(no subject)

I haven't written anything here for a few months. I think I'm not quite back in my own life yet -- I feel like I have too much to tend to.

Most of the gardening I need to deal with is emotional, as in, I still need to clear up stuff floating around my head before I can face the world openly. I'm not having much luck Just Being lately.

competence, day one

Actually, this is day 9800 and something if you count from when I was born... Fennel 10K is coming up soon and if you're reading this I'm pretty sure you're invited...

So I want to be less of a laggard. This is partially a matter of willpower, partially a matter of teaching myself how to learn things, and partially a matter of designing clever ways for me to remember to do the dumb things I gotta do. This has been a bee in my bonnet for a while, and today's nothing special except that earlier today I had a moment of true and perfect incompetence. I didn't do anything WRONG, you understand, I just accepted that there was nothing fundamental about me which made me capable of doing anything at all. It's all effort and learning and good habits. I just need more of them.

First thing I did when I got home, I made myself a sandwich. Yesterday I went to the store with the intent of buying ingredients I could make something out of. This turned out to be bread, swiss cheese, and tomatoes. These were selected in part because I knew what to do with them, and part because when I got to the store I realized I had no idea what there was in our pantry except for a bottle of "Dijonnaise" mustard/mayonnaise that had caught my eye by being alarming. So I bought stuff that went with that.

I can't cook. Making a sandwich isn't exactly cooking, but slicing cheese and produce is the sort of thing that intimidates me about trying to cook for myself (it takes so much time! why not get Indian take-out?) so I am giving myself a little credit. I sliced way too much cheese, because apparently I have a pretty inaccurate idea of what a slice of bread looks like. Imagine that! Slice of bread. Oh well.

I took the sandwiches out onto the back porch, having turned on the light in my bedroom and set some music playing so I'd have light and entertainment while eating. The music was too quiet, but that was okay. I'll get it right next time.

I was drinking seltzer water, because someone suggested flavored seltzer might be more palatable to me than plain water (can't stand it!). The seltzer was painfully bitter, though; by the end of one sandwich I was nearly gagging every time I took a sip, so no dice there.

Cleaned up after sandwiches. I even remembered to plug the kitchen fan back in (I needed the outlet for the toaster) so I get minor competent roommate points for that.Tomatoes went in a plastic bag, not sealed but twisted around a whole lot so it's kind of maybe airtight. I hope that's good enough. Bread in fridge too, because I fear mold and who knows when anyone will eat more of that bread.

Next: laundry. I've done this a lot, sometimes when it wasn't even a crisis yet. But it's been building up and in fact the room rearrangement sort of left clothes everywhere. Out of perversity, I decide that I will do the laundry wearing children's underpants and a trenchcoat and that's it. (Partially this was dictated by wanting to wash all my real underwear at once. I don't have enough of it, especially if you only count the pairs that I don't mind other people seeing, which is, I don't know, slightly a concern.)

I felt totally obscene walking down to the washing machine like that. The trenchcoat's really too warm for this weather; I think even my bathrobe (currently in a duffel under the kitchen table, having served as an overcoat for Burning Man) would be better: less clammy.

I happen to know there's space in the dresser for clean clothes. I might fold them to save space, or I might jam them all in, decreasing the chance of me doing another load of laundry before this one's mostly used up. Tough call. Folding, despite being a necessary component of civilized human society, really hurts my back. Plus, I'm sorry to reduce it to this level, but I'm pretty sure that everyone who has ever kissed me did so even though they'd seen me wearing wrinkled clothes for most of their prior interactions with me, so I suspect some of clothes-folding's air of inevitability is just hype.

Now I'm listening to Rick Springfield and writing this. Why? Because he's a pop genius. But why else? I'm not sure. I think there's a point to thinking about this stuff. Even if it bores you all senseless I suspect I need to simply declare that the things I feel bad about not doing (or not doing well, or often, or...) are not as simple as I've been made to think. I need to somehow put my own stamp on simple goddamn activities. And at the moment, my livejournal isn't doing anything else, so it might as well be for that.

Maybe tomorrow I will fill out that form at work whose absence has been keeping me from getting paid for the last few weeks. I was on vacation! I get, like, half a pass on that.