everything, everything

[fandomonymous]

The following are bullet points about my crazy trip to Europe that I will flesh out, publicly or privately, eventually.

• General Europe observations
  
• General flight/logistics notes for my future self
  
• Switzerland day trip - Lugano, Bellenzona, castles and palm trees
  
• Navigating family is *weird* but not in the ways I'd worried about
  
• Milan itself, elegance and strangeness
  
• Florence, with joyful crowds
  
• Venice, a maze of twisty little passages
  
• Munich, before and after PartnerBeast, oddly provincial
  
• the Allianz, problematic fave
  
• Berlin, where punk might not be dead
  
• Amsterdam, party town
  
• Paris, confronting ingrained biases
  

And elsewhere:

• The World Cup has been MADNESS, holy god. I'm less bitter than I expected I'd be about Germany's inglorious exit. (Perhaps this would have been different if Lahm was still playing, because Kawa Is An Intense Kind of Fan, but eh.) Really curious to see how the rest plays out, and how I interact with it as now Officially Neutral.
  
• I'm bummed about missing Pride but I'll deal. I actually somehow missed all the Pride parades of all the cities I was in, and only briefly went to Queens Pride's street fair, lolsigh. (Though the street vendors were carrying way more bi/pan stuff, which was rad as hell! I bought a small pansexual flag for myself!)
  
• Speaking of queerness, I am accepting "they" alongside with "she" as my personal pronouns, especially in explicitly queer contexts. I don't think this'll change much of anything about my presentation to the outside world, and I have no intention at this point of pursuing hormone therapy and/or surgery. Like, I already wear masculine shoes and to a lesser degree accessories, but I'm still pretty femme as a whole. I might bind when it's colder sometimes, since I wear lots of button down shirts at work anyway and that makes them fit better, and my next pair of glasses might be less femme. But we'll see.
  
• I've officially cracked a year at this Fancy Hospital job. The fanciness enabled the trip and my move this year. Stability is wild.
  
• I'm psyched about my birthday coming up. Come on Saturday, it'll be fun!
  
• Some comet stuff is making me sad. :( No further info on broadcast channels.
  
• Still not caught up on Steins;Gate or SGDQ (which happened a full week before I thought it would, and thus I missed 99% of it) so between that and upcoming World Cup matches I have lots to listen to/watch for a long while, so that's all pretty exciting.
  
• I'm hopefully attending Roguelike Celebration in October, and maaaaaaaaaybe submitting a talk on kuyashii, but we'll see what I come up with.