What I’ve Been Up To This Week

JournalCon is next week and you’d think I’d want to be churning out the witty-yet-poignant entries doubletime to get ready for it, you know, to really impress everyone and make someone give me a million dollars to continue inflicting this journal on you all, but, uh, no. Instead I’ll just throw out a couple of random facts about my week and you’ll kind of pull them all together and I’ll just call this an entry since I feel funny when I don’t update often, okay? So, really, forget about the million dollars because you know I’m just going to keep writing here on and on and on and on here anyway. Without further ado, I give you: What I’ve Been Up To This Week.

Uh, okay, well, the first thing is that I biked around the lake twice yesterday instead of my usual once. It’s still really hot here so I don’t go until eight usually. There are still a lot of people walking or biking or scooting or running or being pushed around the lake at that time so I still get to observe life’s rich pageant, which is half the fun of Green Lake anyway. The last couple of times I’ve gone I’ve written a journal entry in my head about all the different things I see there…I’ve written the entry in my head twice and it’s always funnier and tighter and better there than when I actually crank up Word and try to type it out. There’s a good part about Canadian geese in that entry and also about girls walking around the lake in pairs and having Deep Conversations. Also about this one very dapper mustachioed guy who wears a homemade vest that says Spanish Lessons on it and who does actually seem to give Spanish lessons occasionally, claro que si. I wish I could write the actual entry and let you enjoy it on your own. Sorry about that.

There’s a hurricane (or possibly two) heading straight for my sister in Tampa so she’s evacuated home to Miami, which, oddly, doesn’t seem to be in much danger. Mom put the hurricane shutters up anyway and went to the store and gassed up anyway though. Hurricane season is rough all around…rough for the people who sort of live in fear for half the year in their island paradise, and rough for their family members in the Pacific Northwest who feel far away and powerless to do anything to help them.

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in this two-day clinical workshop for my work, learning more about this therapy style I’m supposed to be using with my patients. It reminded me a lot of social work school in that there was a lot of talk about “just being comfortable in that space” and “creating rapport” and “setting aside our expectations.” Lots of talk about oppression and outcomes and shifting focus and stuff like that. One of the people running the workshop was…I can’t explain it. He was very nice and helpful and friendly and he kept saying things like “Can we build some consensus on whether these are appropriate boundaries for the duration of our experience together?” and “Okay, well, that’s just another example of the A-word…’Agenda!’” and things like that and he wrote down emotion words on one of those gigantic Post-It note things and we were supposed to do this call-and-response thing, like, he’d yell out some sentence that a client might say and we were supposed to yell out appropriate reflections of that statement the way you’re supposed to in this particular type of therapy, and each time he’s cross his arms and raise his eyebrows and nod his head and I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of himself or if he knew I thought he was sort of self-referentially funny, or what. It was a little confusing. Also, someone there had some knitting she was doing, a really easy pretty pattern with awesome yarn, and I was inspired and got some more work done on Lily’s blanket. And people complemented the color of the yarn I was using.

I had a pretty rough weekend last weekend so I’m looking forward to a better one this weekend. I’m not exactly sure how to make it better but my first impulse is to not cry for three or four hours. As long as I get that right it can’t help but go up from there, you know? Maybe I’ll see Garden State or something.

Or I could stay home and watch British television on DVD. My queue looks like I’m some sort of panama-hatted expatriate abroad, what with the Coupling and the Jeeves and Wooster and the AbFab and the Vicar of Dibley and so on and so forth. I guess I want funny and easily digestible in hour long segments, or something? As a side benefit, my fake English accent is getting pretty good, which is nice because you can never have too many fake accents in Your Fake Accent Wardrobe. Mainstays in mine are Fake Pirate, Fake Vaguely European But Probably French Although You Never Can Tell, and Fake Miaaaaaaaami, Baby. Simple but timeless and elegant, you know?

And speaking of England, my friends Ashley and Thomas are moving there in like, two weeks. I spoke to Ash last night and it sounded like she’s a little shell-shocked, like she just sold her house and car and is getting rid of most of her stuff not to mention her dog and cat and is moving to another country for three to five years and it’s all been sort of a whirlwind thing for them. Both she and I want me to visit here there and she’s said stuff like “So when you move here…” and “You can be there as soon as your visa goes through…” We’ll see.

Saturday, when I wasn’t crying, I made this sort of ill-advised vegetable soup I make sometimes when I feel I’m not getting enough vegetables. I get some vegetables and some sort of legume and throw it in the pot with water and kind of boil it up and then throw the whole thing on top of some brown rice which I usually forget about on the burner and have to, subsequently, spend several minutes scraping out of the pot. It usually needs a lot of salt and pepper. It’s sort of drearily healthful and I always make too much of it and hence I have a whole big bowl of it in the fridge, still, waiting to be consumed in order to convey nutrients to my system…you can’t really call this eating, I’m afraid.

I go back and forth about being excited for JournalCon. For a while I was all, “Meh.” Not that I didn’t think it was going to be cool, or not that I wasn’t expecting to have fun, and not that I didn’t think I would enjoy seeing all my hot internet friends…but there hasn’t been the same frisson of “Oh mah gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw, I am going to meet all these Internet Rock Stars!” that I felt last year. This year it’s more mellow, like, I’m going to see some people I met last year and totally loved and meet some new people that I’m pretty sure I will also totally love, and talk about something we all do that we also totally love, and you know, eat yummy food, go to Lush, sing karaoke (will I dare?), do a little pimp hands and call it good. There are lots of people going whom I may kiss right on the mouth but I’m not going to mention them by name here because I want it to be a surprise for everyone. You know how I am. I am going to miss my girl Sundry though, and I plan to pour some root beer on the ground in her honor at some point during the proceedings. Oh, and swag! I’m not doing any this year! Except I still have a bunch of Ampersand fake tattoos from last year that I was too shy to give out. Maybe I’ll bring those again and be too shy to give them out again. Only time will tell.

In other news, I am wearing a red skirt today; I need to do laundry; I am really wanting to get this CD because I heard a song off it the other day on KEXP and it’s been in my head ever since; I went to the Fremont Sunday Market last Sunday and am going again this Sunday specifically to get a cool t-shirt to wear to the abovementioned JournalCon and also, possibly, to eat crepes; I am reading Eliza’s European Adventures and feeling nostalgic for my own, which feel two million miles away and four hundred million years ago; it’s sunny and warm today and I wish I could be outside; I totally need a haircut but I’m simultaneously thinking of growing my hair out again; my sucky pedicure has finally chipped off to the extent where I don’t feel guilty taking the rest of it off and repainting my toes with silver or something neutral; my heart is still, at two months post-breakup and counting, still broken and I’m pretty sure it will never ever heal, ever ever; I’m reading Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them finally, a year or so after everyone else; I am completely out of popsicles and have plans to ameliorate that situation as soon as possible.