I woke up early enough to hit the beach but I slept so terribly that I just went back to bed Friday morning. Got up an hour before work and goofed around a little.
Work was a little better, if slow. I did the background on three new stories and got them rolling, asking for email introductions to some peope I’m interviewing. Nobody got back to me, so I couldn’t set anything up, but it felt good to create the new folders and start my note-taking.
Someone initiated a new meeting to talk about my new way of doing proposals. I don’t know why it caught me off guard, but it did. I wasn’t expecting new meetings with my boss and my new tutor’s boss. It’s a lot more formal a consequence than I was hoping for. I am just not at my best in meetings; I feel like I’m at a huge disadvantage, like the blind person brought into a meeting heavy on PowerPoint slides. I can manage; I can even contribute. It’s just such a mental strain on me that it exhausts me.
Plus, if you’re the blind person in these meetings, the dread you feel anticipating the meetings is also a strain. I don’t think it’s very understandable to people who thrive in meetings, but it’s real. Yes, I can do them, just as I do my administrative paperwork and just as I did all those report cards, once upon a time. But at least with paperwork and grading, I did it on my turf, generally on my terms, albeit on someone else’s timeline. These meetings are always someone else’s turf and someone else’s terms. It’s tough for a guy whose work is mostly staring at a computer screen.
I was determined to hit the beach Saturday morning, so I spent most of my after-work time doing some chores and getting ready for bed. It was an abbrevited day. I expect a lot of them will be this way as I try to get swimming back into my life the way it was before all this.
Okay, breakfast was some English muffin pizzas. Once I start enjoying these they are a difficult habit to break. Lunch was a couple of quick burritos. If the ground beef I still have in my fridge from last weekend is still good, I’m making some more filling this weekend. Dinner was Korean instant ramen with a mountain of bean sprouts and two eggs. I don’t think there was any snacking.
I FB messaged Melissa to ask some questions about the Kakaako Farmers Market. I told her crowds freak me out nowadays, so she steered me away, saying if I go later in the morning to the Pearlridge one, it’s a lot more sparsely attended. It’s her job to hype anything Pearlridge related, but she also never gives bad advice. I also FB messaged F5 girl, who lives in Wisconsin, to see if she’s okay. This led to some strange conversation about Bob Uecker.
Traded a few small texts with Crush Girl. That was it.
This weekend: more podcast prep. A little bit of work on the Beast. Halt and Catch Fire season two (the first four episodes). And a bunch of reading, I hope.
Reach out if you’d like someone to connect with. I’m here.