Day One Thousand Two Hundred And Twenty-Two

Dear Diary,

Yeah, the single biggest surprise about adulthood, at least for me, is how true all those memes about boring shit being fantastic are.

I'm talking about those ones like 'adulthood is when you have a favorite burner on the stove', or 'getting into bed at eight PM is cause for celebration' and shit like that. Back in the day I always wound up torn about those. On the one hand, I absolutely had a favorite burner on the stove, because my mom always used the front right one, so of course that was the best one. Also, if I was in bed at eight PM it's cause I'd found something exciting enough to need some me time. On the other, I absolutely thought that anybody who thought those were signs of maturity had to be living the saddest of lives.

Now that I'm thinking about it from an adult perspective, even a Young Adult perspective, I'm realizing that maybe I was kinda mature for my age. Or traumatized. Very likely traumatized. Then again, sometimes I think maturity is... Not a direct result of trauma. That shit can go right the fuck away. I'm also not a big fan of 'mature for your age', because that is the favored line of pedophiles, abusers, and exploiters everywhere. But the thing is I've never met somebody who I'd consider mature who didn't have some kind of trauma in their background.

That's not to say that everybody who's been traumatized is mature. Kinda the opposite, because most of the immediate responses to trauma are kinda primal, and equally immature as fuck. Real four 'F' kinda stuff. Fight, flight, freeze, mate. Still laughing about a textbook a universe away, but that shit is objectively funny. At any rate, the maturity doesn't come with trauma. If anything, I think it comes with healing from trauma.

But people do think trauma causes maturity. I can't see a single other reason why so many people think traumatizing kids who aren't maturing fast enough will 'fix' them. Thing is, if actual maturity is gained by healing from trauma, maybe what happens with traumatized kids too young to really grok maturity is like scar tissue. It's not maturity, but it looks like it if you don't examine it too closely.

Shit, did I just say 'trauma at an individual level can resemble maturity' or some shit like that? I think I did. I'm also not gonna take it back, because arrested development would sure as shit explain all those kids who were 'so mature' in grade school, but wound up being labeled 'immature' once they got to High School and beyond.

Then again, as I've mentioned before, I'm not some kind of world renowned expert who's absorbed hundreds of years, probably billions of hours, of scientific research into human psychology. Just a bitch who used to have an internet connection and a complete lack of self-regulatory mechanisms, who's been isekaied into the only sapient part of a continent spanning apocalypse goddess. I could be completely wrong about any of that shit. Fuck, I didn't even pass all my science courses, and definitely not with flying colors.

At any rate, got home after a day of increasingly normalized doing everything everywhere all at once, collecting all the kids in the Dining Room before bringing out dinner.

I wanted to try something today, so I asked Marie to back me up. Having my Murder Mittens as a sous chef is an experience, because all I had to do was tell her what I needed and what I needed it for and bam, seconds to minutes later I had that shit ready to go. Okay, she didn't caramelize the onions that fast, because actually caramelizing onions takes a while. I'm not talking about blanching or sauteing them, but actually caramelizing them, which takes time and patience no matter what tricks you use.

I felt the tiniest bit bad because those caramelized onions weren't part of the food, but one of the sauces. Because if you're gonna have tempura and sushi, you gotta have dipping sauces. Anything else would be uncivilized, and my kids are pretty fuckin' close to feral as it is. I'm not saying that's in any way a bad thing, either, because I'm thinking too many kids, Mortal and otherwise, wound up domesticated here and now.

At any rate, I did a couple kinds of sushi and a lot of tempura, and I'm not sure if they were ones Murder Mittens had done before or not. Especially because most of them were, in fact, veggies. I managed to score some crabs from the Yards, from Calverton, and some really nice ones from Troll Home, which I cooked up, pulled the meat out of, and sent the rest to be converted to fertilizer for the garden. The meat in the sushi was cooked crab, and I did some crab tempura as well. Beyond that I included carrots, cucumbers, radish, bell peppers, even some sweet potatoes and yams. Both as sushi ingredients and as tempura cores.

I also... It wasn't really 'tempura' in the traditional sense. From what I remember, and what Marie confirmed, tempura uses a single light layer of a thin flour batter. What I wound up doing was a slightly thicker batter, and I dipped the 'tempura' contents into that after flouring them, then dredged them in some seasoned flour, then dipped them again, then dredged them again, then dipped them again, then dredged them again. I'm pretty sure that the final products were at least seventy percent crunchy coating by volume, but fuck it, the kids ate them up. Even the carnivorous ones seemed to find the crunch and the faint...

Look, grease is part of cooking, and anybody who doesn't admit to liking a little bit of grease needs to get their head out. It's where the savory flavor lives, and most of the awesome steaks and other meat cuts and preparations are ways to get the grease or fat or oil to suffuse the meat until you don't realize you're eating the fat. Thing is, I hated the texture of crispy fat as a kid, but as an adult, when I get that perfectly rendered crispy bubble to pop and let loose with a wave of flavor in my mouth, it's like nothing else I've had in there.

Okay, it absolutely is, but I think if I let any of the boys, Vincent especially, know that they might not let my mouth near them again.

At any rate, crab and veggie sushi and tempura. Kids ate it up. I maybe wound up duping a bunch of it just so I could eat... Not my fill, but savor that flavor all night long while the rest of the fam ate their fill. Which they all did.

In fact, they ate enough that by the end of dinner they were all ready to just lie there in the Bath digesting. I made sure none of them skimped on showers beforehand, although a lot of that was me lending surreptitious tentacle washcloth aid. I didn't want to embarrass them or set of any kind of defiant behavior, I just wanted them to be clean enough they wouldn't feel manky in the morning.

All of us went to sleep in the Bath. Dreamt of my ladies in pretty much the same configuration in my Maw. Just about as energetic, too. Then again, when I woke up I couldn't really think of anything that screamed 'urgent' at me. Yeah, we had that situation in Airi, but honestly at this point that was mostly an Airish thing. With all our diplomancers telling me I needed to stay the fuck home, I refused to feel any kind of urgency or upset about not being right there on the front lines of a war so cold it might as well be peace.

No, seriously, Tallulah had some morning Court in Rich Man's Port today, and at the end of it she confirmed that thus far there hadn't even been any troop movements. Spent the rest of the day leaning against her knee while she sat on her throne, Co-Located to Airi doing diplomat things.

That let Cailyn and her husband have some more time together in the Grand Council chamber. If anybody's bitching about Rich Man's Port and Newark being an unshakeable two City voting bloc, Ophelia can suck it up and convince both of them if she wants them.

Given Cailyn is clearly her mother's daughter when it comes to politics, diplomacy, and general social maneuvering, I think Ophelia might be better off to just ask Cailyn and George what their price is, then find a way to pay it. Also, accept that no matter how savvy Cailyn is, George isn't gonna vote for anything that's too sus.

Teaching in Norfolk today was interesting. Not in 'interesting times' kind of ways, either. The weather was literally the most interesting thing about the day, but for the life of me I couldn't think of how to work it into a Math lesson until the end of the day, when it was kinda too late. Next week, if it looks like we're gonna have the same kind of 'cool in the morning, heating up through the morning, until the only thing that kept the afternoon from sweltering was the breeze off the ocean', I'm gonna see about doing a sciencey Math lesson where they do some kind of measurements about rates of change or some shit like that.

Of course, that means I'll have to come up with some way for them to accurately measure the fuckin' temperature. Which, amazingly, is not really a common thing here and now. The only thing I've seen that does anything like scientific measuring is Saffron's Status.

Fuck it, maybe I'll do some research my own self, whip up some Global Measurement Tools or some shit like that.

Speaking of research, brought sushi and sashimi for Saffron's pit stop. Totally worth for the quiet smiles that slip across her face when she hears Maid me come into the room, when I gently dry her lips off post pit stop, when I lock her back down for an afternoon of coding.

I half think Hat may have been hanging around the room. Not obviously, but while I can Blend the shit out of myself and anything I choose to, cutting through Glamour isn't exactly something I'm great at, especially if somebody's not any kind of threat.

Doing Maid service at the Academies was another pleasant sort of boring, although I did wind up finding a few of my Cadets' rooms. Only because they were in them when I showed up to scoop up dirty laundry and sheets. They gave me weird looks, but didn't say anything, so I let it lie. Let them think there are as many of me as there are Maenads, let them think that's my kink, let them think whatever they want.

I think maybe that bit, doing Maid work, is the closest I can get on a daily basis to my original definition of 'Hero'. Which, to be fair, is still kind of my 'gold standard'.

Because I leave each and every room a little better than I found it.

Of course at the end of the day, Tallulah reached down and ruffled my hair. Gently, but enough to get me to look up and murmur, "what's up, T?"

"The Lord of Sun's Harbor has requested you attend an audience with him."