further and further on

• There were a lot of social things this month with mixed results, overall leaning 'good', spread across my polycule. Some of the not-so-good is about my own ability to identify and communicate what I desire. That's some stuff to unpack in a more private context than this one. The nature of connecting to people and communicating with them is a thing I have been working really hard on in therapy, and some of that work is starting to pay off, though with plenty of tears along the way.
  
• I marched St. Pat's for All with PFLAG and the New York Area Bisexual Network, which was a big emotional deal for me. Not a big march group but lots of people on Skillman Avenue seeing one of their neighbors with bi and pan flags waving. <3 <3 <3
  
• Tabletop games this month were Saga of the Icelanders, which is not the most compelling setting to me but has some potential I guess; Parsley, which I'm really into conceptually but would find super difficult to play again now that I'm 'spoiled' on the intro session; and Honey Heist, always a delight. I still want to run more Fiasco - I might actually run it publicly at Roguelike Celebration this fall, though not guaranteed! - but experimenting with systems is fine too.
  
• I went back on the lunch service due to spoons - it's hard to use up leftovers/go grocery shopping for one! Cooking is still fun. PartnerBeast and I have done a few enormous, crazy cooking projects on Sundays, which has been SUPER FUN. (Alison and I have cooked together too, but in a lighter, less intense way, also great.) My appetite has been changing up a bit which is weird.
  
• I've switched from learning Tagalog from that book previously mentioned to Transparent, a web service with some fun vocabulary learning games but also some bugs. It's free with a Queens Library card, which is nice. I've also halted Duolingo Mandarin, because trying to learn two languages at once was frying my brain a bit and I kept prioritizing Mandarin over Tagalog. It's been gratifying trying to wrap my mind around Tagalog's particle and word order flexibility, and having the sounds already (mostly) in my mouth, just learning to parse them instead of registering them as 'that's Tagalog and not for me'.
  
• This month has a bunch of dentist appointments, paying those taxes, and heavy work stuff, which is annoying. This month also has dropping my gender marker on my IDNYC card[0], a metamour's long overdue top surgery, a Dessa concert, and PartnerBeast's (and my mom's) birthdays.[1] So yeah!!

[0]I don't plan on getting any other gender markers changed just yet, though I do qualify for X on my birth certificate. Maybe if/when US passports allow for an X marker, I'll do the birth certificate, driver's license, and passport in one fell swoop. But IDNYC isn't really used for much other than museum memberships, so it feels like a low stress thing to change. I still don't correct people who use she/her for me except in specifically trans-centered contexts. (I also don't view myself as trans and have no desire to transition or pass as anything specific, just as a person who happened to be AFAB, shops on both sides of the arbitrary aisle, and wishes gender mattered less in society.)
[1]I have no idea what to get either of them. My mom is obviously trying to own much fewer nouns due to the move, and PartnerBeast only asked for 'an excuse, to something'. I have a handful of ideas but I'm not sure if or how I'll be able to execute them. Blah.