beautiful reprobates

A half dozen or so of us at work have started a book club. The first month I didn't get around to reading the book, which is fine because it was apparently terrible. This month we chose some literary fiction which is fine but I'm not used to it.

The audiobook is sixteen hours and forty-nine minutes long!

I've been using a perfectly good app to listen to audiobooks for a year or more but I bought the paid version because that was necessary to listen at higher speeds than 1x (normal).

All my library books (different app) get listened to at 1.5x or 1.75x.

It was a good decision, I'm 21% of the way through the book now.

1) What's one of the nicest things a friend has ever done for you?

diffrentcolours and mother_bones making it very clear to me that I had options, when my marriage felt too difficult to extract itself from, they just loved me and waited for me and made sure I never felt like I was alone.

They let me stay here without paying for much the first few months so I didn't have to worry about money (which I appreciated so much but also when I got money I appreciated that they let me pay it back because it was really important to me, rather than to them, that I do that).

They took on me at my most messed-up and Gary just as he was starting to be a lot of work, and adjusted their lives repeatedly to meet our needs. And they've continued to provide a warm, safe, functional and pleasant house for me to live in ever since.

2) What's one of the nicest things a stranger has ever done for you?

In 2018 I went to London with friends. The plan was to stay overnight, see Hamilton, and then one of them was taking me to Brussels on the Eurostar so I could make use of my less-than-a-year-old British passport to travel within the EU while the UK was still part of it.

By the time the play had finished, I had a Facebook message from a stranger. She said she was staff on the train we'd gotten to London, she'd found the little plastic wallet that I had my railcard and train tickets in which I'd apparently dropped on the floor rather than putting back in my bag after the tickets had been inspected, and that she'd handed it in at Euston so it'd be waiting for me on my return.

Without that ticket wallet, both me and my companion traveling on my disabled railcard would've had to buy new tickets from London to Manchester which is exorbitantly expensive especially at the last minute, and it would've been a cost that was utterly beyond me at that point. And I would have wanted to cover it since it would've been 100% my fault that I'd lost the tickets!

I am so grateful to that lady. So clever of her to look up the railcard name on Facebook to communicate with me, and thank goodness I didn't have a common name! (Also lucky for me it was the same name; since my railcard eligibility is my Certificate of Visual Impairment and since that's in my old name, my railcard is in my old name too; I've been calling it my "blind name" lately for this reason as a lot of things depend on that: so like at the gym I'm getting a discounted membership for being disabled and that means the other day when the gym staff asked my name as I was signing in, I had to think quickly to get it right! Anyway, this method wouldn't even work for finding me on Facebook these days but it did back in the days of Hamilton and Britain being in the EU.)

I got in touch with the train company to lavish compliments on her and I hope they gave her whatever treats or bonuses they offer. It was a small effort for her but it made a huge difference to me.

3) What is a trait in another person that you instantly admire, and that draws you to them?

Vulnerability and emotional fluency.

4) What is a trait in another person that instantly repels you, and prevents you from forming a close relationship with them?

Treating people as things, as Granny Weatherwax describes it.

5) Time to vent: tell us about something rotten someone has done to you.

Two of the three people I was with Answer 3 aren't in my life any more, both related to the same instigating incident where almost all my friends and my community fell for some DARVO, ghosted on me, and/or apparently still drastically misunderstand the circumstances in Answer 1. This being unrelated to but almost perfectly timed with the beginning of the pandemic was incredibly isolating. It's taken time to rebuild friendships and a sense of community, but good progress has been made over the last couple years.

D and I were walking home from an errand when we ran into Pickle, a little French bulldog, and her human (whose name of course I have no idea of). We were near one of our old dog-walking destinations, and she recognized D and I right away -- she called out "where's your dog?"

We stopped and chatted, shared the sad news about Gary, and she was really sweet about how you alway miss them and them and the company they provide. She said her mum's birthday is soon -- or has just been, recently? -- "and even though she's been gone six years I still miss her."

It was really nice to run in to her, and I'm impressed that she recognized us without the dog; I don't know that I'd recognize her without Pickle!

I never got around to talking about the other two things that D and I saw that week, Breaking the Code or Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

Breaking the Code is a play that D had seen a TV movie version of (starring Derek Jacobi, that sounds amazing) of a book he's also read and considers the best biography of Alan Turing. D knows quite a lot more about Turing than I do, so I consider this high praise. My knowledge is more on the did-the-walking-tour that that guy (Ed something?) does around "Turing's Manchester," I've seen his mug chained to the radiator at Bletchley Park and for the afternoon I was there I did understand how the bombe worked but I've forgotten again now...and of course I know the tragic ending to his story that queers absorb: prosecution, chemical castration, suicide. I was really enjoying the walking tour until I remembered that bit was coming up at the end...

Anyway, I really enjoyed the play. I liked the epilogue that has been added to it, where a modern-day pupil at the school Turing went to is doing a presentation or something about him for LGBT History Month, which adds his pardon and a little more context to what's otherwise an utterly pointless loss of life. This life also happened to be really important to the second world war, but I am always mindful of how many ordinary lives were diminished in similar ways. I do think that having to be secretive about what he did during the war, even afterward, does offer a sad parallel to his isolation.

The play is set during his time in Manchester, with flashbacks to school and Bletchley and everything and I've no idea how true to life this is but in the play anyway he's wistful about his time at Bletchley, seeing it as a period of freedom, getting to be himself -- he's played with a very autistic affect and a stammer that can be severe, he could be weird and queer and chain his mug to the radiator and he could get away with whatever he wanted because his brain was so important to the war effort.

"Breaking the code" at first seemed an odd name for the play because breaking the code is exactly what -- D taught me -- Turing did not do; three Polish cryptologists did. (Turing developed optimizations to their methods, and created an electromechanical computer which allowed Enigma to be brute-forced much faster. He was a genius and deserves to be recognised as such. But he was part of a team at Bletchley who were building on Polish work, and Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski deserve recognition along with the French spy Hans-Thilo Schmidt and many others.) But of course the phrase can also of course to social codes, which included compulsory heterosexuality. When Turing reports a burglary to the police and in the process tells them he has broken the law -- "gross indecency" -- they have to act on that; he has broken a part of the legal code.

The other metric that D judges a biography of Alan Turing on is whether it says he invented the computer -- he didn't, or if he did it depends on what you mean by "computer" and for that matter "invent" -- and the play could probably have done better at that but it didn't feel egregiously inaccurate either. Turing does at one point say something like "we won the war because of me," but of course saying it doesn't make it so, and he says it to his "bit of rough picked up from the Oxford Road" as the police officer describes the young man, so the possibility of exaggeration to impress (or dismiss?) seems plausible.

Finally in a thing that probably only I noticed, near the end of the play when Turing has met up with an old Bletchley friend, who's now a wife and mother, and he's now infamous for his gay crime. So they have a lot to catch up on. At one point Turing is explaining about his "chemical castration," which was the option he took to avoid prison. I'd known about this, but I'd somehow never until this moment considered that what he'd been given was of course estrogen. They gave him dysphoria, I thought. What an awful thing to do to anybody. Anyway, the thing I noticed is that when Turing tells his friend in his matter-of-fact tone "I'm growing breasts!" all around the auditorium there was a chuckle from the white, older audience who like D and I were spending our Halloween at t the theater. I didn't laugh. Turing cheerfully went on to say something like "No one knows what'll happen to them when I stop getting the injections, if they'll go away or what!" Sitting there, seventy-one years later and a short walk from the stop where we'd gotten off the bus, which I just learned is where he met his "bit of rough from the Oxford Road" as the police officer in the play describes his lover, and a chest flattened with modern compression fabric, I winced. No. If only they just went away again... I was disappointed but not surprised at the room full of respectable theatergoers laughing at this. (The idea that taking estrogen would make someone less horny seemed much more amusing to me, but that's based on knowing so many trans women, and they are of course women and not men who are being punished.)

Oh wait, one other me-specific thing: in the play, Turing's mother did not accept that her son had died by suicide. It reminded me of my own mom, who was outraged when asked by police if my brother might have crashed his car intentionally. I understood that they have to ask but she was livid at the question. Maybe some mothers are just always going to be. You think you know your son so well, maybe better than anyone else, and then it turns out that no one gets to know him any more. I saw this play the day when I'd had that dream about being called my brother's brother so maybe that's why I thought of this.

I expected my appeal of the decision to deny me disability welfare benefits was rejected.

This money is supposed to be for the extra costs of being disabled -- taxis, a cleaner, assistive tech, whatever you need. It's not supposed to pay your rent and bills but it did for me, for years. I'm grateful it doesn't any more.

What's unexpected is how hard this has hit me. It just...fucking sucks to be dispassionately informed that my needs have not been detected (again).