#literally got the acceptance email while i was out at dinner with my current coworkers

[opiumvampire]

hiiiii i got a really cute haircut and also an offer for a full time interior design job :)

[kinetic-elaboration]

September 10: Friday

I just had this feeling this morning like I didn’t want to go to work and eh... that was probably right. Nothing really bad happened, I just felt very strongly that I did NOT want to be there.

My coworker wanted to talk to me at like 8:30 in the morning (you know those silly little ‘don’t talk to me before I’ve had my coffee’ signs?? literally do not talk to me before 9:30 EARLIEST) and I was supremely incoherent. Then later a different coworker essentially took out his bad mood on my department including on me personally, and it was... dumb. I got his point but I’m just, as I tried to explain to others later, unkeen on being talked to about actions I took under others’ explicit instructions. Also, in part because of that, in part because I thought he was semi-unreasonable, and in part because I just truly didn’t want to do what he was asking/telling me to do, I did not really budge on the issue. Which was very awkward because as I said I did get his point. And of course the issue is SOMETHING DUMB which is always how it is. All of these fights are 100% shit that would sound idiotic if you tried to explain it to someone else, which is why I’m vaguing right now.

And the nametags thing came up on Teams (thanks @ the same coworker), and the only good thing about that is that the director explicitly said she was against the idea so I feel pretty confident that it won’t be mandated. Also I could detect some panic in other people about it. I do NOT like the way this is being handled AT ALL. Plus it’s just the hill I’ve decided to die on (because I think I can win--so I guess it’s better to say this is the hill I’m going to defeat my enemies on) so I gotta get annoyed at it. I refrained from contributing to the conversation but I did like the director’s anti-nametag post, which I think gets my point across.

Also I felt like I spent a lot of time doing not much, to be honest. Still didn’t go to stupid compact shelving. Devoted too much time to the crap in the above paragraphs. Talked to BL over in admin and heard some more unflattering stories about a particular administrator. Like, incredibly unflattering. Which is stuff I do want to know but it contributes to the overall Mood of the day, which again is ‘I don’t want to be here.’

I took a very late lunch, and that in turn contributed to me not paying enough attention to the time and leaving late.OH AND I got 3 important emails in the last ten minutes of the day. Two were very expected because they were coming from the West Coast but the last was like.. do not make me deal with this right now.

I didn’t deal with almost any of it but I did get so distracted that I left about five minutes late, and so I missed the bus. I wasn’t too upset about it since the weather was nice anyway and I didn’t mind spending some time downtown. But I did waste time trying to see if I could catch said bus, and then more time trying to go to my favorite coffee shop, which had closed at 5. But since it was 5:15, there were still people inside (cleaning up, which is fair) and people outside (drinking coffees they’d bought before 5 I’m sure, also fair), and the sign said hours were until 7 so I spent a few confused, embarrassing moments going ????? what is the truth?

So ultimately I went to a different cafe, a newish one that opened in 2019 I think. I’ve always avoided it in part because the floor is very loud and in part because I felt like I was cheating on my main place lol. (Not that I never get coffee anywhere else... just that this place is so close to my usual place, I always feel like, if I’m in the area, I might as well go to said usual place.) I did find the inside very disorienting. The pattern of the floor is just truly A Lot. They did have these weird teacup ornaments hanging from the ceiling though. I got an iced latte, which was fine, and this delicious spinach and feta pastry. I feel like I should stop by more often for baked goods. I settled outside with what I’d gotten, mostly because of the floor, partly because it actually was nice out, and partly because I’m not currently comfortable with indoor dining, even in places with almost no one in them.

I only had like 25 minutes to kill at that point, but it was nice. I had a notebook with me and I did a teeny bit of planning on the Southern Gothic AU (still behind on this!!). Mostly I listened to the conversation next to me. I couldn’t entirely help it; the girl’s voice was carrying. She was talking to her guy friend about some recent issues they’d been having in their friendship. I was honestly...kind of impressed with them? I could mostly hear her--he was talking too but his voice didn’t carry as much--but it just overall sounded like a really open, emotionally honest, generally calm talk. Like certainly there were strong emotions in play (not exactly going to judge whether they were “warranted” given the apparent facts of the dispute, since I just ranted about a disagreement over something so dumb I don’t even want to name it in public) but they were just... expressing feelings that were difficult, and expressing displeasure with others’ actions, without yelling or being passive aggressive, etc. I mean even that they’d picked this time and place to meet specifically to discuss it I thought was commendable. And they were definitely friends, not bf/gf, because the disagreement involved his girlfriend (once referred to as his “partner”...sorry lol I judged that a LITTLE since they looked like they were maybe 21 years old--partner in WHAT??). The girl mentioned her therapist, which put a lot of her tone and vocabulary into perspective. Not necessarily in a bad way, I mean, it seemed to be working? But as someone who has never been to therapy, but is self-taught, so to speak, in gauging and describing my own feelings, I could... discern a sort of purposeful vocabulary that almost sounded scripted. I wrote down some specific quotes but I don’t want to put them in a public place. I’ll draw my respecting-strangers’-privacy line in the sand there. But a lot of, like “when you do x, it makes me feel y” kind of controlled explanations.

Anyway, I got very invested in that. Partly for future writing purposes, partly out of curiosity and partly because... I don’t know that I could have that kind of conversation NOW and I’m fairly sure I could not have when I was in college. I mean.... I don’t know... I’ve blocked out a lot of the pretentious/serious/about-our-feelings talks I did have. And what sticks out now are all the times I didn’t do that--all of the many, many issues with TA38... Even the way B and I have literally NEVER acknowledged the handful of times we hooked up in 2009.

You’re never gonna sound COOL talking about your emotions, your wants and your needs; it’s always gonna sound, imo, like a Therapy Script. And I don’t even always think you gotta have those talks. After graduation, R and I literally had this exchange where we said ‘well we both made mistakes last year, and we could try to untangle it now, but it’s just gonna bring up a lot of bad feelings. It’s done now anyway. Blanket apologies given, blanket acceptance of apologies, let’s move on.” And we did and it was fine. But if we’d had better conversations while we were living together, that would have been a different situation.

All of which is of course complicated for me personally because I am extremely conflict-averse. EXTREMELY.

Anyway, I ran into BL at the bus stop and we talked a bit there and on the bus, which was fine but kinda exhausting tbqh especially because of the topic of conversation. I got home at 6:30 and must have crawled immediately into bed and gone to sleep, but I barely remember it at all. Woke up at 10:30 and had no idea what time it was or what day it was or what I was doing.

Had dinner and then somehow went down a rabbit hole that started... somewhere?? and ended with me looking up my childhood home on Google Earth, which you KNOW is the sign of a mentally stable person who is doing just fine okay.

Now it’s the absolutely disgusting hour of 2:30 in the morning... Idk I wanted to go out tomorrow and take advantage of the nice weather but we’ll see how that goes. The thing is I feel like I need a full day to sleep but I only have two (2) days and in that time I gotta do laundry, cook for the week, preferably write one (1) whole chapter of this fic, and possibly also go on the aforementioned excursion. Which is a lot for me. It doesn’t really... fit.

Everything’s just so much all the time and so on.