Couch 236: NY PS Langston Hughes

Well, she no longer has a choice. She developed further symptoms this morning (dizziness, nausea, vomiting), so she’s in the hospital. I’m en route.

I'm so sorry about your Mom @@. I hope she will be okay. HUGS If wished. Kit

@@, thinking of you and your mother.

My mom's still in the hospital (tomorrow will be 2 weeks). She's improving and working on getting her strength back so we are grateful.

Hospitals now have wifi and valet parking (or this one does, anyway) but inside it's the same old ****.

It is somewhat amusing to hear a retired doctor complain about typical doctor-y behavior like evasiveness and non-committalness.

I'm having to empty my entire kitchen and bathrooms because our building supposedly has cockroaches. *sigh* It's taking me a lot longer than I expected and I'm feeling overwhelmed.

One of h's friends is here and they're watching golf on tv, I had a good coupon so when I got off work (they cancelled today's OT) I went and picked up pizza from marco's for us. I got a garden pizza and it has artichokes on it, I'd never had artichokes on pizza before it's pretty tasty! love their thin crust pizza yum.

Sheep are the most brainless unintelligent animals on earth. They exist solely so you can eat mint jelly.

L was in the weekly zoom drum circle last night, I was surprised to see her it is the first one I've seen her in since I started attending them. And relieved that it didn't feel weird or awkward at all seeing her in there. There's not like full group discussions or anything that would make it weird, we do breakout rooms to practice the things we've learned in his workshops one-on-one. Last night I worked with a gal in San Francisco, she was really nice I don't recall having met her before. I wonder if when L saw me, she messaged him to not put us in the same breakout room. That might have been a little weird if he had. Me, I'm 6 of one, half a dozen of the other on that subject! Anyway I am happy with how normal it felt seeing her on there.

Glad it felt normal to you, Artie! Maybe it helps that you had the recent correspondence with her?

It's funny, I'm trying to think of any possible online place where I could run into Dr. T, and our hobbies and interests (what I know of his, at least) are so different, that I can't think of anything, unless maybe it was some sort of political forum. In person at a restaurant or store, yes. But for some sort of hobby? Again, unless it's something political (similar views), can't think of anything.

Random amusing thing from the start of today's in-person session:
I told Dr. T how there had been one other person in the waiting room earlier and how when I'd used my hand sanitizer bottle, it had made a particular noise, and I wondered if the guy thought I had farted. Dr. T: "I'm sorry I missed that. I love a good fart joke!"

I talked to my mom this morning, she called to tell me she got her 'green card' (she's very proud of this my sister said) that allows her to get out of bed and move around her room on her own with a walker, without a nurse's assistance. We didn't get to talk very long because a nurse had just come in bringing her medications. Hopefully she'll be going home next week, and will be going to a day program for OT and PT 5 days a week, then 3 days a week. She sounded pretty good, other than her voice is still a little hoarse.

Yes, I think you're right that the recent email exchange did help with that.

Yeah, I got into this whole shamanic thing because of her actually. Years ago I'd had that one dream that she said sounded like a shamanic journey so I looked up what that was, liked what I read, which led me to find the drumming group I used to hang out with, and then one time she sent me info about Michael Harner's foundation, and I finally started taking workshops through them not long before the pandemic started. The first one was with a local instructor in person, and the other 2 over zoom with the guy who does these circles. It was through one of the workshops (I've taken 2 with this particular instructor now) that I was invited to the weekly circles, and finally got brave enough to start attending them. I am enjoying them a lot, and enjoying meeting new people every week in different areas of the country.

I made these guys yesterday after work. The sunglasses just came from Amazon a few minutes ago. They are now officially Too Cool For School. Ha!!

I can't imagine *not* finding that weird or awkward.

I was a little concerned that it might feel weird because we never really talked too much about the possibility. Except that it would be like running into each other at Costco again or something I would have to say hello first and she'd said that as far as anyone else there knows, we could have met each other at local drumming events or something. Honestly I don't think anybody else there cares one way or the other anyway, whether or not we know each other or how.

I need to go work on my first poem of April for the 30 poems in 30 days challenge.

I finally got back from my trip to hometown with my cats in tow. It's nice to have custody of them again from ex-husband. They love my apartment and seemed to have missed me. I wasn't sure how it would go - cats are such fickle creatures and it was a very long car ride.

Glad to hear that, Artie!

Glad you have your cats back and that they seem happy to see you!

Hm, maybe I should try this as well!

With high hopes in my ability to actually complete the poem a day challenge this year, I created a blog for it, and just posted my first poem. I am hoping that adding said blog to the list of participant's sites on napowrimo.net will be the push I need to complete the challenge for real in 2022.

That's great, Artie!

ETA: Poem 1 completed! (Well, I mean, it could use some editing, but....) Inspiration: a line in a song that made me cry on the way to therapy and a discussion about careers in session (that was inspired by that lyric).

Woohoo!! Way to go. Yeah, I feel you, mine could use some editing too, but for me anyway this challenge is not about perfection in the writing, it's more about doing the writing. I can edit later. I often do, pull out older poems and edit them. Anyway my inspiration today was a song lyric too, from Jim Croce's "Hey Tomorrow":

"So many times I said I'd been changin'
then slipped into patterns of what's happened before."


I feel like I am ready to write one about the realization that hit me on the way home from a therapy session in like mid-November, that led to that Sunday email and subsequent fateful phone call where we decided we were stopping and scheduled those few ending sessions. That poem will not be put on my blog though, so that'll have to be a 2-poem day haha.

This leaving therapy has really been a process, as much as the therapy itself was a process. I don't know how long it's going to take before I am ready to let external her go; and just move forward being happy to have the version of her in my heart that I can talk to whenever I want. I think it's happening, it's just slow. I'm thinking I may start a separate thread about the leaving a long-term therapy process. I dunno.

That's great, Artie! And seems like it could be healing to write the other poem you're talking about, though I understand your not wanting to post it on your blog. Maybe you can do that and, say, a haiku (or something else really short) for the blog that day?