BeReal, Open Door Spotify, Open Door lunch, dinner

November 30, 2023

Oh my God, it’s almost 11pm and I haven’t started this yet. Was about to go to sleep, and randomly remembered I hadn’t done this yet. I’m also gonna say that I have TERRIBLE photos today. Today, I volunteered at Open Door after spending the whole afternoon at a coffee shop working on Spanish translation exercises, and I forgot to take a photo not only at the coffee shop but also at Open Door, even though I had an excellent conversation with Italia tonight. Today, I had my morning meds at 8:30am because I was planning to be able to take the night ones at the same time and I knew I was volunteering at Open Door at night. What actually happened was that I kind of unintentionally skipped lunch because the coffee shop I was at didn’t have any food and I wan’t even that hungry then either, so I was VERY hungry by dinner, so I stopped at McDonalds on my way home from Open Door and got a cheeseburger that we calculated the other day has the right fat content, and I took one pill, which we also decided the other day. Meds at 8:10pm. My situation is that I need a higher dose than one pill twice a day, so I’ll do two in the morning and one at night, except for the 30th, when I did two at noon after skipping the morning because I hadn’t known I was re-starting my medication that day.

I’m also gonna say that today I had some VERY good Zoom calls. First of all, I had the first meeting with a potential job coach, and a person from Accord, the company. We decided that I could move forward looking at meeting on Fridays with my new job coach, and I also learned during the meeting from my case manager, Sarah, that the new job coach is not from the same company my old job coach was from. This one will be from Accord, not Bridgeway, and I told them all about the fact that I’d currently only like to work a very small number of hours and stay on disability for the time being. Not sure I ever wanna get off tbh, especially now that I’ve become a TON less obsessed with “being normal.” I also told them that I don’t feel like the TBI would have benefitted me at all if I hadn’t spent the past 6 years suffering from cancer hell. But I did, so I feel like the TBI and being ripped away from work, my "cancer coping mechanism," and has actually potentially helped me now.

After the job coach meeting, I had a session with Whitney, where I decided that I’d like to choose specific photos of the day to highlight for her every week, even though we’re not moving our sessions to once every two weeks in general. I also decided that in a way, I can see the cancer medication and the restrictions it places on me as a positive, not a negative, because it give me a bit of a road map for how I should eat. Also, it makes me eat sometimes. I know that on a recent day when I wasn’t taking meds I ended up kinda skipping dinner. Anyways, the most important thing that I decided during our session was that I frankly have not been happy ever since high school, and THAT is the reason that I’ve been obsessed with high school and my high school friendships. I still value my high school friends, but I think I was placing excessive importance on them before. Oh, and I also decided this all means that I officially have not been happy for six years, and that now that I’m not obsessed with “becoming more average,” I’m not interested in pursuing restaurant work anymore. Told the job coach that too. After my sessions, I decided to go to a coffee shop. I put “coffee” randomly into Google Maps, and it brought me to Coffee Cup, which turned out to be a restaurant, not a coffee shop. But the hostess and a customer there helped me by saying there was a real coffee shop a few blocks down, called JS Bean Factory. That’s where I went and spent my afternoon. While I was there, I pretty much worked on Spanish, and posted a few of my Bumble messages in Spanish on lang-8 for corrections.

I also I did NOT set an alarm for going to Open Door, but at one point I typed in getting there, and it said I couldn’t get there half an hour early, so I left right then. Right when I left the coffee shop I gave the couple sitting next to me two business cards, including the Mexican fence and a picture from Oklahoma, I think. Thank God I’ve ordered 200 new business cards, including a bunch of post-TBI photos this time. Then I left right after that. Not setting an alarm worked out though, and I got there like 5 min early still. I haven’t glanced at my notes this whole time, but I think I’m gonna now, just bc I don’t remember everything I talked about with Italia even though it was fantastic. At Open Door, no one signed up to run the “weigh station” today, so that means that I was assigned there for the first time ever. That’s the place where clients weigh their food and we record the pounds before they leave. At that station, several people were surprised I knew Spanish, which was different just because when I’m there as a translator, it’s less surprising to people I know it, even though I’m blonde. At the end, I also told Italia my idea to play Mexican Christmas music next time I’m at the weigh station, not the “best Christmas playlist,” I was playing this time. Also at the end of the night, I told Italia a bit about how my new volunteer job was a bit disappointing in that I wasn’t using Spanish there, and I told her my idea to get a very part time (like 10-15 hours a week) job that would use Spanish. Oh, and I also showed her my profile on Lang-8, and mentioned the fact they’re not allowing new signups anymore, tragically. I can only use it because I had an account before the crash.