(Note to the public: This is an expansion on an earlier Patron-only update. If you want those updates, sign up! I do post extra stuff, and Patrons get to see public blog entries at least 24 hours early.)
Packages continue to arrive. The Amazon guy must be so confused by now.
I am intentionally not trying to figure out who's behind it. I do know a few people IRL who could pull it off, but the reason I know them is because they're very public supporters of the arts -- I'd be aware that it was them, because they'd also be forwarding me grant applications and pitching me into networking meetings. At least two people were involved at some point, because one of the early anony-mice chose a pseudonym instead of using the default 'enjoy your gift!' message. Amazon lets you put a name on gifts, so if they wanted me to know who it was, they'd have said by now. I do keep sending thank you notes.
Nobody would keep it up this long if it wasn't fun, so good for you! I'd probably do the same thing if I had the resources. When I have money and other people don't I pay for lunches a lot, at least. I get to spoil the rats because the things that give them joy are very cheap in human terms. Right now one of them has shoved his fat little arm out through the cage bars and is trying to pull the Valentine's garland in, because it's shiny and make rustling noises and he wants it. They're very like toddlers, where the only value things have is how interesting they are, and how long it keeps them occupied. Plus they like to throw Cheerios all over the floor.
I don't have the money to get drunk right now, which narrows my options for entertainment down to 'YouTube' and 'overthinking things', so I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I have such mixed feelings about having an anonymous benefactor.
Most of it is very generic. When you're raised as female, especially if you turn out conventionally attractive, you're socialized to be suspicious of strangers who give you things without specifying what they want in return. Everyone wants something, when they give you a gift; even in the most innocent case, they want you to have a happy reaction. The presumption is that it's probably a dude, and he probably wants to bang you, or at least see your tits. This is a sexist and generally gross way of thinking that persists mainly because there are still some shambling choads out there who think this way, and get super mad when they hand you things you didn't ask for, and you still don't have sex with them.
I also find this line of thinking irksome, because it rests on the presumption that trading stuff for attention is somehow immoral. Why, exactly? I mean, it's uncool to assume you can just buy someone's time and focus without asking if they're for sale and negotiating prices first, but if two adults give informed consent to the arrangement, what exactly is wrong with this? And yes, you can take this to its logical conclusion. I don't do full-contact sex work, but I'm also not teaching ballroom dance or going to massage school -- I don't like strangers in my personal space. You can do whatever you want with your body. I have done boudoir and glamour modeling, and I've stripped on stage, and I'd be just fine working in someplace akin to one of Japan's famous 'hostess clubs'. It's an acting job like any other.
The rest, I think, is just that I live in a dourly Calvinist country, and I've been bombarded with 'nobody owes you nuthin' messaging since birth. Whatever you get for the work you do is supposed to be the reward for earning the approval of a higher power -- if not God, then at least management. Even artists are traditionally supposed to be concerned with the opinions of "critics", as if people with printed opinions magically control how much some other random yahoo is willing to pay to see, hear, or experience something pretty. I create things, and someone out there has decided that's worth making the Empire of Bezos mail me 30 lbs of pasta. Feels like making an illicit end run around the System.
In this case, I'm pretty sure whoever is sending stuff just wants me to have stuff, because stuff makes my life easier. And I appreciate it. The Wish Lists are about evenly split between things that seem bafflingly mundane, like socks and toilet paper, and stuff that looks like cool toys but is actually for work. Whoever sent the shoes, you should probably know that you've also provided the rats some most excellently comfortable places to sleep. Those were the boxes that got wrapped for the Valentine's Day cage set. You can see Casper's cage, la cage des Fromages, and their snack bowls on my Instagram.
(The improved picture quality is courtesy whoever sent the Amazon gift card. I hate replacing phones, but the previous model was starting to get pernickety about the exact angle at which I was allowed to press the power button. I upgraded to "whatever thing wasn't enormous but had a half-decent camera", which turned out to be a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S10e.
It's in a pretty red case. I give it about three more days before a rat puts some wee little teef marks in it. Phone cases are tasty, apparently.)
The stuff for work is a lot of fun, I suppose, but only because I like what I do for a living. I just applied to perform at another even in April for some percentage of the ticket sales, probably with one of the LED hoops. The bulk of the Electronics Wish List was the contents of a digital content creation setup. I already had a cheap ring light from being bored during lockdown, but thanks to the Amazon gifter(s) and another Patron who offloaded a bunch of ex-business computers into one of my wheeled suitcases the other week, I have a portable kit that fits in a computer bag and runs entirely off the laptop. I'm sure I won't get the full advertised 8-hour battery life with an audio capture box and a desk mic and so forth dangling off the USB controller, but if I'm streaming something for eight hours I'm going to demand a wall plug anyway. I'm using it to Zoom someone's wedding for their out-of-town guests this weekend.
I am sadly running out of things that I need which can also be bought on Amazon. I buy my contacts from the UK, rat medications from farm suppliers, rat decorations from the local Dollar Tree, some of the more esoteric supplements from a lab in Chicago, and transit fare from the vending machines in the T. Pretty sure the Apple Store would laugh at me if I asked whether the internets could pay to have my MacBook repaired.
At the moment, what is worrying me most is rent, phone service, and dance classes, not necessarily in that order. I think the rent and phone things are pretty self-explanatory; my grant money won't be here until March, because government. I've applied for the federal phone service stipend but I need to snail mail them some documents, also because government.
(I had to mail in my grant papers, too. They needed a voided check to set up the electronic transfer. Why, in anno domini 2023, would I have any idea where my checkbook is? I Venmo my rent, ffs. My other bills are paid online with a PayPal MasterCard. Hell, if I cared enough to set up Google or Samsung Pay, I could buy things at CVS by strategically whacking my phone against the POS terminal. The bank gave me a pack of 25 starter checks when I opened the account, and I finished them eleven years later. I did finally find the fucking thing, but I don't have any idea why it was necessary when I could give them the routing and account numbers just fine without it.)
The dance classes are probably more important to me than they ought to be. One of the reasons I have held onto the volunteer position I have at my home studio is that they compensate us in credit, which continues to exist on their system regardless of my own financial situation. I could be living in a refrigerator box under an overpass and still take class. (Admittedly, it's easier to work this in than a lot of other things -- there's a lot of dead time at the desk, and I usually bring in some other project to work on while I'm in. Some of it is the unrelated paid IT jobs I take care of for them, so technically I'm double-billing those hours. They know and don't care, because I'm a very good receptionist even when I'm only using a quarter of my brain for it.) I am deeply unhappy if I cannot be in class. I had to take the weekend off for a head cold last month and I was miserable, even beyond the part where I used several trees' worth of tissues.
I tend to follow individual teachers rather than styles, and several of the ones I like taking class with now also work at Boston Dance Studios, a new space downtown. I've applied to their workstudy program but received no answer yet. A 10 class/30 day package covers 5 weeks of classes for me, if I'm clever about timing it, and BDS sells gift cards. It's local, non-profit, and run by a woman of color, so I'd be inclined to support it even if I had to find all new teachers there. Her personal specialty is dance heels, so if you're also local and ever harbored fantasies about being a video vixen, you can take a look.
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