JCC with Chloe, tree and pickle pizza with Hannah

October 19, 2023:

Ok I’ll go for this now. Today was a very good day. Maybe some time in the future I’ll stop being surprised when that happens. First things first, I woke up at 4:30am and peed, brushed my teeth and learned how to ping my phone from my watch after the iOS 10 update. You have to press a side button to get there. Then, I went back asleep and my alarm for my meds went off at 8am, and I realized I’d forgotten to set it like 10 minutes early so I could have time to cook the eggs and still take them at 8am. So therefore, I took my meds at 8:08am today.

I got ready, and fortunately I left for the yoga at the JCC like 15 minutes early. That was good because I realized once I got there that I’d accidentally grabbed my camera backpack, not my gym backpack, and didn’t even have the gym ID to scan to get in. So I ran home and got the bag, and then I did my yoga class with Debi. Debi also gave me a flyer for a show that she’s performing in. It runs through the month, and it’d be cool to go some time. After yoga, I realized that I didn’t even have my shoes in the bag I'd grabbed, which I would need for my training with Chloe. So then, I finished the yoga class with Debi, and ran back home to grab yet again to grab my shoes. That also made me think that I should keep extra gym-like shoes in my car, just to have them. I got there like 10 minutes late for my training session, but fortunately I ran into Chloe downstairs and she even I ran into Chloe downstairs and she even asked me we even had a session.

Then, I had undoubtably the best session with Chloe that I’ve ever had. I told her all of my realizations about becoming content with being alone and how I’d recently gotten very depressed when I realized that you can’t ALWAYS be around people. I also told her my thought about how I feel like I had been using my photos of the day to “prove” to either myself or the world that I was being “social enough,” and that that’s why I had soooo many random selfies in there. While talking with her, I decided that I’m not going to never do selfies, but I’ll only do selfies if I had a meaningful moment with the other person. So today, she qualified for one, and I asked for one at the end of our session. She also quite liked my orange shirt, and we also had talked about how I’ll often attach meaning to insignificant things like the colors of my hair clip, and I said that until recently I’d worn the orange-ish clip when in a bad mood, and the green one when in a decent mood, but today I chose to wore the orange-ish one because it matched my shirt. And she told me that now, the orange shirt I was wearing could be a good memories shirt too.

Tragically, Chloe is going to be leaving the JCC for a new job that allows her to stay home with her newborn baby. Big disappointment, since I like her a lot even though I haven't had her as a trainer for that long. After the gym, I went home and I started cleaning out a lot of my stuff. I stocked my gym bag with clean socks, underwear and deodorant and took out the irrelevant things like a few pairs of extra socks from a Mayo MRI. I also started packing quite a bit, and laid out a lot of the shirts I’d like to bring and decided on some shoes. I walked up and down my hallway to test the comfort of several pairs, and decided on bringing the red high top Allbirds, not a pair of my Vans, mainly for comfort reasons. I’m still not done packing, but I’ve made some good progress. I’ve also decided to not bring my DSLR camera to Colorado, because it would be a hassle and I’m not sure how much I’d be using it. I also started to sort out my any.do organization, since two lists had gotten mixed up and I almost lost record of a lot of important tasks.

After I spent a lot of time on the packing stuff and any.do, Hannah actually texted me and asked me what I was doing tonight, and we decided to hang out. She asked what I was doing, and I said I was just working on packing but she could come over and help me. So that’s what we did! We met up at like 2:20pm, with her just coming over to my house. Then, we hung around for an hour or two and just talked, and I also shared some of the help that Chloe had given me today. I definitely shared the piece about only doing selfie photo of the days if it was a good moment and a meaningful interaction. Then, we decided to walk to Tipsy Steer for a snack, and the snack actually turned out to dinner. It was the pickle pizza that we’d been talking about getting ever since I couldn’t go to the state fair.

While we were walking there, we took a selfie in front of a tree she said was pretty, and then we did another one once we were there just to capture the pizza in all its glory. We also had some excellent talks, and I told her that I had been using “I’m an extrovert” as an excuse to ALWAYS need to be around people, but now am growing to accept living alone and am no longer so desperate for a roommate, when I hadn’t understood her opinion on that before at all. I also showed her the picture of all 13 of my notebooks that I’ve used to jot notes on my day, and she said: “I have a million notebooks, I should just carry them around and take notes.”

The other really cool thing we talked about was when she told me about the Spotify “daylist” feature, that creates an ever-updating playlist for you based on what you listen to. Apparently that’s a big way she discovers new music. Oh, and she also suggested the book Practical Magic to me. So she’s giving me a bunch of new things to look in to, which is a huge reason it was a great meeting. Then, we played a few hands of Canasta, and she said I’d gotten a ton better. I said it was probably because playing online had taught me not to pick up the pile so often, and just to draw two cards each turn. Then, we walked back to my house, where she came in again and we started to listen to my Daylist, which is described as “high school millennial night” right now. That suits what I would have expected for me. I’m still listening to it, and it’s very good. Hannah also got me set up to work on the crossing duplicates off the packing list, and suggested I play my Daylist loudly from the other room while I work on the list. So, I did that. And then, at 8pm I had my meds with two cups of oat milk and a few almonds. It occurred ot me that something I’d like to buy is more drinks that have the right fat content in some form, since I was totally full of food still when I had to take my meds, but could drink a little something.