Adventures du jour!
I know white people aren’t supposed to be ashy but I’m ashy. I’m not sure how ANYTHING can be dried out in this humidity. C’est la Florida!
Happy day after Turkey Day! I hope everything went well with you and yours.
Yesterday sucked for Ray and I, but it sucked less than last year, and OMG it sucked less than 2020 by exponential factors.
Thanksgiving used to be my favorite holiday (just slightly ahead of Halloween, sorry!). Then shit got weird with the friend group I was in, at the same time the ex was pressuring me to drop them (because he hated feeling grateful, as far as I can tell). I want to say that the weirdness wasn’t really about the 2016 elections, but it sort of was, for me at least: the token Republican in the group decided to start harassing me online, nobody in that group had my back, I blocked him and avoided events he said he’d be at. Other life stuff happened, individual friendships throughout the group were broken or strained, and there wasn’t the resilience needed to recover. After that, though, the ex put pressure on me not to join any *other* groups, and found ways to make sure most of my socializing was with people who were primarily his friends or coworkers so he could control things. While many of those people are perfectly fine folks, I was either never close to them, or they turned out to be more fucking assholes I got close to. As you do.
Fortunately, I still had my writer friends (many of you!), and you have provided threads back out of the maze. Thank you.
After the ex and I split up, I was stuck in the House of Doom for Covid/financial reasons and spent Thanksgiving 2020 upstairs in a bedroom without access to the kitchen. 2021 I was in St. Petersburg with Ray, lonesome for a real Thanksgiving and a big group to share it with–but safe. The ex contacted us the day after on one of his many fishing attempts, sending messages of “love” and “sympathy” to see what kind of response he’d get. None, as it turned out. But it was unnerving.
This year, Ray and I both had to admit that we were on high alert again.–Even if he does try to contact us, it’ll be easier to resist the urge to say anything back. I give sooooo much less of a shit at this point, with either anger or affection, and I’ve done soooooo much work to recover things that I stripped away for survival’s sake. I’m in a better spot. Ray seems so, too.
BUT yesterday still sucked, and I still had to reach out to a friend for support (thank you!) before I felt human.
The good parts: Ray made scalloped potatoes the way the gods intended. I’ll have to see which recipe she used, because dayyyyumm. And Polska Kielbasa, because I said I didn’t want a turkey or a big ham or anything and she said, “Well *I* want sausage.” It was just right with the potatoes. I made a Fancy Salad to go with the potatoes: greens, blackberries, dried fruit, nuts, cheese, prosciutto, balsamic vinaigrette.–I forgot to make the pickled red onions, or I woulda added those, too.
We watched more Iruma-kun. We’re at the episodes were the badass student council president love interest gets drugged to make her meek and modest, like a good girl should. Everyone freaks the fuck out because it means the bread-and-circuses rich dude might actually be able to take over the student council using charisma and repetition of nonsense. It’s a wise cartoon.
I’ve always liked this quote, although it’s probably not by anybody in particular (although often attributed to Einstein):
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
At any rate, much later, after I finally broke down and cried most of it out and talked to the friend, Ray brushed my hair for me for like ten minutes. It was good. I raised a good one, as in, Ray was always a good one and I didn’t fuck it up too badly.
Read a bunch of webtoons, binging on Eggnoid in particular; read part of a book on a funeral director letting go of his fear of death; listened to friends’ videos.
Slept decently.
Yoga this morning: my on-again off-again hip (the stuff that feels knifelike) is starting to be something I can manage by relaxing one particular muscle. I can’t isolate it very well, but it’s a start.
Yoga Anatomy:
“The weight of a body part is a product of the resistance created by gravity, which is a fundamental source of resistance for everything on this planet. We negotiate this force every time we lift an arm, stand up, roll over, or take a breath. Added resistance also comes from other forces, such as the weight of something being carried, an opposing muscle contraction, or even an emotional state (for example, excitement, anger, or the effort not to cry might create resistance, while relief, happiness, or distraction might decrease resistance).”
It feels like that muscle in my hip is constantly tense due to an anterior pronation (or rotation? I’m not sure) through my hips, with the knifelike spikes in pain due to anger and (go figure) the effort not to cry. If I let go of the anger or have a good cry, the knifelike pains stop, but the fundamental tension in the hip is still there, so it’s easy for the least little thing to put me back in pain.–I’m working on stretching the muscles at the front of the hip, but it looks like my knees and ankles might also be involved. Still trying to sort out All the Things.
Walk: lots of lovely fog. I took a picture of a foggy part of a park and went back to check the picture to see if I got it reasonably in focus, and BAM noticed a ghostly pink speck on the picture. One second, nobody was there; the next, there was a person. In a pink shirt. I zoomed in on her and took another picture. She was just standing there, so I walked up to her and said hello and showed her the picture and told her how it felt like she’d appeared out of nowhere. She laughed and said she’d been watching a couple of raccoons up in a tree, chasing each other. “I thought they were a bird,” she kept saying. “A really big bird.” We watched them together for a moment.
I have to say, those were some BIG raccoons. Fat, too. Like, bigger than a golden retriver? Not horrific science experiment mutation from Goosebumps big. But big.
I got more story ideas for the next scene of the WIP. I started it earlier this week but couldn’t get into the violence. The Minor Bad is literally knocking at the door to get let in and I went nooooooooooo not today. Then skipped yesterday entirely.
The good news is I figured out how to run the scene without killing any of my characters or getting them sucked into police custody overnight. The bad news is that UGH, YUCK I don’t wanna.
I’m going to spend today telling myself that nobody’s going to follow me through this story. Nobody. It’s too much. So, therefore, it’s completely safe to write authentically. Everyone will have given up by this point. It’s fine. [Sticks fingers in ears.] LA LA LA LA LA.
I’m still consumed with jealousy over LaVyrle Spencer’s writing, but I wrote about that elsewhere so I won’t mention it again. NEITHER SHOULD YOU. Oh well…if I actually felt like I were a master of my craft at that level, I’d zone out on writing. As it is, writing seems endlessly difficult and probably therefore endlessly interesting.
WAAAAAH I DON’T WANNA. Wish me luck.