Salon post: May 25

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post! No post last week, since I hit 'wow, I can't even'.


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Topic of the week
This week has been a week of juggling way more things than I want to be - I'm cat-sitting for a friend who is out of town for family medical reasons, I had an errand that involved an hour on the bus on Monday (and 10 minutes of actually doing the thing), the allergy shots are still a new addition to my schedule, and I ended up out sick with a migraine yesterday.

Oh, and I'm running group ritual for people for the first time in years on Saturday, and the first time in my current apartment.

What do you do when you have a week with lots of adjustments needed?

What I've been up to:
All of the above, plus a bit of writing, and a fair bit of mindless watching of things around the edges. As you do.


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Comments

[alexseanchai]

I am not sure if it is okay to post this here, jenett, so if it's not okay just delete this comment and I'll take the hint?

I'm doing a divination session Mon May 28 in hopes of people crossing my palm with silver and whatnot, though I'm also okay with doing one-card tarot draws for people without money changing hands. While I'm primarily coming at divination from a polytheistic, magical angle, I can certainly angle readings towards tarot as story prompts or tarot as plot guidance or tarot as character building exercise or what have you.

[jenett]

I am fine with such things from people who are otherwise participating in the conversation (or have done so in the past), if it's brief.

(This is a great length.)

[alexseanchai]

shiny

[alexseanchai]

Truth be told, re such a week, I panic? Or not panic necessarily, but my anxiety certainly ramps way the hell up. My therapist's advice is, basically, eat the elephant one bite at a time...

(Actually my therapist's advice is write the story one sentence at a time. Where 'story' means a lot of things that aren't necessarily, you know, story. I told her about the concept of 'alibi sentence' as I encountered it in the floating-around-DW-journals community Writing Every Day, right, and she immediately latched onto it as a tool for getting everything else accomplished in bite-sized pieces. Like yesterday my first sentence after getting home from work was "sweep kitchen floor". After that, "load dishwasher".)

Sunday I'm leading a Unitarian Universalist service—if any of you happen to be in shouting distance of Dover DE, it's 10a at Congregation Beth Sholom on Queen St, and you're more than welcome to come—and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

(the Powerpoint isn't finished and, because I expect the congregation to read some of the bits and there's a lot of bits, it needs to...well really it needed to have been finished last weekend at the latest)

And there's money shit and housing shit and job hunt shit and *muffles scream in pillow*

[rosefox]

What is an alibi sentence?

[alexseanchai]

You write one sentence on whatever the project is, and then you can honestly say you've written. idk why it's called an alibi.

[solitarywalker]

i guess i enjoy such adjustments, especially going to places i don't usually go or haven't been to before. It's difficult to do so without a particular purpose. Given a purpose, i welcome the chance to break way from routine.

[jenett]

I've had chronic health issues that mess with my stamina for so long that I don't even remember what that feels like - I'm always so carefully measuring exertion and how it feels.

(It's worse since 2010, but it's been an issue since the mid-late 90s, when I was in my early 20s, so, y'know. 2 decades now.)

I very occasionally get a sense of it when travelling, but I basically have to mark the day in my head as 'the only thing I'm doing is going out and exploring and coming back and getting food from a known place on my route and falling over'

[jazzyjj]

It seems I've had a lot of juggling around to do as of late. I have one neighbor in particular who is a very nice guy, but he always comes over to my apartment to hang out. Either that or he'll have me over to his apartment, and when the weather's cooperating we sit on our back deck. I've tried telling him nicely that sometimes I have things that I need to get done. Others have also tried telling him this, including his therapist. Don't get me wrong: I like him and enjoy his company, and vice versa. But I feel like virtually all he does is wait around for me when he's not at a coffee shop located about 2 blocks from our building. Either that, or sometimes a neighbor of ours who lives downstairs. She also has things that she needs to do, and she has told him this on numerous occasions and in no uncertain terms. He just doesn't get out of our building nearly enough, and I don't know why exactly. He tells me part of it is that he's just extremely free-spirited. He even has made friends at the locally-owned coffee shop I mentioned earlier, but he hardly ever hangs out with them unless it's really early in the morning when they first open for business. We even have a running joke that he probably gives them more business than any of their other regulars. But it's so true too. Fortunately he is good-natured about it though.





So besides Memorial Day Weekend plans, I thought I'd bring some of my toys here to my parents' 2-flat. I'm speaking about my MacBook and newly-acquired iPhone. Speaking of which, I've been exploring the iPhone and like it a lot.

[jenett]

Those conversations are always so complicated, the "I like spending time with you, but this is a bit much."

I don't know if you've come across the Captain Awkward blog, or how it navigates with a screenreader, but she has some great scripts for dealing with this kind of thing. (The Friendship category strikes me as the most relevant, but I know other people here read her, and might have specific post recommendations.)

[jazzyjj]

Thanks for the recommendation. I am subscribed to her feed on Dw and will have a look through the archives. She always seems to dish out good advice, and I think she lives somewhere here in the Chicago area. Lol perhaps I'll actually get to meet her sometime. But probably not as I don't travel well unless taking ADA paratransit or with a friend or family member. But anyway, thanks again.

[redbird]

I had an MRI this morning, and would post a (mostly positive) review of the new facilities at Mt. Auburn Hospital, except I don't want my medical information that close to Yelp or similar. So: new and wider machines, so more comfortable than a year ago, but they still aren't offering the patient the chance to listen to music.

This connects to our theme only in that I'd originally planned to visit Adrian tonight or tomorrow, and instead spent last night there, and went to the hospital from her place. That in turn gave me loads of time to sit on the lawn near Mt. Auburn Street, sniff lilies of the valley, and intermittently fret about the state of the world.

[jenett]

Yay new facilities. And particularly yay lilies of the valley.

[finch]

I've never had the option of a musical MRI! How does that work, do they just play the music through speakers in the tube?

[redbird]

I think that's how they did it: it's been a few years. I remember one place asking my genre preference for music. I asked for Louis Armstrong-style jazz, because I wanted something I would enjoy but not be tempted to sing along to, since singing along might make it harder not to move my head.

I vaguely recall bringing a music CD with me to an MRI, before Spotify/Pandora channels were a common thing.

[jazzyjj]

I had an MRI done about 4 years ago, and they asked me what music genre I wanted. I told them jazz, so the technician turned it on while the MRI was being taken. The tube was actually open-ended, so I could hear the music very well while moving through. Then just last year as I was having a procedure done by a dermatologist, he asked me what my favorite music genre was. I again told him jazz, so his nurse went and turned on the radio station. I got to listen while he worked on me. I'm not one for much anxiety, but the music made me feel more comfortable. In addition, it was a very minor procedure and this doc knows his stuff.

[finch]

Well, last weekend I had a birthday party for four year olds and then immediately had to turn around and get the apartment ready for my in-laws visiting. Honestly my usual coping mechanism is to keep dragging my ass through it as long as I have to and then sleep it off, which is currently scheduled for Tuesday.

[redrose]

That tends to be mine too.

[silveradept]

I have been known, once the shuffle and the chaos is done, to deliberately block off time for things that are fun and to do those things until I have either burnt out the accumulated stress or spent enough time at it that I get motivated to get back into the routine.