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I am engaged.

My partner proposed to me at 2:22pm local time yesterday with a silver locket in an ornately decorated pewter box—there was a simple claddagh seal on the top. The box reminded me of Legend of Zelda heart containers, especially the ones in Twilight Princess. They said it seemed like the luckiest time to ask, and if they didn’t then, when would they? They beat me to it, though admittedly I was struggling to find the right ring for them for a few years now. I didn’t want to assume style or shape since it is generally worn daily, and people see and notice them a lot. We’re going to go together to pick them out sometime soon.

It doesn’t really feel like a real thing, yet. We’ve told four people and asked that they keep it to themselves because we want to spread the news ourselves. They’re already asking about dates, times, places, plans, and we haven’t talked about anything yet. It’s overwhelming. We were planning on an extended engagement and figuring things out after we have our individual finances in order awhile from now. We both have debts to pay, and we don’t want the other to be saddled with the our’s if something bad happens.

We’re going to start planning together in a shared notebook for the wedding. Personally, I’d like to have a pretty small gathering locally and maybe have a potluck afterwards as the reception. It’s not something I’ve really ever thought about besides knowing if I did get married, I would not be wearing a dress.

I have a lot of cousins. One of them had an elegantly simple wedding almost ten years ago. Her mom and aunts helped her make all of the decorations and set up some fun activities. In her bridal party was one of the first butch women I had seen wearing a fancy “men’s” style suit in-person. It was well-tailored and sharp-looking. She looked so confident and poised. I want to look formal like that, but I also want to be a bit more flamboyant. I don’t know where to even start looking. I like Howl’s billowy top and high-waisted pants in Howl’s Moving Castle. I guess I’ll start looking around to see if there is a more formal version of that outfit.

We watched Kiki’s Delivery Service before going to bed the night before my partner proposed. Kiki and Tombo was our first couple’s Halloween costume. The movie never made me cry or anything like that as a child. It always felt like a full adventure, though. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched it now, but it’s one I keep going back to. I notice and appreciate different things every time. (Spoilers ahead) We both cried when Kiki caught Tombo and lowered him to the rescue trampoline. The use of silence during that point is so powerful to me. I’m thinking about making the herring pumpkin pie sometime soon—I know I’ve seen someone made a recipe for it, but I can’t remember who it was. I’ll include it when I find it if I make it. It sounds like more of an autumn dish, but I think there are still pumpkins locally that have been stored properly for sale.

My partner had (secretly) taken the day off from work to propose. They spent some of their free time helping me make Dassana’s palak paneer from scratch and some roasted sweet potatoes for dinner. We also had a serving each of our most recent ginger beer. I used dark brown sugar—a third less than usual, and some jasmine flowers. Overall, we both ended up feeling pleasantly sedated by the meal.

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I’m using my time to write music and short stories when I am inspired to do so, and learn 3D stuff in Blender when I run out of writing juice. I’m following the donut tutorial from Blender Guru. I’ll post my final render here when it’s all done. It’s not too exciting, but it’s a learning process. There are so many hot keys and different types of information to remember. I’ve started from the beginning a few times now so that I reinforce the information.

I couldn’t get past the subdivision step on my laptop because I don’t have an actual graphics card??? The program would crash whenever I tried to apply a subdivision modifier or the smooth shading. So my partner offered for me to use their tower, which has a reasonably powerful older graphics card. It makes me nervous to think about if I actually get good at it and want to do it more seriously, I’ll have to figure out how to get a “real” computer. That’s definitely a ways off, though.

Committing to learning and doing something is scary to me sometimes, because it feels like a final decision. Like it’s what I have to do with my time forever, since I’ve sunk the time and effort of learning into it; like that time is a waste if I move on and decide to do something else. I think it has a lot to do with how I was raised and the way adults talked to me when I was a child. I had ~*sO mUcH pOtEnTiAl If I jUsT pIcKeD sOmEtHiNg AnD aPpLiEd MySeLf*~ (as an undiagnosed ADHD autist) and now I’m just “wasting” it doing what I want with my free time and trying to do my part to keep the roof over our heads and food in our mouths with the work I can stand.

I feel a strong familial, societal, and social pressure to pick something (important, flashy, interesting) and just stick with it indefinitely, and it’s supposed to become my identity. But identifying with my job doesn’t seem like it’s for me or people in my socio-economic position. I don’t think I can “transcend” my lot in life, nor do I feel an urge to do so outside of avoiding deadly work. I often feel like all of the arbitrary things people care about and value (they feel arbitrary to me, anyway) get in the way of true self expression, of living a meaningful life, of deep connection between different people. Social hierarchies are boring and lazy and violent.

Something I’ve realized as I get older is that all of my flash-in-the-pan interests, where I go deep into something for a couple of weeks and abandon it for the next dopamine mine that catches my eye, come back to loosely synthesize into other things. Acquiring knowledge and skills across a breadth of canons and disciplines always comes back to help me somehow. If nothing else, it can help me connect with other humans. I’ve found that the hand movements for the origami I was taught as a child show up in some kneading methods for dough and for forming basically any type of dumpling; learning knitting and crochetting as a young person helps me manage cords as an adult; the wrist, hand, and arm control of calligraphy (or most physical visual arts) shows up in soldering; reading character-driven fiction makes it easier to empathize with and understand real-world people; learning history helps me to contextualize myself, family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, strangers I meet, etc.

I think there are people that openly accept their designated blinders for life and bumble around with a handful of unexamined directives and then they decide they want to restrict their worldview further to pinpricks. I grow so weary and exhausted when people want to figure out what box I go in and then they don’t want to talk about things that light the fire in their hearts. It makes me wonder if their fire has died, or if they proudly killed it themselves. While we all need money to survive in this world in some form or another, I think applying a financial or social hierarchical frame of mind to everything—including time and effort—is detrimental to my experience as a human. Basically: time is not money, and money is not value (to me, anyway).

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Anyway. That’s a lot of words for now. I’m going to get back to Blender. I hope you are keeping your fire lit, and finding time to stoke it with what matters to you. Thanks for reading, see you again sometime.