Leeann Chin, pañuelos, and Open Door with Italia y Sean

December 14, 2023

Today was definitely a good photo day! I didn’t do a good job before Open Door, but I achieved an EXCELLENT one at Open Door, with both Italia and Sean, shortly after I had accomplished some really important conversation points with Sean. I also did that with Italia, but I’ll get there later. Basically, the entire story of today began by me taking my meds at like 8:09am with two eggs and a tiny bit of cheese. Papa made me those eggs after walking the dog, since I said I wanted to take them a bit later today since I’m doing Open Door at night til a bit after 7pm. 

I also had a very good morning after that. The important thing that I did was I ordered 200 new business cards for my blog site, and I also made some pretty significant changes to them. I KNOW that I thought that I didn’t wanna change their color until I made significant changes, and today I did! I added “www.anymagnuson.com” to them, and also added my entire website URL to the blog site since the bit.ly link we made was no longer working for some reason. Now, it says anyatbirecovery.wixsite.com/tbi-photo-journal all written out. After I ordered all those, I actually learned that all the business card boxes I had pre-accident were things I’d purchased for four dollars, and they never came with the cards. So today I ordered a new $4 case for my next 200 cards, and I made it green like the new cards are as well. I also learned that cases are SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive on Amazon. Couldn’t have gotten one for cheaper than $15 or so. 

Around that time, I also received a promo to get 25% off if I get a friend to use my code, and that led me to send it to half the people I know. I sent a lot to random people who will probably never want business cards, but I’m hopeful about some of my journalism contacts tbh. And much later in the night, sending them all out also led to a nice conversation with Sidney and Zach’s friend Blake, who I think did some graphic design stuff too. 

Let’s get back to my day! The first thing I really did was a good therapy session, and then I went to a blood test, where she also had a hard time sticking me as usual, since I guess I just like to be difficult. I had a good talk with the lady though, whose name was Shirola. I actually ended up giving her a photo business card too, and she said that her daughter is getting married on Saturday and they ended up paying more than they were planning on a photographer. I told her about how I had recently charged hardly anything just because I can’t earn too much on disability. I feel like I also told her that I felt like my really hard veins were kind of a “metaphor for my life” because “I’m tricky.” 

THEN, I decided for lunch I just didn’t want spicy food, so we went to Leeann Chin. I ended up in some conversations with the Mexican workers anyways though, and I asked them in Spanish if you could say “chao” for “adiós” in Mexico, since I heard it from Ecuadorians. One of the workers, named Victor, told me that there were Ecuadorians, Chileans, Peruvians, and like two more countries I forget working there now. I told them I’d assumed they were Chinese when I first saw them. All of this was also in Spanish, lol. 

Also, in a way, what I did this morning with sending out my referral bonus opportunity to almost everyone I knew really showed me how special and connected I am, and THAT is why I had a very important morning this morning. I also wrote, “thank God I’m not still holding on to being unhappy. I LOVE taking notes.” Anyways, a bit after that, I went to Open Door. When I left, I thought I’d be quite early. I was actually one minute late, so I was very off in my estimation. 

At Open Door, I had some wonderful conversations with Sean and Italia, who are the two people in my photo. I told Sean that I was really starting to believe that the TBI had benefited me in some ways, like how I’d been working insane hours to never have time to think about or accept my cancer trauma. I think I also told Italia more detail about that later. The other kinda cool thing that happened tonight was a client named Gustavo literally gave me a nice lesson. He was talking about some of the scarves and things we were giving away, and he told me one of them could be called a “pañuelo.” He literally even pulled up some images on his phone and showed me photos of other “pañuelos.” Got a picture of his hands doing that too, randomly, right after my pic of my meal at Leeann Chin today. 

The other cool thing that happened is that one client literally commented to us at the desk that she felt like she’d “lose her life” if she lost the little notebook she was writing in, and I held up my #15 and said I felt the same way. Oh, and I also succeded in asking Italia how to best express the word “tripped” en español. Didn’t quite get to asking about how to best refer to business cards, but that can be a future convo maybe. Well, I’m gonna try to wake up a bit early tomorrow to do meds on the early side because tomorrow I have a cheesecake party at night and I wanna be able to enjoy that without worrying about fat counts the whole time. 

Oh, and the other REALLY COOL thing I almost forgot to add is that I was able to give one of my new photography business cards to a different bilingual employee, named Miriam. She asked if I’d be open to shooting pictures at a quinceeñera, and said one of her daughters is having one next year and she might be interested. Funny because I’d literally never really talked to Miiam before, but tonight I kind of did for the first time, and I learned that she’d actually been hired after Italia was hired, which is much more recently than I started working there.