Emotion packed day in Florida shelter

Thursday October 17 2024
Today was an emotion packed day and almost entirely negative emotion. Well, maybe not entirely.
I finally started doing things for Red Cross. Went to a couple shelters and yes they do exist they aren’t some kind of hoax and did shelter transition triage (SRT) basically asking the clients a series of questions to gauge their situation. They told me a lot of stories. That’s a big part of our job is just to listen to their stories, many of which have nothing to do with the disaster–well indirectly maybe. They talk about horrible car accidents, diseases, getting ripped off, injuries, the cost of medication, frustrations of insurance companies. Of course they all have a flood story. Many have lost everything. Many don’t have insurance and were already barely scraping by before the disaster.
It’s sad to listen to them. It’s real sad. But it’s not depressing. In a way I’m actually happier than I was biking Miami Beach and eating fifty dollar fajitas. Now I’m back on my cot in the giant tent that screeches and squeals in the wind and the generators running constantly.
Last night was probably the coldest night I’ve had of sleep since my cousin’s wedding at a dude ranch in the mountains of Colorado like twenty years ago. There weren’t enough blankets for everyone… or what’s more likely is that we did not know where the blankets were located. But someone loaned me a nice blanket for tonight and it’s supposed to be a little warmer tonight.
But also, the emotion today, I had to sort of lose a friend today as I had to vote to ban someone for bad behavior from a kink group that I help run. They wound up blocking me so I couldn’t talk to them about it. It’s like, if you go around making people feel unsafe and cornering them and then claim discrimination because they don’t find you sexy, it’s like, what can I do? You need to be able to behave yourself.
But on the other hand, we don’t have any real process to help people who misbehave. The kink community doesn’t have an HR department. It’s like, one or two complaints feel like they just get ignored but on the third complaint they just get banned out of the blue. That book I read recently about teaching kids 50 Rules or something said once that if you just clearly lay out your expectations to the kids, they will usually follow and if they aren’t, the majority of the time is because your expectations are inconsistent or not properly communicated.
To a certain degree this is true in the kink and greater LGBTQ community. Our values work so differently from the vanilla world and sure they make a lot more sense but they’re completely foreign to a lot of people. Vanilla people in my experience want passion over consent and I don’t know what I’m trying to say.
My feet stink really bad. And hurt. My new shoes are doing a number on them. Today I only got like 7300 steps in, less than half as many as I have on any other day so far but it’s still not enough of a break for them.
Listening to Phil Collins Take Me Home at the moment.
So after dealing with this misbehaving friend who now hates me remotely while shuttling to the shelters and between talking to clients and I mean, it really wasn’t a particularly difficult day but on paper it was bad and then I get a call from my aunt telling me my mom is in the hospital. Now I’m worried about her. They say she’s gonna be fine it’s not super serious but still I’m thinking about flying home to Seattle and Bellingham instead of flying home to Pittsburgh when I’m done with this Red Cross deployment. That’s one advantage of working from home.
Makes me realize what an incredible life I lead that I can just choose to go wherever I want and work from wherever and I had two of the best parents I could have reasonably hoped for who set me up for success.