week

The house here is full now. Four of us, another week of chaos, which I can handle. It's the steadiness that I'm not prepared for.

One more week with the three of us with the A names, then miss F settles into her new room, again ( the end of the summer of musical bedrooms), and subletee miss A moves into the living room until she finds a new place.

This weekend is the Grand Cleanup of the house. Which is this big scary grey cloud over there. I haven't even unpacked my clothes from when I moved back in at the beginning of August. Living out of laundry baskets for nearly a month. Kind of feels like travelling.

And here I am, in my last free week, feeling it filling up, so little space left, so much to do. Counselling appointmet, IKEA visit, first gym visit.

And really, booking that first gym visit wasn't pleasant. Everyone I spoke to on the phone was very brusque. I don't like brusqueness, I want people to be nice to me, to be helpful, especially when I'm nervous. It's my first visit, I obviously don't know what I'm doing, I just want some information and an encouraging voice on the other end of the phone line. being treated coldly does not make me want to go to their gym and have to potentially deal with someone else who will treat me coldly in person for the entire duration of my gym orientation. This is why I've avoided aking for help at local rec centre gyms, and why I've avoided getting gym memberships in the past. The few times I've called and requested information, or gone in to talk to someone , it's always been a bad experience.

Now, I realize that I am more sensitive than other people to things like tone of voice and body language, but I've been in many social situations where I have felt welcomed and encouraged, so it's frustrating when I put myself out there and end up discouraged. Especially when other people seem to have positive experiences in places and situations that I have negative ones.

I think that I just have much higher interpersonal standards than most people. I tend to work quite hard at ensuring that other people are comfortable, and feel well taken care of, and welcomed. I care, significantly, even if the interaction is a small, supposedly meaningless one, I want the other person to experience the interaction as a significant occurrence/experience.

Which is what made me such a terrible retail/customer serivce worker. I've always known and recognized the bullshit relatioship of that whole interaction, and that the only important thing occurring is actually simple human connection. I hate selling people things they don't need, and don't really want. And so, I don't work in retail anymore. And it's why I'm going back to school.

But for right now, I'm going to sit in quiet, having finished my cup of peppermint tea, and then put on some sunscreen and go for a walk, do some errands. Pick up some twig tea, maybe, some nice shampoo from an organic store. Put on some lip balm and enjoy the sunny afternoon.