Could not be more perfect after my last post. Maybe I should do this every week...

1. What made you happy this week?
   Greens winning the by-election for my new MP.

2. What made you sad?
Remembering random things from my childhood that involved my grandparents looking after my brother and I, and being the only person who's still around to remember those things.

3. What made you angry?
The U.S. and Israel making the lives of people in Gaza as well as Iran harder.

4. What are you looking forward to in the next week?
In a way, I'm looking forward to D having a medical thing done next Sunday, even if it'll mean some discomfort and disruption for the next couple months. Because it's been going on for years and could've been sorted ages ago. But now it finally will be.

5. What are you not looking forward to?
Going back to work after a week off that felt more like three days off.

I started getting a migraine halfway through lift club this morning.

I ignored it of course -- just the aura, at that point -- knowing that I'd have a while before it got, y'know, debilitating.

I enjoyed the rest of the exercises. I did nearly fall both at the beginning and the end of the escalator I took to get from the tram to the train, oops. But also I got home fine, via B&M for medicinal snacks -- mostly sugar, which I often crave during migraines, but also one particular 59p instant ramen thing that I suddenly needed, and enjoyed very much for my lunch.

It was that rare rough day for the whole house: D's IBS was playing up and he had to make his brain work on paperwork so much this afternoon that when he finally emerged I wondered if migraines were contagious (luckily he perked up a little after eating something). V slept through all their alarms and so has been off-kilter all day. I slept for four hours this afternoon and after that reached the point where I felt okay unless I tried to move or even think too hard.

Then we watched a Starfleet Academy episode and as soon as Sam mentioned Our Town I was like ...you come to me, on the day of my migraine, and now I'm gonna have to cry? (Crying is fine but a physically unenjoyable experience for me at the best of times. Which, we've established, today is not.) (I got a tear in my eye, but even that was only at the very end.)

Like I've said here, Our Town is largely responsible for why I write almost every day here. "I can't look at everything hard enough" fucking haunts me (of course we heard that line in the episode), and it's important to me to look at things as hard as I can while they are happening.

tl;dr: People are actually bad at predicting how much they'll enjoy reading back what they've written about their lives! Writing about the ordinary experiences of your life can be even more cheering to you when you go back and read them than the extraordinary ones.

A nice reminder on an excessively ordinary day.

I've accrued a simply horrifying number of open tabs, and I'm finally able to whittle them down a bit.

I'm finally able to read a few of those I've accumulated about Minneapolis/ICE. Here's my favorite one so far:

I feel more from Minnesota than I’ve ever felt. is a great quote -- even from four thousand miles away I feel more from Minnesota than I ever have, but this goes on:

But now I know as I’m walking down the street that I have hundreds of people who will swarm to help me if needed, and that I will swarm to help them.... It’s like building a muscle of solidarity across race, across class. It’s something the Left talks about a lot, but I’ve never experienced it like this. And it’s truly ordinary people — it’s not majority organizers or activists. It’s people who’ve never organized a day in their lives but know something wrong is happening and want to do something.

And on dealing with the fear:

it starts really small, and then the small things become more risky, and you don’t want to give them up... So now the people delivering groceries — which, again, is a very low-risk thing — have been trained to know that in case ICE grabs them, they should never write the list of addresses down digitally. You write it on a physical piece of paper, and if ICE grabs you, you eat the piece of paper. ...[D]elivering groceries shouldn’t be high-risk. It violates people’s sense of dignity and basic rights, and that’s what creates courage.

The whole thing is so good, it's well worth a read.

Tonight's knock on the door was a Labour canvasser who asked if I was planning to vote; I said I'd just done my postal vote this afternoon, and "I'm afraid I voted Green," I tried to let him down gently.

He still tried to show me the latest "only Labour can beat Reform" chart which baffled me: from my own time canvassing I can only expect that in such circumstances they have a box to tick for "voted for someone else" and you move on! Arguing with people who've already voted is a waste of time.

I hadn't been going to get in to this but since he wasn't going away I told him that I'm a disabled immigrant and Labour are making life more difficult for all of those so I couldn't vote for them. He said "well Angeliki settled here from Europe..."

It just felt so point-missing. I don't really care about the demographics of a candidate too much. I care how they'll vote, I care about their party's policies and how they'll affect all immigrants! (Or any other group on the wrong side of this power imbalance.)

I appreciate there's a lot of new volunteers on all sides in this by-election. (Seriously dude, I hope they trained you enough that you know there should be a box for you to tick that says I can be done wasting your and all your colleagues' time!) But it's hard not to feel like this is what Labour has been for all twenty of the years I lived here: focus on this exceptional individual, not the boring systemic problems that the party will always shy away from.

The funniest thing was, as I was finally getting this guy to go away, I'd spotted another guy behind him and I'd assumed he was a fellow canvasser with this guy, but as I started to close the door, he caught my attention to say "I'm from the Greens, did you want to put up a sign?" And only then I remembered that D had in fact asked for one the other day, so me and this guy and D eventually ended up out in the rain trying to find something to affix it to before ending up dragging a big tree in a big pot to the edge of the driveway for maximum visibility.

I hope that sends the Labour canvassers a message, for the couple more days until this election finally happens.

Like D, I have been telling all the canvassers who come to the door that I'll vote for whoever has the best chance of beating Reform, but I am relieved that now the constituency-level polling indicates that it's more likely to be the Greens than Labour, because I really didn't want to have to hold my nose and vote for Labour. I'm a trans disabled immigrant and they went through a phase last year of trying to make things more difficult for every single one of those groups of people.

And I do like the points the Greens in the person of Zack Polanski are making, particularly in their most recent party political broadcast. (With one note: I have very strong feelings about "make X Y again" constructions of any kind these days, but I'm grudgingly willing to make an exception for "make hope normal again" despite how loaded "hope" and "normal" are as the X and Y in this case!)

I thought I'd just get dropped off at the train station after our session (and the all-important debrief in Costa) was finished. But I should've known: my lovely colleague has sight loss herself and assured me that they -- she, her husband/PA, her guide dog -- would wait until I was safely on a train.

But first, I needed to pee, so I got directed to the gents' and I was only gone for a few minutes but when I walked back up the platform I saw those two (three, counting Flick the dog) standing with two other ladies chatting away. As I got closer I'd have guessed they were people R knew from work; one of them mentioned another charity that's known to us. I was happy to chill while they did that "Oh you know Nick?" kind of thing. But it turns out they didn't know each other; these women had just been at some sight-loss related event but one of them just spoke up when she saw the guide dog because she always does and is clearly the kind of person who'll talk to anyone. They had made friends at a local society for blind people, and had just come from, of all things, a funeral for someone they knew from that group. The chattier one told us about her eye condition, Homonymous Hemianopia -- and R and I said "that's the one we couldn't say before!" when we were going through a list of them at the session earlier; we both know about hemianopia but neither of us could get the word out at the time.

Then the other person said "And I have optic nerve hypoplasia."

And then I said "Shut up!" because I was so surprised. That's what I have! And even among other blind people, no one's heard of it. It's an odd, rare thing. I literally don't think I've ever met anyone else who's got it.

They and I ended up getting on the same train for the first 15 minutes or so, by which point the chatty one had made friends with the conductor and exchanged numbers with me.

My hypoplasia pal lives in Runcorn and says she comes to Manchester regularly; I said she should let me know if she wants to hang out.

Such a goofy coincidence, but an uplifting end to a day that could've gone better. (It was fine, it just...well, I'm too tired to explain it now. But it was fine. Just, could've been better.)