Moon Memo: Tools and Grumbling
Good Morning from Portland Oregon, where I am currently looking at tools and grumbling.
tools
"You seem to be looking at tools a lot right now," my dear friend Alana said. "Usually that means you're dissatisfied at work."
"Work is fine. I'm dissatisfied with life right now."
I said that before I really thought about it, and it's only half true. I'm not dissatisfied with life. Life is actually pretty brilliant right now. It's just that my tools keep breaking on me, and I'm tired of it.
None of you may know this, but this little letter was processed through a tool called Tinyletter for years. Years and years. Unfortunately they were absorbed into another company a few years ago, and just this week we were told that the tool is going away. So I'm on the search for another tool.
Unfortunately, the new owner's own tool is 70 different layers of complex. It's meant for marketing emails, not for little missives to a small group of friends. So to post a Moon Memo I have to jump through 30 different hoops. It used to take me 1 minute to post the memo to my whole group. Now it's like a 15 minute slog of checkmarks and "you could get so much more money from your customers if you do this..." kind of bullshit. No thank you.
Technically, I could just send it as a direct email to the 69 (lol) subscribers, but that would be impractical. Hard to keep track of. Doesn't give people the freedom to remove themselves from the newsletter as they'd like.
I'm going to try Buttondown this time. See if it works. As long as I keep below 100 subscribers it's free, and if it goes up to a thousand it's still pretty cheap. Also button down has a VERY easy interface, and uses a formatting language that I like to use (markdown).
So you'll probably get another email asking to see if permissions work. And this newsletter may get a bit better. Who knows.
Publication
I'm officially a published poet again. I spent the last 6 years learning how to write poetry again. Before I came out I was regularly publishing poems, like 3-6 per year. It was part of my identity: published poet.
Some things felt less important after I came out. I was mostly processing gender stuff, processing openly queer stuff, processing All The Things. I didn't write a poem for my first 3 years out. I started writing poems daily again in 2020. The loneliness of the pandemic years pushed me back into poetry.
Wrote a couple of books. Mailed them out. Rejections.
This fall, I decided to send to the little magazines again. And now I have a couple of poems that are coming out during the next 12 months. It feels nice, that at least somewhere in the archives of a few magazines I will exist as a poet.
The first poem came out in the Lavender Review this week. You can find it here
Thanks to everyone for believing in me.
Time management
At work I'm starting to feel like I have to set a hard rule for tardiness. I've spent the last month spending over 4 hours total just waiting for people to show up for appointments, and another 4 hours total in meetings that went overtime when they've gone late.
I will wait for 10 minutes, and then I will jet. Any longer and it's a waste of my time. Any shorter and I'm the unreasonable one. And we all know it. We all know that this is a reasonable amount of waiting.
If someone else is made to wait longer than 10 minutes for me, I feel extremely guilty. I am the kind of girl that's like "if I'm 10 minutes early I'm right on time." A lot of people don't understand that. And I get it. But I'm starting to feel like I need to be honest about it, and move into a place where I say No More. Especially at work.
I have rules for myself, the 10 lipsticks. These are my guiding principals as I wander my way through the world. #3 is Be On Time (just under Be Prepared and Write The Poem.). Timeliness shows respect, and I respect my friends and coworkers too much to be late to meet them.
I know that I am not normal in this. I know that almost everyone else I know is chronically late. And that's fine. I can love people that have different ethics than me. But lately I've been spending a lot of time waiting. And I don't know if it's healthy for me to constantly spend time waiting anymore. If we are late for our coworkers, it means we are late for our clients. And I don't have time for that.
A little bit of begging
I had a medical adventure a few weeks ago. I'M FINE!!! Really. I had a pretty serious panic attack that I thought was a heart attack, and so I took a ride in an ambulance. Unfortunately, my VERY GOOD insurance still didn't cover my expenses, to the tune of getting an unexpected $1000 in medical expenses.
I know that this is the holiday season, and that people are going to be short. But if you have the resources, my venmo is here my paypal is here, and I appreciate the hell out of you. I hate to ask. But I figured it wouldn't hurt. Thank you.
Wrestling
My boss cheered himself horse as Amira body slammed her opponent. He was thrilled when Drake Kwan, our Korean powerhouse, slammed his appointment and won his match. I could see him as a child again, in the wrong gender, secretly playing with Hulk Hogan and Iron Sheik action figures that he traded his barbie for. I could see him fall into the joy again, the opera with punching that I love more than any other form of pop culture entertainment.
Next to me my friend Fox was booing. She was vocal in her anger at the baddies, passionate in her cheering of the goodies. Next to her, Miryam beams inside her mask. Her shirt says Wrestling is My Kink. All the wrestlers love it.
Wrestling is gay. It's good for gay people. It's a pantomime of the lowest form of culture. And I am grateful for it.
Outro
Alright, let's see if all this formatting works. Thanks so much for your patience as I do this transition (lol) from one tool to another. Sorry to keep spamming your inbox. Love all of you so much.
Onward and upward!
Misha