Trader Joe’s and dinner at Grandma’s house

November 5, 2023:

Well it looks like unlike what happened yesterday, this time I actually didn’t make the 5th’s post. Yesterday was a pretty nice day, and felt independent too. I’ll go through it now. I had my meds at 6:47am with yogurt. I wrote that the peach yogurt was better than the mango, but I did realize right after I ate that I’d forgotten to use my frozen breakfast meals for meds. I thought that I’d just do it the next day. Then, I drove to Trader Joe’s first thing, getting there at like 9, when they open. I got my shopping done, and got a chai tea mix that has some fat in it too. Had to ask an employee if they thought one serving was ⅓ cup of the powder or ⅓ cup of the liquid beverage, since it said “⅓ cup” had 5g of fat. Well I got that, and also made a small list of things to buy at Target since Trader Joe’s didn’t have them. Stuff like chapstick and superglue. Tragically, I forgot to take a photo while I was shopping. Just have a picture of the receipt I took in the parking lot afterwards.

While I was out shopping, I had a couple of “important thoughts.” One of them was that because the kind of happiness I got working at Fogo was the kind that came and went quickly, that had convinced me that happiness was an on/off switch. Also, that my fear of being “impaired” forever and not being capable is a huge part of the reason driving is so important to me now. Unrelated, but yesterday Mattheas said we should hang out sometime. I thanked him for “sticking with me through my depression,” and told him that I had been using the fact that I’ll have cancer forever to convince me that I’d be depressed forever.

Anyways, then I organized some stuff, and mom came over at like 1pm to help me get Photoshop working again. It turned out that the real problem with my computer was that it was wayyy too full, so there wasn’t space for Photoshop to run. While she was over, I also realized I hadn’t done my post for the fourth, which I learned because I’d saved a copy of the InDesign file with nothing written, and so I had to add things to my post even though it had already been made. Unlike the situation I’m in now, where I truly didn’t do yesterday’s post at all. What mom and I ended up doing was clearing all the large photos/videos stored in my messages, and we learned that when I install applications updates, it doesn’t replace the old version. So I had like 6 copies of Photoshop, InDesign, etc. Those were huge. I also finished my “artist statement,” and sent it to the lady, Amber, for my Zoom art show on Thursday. Then, mom and I both ran to Papa’s house to get things done. I dropped off a bottle of Goo Gone and did my laundry.

Then, we decided to go over to Grandma’s house to have dinner with Jodi and Bill too. It was spaghetti. At dinner, Papa talked a lot about a play he’d seen with Talia, For the People, that they hadn’t liked much. I told them about my art show submission, and then we watched the Love Your Brain video on CNN that Papa had sent me a few days ago and I hadn’t watched yet. It was really good, and the cool thing was that I heard was someone saying that a big effect of a brain injury is that you don’t feel “able.” Frankly, that is EXACTLY what I had been talking about every time I said I didn’t “feel like an adult.” I wrote that that line was a “better phrase for me than I’ve heard in two years.” I also decided that I’d definitely like to volunteer at the retreat next year, and we said more important things I’m not gonna say in detail.

After our wonderful talks, I drove Papa back to his house, and also had my meds at 8:30pm with a yogurt. I didn’t really like the yogurt, so I decided to not finish it, and have the rest of my fat from a rice pudding with 2 grams of fat, which I learned by googling it. At night, I also wrote down that all these talks had made me really excited to talk to Jessica tomorrow, which is in like four minutes now.