Tag: stress

Scary, scary

I have been working on actively taking on doing things that scare me. On Sunday, I went running on my own at a park that people use for running all the time. It was terrifying, and thrilling. And I actually want to go back. It makes sense to me now, why people might run there versus at home. I’m sick of running through my neighborhood, I’ve done it so much. This made for a change of scenery with reliable measurements and safety. Also, it provided support and encouragement via everyone else there getting in a run and/or walk in their mornings.

On Monday and Tuesday, I also did something each day, but I’m not recalling what at present… I actually am not even remembering almost anything I did on either day right now… lunch with my dad was… yesterday? Yes, yesterday. I worked Monday. Yeah, and I even wrote all about my day yesterday… I guess I’m tired now and ready for bedtime. Haha 😛 Anyway, moving onward…

Today, I asked for something that was due to me. The answer was an easy and immediate, “Yeah, of course!” from the person. Wow! That was easy and had an awesome result. I also went to the post office and handled all my mailings that needed to go out…. months ago, really. But they are now done! Yay! Huge relief there. Yay!

Tomorrow, it will be something else. And the same is the goal for each day after that. I took on this idea at one point in college, and I ended up having a blast with the things I did. Life had a new and spectacular edge to it. I still remember specifically how I ended up skateboarding behind the administration building as one of those things – I really wanted to try it, but was scared… and so I made it my thing for that day, and let the guy teach me how to do it. It was thrilling and frightening, and I am still grateful that I did it.

One of the scariest things for me is speaking up, be it standing up for myself or just asking for something, making a request, speaking up can be quite difficult for me to do. So, I expect a good handful of these scary things will involve speaking up. For the first while, anyway. Perhaps I will adjust so well to having to speak up so often as my scary thing for the day, that it won’t be scary anymore. That could be fun. It would open up a whole new world of scary things to pursue.

(Keep in mind, these are not dangerous things. They are merely regular things that, due to fear, I typically would avoid doing, despite wishing I could or would do them.)

Post-a-day 2021

^Man, I just got it wrong this time. I had closed the post, when I wondered if I had even put the last line on it. I wasn’t even thinking about if I’d gotten the year correct. When I saw it, I was surprised and relieved that I’d written it. And then, as I was scrolling away to close it, I remembered to check for the correct year. And it was 2020. ::mega face palm tonight Haha

An unexpected day of… casual chaos?

Okay, so the song-writing got held off until tomorrow. That’s okay. I had a lovely day nonetheless, filled with all sorts of oddities that turned out to be just fine in the end.

My lunch with my dad got all messed up, and we didn’t go to any of the places we were considering, and it wasn’t just the two of us. We didn’t talk about almost any of what we would have discussed as just the two of us. I didn’t get the amazing seasonal meal I had been anticipating. And we still enjoyed having lunch together and talking on he phone a bit afterward, and I enjoyed my dish, despite its having not been strictly with my diet (diet as in ‘regime,’ not as in ‘on a diet’). It was brisket and barbecue sauce with fresh purple cabbage on a baked sweet potato. Baller, though the sauce was a bit too sweet for my taste. That would be the sugar.

Then I was supposed to pick up something from my mom. She got distracted on her way in to work, and so wasn’t there. I waited around half an hour, but had no word in response from her, so continued on to Costco to buy groceries. (Yes, I get my fruits and veggies from Costco usually, because I go through them so quickly, preparing most of my food and beverage at home all the time. Today, I was mostly getting frozen fruits and fresh greens to use for smoothies. Yumm!) Turns out that my mom actually forgot her phone at home today, but she called me when she had arrived at the office, in order to let me know that I could come meet her now.

In my morning research today, I had found that Walmart would print passport photos, if we submit them online. Through doing my morning research, I didn’t put together my new shelving unit from Ikea, as had been the plan. But I had found a much more affordable way to get my passport photos than by going to CVS or Walgreens, and was grateful for that.

I was going to have my friend photo me when she came for the songwriting, and then was going to have my dad do it instead at lunch. Then that fell through, and I figured my mom could do it when we met up (because my friend had canceled at this point). But that was not too likely, since I couldn’t reach my mom at all now.

What to do? What to do?

When entering Costco, I glanced to the photo department – I had been surprised that they didn’t have passport photos as an option online during my research, so wanted to verify casually – and saw a massive sign reading, “Passport Photos”. I did an about-face, walked up to the photo counter and asked if they did passport photos (because doing them is different from just printing them, mind you). She said, “Yeah! I’ll just meet you down at the end past the last counter. There’s a white screen there.”

Okay, great! Thanks!

I ditched my jacket, used a mirror, fixed my hair and scarf – which was surprisingly little effort, actually – and posed happily for a photo. And then another, because I didn’t love it.

The second photo I accepted, acknowledging that it did look as I look – it was true to me as a representation – and then went about my fruit and veggie shopping before picking up the four photos for less than even the Walmart price had been(!!!), and then heading back to the office to meet my mom (she had called me at this point).

I had a lovely visit on top of the little parking area with her, then headed home to find the same old lady with the same old little dog crapping in the yard as was crapping in the yard when I had left earlier for lunch.

I unpacked, organized the freezer stuff, finished a pumpkin pie smoothie from yesterday (It was heavy and intense, like drinking pie, really.), did a double handful of deadlifts as I passed the barbell, did a load of laundry, tutored out of nowhere, worked on and shared photos I recently did, made another smoothie, listened to Matthew McConaughey read more of his book, showered, and then put together the shelving unit.

Now, I am about to pass out with exhaustion in my eyes and back and neck, ready to get up early for the workout class. I even reached out to my workout buddy friend this morning to verify that he’d be st class in the morning. I can’t get up and attend a 5:15am class without him, now! 😛

So, the day went nothing as anticipated, but I still accomplished almost everything that I had intended, plus much more. By doing the shelving unit, I ended up with a good surface space to do my kakizome tomorrow. So, though I didn’t do the kakizome today, I not have a better space and more of the right kind of paper for practice (it was between the shelves in the box!)!

Before I further my rambling, I bid you all a lovely, rest-filled night!

Post-a-day 2021

^I almost got it wrong, but I caught myself just before typing it out!

Dance, if you wanna

One of the most upsetting things in our society right now for me – one of the day-to-day things that really bugs me and kind of breaks my heart – is how much gender is used as a restrictor by so much of society.

I mentioned how I thought my nephew really would love learning and doing ballet and other dances, and I was met with a passive laugh and a certain, somewhat snarky comment to say that it never would happen, but what a cute idea. I was gobsmacked. The person didn’t even think I was saying it because I meant it. She actually thought I was just saying it passively, as opposed to my sharing something I genuinely believed and had hopes could happen.

Granted, my sister has very much played the gender toys game for her kids – pink and purses and baby-dolls are for girls, and blues and trucks and superheroes are for boys. However, dance is something amazing for any and all people to do, especially athletes. My sister is an athlete, and she can understand that benefit of dance especially. I think she might be willing to consider the idea of dance for my nephew, if it were presented appropriately and he showed interest in it openly.

Even that, though, has its own degree of upset and disappointment for me: that it has to be presented appropriately. I don’t just mean showing that dance is awesome, but showing that dance is so awesome that it is okay for both genders. Because I know, that likely would be part of it for her.

If I ever have children, no matter the gender of each and every, they all will do karate and dance and volleyball and all the fun, beautiful, beneficial stuff out there that we can find and/or create for them to do. Gender will have no value in the matter. It merely will determine which bathroom they use while at the activity.

Post-a-day 2021

^ Wrote that wrong at first again, but caught myself before submitting! Happy 2021, folks!

Slightly a mess

I don’t do well with “storing things”. Winter sweaters or not-so-often-used items that usually are stored away, perhaps in a closet or the back of a shelf, usually end up staying in the back of that closet or shelf for me. Even when I need them, want them, the hassle of pulling them out and finding a new, daily use spot for them is usually too great for me to make the effort. Plus, I tend to forget about them. I meander around my clothes, bummed and uncomprehending why I cannot seem to find clothes that I love for the current weather. I notice that I need the heavy sweater as I am on my way out. at that point in time, I am ready to leave, and do not mentally or physically want to spend the time to pull out the big sweaters. So, I find the easiest-to-reach one that will get me by in the day, and head out the door. If I remember later – and that’s a big “if” – when I am back home and not busy, I might rearrange to put the heavy sweater box into an easily accessed spot. But it usually takes me a couple months of needing them consistently to do that.

I know, I know: it is rather ridiculous. But I’m not doing it intentionally, necessarily. It kind of just happens that way, and I am noticing it right now as I contemplate why I never seem to wear all my cool sweaters in Fall and Winter (aside from the fact that our temperatures change constantly from cold to hot to cool, even on a single day, here in Houston).

But I also notice it with other things. If my guitar is in a case, I will pull it out rarely. If it is sitting out on a stand, I will grab it and play it regularly, and often. Basically, I guess I just use what is out, easily accessed. If it is put away or hard to reach, I tend not to use it unless using it is a necessity.

Keeping that in mind, I think a sort of room organization overhaul is coming soon…

Especially considering that I will be getting back an awesome chair and ottoman that I had lent to my cousin year ago, when I moved to Japan for a while. I would like to have a functional space that includes the chair and ottoman, anyway, so some rearranging needs to happen for that already. And the sewing machine and its table… forgot about that again… haha

Post-a-day 2020

Birthdays and bad days

I remember attending my childhood best friend’s birthday party at Skate Central, an indoor roller skating rink, own time when we were little. I had gotten her a Bop-It (probably a Bop-It Extreme). As is usual for my family – my mom is very good at thinking things through practically, and so trained us even as young children to do the same – we had taped the necessary batteries (the ones “not included” with the toy itself) to the present. Therefore, whenever the recipient – in this case, my best friend – wanted to get set up with playing with the toy, all the necessary tools were on hand. And no, it didn’t require any other tools, or we likely would have brought them along, too.

Anyway, that was the present that I was very excited to give to her. Someone else at the party also have her a Bop-It. The same kind, yes. That person did not include batteries in her gift-giving.

So, what happens? My friend and her mom take the batteries from my Bop-It and open up the other friend’s Bop-It to use. Mine will be given away at a later time to someone else, but the batteries were nonetheless useful.

…..

I am not sure that I can appropriately express how distraught and useless I felt at that moment. I only saw myself as useful in filling in where others had failed. I was no main focus in any way. I was merely there to fill in the gaps, as needed… to provide the batteries that no one ha smothered to remember or would consider again until they ran out of power and needed replacing. I was forgetful and a convenient helping hand. Nothing else.

Can you believe I got all that from a single event like that? Yes, it was ridiculous what they did. And yes, they did it without even thinking – they needed batteries to open this other one, and saw batteries on the first Bop-It – problem solved.

This is now something for me to contemplate and consider for a bit. I imagine I have some strong opinions about myself deep down because of that incident. It really hurt me at the time, and we human beings tend to do rash things when we are hurt unexpectedly.

Yeah…

By the way, I loved playing Bop-It Extreme as a kid. I would spend hours walking around – pacing around – my dad’s house upstairs, playing on my own. Everyone said the sound-only game was the hardest. (Psychologically speaking, it’s actually easier, but whatever…) Most people, even with practice, never made it far past the twenties and thirties. I grew accustomed to challenging myself with that one, and ended up with a ridiculous high score of around three hundred something. I averaged a hundred or so for any given play. And that started after only a matter of days of playing it. It was just very natural for me, and also quite fun. I truly enjoyed it, and I loved spending my time playing Bop-It Extreme.

My mom found my one from her house recently. I had gotten a second one, because I missed it when I wasn’t at my dad’s house, which was the majority of the time. When she found it, she replaced the batteries in preparation of showing it to me. I convinced her to play a few rounds with me in the multiplayer version, and we had a blast. When I did the solo player version, I ended up stopping because I wanted to get back to what I had been doing beforehand, not because I made an error. In other words, it was still easy peasy for me, and I was awesome at it.

I really loved playing Bop-It Extreme. 🙂

Post-a-day 2020

Working it out…?

I am going to test out my old gym this coming week, and see how it goes, how I like it all. I am nervous both that I will like it and that I will not like it. If I like it, I still will have to figure out whether I want to find a way to make it work to go there again, despite the super high price now. If I don’t like it, I will have to get myself sorted in entirely doing workouts at home for the future. While I trust that I can do that, I do not want to do that. That’s a lot of alone time for something I prefer to have as a social situation.

So, we shall see… fingers crossed that, no matter the experience this next week, I am complete about how it goes and about how to move forward with and from the experience.

And now, I must sleep, as my alarm will be going off at five, because sign-ups open 24 hours before the start of the class… and they have very limited capacities…, and I need to attend the 5:15am class. Ugh. So, I’m getting up at five not even for a workout, but to sign up for a workout. Totally ridiculous, I agree. 😛

Post-a-day 2020

Christmas Day? No way

It seems that today has been Christmas Day. It felt very much like an average Thursday for the books, and my mother agrees.

Turns out that it has actually been a Friday, and it didn’t even feel like that. Suffice it to say that this has been probably my oddest Christmas ever. And I lived in Japan for a while, where KFC and drinking parties where most people wear (slutty?) Santa costumes are the norm for Christmas Day night.

We saw road signs from Texas Department of Transportation (TXDOT) yesterday and today, and they were kind of hilarious. They read, “He sees you when you’re speeding. He knows when you drive baked.”* One of the best holiday lights setups I’ve seen this year, for sure!

Well, it’s 7:30pm, and I’m exhausted, so I’m going to do my stretches and reading now, and get to sleep. Merry Christmas, folks!

*If you do not get the reference here, it is a play with the words from “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, the song.

Post-a-day 2020

Value in being valued

On a walk the other day with my mom, we met these nice old people who live on her street, just after we picked up some ujukitsu off the ground in their backyard/the abandoned small golf course. Turns out that they met one another while teaching for a year in Japan on a military base (that is no longer in existence) near Tokyo. I am familiar with the train line that led to it, according to them. Before Japan, they each had taught a year or two in Hawai (he) and the Philippines (she), and then they met and married and moved to teach on a base in Germany together. They were part of the foreign service teaching for 14 years altogether, I believe they had said. Then they moved to Houston and taught in elementary schools here until they retired. It was adorable to hear.

Considering my frustrations in this part-time job I am now working, I have wondered if something in school teaching is still calling to me. I miss having classes of kids, and teaching something – and something valuable – each and every day I go to work, and being loved and trusted and valued by those around me, in immediate interaction with me every day. Though, perhaps it is less about the classroom and more about the respect and valuing and love that comes to me in a classroom, but that has seemed nearly nonexistent in this position. I have even felt disrespected and incredibly undervalued and unappreciated here.

I wonder what there is for me to do about that.

I know one thing for sure: I’m tired of relying on the way I am told things work. Word-of-mouth information is faulty, and it has proven itself to be so over and over again in this job. I am tired of it. I will do my research for all of my questions, and clock the hours and expect no pay for them, and I will be prepared for all the stuff at this job that will pop up at some time or other – the crazy situations all seem to be inevitable, and I prefer to be prepared and to know what on Earth is going on. So, I will prepare myself, and I will not rely any longer on anyone else to teach me what I need to know or what they all think I need to know – that has been terrible so far, and I am done with it.

In doing that, I will be prepared as I want to be prepared, and as I always prepare myself when I care about something. The system is faulty, and I do not have to follow it – I can do better than it, and I shall, especially in this part of it.

Separately, I am doing more photos tomorrow morning, and I am nervous. I have been doubting and stressed since that bad photo shoot where I didn’t trust myself the other week. I know I need to take photos to move past this, but that doesn’t make it less scary for me. Someone will be relying on me, and I will be relying on a camera… and myself. Now, I just need to trust myself, and do what is needed to be done. Even if that seems like a ridiculous something. You can do this, Banana. Trust yourself and have faith in yourself – Jishin to Kokoro.

Post-a-day 2020

Stress and Presence

My mom and I had some stuff go rather poorly yesterday. I was extremely tired, both physically and emotionally, and she was rather tired and stressed, so it wasn’t a good start for entering into somewhat stressful territory for us together. Nonetheless, it happened, and it didn’t go very well, and we both were left, at the end of the day, dissatisfied with parts of our interactions throughout the day. This morning, we started to talk about it all, and that went even worse. Would you guess it? We were both even more exhausted and stressed than yesterday. So, no shocker at how that all went this morning.

After a morning of delight and an afternoon and evening filled with stress and a lack of logic/sense/consciousness from others, I was really working to get off it and to forgive and be okay. Once I was in the midst of all of that, rather than cry my heart and exhaustion out and still have to work, I set myself to mental work to see what I could resolve. I couldn’t alter my surroundings, but I could reconsider my stance within them, and I could use that time, rather than to be stressed, to re-evaluate what really would make the difference for my mom and me and our joint stress regarding our interactions lately and, especially, yesterday and this morning.

By the end of work time, I had it all figured out. I hopped into the car with my mom to go look at Christmas lights together in the area, and we talked through everything over the first 15-20 minutes. We both got heard and clear, and we established actions to take in the future whenever certain scenarios arise (the ones that have been sorts of trigger situations lately). It makes a world of a difference when neither of us is in the middle of doing something, and we are in the same place as one another. It also helped that I was reminded of how stressed life can be when I live it on other people’s levels instead of my own.

So, life is a whole lot better having things clear between my mom and me. That was a huge layer of stress today that feels amazing to have removed at last (though it was only about 20 hours in existence).

And, all I care to say how about all the other nonsense I experienced today with work is: Please, be present in life, and pay attention – it really sucks for the people around you whenever you don’t, whether you notice it or not.

At that, I bid you a good night and restful, refreshing sleep tonight. 🙂

P.S. Happy my brother’s birthday to you, and happy winter solstice! This has been the shortest day of the year, signing off!

Post-a-day 2020