one is silver, the other gold, etc. etc.

So it's not November anymore, but who cares? I'm still going to talk about some things I'm grateful for.

New friends:
The really fun thing about new friends is that you get to present yourself in a new way to them. They come to you as a blank slate ready to reflect a new you back at yourself. I've learned a whole lot about myself in these past few months just by introducing myself to new people, especially complete strangers as opposed to friends of friends.

Old friends:
Matt and I did most of our moving on Thanksgiving and the day after, so we didn't get to celebrate that much. But we got to Portland on the other end and people came over to help us move in and people gave us leftover Thanksgivings. So we got to eat Thanksgiving for dinner last night. And I went out and hung out with humans in Portland who were thrilled to see me. And plans were made and such.

Yayfor friends!

cryptic gratitude

No details, but I think last night's gratitude is important to write down. I'm glad someone called me on my shit yesterday. I may have been angry in the short term, but I got stuff done and it shocked me out of a rut. Next rut to fix: sleep deprivation cycle.

State of the Vera

Well, apparently I didn't make it very far with my gratitude posting month. I'll probably do more of it, but every day didn't work out this year. So instead, today I'll post a State of the Vera Address:

Jobs:
I've been temping since we moved to Seattle. It's been a mixed bag of fun, horror, learning new skills, and just slogging through. I'm about to move back to Portland where I don't even have a good prospect at the moment. There are plenty of maybes, but maybes don't pay the rent. So I've been freaking out about that a little bit. I'm pretty confident that once I start walking into vet clinic and handing them resumes, things will loosen up, but since I'm living up here and can't physically do that, I just have to sit on my hands and surf Craigslist. Hilarious fun!

Housing:
Matt and I just nabbed a gorgeous house in NE Portland for a little less than the one we're in now in Seattle. It's biking distance to a number of friends and walking distance to the Kennedy School and New Seasons. It's bigger than this house (by a small amount), has a fenced back yard, and butts right up against Wilshire Park, where there's an off-leash area. It's wonderful! It's beautiful! And there've been a variety of interesting kinks in our plan to move there. It's not worth going through every gory detail, but every day brings a new emotional roller coaster of housing.

Sleeping:
I finally got my sleeping habits under control. For a while there, I had insomnia like whoa. I think it was mostly related to anxiety and I got that under control after a while with cunning application of tea and therapy. But here it comes again, just in time for us to move. Woohoo! In related news, I've learned that energy drinks are awesome, but I crash really hard after they're out of my system.

Depression:
Wow! I really kicked it! Well, mostly. I'm learning some coping techniques. Some are really mundane, like calling a friend for a quick kick in the pants, or going for a walk with the dog. Others are a little more maintenance, like eating balanced meals. But every day I wake up and tell myself that today is a good day, and usually it is.

Bad pun moment:
The state of the Vera is Washington, soon to be Oregon.

Today's Gratitude:
I managed to start turning my life around before age 25. Albeit, it was just a few months shy, but I'm still glad I did it.

running running running

I was planning to write a state of the Vera address, but apparently I had other things to do away from the computer. The address should be forthcoming.

Today Matt, Baldr, and I went to the dog park and ran ourselves silly. Baldr had a chance to chase another malamute around and there were several labs and retrievers that wanted to wrestle with him. But the best part of all of that was chasing him around the park. Matt and I took turns playing tag with Baldr until he was too tired to stand up. It was great!

Day (maybe I should stop counting because I missed a few days) 15 Gratitude:
running really fast until I'm out of breath and giggly

I knew this would happen...

I made it a third of the way through the month before hitting writer's block. I've had three or four grumpy evenings and bad night's sleep, which of course, leads to tiredness and feeling generally delicate. Blah. So I guess today I'll list something I'm grateful about in general, every day, and try not to take it for granted.

Day 12 Gratitude:
Baldr and Zhenya offer me unconditional love, every day, all the time, no matter what

fans, and things that hit them

I've been a mess for most of today. I think it's sleep deprivation catching up to me, or possibly leftover stress, improperly processed, from last night. But anyways, I messed up a few things, Matt and I grumped at each other, and then the toilet overflowed. A lot. There was some screaming and swearing and then cleaning up. And a bit more grumping, because that's how these things go. But then the grumps were replaced with dinner, accomplishing something in the job search, and snuggling in front of stupid TV. All is well!

Day 11 Gratitude:
rooting out the source of the grumps

when you're not strong, I'll be your friend

No details here, but a little outline:
-Saw friends who went out of their way to see me on Sunday
-Called people on the phone and talked to them about friend things and it was great
-Had various twitter in livejournal exchanges with friends

I did a little leaning and a little supporting in the past few days.

Day 10 Gratitude:
friend networks that are strong enough for mutual leaning in many directions

PS I posted this and then decided to add another few thoughts about friendship:
It's been a good long while since the last time that I felt strong enough about myself to be the support person. It's a role that I would really rather be taking, and suddenly I find that I'm really doing ok enough to hold others up for a bit. It's only fair; they did the same for me. And the best part about it is that there are many people I can turn to next, so we're all supporting each other.

flying hugs

Today I went down to Portland on a whim. Really, it hadn't been planned before about 10am today that I would do it. But Dad and I looked at a house and hung out with folks and had coffee and it was generally awesome. More than one person I ran into gave me a flying hug. :) I took the Amtrak Cascade line back up north for the first time in my life. It was just about uneventful, though I had to screw my courage to the sticking point and whatnot. Traveling alone is all scary and stuff! The worst part of the trip was when google maps gave Matt bad directions to the station, so he got all frustrated and I waited in the rain. (Honest! I had fun!) But I think I handled today and all of its attending chaos far better than I would have 6 months to a year ago.

Day 9 Gratitude:
Good stories to tell.

Oh, dear...

I've come to one of those days that didn't have something particular in it to be thankful about. I mean, it was a fantastic day... We ate at restaurants that I love, spent time with cool people, played Scrabble, got housey things done, generally Saturdayed the heck out of today. So I suppose I can pick something from the more general list of things that I'm thankful for and go from there...

Day 8 Gratitude:
I'm glad that I live in a society at a level that allows me free time.

you got your health and you got food in you belly

I thought up this whole thing I was going to write here about today... Last night Dad got in to visit us. He hasn't seen me in a while and was pleasantly surprised to see my face has all cleared up. I haven't had my stupid eye-dripping issue for a while and I'm feeling generally healthy. Ignoring that odd infection I had a few weeks back and the general anxiety and insomnia, I'm doing pretty well at the moment, physically.

Day 7 Gratitude:
my health (is better than it was a year ago, or even a month ago)

schadenfreude

There's some drama at work at the moment... Nothing that directly involves me, but I get to hear about it a lot. A group of us ended up making terrible, terrible jokes today for a good long time. It reminded me a bit of laughing so hard in the Looking Glass House that I fell on the floor.

Day 6 Gratitude:
laughing to hard you can't breathe

remember, remember

I had a session with my therapist this evening. We talked about various things I've been doing to try to combat my depression and how successful they've been (or not) and came up with a few new tools for myself. I was surprised to realize that I'm in very similar situations that I was in about a year ago in terms of social isolation at work and monotony of what I'm doing to earn a living. And I'm handling it fifty times better than I did then.

Day 5 Gratitude:
making quantifiable progress

Blue!

I've been a bundle of nervous energy for days and days... I'm not handling this election thing terribly well this year. I was more collected in 2004, possibly because I didn't care for Kerry as much as I disliked Bush. But Matt and I are listening to OPB's coverage of the results. I'm dealing with some of my nerves by baking brownies and frantically refreshing electoral maps and news sites. If you told me four years ago that I would spend this evening eating spaghetti and sitting mostly quietly at my computer...

These brownies are celebratory and not drown-your-sorrows.

Day 4 Gratitude:
President Barack Hussein Obama

(I don't feel like this is real... We've been waiting for too long.)

failure

So I blew the experiment on the second day. That doesn't mean I didn't have something to write about, I just got home really late and forgot to sit down and write it. So here's what yesterday's entry would have been, and I swear it's not a cop-out.

So yeah, on Saturday I wrote about family. Last night I had dinner with those same cousins. It was low key, we watched some Star Wars, and hung out for a while while I wrestled with their dog and we talked about the world. So again:

Day 2 Gratitude:
Family

Today I started off with an odd morning... It was light out, because of the time change, and Matt was still in Portland, so I had to get Baldr fed and walked before I went to work. It was fun! I handled my time a lot better than I usually do in the mornings. I think I might see if I can walk Baldr in the mornings a few more days. And then I decided that today's mantra would be "Today is a good day." It seemed to work. I made a new friend and we had all kinds of great conversations about music, video games, and bad jokes. I actually kind of had fun at my dead-end warehouse temp job.

Day 3 Gratitude:
"Today is a good day."

catching up

The weird thing about family (and friends, really) is that even if you haven't seen or heard from them in ages, they're still family (and friends) and they still care. I spent some time this morning with my cousin Jules and our dogs at the park talking about Deep Philosophical Things.

Day 1 Gratitude:
Family

NaBloGraPoMo

For the past few years I've participated in National Blog Posting Month, trying to post every day for the month of November. This year I'm going to try something a little different... To start off, I'm posting here instead of my older journal. I'm also going to try to post things that pertain to this blog's purpose (self-reflection, personal growth, spiritual things, and my Fiendish Plan) and if I have nothing good to say, post about things that I'm grateful for. This will be an adventure!

fiendish plan

I have a fiendish plan of what to Do With Myself when I Grow Up. I don't really want to go into detail too much for fear of jinxing anythings, but needless to say, this plan is very, very me and will be very, very difficult.

In the process of deciding to do this I've discovered a few interesting things about myself.

1) It took me two or three years to figure out that this was something I wanted to do. Many people (parents, friends, Matt, and even me) have suggested this line of thought before, but I guess I needed to be good and ready before I'd agree to it. Man, am I stubborn!

2) I'm letting my fear of screwing up keep me from acting. I spend a lot of time looking at how scary this path is and then not doing much about it. Then a friend calls, or something like that, and they tell me how exciting it is that I'm pursuing this plan, or they remind me how great an idea it is, and I charge in again. Today I'm looking at all of the steps I need to take first and it's looking like a big, gigantic, expensive thing.

success?

From Cats!

Well, whatever I'm doing seems to be working... Some combination of diet change, activity change, and attitude change has left me feeling pretty good about the world for many days in a row. Oddly, this means I feel like I have less to talk about in this space. Just sayin'. So here's a photo of me that I took late at night with a kitten on my shoulder.

a moment of Portland surrealism

I went to Portland last weekend to visit some friends. It was pretty awesome and there were kittens. But I'm still not as self-confident as these melons.

"Hello, hello? Is this thing on?"

She said,

This is an intervention. We're not happy with the way you're living your life. You've become far too timid. You're blending in to make things easier, but you're making it harder on yourself in the long run. You can't chip away bits of yourself to fit in to this world. You've lost too much of yourself and it's hurting you. Remember that you're not alone and we're here for you. Don't make any decisions, no matter how small, without talking to us. We're always here and we'll always take your call. Remember you have a body! Use it! You're too stuck in your mind and that's making you miserable. Make a plan and follow it. Don't let timid Vera take over! Decide who you want to be and become her. You've done it before, but it's been too long. Let's make a plan. Three goals. What do you want to accomplish in the next month?

1) Find a chorus and sing at least once a week.
2) Get a job that fits better.
3) Make an appointment with a doctor.

Ok, good. Now repeat them back to me. We will help you with this. Call us any time.

And then I asked him if he was my strength.

"No. You are your own strength. I am your tiger."

Two of Swords

I started this blog initially to be somewhere I could write about rediscovering myself. Since starting, I've found that the things I'm discovering are so intensely personal that it's hard to talk about them, so here goes:

Suburban Housewives:

In my current job I'm working a lot with suburban housewives. They live in particular little boxes that make me wildly uncomfortable. As an example, they described a former coworker as "weird" because she was a little quirky and dressed a little gothy. By my usual standards, this woman was quite tame. By the standards of the people I'm working with, she was so ludicrously weird that they had no way of interacting with her.

Somehow I find myself tucked into an office with these women as if we have things in common. Yes, in some ways we do; I enjoy spending time with them and joking about things during the day, but I suspect that they would look at me even funnier if they knew anything about my personal life. I look at the Suburban Housewife archetype and I'm sort of horrified. Do I want to be a wife in that sense? How much do I want to be defined by cultural norms?

Heteronormativity:

I got used to being one of a crowd of mostly queer people and queer allies at Reed. Since graduation, with one notable exception, I've been thrust into a completely heteronormative world. It feels like I've lost something. People I spend time with now are all traditionally married or trying to get to that point. I know very few queer people (as friends) that I met after college. I barely feel comfortable talking about queer issues with the people I'm around now.

Loss of Self-Confidence:

I spent a lot of time in high school trying very hard not to fit in. Somewhere along the line I decided that the better bet was to hide how different I am with good clothing and grooming and let people discover my quirks later on. I think it was a financial decision, since it's hard to get a job if you dress funny and talk about your religion a lot. I noticed that people take you much more seriously if you establish yourself as reasonable before they learn about your atypical ideas. The unfortunate side effect that this change has had is that I find I have little confidence in identifying what is and isn't me.

I've found myself agreeing to do things that I wouldn't have otherwise, just so I don't stand out. Just the other day I agreed to order a dessert at a restaurant because everyone else in my party said they would like a bite of it. Generally, I don't like to order desserts in restaurants, let alone share them.

So where did I go from being stealthy about my differences to uncertain about what I actually like? I'm not sure where the change happened, but I most certainly need to change it back.

Conclusion:

So the point of all of this is that I need to make some major changes in the way I'm living my life. I made a promise to myself in January that I would spend more time with friends this year and that hasn't quite worked out, partly because of the move to Seattle and partly because I've fallen into unhealthy patterns. So I'm going to have to call people instead of seeing them in person. :) I also need to take more time just for me and nobody else. And hopefully I'll find more that I can write about in this space.

Next steps:

1) Spend more time with friends (in person or on the phone)
2) Eat healthier and cook more
3) Pray more, do more tarot readings, etc.
4) Analyze and identify my own likes and dislikes
5) Be more selfish

Hello, world.

in praise of food

Matt and I made some spectacular chili a couple of weeks ago.

We've found several meals that we can make consistently that use a small number of ingredients, but feed us for several days. (Chili is just one of them, but it's the best example) We started out with prepackaged things, like Hamburger Helper, and then found ways to reproduce what we like without the prepackaged stuff. (And we get to spice them the way we want to, not the way some corporate cook thinks Americans will like their food.) The most recent discovery takes this a step further. Instead of using prepackaged mixes, we switched to getting canned ingredients (canned beans, canned corn, etc.), but we've recently discovered that dried bulk foods work even better. It takes considerably more preparation, but the results are far, far tastier and feel healthier. And the best part about this shift in our cooking? Each step we've taken means that our food has cost less to create, but we end up with more food.

In conclusion: Buying food in bulk and putting just a little more effort into making a meal means that you pay less and end up with more, tastier food.

esteeming oneself

At the moment I'm sort of employed; I'm working a temporary job for a construction company with no definite end date. So far I've only worked three days for them, but I still feel like a fish out of the water. Their filing system is out of date and needs serious remedial help, so I spent a chunk of time today getting familiar with what should and shouldn't be there. I was mostly doing it for my own benefit, since I'm going to be working with this system consistently and feel pretty outclassed. My supervisor walked into my shared office this afternoon and exclaimed about how neat the filing section was. "Wow, Vera! You're really on top of this! You just charge right in and do it without waiting around!"

Right then it sunk in that I'm doing a good job. I've spent the past few months sitting in a little hole feeling bad about myself for various reasons. Suddenly I find myself in a position to be making somebody else's job much easier and she really appreciates it.

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I'm awesome!

Seattle

Holy crap, I just moved to Seattle. Ok, "just" isn't quite the right word. Matt and I have been here a little over a week. The first few days we were here the basic getting stuff unpacked and wrangling of pets kept us occupied. We're still not completely unpacked. The house is beautiful and bright every room has a massive window (or four) that keeps the whole house well lit even on cloudy days. The weather hasn't been perfect, but it's nothing to complain about. The neighborhood is lovely and quiet, except for the occasional playing child.

So here's the thing: I'm terrified. I just moved away from a city that I'd grown to love over the past six years. I had just reached a point where I felt I could drive just about anywhere and not get too lost. Suddenly I find myself in a city whose traffic I despise and whose layout is so completely foreign as to make my head spin. For the first few days we were here I found myself getting panicky when we left the house. I got scared when we just took the dog for a walk, but when we hopped in the car for a quick trip to the grocery store, I would watch the scenery rush by and take me further from things I recognized.

The other day I went grocery shopping by myself. The drive itself wasn't so bad; I was concentrating enough on driving Matt's truck (which is a difficult task) that I couldn't get too wrapped up on the distance from home. I grabbed a cart and checked my list to see what I needed. The map at the door showed me where to find food items, so I got rolling. I was halfway through the vegetable section when I felt that panic again. The whole place was completely foreign and so very familiar at the same time. I thought about the grocery store that is near our old place in Portland and how it took me a while to get used to it. I will probably never shop there again. There is nothing familiar about things that used to be routine. It's a different store in a different state filled with people who are Washingtonians and not Oregonians who can clearly see that I don't belong there.

I decided not to panic. Instead I bought my groceries and went home. I felt triumphant when I got back. I beat the grocery store monster! And we made a nice dinner at home.

It's been six years since I last moved to a new state. Last time I did I tried to convince my parents that it was a bad idea and I shouldn't go to college after all. I'm handling it slightly better this time, I think? But here's hoping that the grocery store feels familiar soon and I can settle into a comfortable routine to keep my head on straight.

transformers

My last day of work was a few days ago. I've been working at a vet clinic for a year and a half. I've learned some very valuable things about myself and the world and I've gotten to sit in on some really neat surgeries.

So I felt a need to, shall we say, give back when I left. I purchased two Transformers figures from the grocery store next door and labeled them "2" and "3." They are carefully hidden in places that I know nobody will look in for at least a month after I'm long gone.

for the record

The other half of my worries about making new friends is all of my worry about leaving friends behind. I'm historically bad at keeping in touch with people that I don't see on a regular basis. So the plan is to be better about making telephone calls and emailing people more often.

making friends

On the way home from work tonight I was thinking about how to make friends. I'm going to be moving to Seattle within the next month and leaving behind everything about Portland that I love. I've lived here for six-ish years and I've made friends with all sorts of people, restaurants, and views. It would be pretty great if I could take them with me, but I know that's not possible. After stressing on this topic for a few minutes it occurred to me that it's really not that hard to make new friends.

In high school and college it was easy to make friends because I was thrown into situations with them. Sitting at a lunch table every day for a year with the same people will force familiarity, if not friendship. I'm still very close to my freshman roommate (we ended up living together in some capacity for four years). I'm engaged to marry a man that I met through an online dating site. But what's important isn't where I met them, but how well we clicked once we met.

So here I am sitting around stressing about meeting people in clubs, choruses, etc, or going out and trying new restaurants. I have to remember that everything and everyone that I'm attached to had to start out as something scary and unknown at one time.

Hello, World!

I decided to start a new blog, so I opened up Blogger and typed in this address. I found, much to my surprise, that there was already a blog at this location, filled with things that I had written. I don't remember starting it or setting up the syndication that mirrored my old blog here, but it was all me. Everything that was posted here was word for word things that I had written in the summer of 2006. So deleted the whole thing and now I'm starting over.

Hi! I'm Vera! My world is going through some rather rapid changes at the moment, so I decided to make more space to think about them. I'm also posting links on the sidebar that I find interesting (though most of them will be cute kitten photos) and mirroring my tweets here.