I hate Wednesdays. This is what my Wednesdays look like:

7:00am - Wake up. Groan because I’m already tired - yesterday I worked (drove to and from Chilliwack) and taught a night class (Richmond), and there aren’t enough hours between the end of class and the morning alarm to become rested.

7:30am - Hit the road in the Sprite Car for Chilliwack, which I have to arrive at before nine so I can be there to greet my supervisor’s first client of the day. She is invariably ten minutes late and it has fallen to me to be the one present and on time to let them in and keep them busy until she arrives. Note that I live 100 kilometres and a major bridge away from the office. She lives about eight. Great. It’s not even 9am and I’m already resentful.

9:00am - First client of the day. I observe and am impressed but also disheartened by my supervisor’s skillz. Will I ever get this?

10:00am - 12:00pm - More clients, and some supervision from my supervisor.  I am not getting this.

Noon to one: lunch, which is not really a break because we talk shop all the way though. There is this lady on the till at Subway who is a very nice woman but also a slow talker and the line takes forever because she’s cracking stupid jokes and inquiring about everyone’s day. If she were a man she’d have fat uncle pants on, they’re those kind of jokes. When she talks she stops working the till. She never stops talking. My sandwich wilts on the counter waiting for me; we exchange longing glances. Plus, today they screwed up and dumped a bunch of dripping chicken on my bun - for once a staffer was fast, too fast for me to prevent chicken. I ask for a new bun, the girl glares, I feel both angry and embarrassed. I just want my vegan sandwich for god’s sake.

1:00pm - 6:00pm - more clients. By my last client my brain is a pudding, I have no idea what I’m doing, and no idea what the client is doing either. I’m hungry and tired. I will never get this.

6:05pm - Go out to the parking lot to find yet another fucking happy-gram from the local commissionaires of whoever the fuck has nothing better to do with their time than put little yellow papers under my windshield wiper congratulating me for using the club. Maybe I’m a jerk but I find this condescending and incredibly irritating. I don’t need some small town busybody to tell me it’s good that I locked my car. You know what’s not good? Seeing a ticket on your car and experiencing the rush of anxiety because you think you just got a ticket. And then finding out it’s a stupid fucking happy-gram. You know what I’d like to do with that happy-gram? Find the person who put it there and shove it right up their ass. How’s that for happy, motherfucker? Instead I crumple it up and throw it on the ground with what I hope is obvious disgust.

6:30 - 8:00pm - Dinner with my brother. Finally I am enjoying the day. No sense in hitting the highway at this time, and it’s pleasant to share a meal. We gossip about family members and lament the lack of vegan options at Boston Pizza.

8:45pm - In the middle of my drive, exit the highway because for some reason I seriously have to pee, even though I was well trained in toddlerhood to go before I leave the house. My bladder hates me. I hate me. I also hate this traffic, which, ha ha, has not appreciably decreased since the afternoon. Some lu-lu is riding my ass even though I am in the slow lane and doing 110km/hr. I entertain elaborate fantasies of slamming on my brakes and killing us both just for the sheer (though temporary) joy of being right: see what happens when you tailgate, you dipshit? But of course I don’t. Barely.

9:20pm - get home, a full 14 hours after leaving. Discover Husband is not home - that’s for the best, I’m not fit for human company and he should be spared my mood. I always feel guilty when I’m a turd to him, he doesn’t deserve it. Frankly, neither do I, which is why I feel like flinging myself off the building to end this frustration and anger. Instead I take a shower. I hate my shampoo, it smells too smelly. Also, I bought a vegan soap that is so big I can’t hold it in one hand. It’s absurdly huge. I have to manhandle it with both hands to soap up, which is kind of funny… but kind of makes me want to cry too. My frustration tolerance has evaporated.

I know lots of people work longer days, do harder jobs, experience greater stresses. But speaking purely subjectively, Wednesdays just kill me. They are too long, too hard, too tiring. I enter them tired from the late night on Tuesdays, and it’s all downhill from there. There are things I need in order to function like a normal person: downtime, breaks, private time, rest time. None of these exist on Wednesday except at dinner time… bless dinner time!

The most interesting thing about this post to me is seeing the progressive emergence of my rage over the course of the day. My actual client hours are the best times - I may feel like I’m totally floundering but I’m also totally immersed, totally focused, really trying hard. They often end with me feeling wiped out and guilty for being such a novice. It takes a lot of work to climb the big learning curve I’m at the bottom of. It’s daunting and simply knowing that adds an element of stressed out resignation to everything I do. Sometimes I wish I didn’t know how hard it will be, how long it will take to master my craft. It makes me feel despair to know that I have to live in this limbo of mediocre work (at best) for probably 2 or 3 more years.

And there’s the usual - family stress, eustress over Husband’s new job (he likes to stay super private here, so I’ll just say he got into a program he’s been angling for for about four years, and this is a MAJOR celebration for us and him. He survived seven interviews and a massive bundle of paperwork and he’s about to embark on a fellowship to become something much more suited to his temperament than his current work. I couldn’t be prouder or happier! Way to go, Moof! Yay!), my ongoing fears about my stupid fucking nerves, Canada Post can’t find my parcel.

But here is the upside: my house is disheveled but it reads Husband… I can see what he ate, where he sat, and what he did while he was home. It’s comforting to see his spoor about the house. I have a great place to live and though it is so, so hard, a career I can work on. And… okay, I ran out of sunny things to say. Maybe I should have kept that happy-gram after all.

For the last six weeks, I have been teaching a parenting group.

I’ll wait while you finish laughing.  Yes, I know I don’t have any kids.  What I have is theory.  Okay.  I totally accept being ignorant as an egg.  Now we move on.

Tonight something amazing happened.  See, the purpose of the group is psychoeducational.  It’s not group therapy, it’s learning.  My partner teacher and I come prepared with lessons and handouts and all that stuff, which is the easy part.  I know the material so there’s no difficulty there.  What has been difficult is my lingering feeling of being a fraud, because I don’t have kids and have never taught parenting before, and a feeling of anxiety and fear lest the theory I am teaching turn out to be a total flop.

I know this shouldn’t be the case.  The stuff we’re teaching is old as the hills and has a very well established track record.  And you don’t need to be a great player to teach people to play great baseball.  But since it’s my first time, I have felt like something of a liar when I assure the parents in my group that what I’m telling them to do will work, because they have some BIG problems.  People don’t come to parenting school because everything is fine at home.  So I feel tremendous pressure to be useful, and to give them information that really works, that will really help them in a nuts and bolts kind of way.

Tonight though, the inner therapist broke through and me and my partner teacher scrapped the curriculum.  The last two sessions were major downloads of information and we sensed they needed a chance to integrate the material as a group.  And wow, did some amazing things happen.

As soon as we let everyone know that tonight’s agenda was problem solving with their concrete examples rather than learning new material, which was basically code for “free for all,” they started really expressing themselves.  We didn’t even stay talking about particular problems for long - soon they were just expressing general feelings of alienation, frustration, mixed emotions, all of that.  All talk of theory was gone - it rapidly transformed into what we would consider an early stage group therapy experience.  My partner teacher and I also slid from teacher mode to the (more comfortable, for us) facilitator mode, and next thing you know the moms are talking about when they didn’t bond to their baby, or the times when they hate their child and being a parent, or their fears of abusing their kids as they were abused.  It was very real and amazing to be a part of.  They’ve been working together for a month and a half and have built trust and rapport to the point where they can be honest.  We’ve worked to make sure the environment of our group is non-judgmental, and tonight it paid off big time.

This was my first experience of a “live” group, and properly speaking, it’s not really group therapy.  But some elements were present and it was electrifying to watch it happen.  A lot of the chemicals were in the petri dish, and some of them reacted.  I even think one member had a significant breakthrough of complex emotion - not normally something associated with a psychoeducational group!

Also, my parents have each reported improvements in their kids’ behaviours and in their relationship with them, which they credit to our lessons.  So the method I’m teaching is (whew!) working.  I feel just fantastic!

Also, it feels great to see how I am helping real people with real problems.  They are grateful and happy, which fills me with joy.  There’s some pride in there, and some relief, and a lot of altruism.  There’s just nothing like giving to others in a way that helps them.  We started as a hodge podge bunch of strangers plus two hesitant grad students, and ended up a bonded unit of support that created a place safe enough to confess hating your baby (if only sometimes).

This is why I’m becoming a therapist.

In furtherance of our no satellite policy (I mean really, isn’t TV watching just about 80% time wasting?) Husband and I are doing some strategic downloading of TV shows that don’t suck for the occasional viewing.  I know, that’s still kind of watching TV - only with the element of “gee now that it’s on I guess I’ll sit here for five hours” removed.  And commercials removed too.  Okay.  So I am appealing to you for advice on good shows to acquire.  Because I’m really not up on pop culture and don’t know what the good series are.

Basically, I enjoy a good mystery or crime drama or just about anything as long as it is NOTHING like CSI.  Holy crap, how can anyone watch that?  Seriously.  I cannot handle an hour of nothing but wise cracking smart assery and dominance plays- it’s like a fourteen year old jock’s idea of what adults might be like: angry, petty, hostile, and immature.  People just don’t interact like that and, while I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, this just pushes it all way too far.  End rant.

Shows I have enjoyed include Deadwood, Cracker, Dexter, Wire in the Blood, and I’m just starting to watch The Shield but it hasn’t fully passed its “not like CSI” test so I may not finish the first season.  This is also why I deleted The Wire after watching only the first episode.  Hostile cops who just shout at each other is so over done.  Please, can we watch shows about people, not stereotypes?  (I do have some rumbling Wire guilt since everyone seems to love it but I dunno… if it’s all like that first episode I’ll hate it.)

What would you recommend?  What have you loved?  What should I spend my precious bandwidth on acquiring?  It doesn’t have to be new, just good. And by good I mean NOTHING LIKE CSI.

kthxbai!

Just got home from dinner and drinks with Husband’s good friend Z.  I am a serious lightweight so my two drinks have pretty much ruined me for useful purposes.  Such as talking, walking, et cetera.  When did this happen?

I used to be hardcore.  At one time I worked for the Vancouver Food Bank (data entry - not recommended).  I was friends with the guys who were in the shipping and warehouse departments, and every Friday we’d be off work by 3 or 4 - and down in the Ivanhoe or the pub in the Patricia Hotel within half an hour.  I know.  Super classy.  But at that time it seemed like there was a certain cache in drinking at the scuzziest bars the downtown east side had to offer.  Now I’m just glad I didn’t get hepatitis.  Anyway, at that time we were always ordering pitchers and I always ended those Fridays staggering and barfing - but I earned it.  I drank a lot of beer, cheap beer, and staggering and barfing is what you sign up for when you drink cheap beer at the Ivanhoe.  It’s not what you sign up for when you have one pint and one highball at a reasonable pub, but now that I am older and more reasonable the result is the same.  Less liquor, same punishment.

No wonder I don’t drink often.

Anyway, I am nervously monitoring my internal processes for barf-sign.  You know what I’m talking about.  The grumbling tummy, the weird physiological disombobulation, and finally, the mouth sweats.  When your salivary glands kick in you know it’s all over.  So far I’m okay but having imbibed two whole ounces over three hours is, if you are me, dangerous.  So I wait.  And blog!  And hopefully don’t get sick.  I will, as always, keep you posted to my gross bathroom habits.  You know you love it.

Oh!  I totally forgot about the bites!  Oh man!  About five days ago I put new sheets on the bed (green, to match the summer duvet cover), and I guess there was some kind of biting insect folded into the linens because I woke up with NINE bites.  A cluster of five on one thigh, a pair on my ankle, and one on each hip.  And holy shit did I have a  bad reaction to them.  The bite zones swelled up, turned blotchy purple, itched like fuck, and grew a red, inflamed rings all around them.  They look like big, swollen hickeys.  Seriously, my thigh was puffed out about a centimetre, in an area the size of a baseball.  And all purple.  Totally gross.  Husband has been monitoring them and giving me dire warnings about skin infections, but finally they seem to be abating.  I tell you, if my digital camera hadn’t just bit the biscuit I would post pictures because the insane reaction is hard to imagine without a visual.  It looks like I got bitten by a nuclear tarantula.  What the hell was in my sheets?  Gives me the creeps, I tell you!  And - overshare coming - I sleep without underpants, and have serious heebie jeebies imagining whatever it was having access to, you know, my private bits.  Yecch!

I try not to drive in the city because it really sucks. But today I was forced into it because I had to take Husband’s laundry in to the drycleaner, and since I’ve procrastinated on it, there were about forty dress shirts to be lugged. It turns out forty dress shirts weigh about eighty pounds. You wouldn’t think it’s possible but it is!  So there was no way I was going to lug all that stuff on the skytrain.  But the laundry must be done, so I needed the car solution.  And that’s life as me in this marriage.

Boy, didn’t that opening sound just painfully domestic/sexist? Disclaimer: my husband doesn’t oppress me. Not even a smidge. We decided early on that we didn’t want to argue about household stuff, which is what happens when people share chores. So we divided up the household labour. Also, Husband has a good paying professional job which he works full time at, and I’m a student who is currently qualified only for jobs that pay as well in a month as what he makes in two days. And finally, I get contentment and satisfaction from keeping house, including cooking and cleaning. Combine these three premises and you get an inescapable, logical conclusion: Husband goes to work and brings home the bacon (but not literally), and I stay home and do the household work. Somehow our carefully thought out and discussed division of labour resulted in a thoroughly fifties style living arrangement. Except I’m in school and he doesn’t call me “toots.”

I’ve probably explained all that before but anyway, here it is again.

Point being, that I managed to do my errands in under an hour, which included a stop downtown and one in east Van, plus coming home after and two different parking lots. It’s a miracle! I’m tickled pink, frankly!

Now I’m off to walk to the local bank and get papers for rolling our coins. Husband offloads his change every night when he gets home from work, and it collects in a pair of plastic tubs on the kitchen counter (one for loonies and toonies, one for the smaller change). I pilfer from the bigger change liberally but finally the volume outstripped my ability to spend it and it’s time to roll it all up.

Okay.  So this isn’t an exciting post.  But I like it, because it’s like the parts of my life that I like best: relaxed, low key, content.  I see it like this: there are exciting and wild times in all our lives, but if that’s your only source of joy you’re in trouble.  Taking a sense of fulfillment from the every day mundane things ensures you will never run out of sustenance.  So here’s me, enjoying my mild day.  I feel great!

Spring cleaning has been going on in this house.  This morning I submitted my last essay of the term by email, and spent the rest of the day cleaning shit up.  Yesterday I did the bathrooms, foyer and bedroom, and today I tackled the floors, kitchen, living room, and laundry.  If I do say so myself, I rocked the cleaning hard.

Except for the dining room table.  This endless pile of mess is the province of my husband, who I believe I have mentioned gets about ten pieces of mail every day.  Not counting what he brings home from work.  Or what comes from the accountant.  So… yeah.  He’s a little like Pig Pen, only there are wafting sheets of paper fluttering about in his wake instead of dust.

I have been hatching a plan to move him into the office.  Because we have one!  We have a second bedroom which has a desk and even a window.  He could do all his computing in there and, I fantasize, bring his papers in there too.  At the moment we both work on the dining table.  This is a less than satisfactory arrangement because all his papers end up here, and following the broken window theory, I too am messy in this environment.  This drives me nuts because you can see the dining table from every room of the apartment except the master bedroom and ensuite, so it always seems like this place is a mess.  Even when I’ve just spent two full days cleaning.  Like today and yesterday.

I’m not one to nag, so mostly I say nothing about the mess.  Every few weeks I gather all Husband’s papers up into a single pile, which I place next to his laptop in what I imagine to be a very enticing invitation to clean it all up and sort it all away.  Of course this never happens.  Eventually, there are three or four piles and I move them all into the office so I don’t have to look at them.  (Right around this point Husband needs one of those papers stat and gives me stink eye because he can’t find them.)

But I’m sick of this pattern.  There is always debris on the dining table.  And sometimes, like now, there’s also food mess that can only be addressed by changing the table cloth, but do you have any idea how labour intensive it is to change the cloth when there are about eight metric tons of paper on top of it?  So I need to move this man into the office.

Which needs to be cleaned first, because it’s full of piles of papers that impede all activity therein - such as walking and, perhaps, breathing.  The tragedy is I can’t clean those piles myself because only Husband knows the arcane and esoteric secrets of what to keep, what to shred, what to recycle. But one glorious day he’ll be in the office… and I’ll have a clear dining table.

And then I’ll be lonely for his company because I’ll never see him again.

Seriously, how can one little car be such a pain in the ass?  I know Husband loves it (it was his gift to himself after finishing his first graduate degree) but I am already planning the nice, comfy sedan, complete with back seat, that we will buy as soon as this car bites it or we have a baby.  You can’t have a baby in a Sprite Car.  You should have it in a hospital!  Ba-dum-bum!

Anyway, today I was driving to Chilliwack during what I didn’t know at the time is the coldest April since 1964.  I know we’re in Canada but we’re in the south west corner of it and we don’t get any winter here!  We certainly don’t get winter in April!  So imagine my surprise when it started to alternate between snow and hail on the highway.  I immediate freaked out because, as I go on and on about here, the stupid car weighs like three ounces and has summer tires (I know you’re thinking, buy some all season radials, woman! but who would think you’d need them in VANCOUVER in the fucking SPRING!?).  I’m terrified of dying in a horrible snowy crash, not only because the car slides if you breathe wrong but also because it is a convertible and I always imagine flipping over and something hard and skull-crushy coming through the rag top.  (By the way, we do have a roll bar of the proper height, but what if the car flips and lands right on a rock?)

So I slow down, and turn on the wipers, and WHOOSH, the driver’s side windshield wiper rips right off and flies away.

Then I crapped my pants.

And then I drove reeeeeally, reeeeeeally slowly down the highway from Langley, where the Sprite Car fucked me yet again, to Clearbrook Road, which is the first exit that has humans and therefore the potential for a garage which stocks wiper blades for my car.  Because the whole assembly flew off.  All that was left was a metal bar sticking out from the place the wiper arm originates, just naked with its hooked end with nothing on it even slightly capable of pushing snow off a windshield.

I kind of panicked and kept the wipers on anyway, watching the little stick that was left scrape back and forth across with windshield, and give credit where credit it due, I must say it did a great job of clearing the snow off a strip of glass about forty centimetres long by about .3 millimetres wide.  Alas, my ocular endowment is not so powerful as to take advantage of the narrow window of visibility and I basically drove blind, squinting and trying to “look past the snow” the way you “look past the lights” of oncoming traffic at night when it rains.

Also, I was trying to not have a major regressive meltdown and just cry, because, hello, this car obviously has it out for me.  But then who would steer?  Ha ha, maybe someone who could see?

I finally make it to Clearbrook and got lucky (not literally… wait, is “get lucky” a literal reference to sex? If it’s a reference it must be figurative.  Okay, I literally got lucky) and there was a garage right off the highway that had a wiper assembly they could sell me, which went on with no trouble and I didn’t even get charged for labour.

I did however pay in years off my life because can you imagine anything scarier than driving blind in a snowstorm on summer tires in a car that will lose the inertial battle with any other car it hits?  Gah!

Okay, there are plenty of scarier things.  They are all very serious and you know them all anyway so I won’t make a list but the point I was trying to say is, I am very, VERY sick of finding myself in danger while engaging in routine activities (driving) in what are supposed to be safe conditions (Vancouver after March).

So here is my list of requirements for the next car we get, whenever that may be:

1. A sedan.  Four doors, back seat, trunk big enough to put more than two little carry-ons wedged in tight.  It will have a good solid weight and tires that don’t morph into skates when on snow.

2. Has air conditioning (SC does not)

3. Has a smooth ride.  I want to feel like I’m driving a sofa.  SC feels like you’re driving a vibrator.  And not in a sexy way.

4. Has good visibility.  Not only is SC very low, but it has a strangely engineered body shape wherein I never feel 100% sure of what is around me.  I drive much more conservatively in this car as a result.

The only thing I’d keep is the great responsiveness of the wheel - SC jumps when you twitch the steering wheel, and that has probably saved my life twice.  But that’s it!  The rest is so gone!

Gone I tell you!

My mom and I have always had a kind of weak relationship.  When I was growing up we were basically strangers; it seems to me now that month passed where all we said to one another was “when’s dinner?” and “do the dishes.”  We didn’t do things together, we didn’t sit and talk, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t like each other too much.  The reasons for that are many and varied, and probably too personal to go into.  But anyway, when my parents divorced when I was in college, I decided I was going to make an effort to forge a relationship with her.  Because otherwise I knew we’d never see each other again.

So I carried that torch for years.  When we saw each other, it was basically because I called her, I drove to her place, I made the effort.  Now, not exclusively of course.  Sometimes she called me.  But not too much.  And I’d go through phases of being pissed off at the state of affairs and declaring that I would no longer be doing all the contacting.  But I only talk big, and of course I’d decide it was more important to stay in touch with my mom than to expect her to call me, which clearly wasn’t going to happen.

Then I got married, and she did tons of stuff for me around the wedding.  Really, she went above and beyond.  It was incredible.

And then everything went back to normal.  Right now, my mom lives about five minutes away from me on 7th and I haven’t seen her since Christmas.  We have talked on the phone once in that time.

So are we the busiest people on earth?  Sort of.  I’m often out of town in Chilliwack and with school going on I always have things to do.  Though I always manage to have time to watch my shows and so on, so that tells you how busy I really am.  My mom works full time and does a lot of projects on the side (she does hair, makeup and styling for photographers), so her time is probably even tighter than mine.  But whenever I talk to her she’s always reporting doing all kinds of fun things with my step-siblings, bike rides and day trips and things.

So we’re not that busy.  She just doesn’t make time to include me in her life, and I’m sick of doing all the work.  And I’m now at a point where I no longer really care that much if I see her.  I don’t usually have much of a good time with her, since she’s wound up like a clock spring (probably because we don’t see each other often and she’s nervous) and I find the conversation often pretty dull.  That stuff never used to bother me, but now I find I just don’t care to be bothered tolerating it.

Recently she emailed me about visiting, and it was this really brash, insistent email about how We Must See Each Other! This Weekend! I Mean It!  And it really put me off, because hello, what gives you the right to get all pushy with a visit when you haven’t spoken to me in months?  I know she was trying to be enthusiastic and funny, but it doesn’t make up for years of pseudo-ignoring.  And it went over very flat with me.  As it happened it was a school weekend so I didn’t have the time to see her, and of course neither of us bothered to try and make a reschedule.

Here’s an interesting point: the relationship we’re falling into is exactly the same as my mom’s relationship with her mom.  Transgenerational transmission of neurosis is alive and well!

I know the thing to do is just keep on maintaining the contact, because that’s the right thing to do, but I lack the motivation.  It’s hard to summon up the energy to stay in touch with someone who doesn’t really want to stay in touch with you.  Well, she always says she does, but the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and my phone ain’t ringing.

But then again, neither is hers.

Tonight after dinner, Husband and I went for a walk.  It sounds like an innocent thing, but it is leading us in a new direction in our lives.

As we walked, we were talking about how nice it is to get out and do something, rather than just slug out in our typical post-dinner manner.  Which got us talking about how my particular vice is stupid TV.  Not that I seek out stupid TV at the expense of good TV, because no such effort is required: at least 95% of what is on is incredibly mindless.  And even that other 5% isn’t always that great.  Nonetheless I enjoy it.

Except that lately I’m not, or at least not as much.  I often find myself wishing the show would hurry up and end so I can get on to watching something else… which invariably fails to satisfy also.  Where I used to be calm and just digging the mindlessness of it all, now I feel empty and guilty the time it takes.  And I think I’m getting sick, after about ten years, of the crime drama.  They’re all the same.  What’s more, I’ve seen them all.

I am becoming aware of a certain restlessness in me.  I think I’ve been wasting a lot of time watching TV in order to mask that restlessness.  And here’s what I noticed tonight: when we were out walking, just watching the sun set and the dogs romp and all of that, there was no restlessness.  It wasn’t even like we were doing big conversation or anything.  We were just being together, out and about.  It wasn’t a waste of time.

TV is a facilitator for me to waste time.  Realize, though, that I’m not against time wasting in general.  A certain amount of it is a way to truly enjoy leisure, to bask in tasklessness.  But too much and it stops being a special time, and just becomes what you do all the fucking time, doing nothing, numbed out, trying to ignore that life is passing you by.  Or at least this is how I feel.  Down time isn’t special because it isn’t scarce.  Humans weren’t built to lie still in a supine position while staring fixedly at a single spot in space.  We were meant to create!  To learn!  To converse with others!  My life is slipping away because I slug out on the TV far too much.

Okay… TV is not the source of all that is bad in my life.  But it’s a symptom of a general rut I’ve sunk into.  I suffer from inertia of the hard-to-get-started type.  I need to get into my hard-to-stop intertia, and I think one way to do that is to remove what my beloved gramma called the idiot box.

Okay - weird moment.  As I typed that, I suddenly remembered that my gramma used to love to watch crime dramas, and I never really got into watching them until she died.  And now I’m ready to let go of them, possibly just out of objective boredom, but maybe because I no longer need that tie to her?  Maybe I was doing the watching for her, if you know what I mean, but now I feel ready to let go.  Anyway it spured a sudden crying bout which Husband kindly attended to by sitting out of his poker tournament (he loves me!).  And now back to our regular post…

So, I learn that TV is the sentinel element in some bad patterns of behaviour that I engage in.  And I think it’s time to cancel the satellite.  The only “joy” it brings me is company when I am lonely (I turn it on when Husband is away) and mindlessness otherwise.

What will I do with all that free time, things which I do far less of because of the TV?

1. read, and here I mean broaden my topics.  For example, I am very interested in insect life and snakes, would greatly enjoy a foray into some very basic biology books about how these creatures live and function.

2. quilt.  Takes a lot of time, and TV interferes with my willingness to set aside a block of time for the quilting.

3. cook

4. paint miniatures

5. learn new hobbies like herb gardening

6. take my bicycle out daily when it’s nice

7. Have regular after dinner walks with Husband

8. Visit my friends, either by inviting them over or by going to their houses or meeting out and about

9. Visit the aquarium, the art gallery, try new restaurants.

10. And when I need to slug out, read a crappy novel, or simply go for a walk, which is as mindless as you like.

This could spur me to do all kinds of social things too, like call friends who we say we should call and never get around to it, or host a dinner with friends, or go to a concert, or anything.  Just imagining this simple thing, canceling the TV, makes me feel like I could be freed to do so much more with my life.

And it’s not about adding more stress or work to my life.  It’s about making room for the things that don’t just take (attention and drive) but also give (in satisfaction, pride, learning, pleasure).  Who wouldn’t be happier if they spent their free time engaged in healthful activities, socialization, hobbies requiring skill, and daily strolls with one’s husband?

Plus, imagine how many fewer ads I’ll have to endure.  God I hate ads!  Where are the down sides?

So.  I decided that it is way worse to feel like I’m making someone miserable than it is to be right, and I again apologized to the person at school who I was in a fight with.  There are times to stick to your guns, but this was not one of them.  Thank god it all seems more or less resolved.

And the internet asshat?  Was disarmed by my refusal to fight back combined with a sincere apology for calling him an asshole (by accident of course), and wrote me a very thoughtful and nice letter responding to my actual issues, rather than just being a weiner.  So I am very happy (might we say superior?) to report that taking the high ground, being well behaved and treating even a jerk like a person has resulted in… drum roll please… the jerk acting like a person!

All that grad school pays off!

Today I had lots of things to do, including a boat load of housework and some school work and sundry other things, but ah fuck it, I went shopping instead.  And bought summer dresses.  Because, what the fuck.  It’s my first day of almost freedom from the semester and dammit, I’m going to waste it.  Woo!