Saturday: Coffee Restaurant + Robert in Moab

December 30, 2023

Alright, I'm aggressively not doing what I did yesterday and the day before, which is basically not write this whatsoever. It's a bit after 12pm right now and I'm in a coffee shop place with mom. We had a bit of a hard time finding a place that didn't exclusively have hard backed chairs, but we ended up in a place called Gloria's that has a wall full of a booth. Now I'm just sitting here and doing this, and I'll possibly work on translating some messages and posting them on Lang-8, my number one corrections site. It's absolutely devastating that the site is going to be officially shutting down at the end of February 2024. They've already stopped allowing the creation of new accounts, and the only reason I have one I can use now is because I had one, and used it extensively, before the crash. Sitting here, we also worked on getting images sent from the phone to not turn into .heic files and stay .jpgs. 

Alright, now it's the end of the day and I just HAVE to talk about the experience I just had. Kerry and Ross' neighbor Robert stopped by, and we had AMAZING conversations. No way I would ever summarize everything we talked about. It's just too much, and some of it is also a touch personal, for everyone. I'm just gonna get the photos in here tonight and call it a day. Basically, we just had a wonderful conversation where we talked about experiences, and he actually did this amazing thing where he brought a printed list of personal questions that could lead to discussions. And dear God, they did. The very first one I chose to answer was just something about "silly tricks" that mentioned cards, and I used that as an excuse to segway into my business cards. Robert was a recipient of both my cards, my photography card and then also my blog card. I explained that the blog has kind of turned into my number one TBI coping skill for my terrible memory. Now, I love writing things down, and I write down sooooo much that does not go into the blog in the end, just because writing it down really helps me to remember it all. When I took the far left photo with Robert I literally asked him "do you wanna be in my blog?" as the intro. It's not a wonderful picture, but is very functional for this. The next photo is just one of us all talking, and me drinking fizzy water. The last photo is the one that I took when I decided to redo my BeReal today, which I hadn't gotten on time because I was watching a movie with mom. So I deleted a picture of myself laying in bed so I could do a new BeReal with Robert there, right before he left.

I suppose at some point I should look back at my notes. Haven't done that so far here. The cool thing about Robert is that he has a shocking amount of random similarities with me. Those include things like being a National Merit Scholar, working in yearbook at least a bit, and knowing Spanish. Speaking of Spanish, tonight I said one relevant thing in Spanish, that I think everyone was able to understand, possibly about "best or worst summer job." At the end of the night I looked back at the list of questions and marked the ones that we'd talked about. They were things about first loves and telling a story of your best/worst summer job. For me, I clearly chose best, and talked about Valleyfair. The other interesting thing about me is that I think I came to is that I don't really have "worst" job, because I've sort of liked every job I've ever had. That just goes along with loving to work, which has always been true for me. 

Basically, Robert and I literally exchanged business cards, since he has one too, so it felt like a very natural exchange situation. I also had VERY interesting stories, and has literally written books, some of which are in Czech. It's the next day now, and I just finished over reading this again, and we might run over to his house now.