Salon post: One of those days

[jenett]

So, I don't know about all of you, but my day started by spilling one of my medication bottles, was followed up by getting a notification for a payment I hadn't made in PayPal, and once I got to work, discovered I was missing a meeting scheduled while I was on vacation. (Plus the range of weird computer failures I mostly expected.)

(I have enough meds to keep me going, though I'm going to have to get them to call in a refill earlier than usual, I have reported it to PayPal and changed all the passwords ever, and the meeting can be coped with. Just, well.)

My questions for you today:

1) How do you deal with days like that, when a bunch of stuff not under your control piles up? (What makes you feel better, what makes you feel more sorted?)

2) Favourite words, and why. (This one brought to you by the friend who sent me the word 'astriferous' this weekend, which means 'bearing stars'. I am also deeply fond of 'tintinabulum'. And 'fortnight'.)

I like the first one because it's descriptive and gorgeous. The second because of the sound of it (it means 'the sound of bells') and fortnight is just an exceedingly practical word.

As always, come, chat, invite friends, change the topic to other things you're interested in, etc.

Comments

[mrissa]

Days Like That: mostly I feel better when I bury my head in a book. It depends. If I can make something go right, it's best to do so, even if it's sorting the laundry or something, but I have days when it becomes clear that that's just not going to happen, and then: book. Head down.

I like "orthogonal." It suits my needs a lot and is nice.

[jenett]

Book time, yes.

Orthogonal, yes. (It's also one of those words it took me a very long time to figure out. Peripatetic is another one like that. I mostly get things from context, rather than looking them up.)

[jjhunter]

Briefly,

1.) rituals like the How Are You? (in Haiku) project; extra exercise, sleep, orientation toward simple sensual pleasures (Good smells, Strong colors, Powerful tastes etc.); poetry; being with people I can be comfortably silent with.

2.) words, especially verbs, starting with gl-; evocative and lovely to say.

Golden gilding gleams gloriously, glowing glints ‘n’ gliding glimmers.

[untonuggan]

I heartily concur with both of these things.

Also, All The Crafts.

[kyrielle]

How do I deal? Poorly. LOL.

Must agree with mrissa - getting things under my control *under* control does help.

So does - as you have - figuring out what the impacts and severity of the pileup are.

If parts of the pileup can be undone (perhaps by others: at work this is most frequently my boss, who may have started the pileup by giving me several things all the same priority), that also helps. Or if they can be turned to amusement for others. (None of yours really fall in that, but the epic woes of my commute one morning do. It was "you have to be kidding me" amusement, but it was amusement. And a little sympathy.)

Reminding myself that they are outside my control and I am only human.

And Comfort Measures. I'll deploy whichever ones are possible and practicable on a day like that, which depends on where I am and what I'm doing and (if not at work) whether the kids are at home. The usual suspects:

* Hot tea with a soothing flavor, and not an epic ton of caffeine, but I don't really do epic-ton-of-caffeine. Exception re the caffeine: if part of the pileup is lack of sleep, moderate caffeine can be good here.

* Music. Usually this means my 'soothing' playlist, although occasionally it will mean the one for pickup the energy and enthusiasm instead. And sometimes I just need stuff I really love, in which case I grab the 5-star rated items and run with it. :)

* If I'm especially distressed, I will feel unusually cold. Interestingly enough, warming me up helps with the distress in this case only. AKA: sit in front of a fire, curl around a mug of tea, or put on a sweatshirt!

* At home, no kids: long, hot soak in the bath. Preferably with a pleasant bath bomb.

* At home, no kids, nothing major to do that day: must agree with mrissa again, book time. Ideally it's going to be an old friend, or a new friend in an old familiar series.

* On days that simply continue to go Like That until the entire day begins to feel like a loss, finding something (usually) small and positive I can do for someone else. If I can refuse to let the whole day go bad, even just a little bit, it helps. It makes me feel like I still have some control/affect, and like I'm doing something right with it.

[jenett]

I'm starting to feel a little better as I dig out from under email that came in while I was gone. (There was rather a lot of it for three days.) And I suspect there will be some house cleaning when I get home.

[kaberett]

(1) Not terribly well, I don't think: certainly this Monday gone I ended up shouting at a stranger (who, to be fair, had just assaulted me), and I also ended up very nearly bursting into tears in the reception at my new GP's.

And then what I did was this: I curled up on the Internet and asked people to reassure me that it genuinely had been awful and horrifying and wasn't just me being unreasonable. I worked out what needed doing and more-or-less got the things in motion to do it. And I fed myself cookies and buried myself in media I could cope with and I very firmly Did Not Leave The Room, because being in public is hard, and I wrote a poem, and I slathered myself in comforting scents.

(2) Ocelot.

[jenett]

From what you have posted, Monday was indeed horrifying, and you were not at all unreasonable to think so.

Comforting scent, yes. (I had been not wearing perfume, because shared office. But that's less of an issue now, and I should get back in the habit. I'm moderate in my use anyway.)

Ocelot is a good word, indeed.

[batrachian]

To continue a theme: not well.

Generally, music helps a lot, as does taking self-imposed 'timeout' breaks to collect and compose myself. When things get messy are when it's some sort of time-critical thing that I actually have to deal with Right Now, and can't take that time. (And it only gets worse when I'm running on minimal reserves, as today is reminding me.)

[kate]

Hm. I am pretty quicksilver wrt moods, so I usually let myself be annoyed for a little while and then take deep breaths and move on with what I need to be doing. Usually just doing whatever work I need to be doing calms things down for me nicely. Treats, especially liquid treats like tea, seem to help, too.

I like penultimate. There are a bunch more words that I can't think of just now, I go in streaks. I like interesting-sounding words, oblique and labyrinthine and obfuscate and accoutrements. I also like to get exactly the right connotation for a word, so when I get to use words like that in conversation it makes me really happy.

[redbird]

I like "fortnight," but hadn't thought much about it until I used it in conversation with someone who seemed both surprised and pleased to hear it used: it's a useful word, hence one that I and my friends use. (Now I'm wondering whether this is a dialect thing: two of the people I'm used to using it with are Irish and Welsh, respectively.)

I'm also fond of "bodega," which there doesn't seem to be a standard English word for, maybe because a lot of places don't have bodegas. (They have them in Montreal, but Anglophone Montrealers call it a "dep," from French "depanneur.")

[jenett]

I acquired fortnight from growing up on reading that included British children's lit and school stories. (Though, curiously, I don't actively remember either of my parents using it often, probably because it's unfamiliar to a lot of Americans.)

But it's much clearer than 'bimonthly' which it otherwise approximates in some uses, but which can also mean 'every two months', and that's just confusing.

[calissa]

Fortnight is in common usage in Australia, just in case you were wondering :)

[elisem]

1) Reading can help. I used to use computer games, but I am doing that less and less lately. (Partly to reduce irritation in my wrists, and partly because I really do need the time to do other things if I can.) Oddly enough, washing dishes will almost always help, probably because hot water is very soothing for my arthritic hands, and because watching order come out of chaos is soothing. Sorting beads definitely works. Tea or something, good noms, such things. Mostly, though, if I can remind myself that one of the useful aspects of ADD is that my attention span (and generally mood) WILL shift, this helps a little. Sometimes a lot. (And there's also what I described to my therapist as "the positive power of Oh Fuck It.")

Used to be I would write when in a day like that, if I could grab the time, because the stuff I wrote (nonfiction, activist stuff mostly) when I was seriously stressy was sometimes very good.

2) Favorite words? Glacier. Stone. Grace. Ask me tomorrow and I'll probably tell you something different.

[untonuggan]

My favorite words shift a lot, too. I have to say, I've always liked the word "persnickety" though.

[elisem]

My day just turned into One Of Those Days. Snippets:

Why is my $700 silver wire order listed as having been delivered to Lawrence, Kansas and left on a porch?
Good grief, I am caller #74 according to the voicemail system. Company-wide meltdown?
This phone system does not accept numberpad input from my iPhone???
I cannot wait on hold much longer, as I have a dentist appointment.

OK. I am about to wash a few dishes, eat a little food, and then go to the dentist, after which I will go to the Apple store (and possibly the AT&T store across the street from it) to solve the mystery of Why My Voicemail Password Does Not Work. (Or possibly why it does not exist. Either one.)

At least the airline found my luggage with all my tools in it and returned it to me late last night. If I only had silver wire to work with, I'd do that, because my work is the most centering thing of all. Guess I forgot to list it because it's so big and central. (Silly brain.)

[jenett]

This is the point at which I start poking at the astrology.

(For people who don't already know this about me, I don't believe in newspaper astrology at all. But in its more complex forms, I think it's a way of looking at patterns in the world, and getting me to ask questions that might be useful.)

Anyway, here's what Heather Roan Robbins (an astrologer from Minnnesota) says (she does a weekly summary, which also sort of explains my issues this weekend. http://starcodes.wordpress.com/2013/09/27/starcodes-sept-27-2013-heather-roan-robbins/)

Specifically:

Wednesday, Oct 2: Why does life have to hurt? We may ask that question, with or without an event to trigger the cause, as Venus semi-squares Pluto this morning. Kindness is there, though we may have to reach for it. Our simple kindness (to ourselves as well as others- it is so easy to be hard on ourselves today) and efforts to help one another (intention is more important than results at the moment) can ameliorate this ache and feed our hearts. Isolation is an illusion, but a powerful one, help others and feel connected, help them feel connected.

[stormyhearted]

1) Some form of escapism. I've been having trouble reading for months, now, but that was a long-standing go-to; on troublesome days when I insist on reading, I'll grab a much loved favorite and reread, because I can skim and still remember the story. I'll also play a day on Sims3 (I am only allowed to play 1-2 game-length days at a time, because otherwise it initiates a spiral of general malcontentedness and an inability to accomplish real life things.) Writing, plotting, and digging up reference images for characters and places. As of the past couple of days, poking at my doll collection and deciding what direction I want to take it in.

2) I got astriferous from the same friend and like it a great deal. 'Nemophilist' is one I like, but rarely have the opportunity to use: "one who is fond of forest or forest scenery; a haunter of the woods." There's a tumblr that I am rather fond of that posts interesting words of various origins- it's been a bit quiet lately, but I think the owner is intending to rectify that soon: http://other-wordly.tumblr.com/.

[untonuggan]

I believe I am a nemophilist. Thanks for that!

[hunningham]

Serendipity is one of my favourite words. I love the meaning - a happy accident, something which goes wrong but turns out well. The derivation is also fun - it's from an old romance called "The Three Princes of Serendip" where the princes go on a quest which is just one fortunate mistake after another. And the word itself just trips off the tongue. (And a bonus - wikipedia tells me that it's one of the ten English words which are hardest to translate into other languages.)

Another lovely word is petrichor, which means the smell of dry earth after it's been raining.

[silveradept]

More often than not, the thing that pushed me over the top gets a frustrated and angry mini-explosion at it, and then things are good. Or used to, anyway. Now, however, doing that draws Disproportionate Response from Significant Other, because doing such things inevitably upsets something, which in turn upsets them (or we go straight to upsetting them), so we're looking for a new cope strategy, as the mini-boom, playing games, and reading books are all strategies that fail because someone or something always needs my help or attention. And I know that holding it all in is also a bad strategy.

As for favorite words, I think "defenestrate" still works admirably as a threat, but my general-purpose word for when I want the world to shape up and fly right is "Argelfaster", the word that invokes the wizard-melting spell in Wrede's Dragons series.

[aedifica]

Favorite words: aedificabamus, because it's so much fun to say. It means "we used to build, or we were in the habit of building."

[calissa]

1) Most of the others have covered my responses, but I'll reiterate anyway. What usually helps me is taking a break and having a cup of tea, preferably somewhere away from my desk. Then it's a matter of tackling what can be tackled. I find starting with something small is usually the best way.

2) It changes. I love 'astriferous'--I'd not heard it until you used it here. I quite like yestere'en for the same reason you like fornight, though I suppose 'last night' may also cover it.