Daily Photo: November 2 - 6, 2021

Tuesday, November 2

Online therapy today. My therapist said I have a really well-shaped head. (In a “your haircut looks good on you” not a “I’m into phrenology” way) She’s also told me her daughter is a low key famous-ish cosplayer and I think I deserve SO many Respects Boundaries points for having not looked her up U_U

When we moved in to this house eight years ago, I threw that shitty blanket over the curtain rod thinking that we’d go buy some “real curtains” “later”. The window-facing side is almost completely bleached bone white from the sun now. If you lay the blanket on the ground, it’s half indigo blue and half nearly-white. It’s a hard split, not a gradation. I’m proud of this, for some reason???

Wednesday, November 3

I prepped so many future embroidery projects. I’m so fuckin’ stoked.

Thursday, November 4

Lucy and I did our second online barre class together this week and it was fucking brutal. But good. But brutal. Oh, and I actually started roughing out some comic pages for my Space Camp memoir about going through the Intensive Outpatient Program in 2019. Reading through my stacks of notes that I wrote at the time, good god. I’m still the same person, but my brain was living in a place that’s just… so foreign to me now. Familiar, like how your elementary school is familiar, but foreign, like how your elementary school feels like a totally different planet and did you actually ever go here or was that all a dream?

[Editor’s Note: I shared my first few Space Camp pages to my Autobio Comics Tier]

Friday, November 5

#ShortGirlLife

Matt climbs three days a week at an indoor gym, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Before the pandemic, climbing wasn’t really my thing. I did it occasionally for the sake of doing a physical activity with Matt or to socialize with new friends, but it wasn’t something I particularly craved to do, you know? It was fine. My primary form of exercise for the last six years was taking pole dance classes at Ecdysiast (incredible place, I did a comic about it and interviewed one of the founders, Shannon Gee, for Oh Joy Sex Toy), but then my body changed significantly from the stress that would eventually send me to Space Camp and I could no longer make it through a class without barfing. Stress! What a fascinating thing. And then, of course, the pandemic started, so my pole journey was pretty thoroughly shut down.

During quarantine, Matt and I figured out a new exercise routine at home with our long-abandoned rowing machine and my street-bike-turned-stationary-bike in the living room, which was fun enough but my baby needs to climb so when his gym began tentatively opening back up (with covid safety protocols in place, obviously) he (carefully) jumped (climbed?) back in.

All this to say, a few months ago I started climbing with him, and now? I’m actually enjoying it a whole lot more. I don’t love it like he does and my mind doesn’t analyze how to “project” through a route. But, y’know, it’s challenging and I’m proud when I’m able to do anything slightly more fancy than climbing straight up and down.

Oh my god, I wrote all that as a set-up to say that I decided to stay home while Matt went climbing tonight and I was going to talk about how rare it is for me to be totally alone but JEEZ anything more I write is just going to be too much so I’m cutting myself off here.

Saturday, Nov 6

Big chores day for Matt and me. Last night I spent TWO! HOURS!!! moving all the mid-size objects out of the kitchen/downstairs bathroom/my studio area so I could sweep and vacuum out every nook and cranny so Matt could then give our embarrassingly filthy floors a mop this morning. Our floors are bafflingly made out of a material that is not supposed to get wet or else it gets damaged. Yes. The downstairs kitchen and bathroom floors are not supposed to get wet. Amazing, I know. We learned this the hard way, by the way. The hire-a-guy-to-replace-wrecked-chunks-of-our-floor way.

What this means is that while Matt mops, my job is to penguin-shuffle with a towel under my feet, drying the floor in his wake.

After mopping/towel-penguin-shuffling, we chauffeured somebody to an appointment way out by the airport, spontaneously decided to pull in to IKEA since we’re so rarely in that area in the first place, eat a Swedish meatball lunch and pick up some new storage containers, on the way back from there we stopped by to visit a friend in the NE and pay them for some freelance work they’ve been doing for OJST, then picked up some veggies from the produce stand in our neighborhood, followed by a couple more stops at various food-suppliers to get sausages, a whole roast chicken, and pastries before we finally, finally, fiiiiiiiiinally made it home. At which point we had to move all the medium-sized objects back into place in the kitchen/bathroom/studio.

I am now recouping on the couch, listening to the dishwasher run through its cycle.