This Is Marcus

I've accrued a simply horrifying number of open tabs, and I'm finally able to whittle them down a bit.

I'm finally able to read a few of those I've accumulated about Minneapolis/ICE. Here's my favorite one so far:

I feel more from Minnesota than I’ve ever felt. is a great quote -- even from four thousand miles away I feel more from Minnesota than I ever have, but this goes on:

But now I know as I’m walking down the street that I have hundreds of people who will swarm to help me if needed, and that I will swarm to help them.... It’s like building a muscle of solidarity across race, across class. It’s something the Left talks about a lot, but I’ve never experienced it like this. And it’s truly ordinary people — it’s not majority organizers or activists. It’s people who’ve never organized a day in their lives but know something wrong is happening and want to do something.

And on dealing with the fear:

it starts really small, and then the small things become more risky, and you don’t want to give them up... So now the people delivering groceries — which, again, is a very low-risk thing — have been trained to know that in case ICE grabs them, they should never write the list of addresses down digitally. You write it on a physical piece of paper, and if ICE grabs you, you eat the piece of paper. ...[D]elivering groceries shouldn’t be high-risk. It violates people’s sense of dignity and basic rights, and that’s what creates courage.

The whole thing is so good, it's well worth a read.

Looking at my podcasts the other day, glaring at the ones I want to update for not updating enough, I did a thing that I know I've done before and I'm sure I will again: I thought gosh I really like that Gareth Dennis, why am I so behind on his??

Then I listen to some and (when it's not about train crashes) pretty soon I'm like I should be taking notes on this, this is about WORK. Free bus passes, driverless public transport, that's stuff I get paid to think about so I don't wanna do it in my spare time so much.

So the podcast episode goes half-unlistened to. Again.

I was already thinking that before the most recent episode, about the Gorton & Denton by-election. I listen to podcasts for escapism, that's why I like baseball! This is no kind of escape.

But today, maybe because of my time off (both a break from thinking about transport policy, and more time to listen to podcasts so I'm burning through them quicker) or maybe because the podcasts I like really aren't updating enough no matter how much I glare at the app, I put this one on.

It was at first pretty novel to hear a voice I associate with engineering disasters etc. talking about roads I've been on and places I know well.

I do think it's interesting how much transport has been emblematic of this election: when I first saw the locally-infamous "Patricia Clegg" letter that Reform is trying to deceive people with, the thing that stuck out to me most was "the buses aren't working," and I just scoffed at this slight on my beloved Bee Network -- not like I'm anything to do with TfGM or Labour or anything, but I'm really impressed at what Andy Burnham has been able to do and it really is nonsense to say that buses don't work when we have, for the first time, real-time information available in the app and AV announcements on increasingly many buses. This more than anything, more than even a candidate from Hitchin, made me feel like that letter was not written by any "concerned neighbour" but by someone who hasn't been to Manchester, not recently.

We got a postcard today "from" Andy Burnham himself telling us "the community has to unite around our candidate or you'll get a Reform MP" (typical Labour, telling us we have to do what they tell us to) and on this postcard, as well as the expected photo of him with the candidate is just a particular photo of yellow Bee Network buses that I've seen in every TfGM press release and news story about them. It really is a symbol of his; bringing about the first franchise outside of London, and the coming integration with local train services, really does feel miraculous.

So yeah, it really is interesting how much transport has been a useful lens to view the by-election with.

But man. Between this by-election and Minnesota, I'm like... never mind living in interesting times, I'm weary of living in interesting places.

Tonight's knock on the door was a Labour canvasser who asked if I was planning to vote; I said I'd just done my postal vote this afternoon, and "I'm afraid I voted Green," I tried to let him down gently.

He still tried to show me the latest "only Labour can beat Reform" chart which baffled me: from my own time canvassing I can only expect that in such circumstances they have a box to tick for "voted for someone else" and you move on! Arguing with people who've already voted is a waste of time.

I hadn't been going to get in to this but since he wasn't going away I told him that I'm a disabled immigrant and Labour are making life more difficult for all of those so I couldn't vote for them. He said "well Angeliki settled here from Europe..."

It just felt so point-missing. I don't really care about the demographics of a candidate too much. I care how they'll vote, I care about their party's policies and how they'll affect all immigrants! (Or any other group on the wrong side of this power imbalance.)

I appreciate there's a lot of new volunteers on all sides in this by-election. (Seriously dude, I hope they trained you enough that you know there should be a box for you to tick that says I can be done wasting your and all your colleagues' time!) But it's hard not to feel like this is what Labour has been for all twenty of the years I lived here: focus on this exceptional individual, not the boring systemic problems that the party will always shy away from.

The funniest thing was, as I was finally getting this guy to go away, I'd spotted another guy behind him and I'd assumed he was a fellow canvasser with this guy, but as I started to close the door, he caught my attention to say "I'm from the Greens, did you want to put up a sign?" And only then I remembered that D had in fact asked for one the other day, so me and this guy and D eventually ended up out in the rain trying to find something to affix it to before ending up dragging a big tree in a big pot to the edge of the driveway for maximum visibility.

I hope that sends the Labour canvassers a message, for the couple more days until this election finally happens.

Today is a good day because I came downstairs to find that the house was warm enough that the heating hadn't needed to kick in, which is so much more comfortable for me.

First thing I noticed when I went outside yesterday was that it smelled like a rainy spring day instead of a rainy winter day.

I am so ready for fresh air and open windows.

Like D, I have been telling all the canvassers who come to the door that I'll vote for whoever has the best chance of beating Reform, but I am relieved that now the constituency-level polling indicates that it's more likely to be the Greens than Labour, because I really didn't want to have to hold my nose and vote for Labour. I'm a trans disabled immigrant and they went through a phase last year of trying to make things more difficult for every single one of those groups of people.

And I do like the points the Greens in the person of Zack Polanski are making, particularly in their most recent party political broadcast. (With one note: I have very strong feelings about "make X Y again" constructions of any kind these days, but I'm grudgingly willing to make an exception for "make hope normal again" despite how loaded "hope" and "normal" are as the X and Y in this case!)

I am so tired I can hardly string a sentence together but I wanted to say that today went great from a "finding a new place on my own" perspective, from actually being incredibly useful from a work perspective. Getting back was actually the annoying part (road works made it difficult to escape the area I'd arrived to by bus, and I got lost trying to walk back to anywhere I could get a bus or Uber; getting back from Stockport took much longer thanks to Piccadilly still being closed).

But I made it just in time to get to a much-needed yoga session, and got home to eat delicious takeout, and a basically-empty weekend and most-of-a-week off now stretches before me.

I thought I'd just get dropped off at the train station after our session (and the all-important debrief in Costa) was finished. But I should've known: my lovely colleague has sight loss herself and assured me that they -- she, her husband/PA, her guide dog -- would wait until I was safely on a train.

But first, I needed to pee, so I got directed to the gents' and I was only gone for a few minutes but when I walked back up the platform I saw those two (three, counting Flick the dog) standing with two other ladies chatting away. As I got closer I'd have guessed they were people R knew from work; one of them mentioned another charity that's known to us. I was happy to chill while they did that "Oh you know Nick?" kind of thing. But it turns out they didn't know each other; these women had just been at some sight-loss related event but one of them just spoke up when she saw the guide dog because she always does and is clearly the kind of person who'll talk to anyone. They had made friends at a local society for blind people, and had just come from, of all things, a funeral for someone they knew from that group. The chattier one told us about her eye condition, Homonymous Hemianopia -- and R and I said "that's the one we couldn't say before!" when we were going through a list of them at the session earlier; we both know about hemianopia but neither of us could get the word out at the time.

Then the other person said "And I have optic nerve hypoplasia."

And then I said "Shut up!" because I was so surprised. That's what I have! And even among other blind people, no one's heard of it. It's an odd, rare thing. I literally don't think I've ever met anyone else who's got it.

They and I ended up getting on the same train for the first 15 minutes or so, by which point the chatty one had made friends with the conductor and exchanged numbers with me.

My hypoplasia pal lives in Runcorn and says she comes to Manchester regularly; I said she should let me know if she wants to hang out.

Such a goofy coincidence, but an uplifting end to a day that could've gone better. (It was fine, it just...well, I'm too tired to explain it now. But it was fine. Just, could've been better.)

So the Church of England has drawn the "Living in Love and Faith" process to a close, in a way that puts any pursuit of my priestly vocation out of reach for the foreseeable future. A new working group is being set up to continue looking at the question of priests in same-sex marriages, which is supposed to report back to Synod in 2028. Based on past experience, that probably means 2029 or 2030, at which point there will no doubt be a new round of painful arguments, and then I guess we'll see. But for now, that door is closed.

I think I am currently feeling less upset about this than I thought I'd be, although it might just be alexithymia fogging things up. It didn't really come as a surprise, so to some extent letting go of the uncertainty is something of a relief.

It also removes the potential complication that comes with having reinvigorated my academic vocation, coming back to the field with my mental health intact, my ADHD treated, and the general increased wisdom that comes with age. Of course academia and the priesthood is hardly a combination that hasn't been tried before, but I had been worrying slightly about what happens if I have to make a choice about which to pursue first, and now that that choice has been taken off the table I can just concentrate on my studies, and should at least be well into a PhD before the question of formal priestly discernment becomes pertinent again.

Enjoy your pancakes or local equivalent* and/or your Lunar New Year treats


*Estonia has (kind of brioche-y) Shrove Buns/vastlakukkel filled with whipped cream (Wikipedia suggests they should have almond paste in too but that’s not how either of Nieceling’s families eat them)

For work-related reasons, I can get a free round trip on any TransPennine Express train.

I'd basically be working on the outbound journey but could come back any time I want, doesn't have to be the same day or anything.

I was excited at having an excuse to go back to York, until I remembered that TPE trains go to Scotland as well... I could go to Edinburgh or Glasgow!

I've got I think four days' vacation I have to use up in March, as well...

It's much longer since I've been to Glasgow, but Edinburgh is closer to where I have friends.

It'd probably mean going on my own though, and that isn't my best thing. But a few days away from Normal Life does sound really nice...

I've got all of next week off work except the Wednesday, which I'll be spending in Chester. It did occur to me that it'd be fun to see how cheap a midweek Premier Inn or whatever would be, and hang out for a few days around the work trip...

I love my house and my people but I like to do different things too.

Yesterday I forgot to do the “traditional” autocomplete valentine poem so you can have it for Lupercalia instead…

Roses are my new obsession,
Violets are the best flowers in this universe.
Sugar is a beautiful color(sic) in this photo of my heart,
And so much of this is just pure love from you guys in the comments.
(iPad - which is apparently a big hippo)

Roses are still very pleased with her husband.
Violets are the fandom I think you should get.
Sugar is dissolved,
And so it helped you get your own back.
(Kindle Fire - obviously living for teh drama)


Roses are good for the kids,
Violets are the best jokes on the wall.
Sugar is a bit of a serif but it’s impossible to get the train back from London
And so you don’t need it for the rest of the year.
(Phone - maybe a bit judgmental)



It’s interesting that the iPad and particularly the phone have learned some ludy-speak (and the phone is more aware of subjects I’m likely to be texting about) while the Kindle seems a bit more generic

I had a pretty dispiriting conversation with my parents this evening.

Whenever I think "wow I'm shit at speaking up when I should," I hope I remember how far I've come.

My mom won't argue with the people in her life who persist in Trump support despite living in Minnesota in 2026. "We just don't talk about politics," I remember hearing this when I was growing up (once or twice; one didn't even need to talk about not talking about politics very often), and it seems so nonsensical as well as enraging these days.

And when she told me about a parent being ableist toward his young son, after said child's disability had been explicitly compared to mine... She was talking to the parents and made that connection herself, saying that how they described his sight reminded her of me, which got the mom to ask if I'd ever "had to" use braille. At this point I was wincing a little, she made it sound like an emergency plan I didn't have to resort to (when actually I taught myself (by sight, not touch) Grade 1 braille when I was 11 because I so desperately wanted to learn it), but whatever. Mom replied, accurately, that I did not learn braille. The kid's mom said that she'd asked because they as his parents had been told braille might be relevant to their child, and I guess here the kid's dad interrupted their conversation to say "absolutely not, he will never do that."

I was so upset. I shouted "that's horrible!"

Mom was upset...with my outburst. "I'm only telling you what he said," she told me, clearly not interested when I tried to explain why I thought this is horrible.

I've been having a bad-brain time anyway, but the idea that there are people out there who insist that their visually impaired kid will never learn braille is bad enough... and it stings to see that my mom isn't even interested in advocating otherwise even when she had been explicitly treated like an expert by the kid's mom by drawing this parallel between my condition and his.

My mom isn't really much of an expert on my condition -- she told me that people in her church prayed for me to stop being blind when I was a baby and I'm a miracle; Wikipedia tells me it's normal for people born with my condition to acquire some sight by the time we're five years old. And her own ableism was baked into the conversation: she's intensely uncomfortable with wheelchair users unless they are expected to "walk again some day" and she was just so paternalistic about the kid that even modeling better reactions (which is usually all I can do when my parents are like this) didn't feel good enough for me.

It just felt like the last straw: a difficult weekend, I accidentally broke the fastening on my current-favorite glasses chain while I was trying to clean glasses that always seem to be dirty lately, I have realized only tonight that all my train journeys this coming week will be even more complicated because Manchester Piccadilly is effectively closed... D kindly tried to fix a problem with my phone not sending e-mail only for it to confound him, leaving him frustrated and confused.

And now it's past my bedtime? I somehow have to go to sleep when I'm so dejected? Bah.

I hung out with a guy from Ecuador today, and we talked about what immigrants always talk about: how much we miss the food we can't get here. (His wife is originally from Venezuela -- they both grew up in Spain before ending up in England -- and our extensive talk about food made me miss the Venezuelan who made arepas, but I think that place didn't survive lockdowns. Apparently there's no Ecuadoran food here; the closest thing he could console himself with is a Colombian place in Liverpool.)

When someone from queer club who has chronic pain and fatigue asked for help with the heavy lifting of moving house, of course I volunteered. This was the man-with-a-van that he hired.

It's funny, when Matt told me to text Dennis I expected that Dennis would be an old gammony bigot, but instead I got Denis, an adorable wife guy, a decade younger than me, helping people move house as a side hustle.

Denis called me Matt at first, which didn't bother me -- Matt's the person he's mostly been dealing with! -- but he could not have been more apologetic. And then apparently he called me Kevin for a while, which did make me laugh (I didn't even know this until he apologized for it!). I did try to assure Denis that all these white guy names are the same but he was adamant.

I don't know Matt well, except that he's a single-in-the-sense-of-not-cohabiting person who's 30 or 40 years old. I expected a room full of stuff. This guy had an amount of books I'd expect from boomers who haven't had to move to a new house in fifty years. And the heaviest bookcases, I think Matt said they were made of old scaffolding or something? And because the bookcases had to go in the van first, they had to come out last, and thus be taken upstairs when I was already wiped out.

We collected stuff from his storage unit and brought it to his house first, then went to his previous house to get stuff from there and there was so much we didn't think we could fit it all in the van and that we'd have to come back to make a second trip. We really really didn't want to do that, though, and managed to avoid it by packing the van so full that Denis's hand truck had to come with us in the front -- I sat in the middle, and it got shotgun. But we were so pleased with ourselves for not having to go back, and it's a damn good thing. I could barely walk the 20ish minutes home by the time we finished -- and when I got there, it took me most of an hour to eat and shower even though I very much wanted to do both of those things!

As we were dragging the bookcases up the stairs, Denis could not stop talking about how strong I was, he was shocked when I told him (not quite in so many words) that I have a bullshit email job, he absolutely thought I was a fellow manual laborer. "How did you get so good at this?" he said. I didn't know how to tell him it's a combination of my dad instilling his (manual laborer) work ethic, and transgym making me hench.

I was not looking forward to having to go help V's relative get stuff from his mum's house to the tip again tomorrow, but it sounds like we almost certainly won't be needed! He got extra done this week and extra help today, which is wonderful for him and well-timed for me. Apparently the last bit, a friend of his with a van, might fall through tomorrow so we're on standby but that slight possibility feels a lot better than the absolute certainty!

Now I'm off to take some more ibuprofen and sleep forever.

I hope everyone is having the Valentines/St Cyril and Methodius/Lupercalia weekend they want whether that’s soppy and romantic, all about chosen family and working together on something worthwhile (and of course lettering/typography) or wolf-y and wild…


Sadly it’s not LJ in the 00s anymore so there aren’t the big organised love-memes and communities - and I don’t think I have the spoons to try to run a mini-love meme right now now.

I'm going to Huddersfield for work on Monday, Wrexham on Wednesday, and at the very end of today I had a call where I ended up agreeing to go to "somewhere near Walsall" on Friday next week (I'm still awaiting the promised email with more specific details than that!).

(For non-locals, these are all 2ish hours away, or less, but one of these in a week would usually be a big deal and leave me really tired the next day and etc.)

They're all trips I really want to make, all for unrelated things that just happen to have turned up at the same time. I'll be fine. But oof!

Tomorrow I'm helping a fellow Queer Club member move heavy furniture to his new place, while V has an unpleasant hospital appointment testing for something potentially serious. Sunday D and I will once again be doing tip runs for V's relative who's clearing out his mum's house...

Everything is... a bit intense at the moment.

I do have almost all of the next week off work (except for a trip to Chester lol, which I actually really want to do). Really looking forward to that.