On verbosity

Would you like to know the difference between me and K? (I am pretending you said yes, you would.) K uses words like dodgeballs, throwing as many as possible, as fast as possible. A hailstorm, a maelstrom, a tidal wave of words washes over me and I am drowning in them, and so I say nothing while I try to catch my breath and K celebrates a victory in leadership.

Me, I think words are like a game of Jenga, and I can only insert one here if I remove one from there. Words should be thoughtfully selected, measured and poured. Words are limited and precious, and must be employed strategically with no waste. Words are more powerful when there are less of them. 

I do not know if one of us is more right than the other. But I know we are playing two very different games. 

So many things I could have done

The job at the university is a three day a week thing, if I’m honest.  They think it’s a full time gig and employ me full time but I complete what needs to be done in three days which leaves me Fridays to do my own doctoral work (and more recently to visit T and build Lego flowers).  And on Mondays… well I accepted a counselling position which is a funny thing because that’s the world I left in frustration- but titrated down to one weekly dose it feels different.  I like it most days. I also work alone, which I prefer. 

But these kids are different from the kids where I used to work.  This is the gritty part of town and these are the kids who were kicked out of mainstream school.  About half of them live in foster care.  Today I met a fourteen-year old who tells me she sometimes drinks hand sanitizer when she can’t get a fix. Her school safety plan has a note about how we must keep hand sanitizer out of any unsupervised spaces.  This piece of information is still stuck in processing.  Sometimes I have thought of myself as having been exposed to some pretty grim stuff.  And this kid just blew my cover. I don’t know that much at all. 

 

No Day.

Today is not a Snow Day, it’s a No Day, and the disappointment feels more connected to cancer than it does to anything else.

Snow Day

I grew up on the Winter Prairies where there was no such thing as a Snow Day, although we often had snow.  Winter Prairie snow is dusty and dry and it doesn’t generally block roads or cause the kind of Armageddon that it causes here on the Wet Coast. Snow Days are a real possibility here and probably the only bad thing about working from home is missing out on the joy that a Snow Day brings.  However, tomorrow is an Out day, the one day a week I have decided to participate in the world, so if tomorrow is, in fact, a Snow Day, I will partake in joy with my friends.  

Let’s pretend that tomorrow is a Snow Day. I have no meetings booked because I am meant to be Out in the world.  If tomorrow is a Snow Day I will drive in the snow to the closed school to bring breakfast to the caretaker because that is a tradition.  And then I will go to the grocery store and buy things to make soup.  Coconut curry. With shrimp.  And cilantro, lots of cilantro.  If tomorrow is a Snow Day then I will bring soup to T and pretend we are on vacation and that she does not have cancer.  And then I will have a nap on the couch and dream about summer. 

Emotional cutoff

“An emotional cutoff is like dragging the family emotional umbilical cord around with you across any distance”… … … … …

Chaos and complexity

If social media had existed when I was in high school it would have been disastrous for me; my prefrontal cortex was lazy as hell and would not have protected me from making terrible decisions that would harm me later. 

In a meeting today K talked about wanting to plan a different type of orientation for our new students, something more “playful”. Although I taught theatre for fifteen or so years because I wanted something playful, the suggestion rankled for some reason. Playfulness feels intimate and I feel grossed out by the idea of being playful with strangers, particularly adults. I expressed my lack of interest in participating and left out the part about finding it distasteful. K made a note on her pad of paper. I am guessing she wrote bitch. 

I am navigating cancer with T and this is frightening. I feel impatient with her for her lack of boundaries and want to tell her that’s how I think the cancer got in. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that those of us with rigid boundaries are just as susceptible. It makes me sad that our childhoods have so much to say to us in the present, fucking epigenetics. 

I have been asked to write another chapter for the book that is coming out in the fall; I have to figure out how to use the research that I have already done without it being considered self-plagiarism. These kinds of stupid rules and technicalities are exhausting. My teaching docket is quite full and although teaching adults is infinitely more satisfying at this stage of my life, I am irritated by their anxieties. Don’t they know I have my own to grapple with? My cuticles continue to suffer and I have mostly given up trying to stop hurting them. A certain degree of self-abuse is tolerable. My teaching partners are disappointing. I prefer the courses that I teach alone. I do not ask my students what type of animal they would be if they were animals, I do not tempt them to be playful. I ask them to check out their own highlight reels and then line them up with the evidence and see what matches and what does not. 

Obstreperous

There is not much in life that throws off my rhythm more than spending time with my parents; the yearly visit winds down and my cuticles are red and raw and bloody from picking at myself incessantly for several days.  The excoriation rituals do not relieve the pressure; they leave my fingers sore and throbbing. I tried to tell them about the book being published in the fall; I tried to tell them about the foreword being written by the famous guy whose name I won’t type. My mother responded by telling me about her book and her foreword (again). These moments that I feel sort of invisible, sort of flattened, I assume this feeling is just part of this relationship. We sometimes move in a better direction, but we always come back here. 

Sometimes my counsellor perspective-taking brain plays games with me. What if I make them feel bad all the time too? What if I think I am carefully protecting everyone else’s feelings and I’m actually doing a terrible job of it and they always leave feeling that I have somehow slighted them? My inside-out world mind games. You never know, though.