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serynPost gym drink: almond milk with cinnamon sugar and vanilla. It's better without the vanilla.
Current irritation: knitting needle "storage solutions" that do nothing about actually storing tools for knitting in a useful way. I don't want them folded up in a book with pockets. I'm sure not going to pay that kind of money for something that could be replicated with a binder and couple dozen inserts from the office supply store. If I cared about how it looked, I could decoupage over the binder, but it's not like the needle cases people are selling are attractive to me.
Good things from this week:
1) when I saw one of the replacement volunteers for the knitting group I bailed on at Whole Foods, I was able to say I was planning to go... and really I was, but only because I had to give a ride to the woman I'd taken over from because she's too disabled to drive.
1a) So having gotten roped into driving someone around actually worked to my advantage. I hadn't wanted to do it but how do you say no? Worse, she asked about last week and canceled an hour before I was going to leave but somehow assumed we had rescheduled without saying so.
1b) My mechanic did my car first so I didn't have to go home and come back, which meant my car was ready after second breakfast and I was able to go to the grocery store and to deal with that knitting group thing.
2) I fixed the scanner. It wasn't hard once I figured it all out. I needed to download the uninstall driver program and to grab their ginormous "every driver we have ever made" pack and install that. Then it just magically worked. I was able to scan and print copies of medical receipts to hopefully get the medical savings account money straightened out. I can't understand why anyone bothers with that because it's such a hassle. I know it's tax free money, that can't be tax free any other way, but I've spent something like 15 hours dealing with this already, even at minimum wage, I make more than what I saved on taxes. (Because we didn't allocate a lot of money to it.)
We've had this printer/scanner thing for years and the scanner has never worked until today. I'm like completely awesome.
3) Simon asked me out on a date and let me look forward to it for several days before canceling and has offered a raincheck. Like it's important to him to make me happy. And that might not sound like a good thing, but neither of us was hugely enthusiastic about the activity choice, so the anticipation is better than actually going.
There are a lot of things that aren't going well, but I can't talk about them in public, and locking the posts means there's a penalty to being my friend. That's a stupid way to treat people you like.
There was one thing though:
My tai chi instructor was talking about what "healthy" means to Chinese people and supposedly it's not about blood pressure and enzyme ratios, it's more practical. Because you're healthy if you can sit and stand and walk and have friends and get along with your family and have a good sex life and digest food you eat. It was a shocking list because I fail almost everything on it. I digest food okay, but my sex life is crap (I got more kisses the year I was 15 than I have in the past 3 years combined.), I can't sit comfortably because all chairs are too tall, I can't walk comfortably for very long because my feet are damaged, I don't have friends (I have people I vaguely know and virtual people. (I think virtual people count, but it certainly doesn't count to the tai chi instructor.)) I am estranged from my family. But my blood pressure is okay (yay, exercise! the people who taught us to hate moving our bodies during PE should be tortured for making everything non-still seem so nasty.) and supposedly all my enzyme ratios are tolerable. I really don't understand why an offhand comment during the "let me lecture while we repeat this" part of class upset me so much. Not even with the teacher, because it wasn't saying "You are a failure!" It was presenting interpreted facts as truth. It wasn't quite a paradigm shift, but I could see the other perspective from here. And it's not a huge surprise that I'm often unhappy. The supposed healthy life measurements I fail would probably sustain me in emotional troughs.
Current irritation: knitting needle "storage solutions" that do nothing about actually storing tools for knitting in a useful way. I don't want them folded up in a book with pockets. I'm sure not going to pay that kind of money for something that could be replicated with a binder and couple dozen inserts from the office supply store. If I cared about how it looked, I could decoupage over the binder, but it's not like the needle cases people are selling are attractive to me.
Good things from this week:
1) when I saw one of the replacement volunteers for the knitting group I bailed on at Whole Foods, I was able to say I was planning to go... and really I was, but only because I had to give a ride to the woman I'd taken over from because she's too disabled to drive.
1a) So having gotten roped into driving someone around actually worked to my advantage. I hadn't wanted to do it but how do you say no? Worse, she asked about last week and canceled an hour before I was going to leave but somehow assumed we had rescheduled without saying so.
1b) My mechanic did my car first so I didn't have to go home and come back, which meant my car was ready after second breakfast and I was able to go to the grocery store and to deal with that knitting group thing.
2) I fixed the scanner. It wasn't hard once I figured it all out. I needed to download the uninstall driver program and to grab their ginormous "every driver we have ever made" pack and install that. Then it just magically worked. I was able to scan and print copies of medical receipts to hopefully get the medical savings account money straightened out. I can't understand why anyone bothers with that because it's such a hassle. I know it's tax free money, that can't be tax free any other way, but I've spent something like 15 hours dealing with this already, even at minimum wage, I make more than what I saved on taxes. (Because we didn't allocate a lot of money to it.)
We've had this printer/scanner thing for years and the scanner has never worked until today. I'm like completely awesome.
3) Simon asked me out on a date and let me look forward to it for several days before canceling and has offered a raincheck. Like it's important to him to make me happy. And that might not sound like a good thing, but neither of us was hugely enthusiastic about the activity choice, so the anticipation is better than actually going.
There are a lot of things that aren't going well, but I can't talk about them in public, and locking the posts means there's a penalty to being my friend. That's a stupid way to treat people you like.
There was one thing though:
My tai chi instructor was talking about what "healthy" means to Chinese people and supposedly it's not about blood pressure and enzyme ratios, it's more practical. Because you're healthy if you can sit and stand and walk and have friends and get along with your family and have a good sex life and digest food you eat. It was a shocking list because I fail almost everything on it. I digest food okay, but my sex life is crap (I got more kisses the year I was 15 than I have in the past 3 years combined.), I can't sit comfortably because all chairs are too tall, I can't walk comfortably for very long because my feet are damaged, I don't have friends (I have people I vaguely know and virtual people. (I think virtual people count, but it certainly doesn't count to the tai chi instructor.)) I am estranged from my family. But my blood pressure is okay (yay, exercise! the people who taught us to hate moving our bodies during PE should be tortured for making everything non-still seem so nasty.) and supposedly all my enzyme ratios are tolerable. I really don't understand why an offhand comment during the "let me lecture while we repeat this" part of class upset me so much. Not even with the teacher, because it wasn't saying "You are a failure!" It was presenting interpreted facts as truth. It wasn't quite a paradigm shift, but I could see the other perspective from here. And it's not a huge surprise that I'm often unhappy. The supposed healthy life measurements I fail would probably sustain me in emotional troughs.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 01:39 am (UTC)Oh, bullshit. We celebrate with you in the open posts and commiserate in the locked ones.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 04:14 am (UTC)My problems with family connectedness are based on my parents being really unhappy to have had children, but to have done so far away from their own kin. There was no one "family" around who could have fed us when my mother was too drunk to care.
I was trying for "familial obligations have to go both ways and they buggered off when I was helpless so I don't feel I owe them anything" but thinking about it... your family doesn't seem all that wonderful from your descriptions and you still appreciate them even though they don't seem to appreciate you. So it must be cultural expectation or innate emotional context or something I'm lacking.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-21 05:08 am (UTC)Mm, that's certainly not my understanding, though it seems to me that there are multiple ways to understand it. For my mother, for example--who doesn't share the same cultural basis as your instructor--it's part of a subtle awareness of one's place in the world, which is a starting point for bending rules and changing one's status. Sure, familial strife can lead to personal stress, but that's true regardless of cultural context if one isn't a total sociopath.
My father is not wonderful, true; my mother and I are pretty different, but (especially since I finished college or so) she and I get along well. It's true (as you imply) that both parents raised me to be loyal to family even if family doesn't treat one well. I don't know how much of that is cultural expectation. I do know that my father both emphasized it more and has been semi-oblivious to how he's held up his end of it, but he's always been more needy than my mother, emotionally speaking. There've been several discrete moments when I've decided consciously not to cut him off (largely because his brother and I are his only family), which is not so different from your sense of feeling that you don't owe your family anything....