body can't tell that I'm not really in danger, and my brain goes into crisis mode. All of that adds up to No Fun and, really, to those sorts of games not being good for me. I can watch other people play them, learn the strategies and form opinions on them by watching. As long as I don't try to play. Kind of like the difference between watching someone on a tightrope or a trapeze versus doing it oneself.

Tabletop games and LARPs are easier for me because I can put aside the details in favor of people interactions. When one tactic doesn't work, I can usually resort to others. (Hm... Fast talk didn't work. Time to pull out the weapons or the bribes or go invisible or....) It's also easier to come up with an approach that's different from what anyone else expects. Even when things turn out badly for my character, I know that that's my *character*. The character's not me. One I've played for a long time is a part of me in some ways so that losing it is upsetting, but it's still on the level of dropping a book in the bathtub (an out of print one, in some cases) or dropping the glass bowl I inherited from my great-aunt. I'm not happy about it, but there's no deep damage.

Role playing, like writing, lets me find outlets for my constant life or death anxiety that aren't harmful. Nobody really dies. Nobody's really traumatized. Nobody's tortured or loses their job or... It's fiction. In real life, I don't have anything to fight that I can grasp, comprehend and efficiently work against. In games and writing, it's possible. (I do write things that I might not enjoy as a reader. They're more stressful than I'd seek for relaxation. Writing them, however, helps a lot. It justifies how I feel normally in some strange way.)

There are games and genres of fiction that I'll never touch because they'd be bad for me. I will never play Paranoia, for example. It would wreck me because I wouldn't be able to pull back to the right distance. I can play Call of Cthulhu, even knowing that my character will almost certainly die or go mad. It's not losing that's the problem. It's not being able to grasp the problem, not being able to plan, not being able to do my best.

I expect that I could learn to play particular board or card games by simply forcing myself to play them repeatedly until I don't freak out so badly. I just can't see that it's worthwhile. I need that energy for other things that matter to me. It's not like a phobia of using the microwave (which I need to do often) or of visiting my mother-in-law (which matters to her, Scott, Delia and other people I love dearly). It's just one of the limits I accept on my life so that I can push in other areas.

(no subject)

I'm stuck in the hotel room again. I made it over to the convention center for a while, but my scooter ran out of power as I was heading back to the hotel for lunch. I don't know if it wasn't fully charged when it was delivered or if it got left on when the clerk put it away last night or... Well, I don't know. I managed to get back to the lobby, but I was fairly certain several times that the dratted thing wasn't going to go that far. The hills seemed to be a big problem.

The convention center and the hotel are on the same block. There's a connector between them, but it requires getting a door open that can't be opened by a person in a wheelchair or scooter and two elevator trips. There's also a short outdoor connection that's easier but that requires elevator trips and some threading of narrow doorways with sharpish turns. Coming back, I went outside and came around the block. I'm not sure that I didn't go the long way around (not that that should matter if the scooter were properly charged).

At any rate, the scooter's down at the front desk, charging. I'm trying to give it plenty of time. Also, I told Scott that I'd take Delia to the kids' room after he took her swimming. They've been gone a bit more than an hour. I'd have done the swimming as I owe him time off, but I can't go near chlorinated pools due to my asthma. Sometimes it might not bother me, but it's not a risk we want to take. I'll probably stay in with Delia this evening. I may try going down to the lobby for the free drinks and snacks. I'd like to be social.

The convention seems very empty compared to the last time I was here. I was easily able to drive through the dealers' room, a novel experience. I saw a few things that tempted me, largely pretty items that would sit on shelves and collect dust. There are a few game books that I'm also interested in. My main hesitation is an uncertainty as to whether I'm going to get a chance to GM again. I suspect that, if I do GM again, I'll look for a basic, generic system that doesn't annoy me for character generation (I like GURPS because you can make anything but dislike how it runs and the fact that it scares off players) and then run rules lite after characters generation. That seems to be how I do it normally, so it's not a change. That means, though, that most rule books are only of use to me as setting source materials.

The bathroom I used at the convention center had the tiniest handicapped stall I've ever tried to use. I think it was only an inch or two wider than the normal stalls. Getting the scooter in was a challenge. Getting to the toilet after getting the scooter in was even harder. I have to guess that this is an older building that had quite a bit grandfathered in.

I also got stuck at one point when I tried to go from the dealers' room into an adjoining space. (I was under the impression that cherydactyl was helping run events in there and hoped to find her. I also thought that Scott and Delia might be with her as that was where they'd been heading the last I knew. I didn't find any of them, and Scott's not been hearing his cell phone ring. Very frustrating.) I got the front wheels over the hump, but the back wheels wouldn't go over, and I couldn't back up. It was one of those big covers for electrical cords and such. I'm never trying to get over one of those again. It looked like it was meant to be possible to go over it, but I was thoroughly stuck. Fortunately, a nice young man helped me out with some lifting and pushing (after I got off to lighten the load).

The getting stuck, the not being able to find people and the battery running down are all contributing to make me want to hide in our room. Of course, I'm also lonely. I want to spend some time with people, friends or strangers, doing *something*, preferably something that I enjoy. Maybe tomorrow.

(no subject)

Oh, and I forgot to mention-- Scott spent a dollar to buy me a pink, stretchy bracelet that says 'I [heart] yaoi' as a surprise. His comment was that he wanted it to show that he knows and is supportive. I decided that that was not the place to get into nuances of what I like and don't like about yaoi or slash or whatever one calls it (and the baggage attached to each term). After all, he was being sweet.

Plus, he really doesn't care about all of that stuff, no more than I care about the details of the computer games he plays and what makes one good and another duller than rocks.