Sunshine and that good kind of homesickness

Hey dear friends across the world, let’s get right to the good news!

(ah shoot, I set this up poorly, in that now it sounds like I have bad news. Like I’m saying “let’s get right to the good stuff, because the bad stuff is going to take a while after.” So let me assure you now, there is no bad stuff! You can just read this pleasant diary without worrying about some second shoe dropping. This is just a succession of good things, without a twist, until I tire of typing. I am sorry if I caused unnecessary stress, dear reader. I want to make sure you can read this diary post with calm and confidence. Anyway, let’s get back to it!)

We’re back! Back to the good news! I got my visa approved for New Zealand! I ain’t on no visitor visa anymore. I’m a true blue worker with 3 years assured here. I can make money now, I can plan out events more than two weeks at a time, I can feel a full lightness of shoulders and all the emotions my body had numbed to try to help with the stress! They feel good, it feels good!

For the last four or five months I’d been in a limbo, like a kid at a party who won’t take their backpack <em>or</em> their jacket off. And Angelica and I were living mostly off substantial kindness of friends and family. But now we can live off kindness and these bright, bird-covered, kiwi dollars!

It’s summer, and it’s 7:30pm, and I’m at the library looking out towards the harbor. The sky is a light, distant blue. Like a blue whose subtlety makes it feel just outta touch, like a sky lost in thought. And I love it, and it’s reminding me so hard of Olympia and Bellingham. There needs to be more words for homesickness. What is the word for when yr pining, but the pining itself feels pleasant? The type of homesickness that comes when you open a box that smells like your old bedroom. Or when you miss someone full on, but it’s nice,b ecause while you miss them you can also feel them so vividly. Like you can create the feeling of someone’s presence by fully tracing the shape of their absence. It’s not a bad thing, it’s not a sickness. It’s just a good sorta unpleasant; emotional licorice.

I’m missing Oly full on right now (full on is a kiwi phrase I’m trying to work in my vernacular so I feel local as). The day feels like a perf Oly day, and I’m missing the sun setting on Percival Landing, and walking back to catch a bus and seeing Frank setting up Danger Room for new comic cday tomorrow. I feel fully, tangibly here in NZ now and I full feel the distance.

And, lucky for me I’ve had multiple homes, and can get multiple kinds of homesickness. There was a tech zine fest back in New York this weekend, and friends of ours went, but brought along a raspberry pi filled with their magic. They hid it beneath a desk, attached it to the wifi all surreptitious, and loaded up the web server they’d spun up that had a full library of radical and queer zines and computing books and other types of kindness. Like, they did some guerilla literacy _and guerilla sys-adminning and it was just so beautiful and made me miss Ridgewood and talking late into the night at Milo’s Yard and all my friends back in my East Coast home.

But now we will have homes in all hemispheres. We’ll have a Wellington Home. I can’t wait to be homesick for it too.

Now, onto other subject! I’ma embarass myself a tad bit now. Though first, I have to brag. Sometimes, <em>I get emails</em>. Like y’all see this website and like it and send me an email to tell me so. And, I gotta keep bragging, this happens somewhat often? And every time I am elated, and write an email back. But I’m not sure if the emails reach, because I have an address that gmail doesn’t like. I’ve tried to configure my email with all the right text records and such, but it still puts a nagging thought in my head that all my letters back home don’t reach. And it puts me in a weird anxiety loop where I don’t wanna seem like I <em>expect</em> people to write me back, but I also don’t know if they never got my reply and are upset that I didn’t write them back. Email and this diary are my main tethers back home now, and I don’t know how well either work. WHICH IS ALL TO SAY: if you wrote me an email and didn’t get an email back, I am sorry! I probably did email you! Please add me to yr address book and I’ll try to fix my site or email to make it easier to reach! And if you <em>did</em> get an email back and now feel guilty like i’m subtweeting you, fuck i’m sorry too! Not intending that! Just letting you in on my anxiety cos here in this diary we are all intimate friends!

Speaking of strained connections, I tried out twitch a couple nights ago and am going to stream again tomorrow night at 6pm, NZ time (9pm pst, 12am EST). It was pleasant to have the webcam on and to be broadcasting basically nothing, like the asynchronous connection and low stakes felt dumb and fun. But I haaaaate centralized services and whatever evils they’re doing. The last 15 minutes of my stream were muted because twitch picked up potentially copyright music in the background (it was field medic. This just reminded me that some terrible company is analyzing snd cross-referencing everything i say and do, and keeping an archive of all my videos longer than they let me keep it. I hate it. I am not sure how to self-host a reliable video service yet, though, that has the same basic options. I want to be able to stream my face and my computer screen and have chat and video too, and have it feel fun. But I’d rather just broadcast out on my porch on twitch now, while I continue to research a better way, than to wait until that better way is found. So if yr around at that time, and wanna swing by and say hey, I am at twitch.tv/lavenderfan. And hopefully soon I’ll just be at porch.coolguy.website...but not yet.

Hoo boy this is a long rambling diary and that’s how I like it! the library be closing soon, the evening is still warm and bright. I’ma walk home now, to Angelica and all our Hataitai friends, and I’ll be thinking of and missing all you online friends while I do.