Traducción, mom BeReal, card holders, Mattheas convo and hat/bracelets

December 16, 2023

Alright, I’m already still pretty happy about what I was able to do with this yesterday... the way I skipped the whole day til the good part of it, and then I did a kind of wonderful job talking a TON about the Spanish at the party and why it was significant to me. I was even able to bring in some other things, like the benefits of being able to tell my story in Spanish in general. Just saying randomly, I kind of feel like the story comes out better in Spanish… Saying this even though what I’m about to write has NOTHING to do with anything that happened yesterday. I just always create these by duplicating yesterday’s inDesign document, so here I am. Lemme work on my photo/photos for today. 

Ok, my most important photo of the day is the one on the far right, where I’m holding up a hat to take a picture of it because I’m currently working on an “items I might lose someday” collection of photos, which will be useful to show to people to find them again. What I was holding up here was a hat I got in Italy, I think, but then I realized that a better photo was of the bracelets I was wearing as well. Those bracelets were made by an older volunteer lady at Open Door, whose name is Maureen I think. She always works in the back, so I don’t see her a ton. The other day I grabbed two bracelets from the set she made for people to take. OH, and the other important thing about that photo is that it shows off my new watch band. 

That red wristband is significant since for MONTHS I was hanging onto the green band that I had been wearing during the crash because I felt that would be the only "decent" time of my life. Me changing my watch wristband the other day was very, very significant... ONLY because I had attached so much meaning to the green watch band before. Technically, the one I’m using now comes from before the crash too, since I got it at the same time as the green one, but it’s NOT the one I was wearing the instant car ran me over. THAT was the green one, which is also pretty tattered now too. Funny how moving forward in these ways can often lead to discarding old, somewhat broken items. 

Lemme do a really, really quick summary of each of the rest of the photos. On the far left, I have a page of an article that the Mayo Clinic wrote about me and my story that I’m translating into Spanish. I LOVE that project, and I literally called it Papa’s early Christmas present to me. I love it even more because it involves finding translations of little phrases I generally use when I’m “telling my story” to new people since the story talks about the cancer and the traumatic brain injury (or el daño cerebral, to be specific). 

The next photo is my on-time BeReal of Mom. She came over to help me with my present acquiring, and we did a very thorough job. I got presents for Liam, Caroline, Bill, Jodi, and Grandma, and I also wrapped the presents I already had for Hannah, Mom, Papa, and Talia. 

The next photo is just a random pic of some business card holders. It’s relevant only because today I went through several of them and tried to make sure they had a good selection of pictures, and also a few copies of my blog cards.

THE NEXT photo is of a text message I sent Mattheas today. It includes an old picture from back when he was a server at Fogo, and he told me that he remembered bringing me and my friends “fresh bread outta the oven” that day. 

The other quite relevant thing that I do NOT have pictures of is a follow-up on my thought that my two closest friends out of Fogo are Mattheas and Suheily. A few days ago, I was messaging a girl named Brandy on Snapchat, who also doesn’t work at Fogo anymore, just like Suheily. And me, lol. I was basically telling her that the only thing I got outta Fogo was a few good friends, and then I realized that she was in that category too. After that, I was thinking that I expected there to be one or two other random Fogo friends that would crawl outta the woodwork. 

Today one did!!! I was talking casually with the bartender Travis, whom I already knew Mattheas is excellent friends with, I asked him "what’s up." My phone had a previous message to him from August 2021, but he didn’t have my number saved so I had to tell him who I was. I told him I was just reaching out to some people “bc I’m doing SO MUCH better.” I also said, “Literally I’m doing better than I was doing back when I was a server.” We got into a conversation, and I was able to explain how when I was a server I was working myself to death, and now I literally can’t do that now because of disability providing health insurance and all. I kinda also told him how MUCH money I was making back when I was a server at Fogo with three jobs. I definitely also mentioned to him that I was “reconnecting with some old Fogo people,” like Mattheas and Suheily as well. He said that he and Mattheas basically hang out every day, which I already knew from Mattheas. So this all seems very promising. It’s a very cool thing to be able to make friends with your old friends again, and tbh it’s necessary: Just like Talia told me that we had to “rebuild our relationship” post-TBI, I kind of have to “rebuild my relationship” with everyone I know. It’s exciting to start doing it more too.