This Happened

[mimekiller]

talking to a first respondeder buddy and they found a lady in her backyard, with a book of human anatomy with the brain cord circled and a MIRROR with herself dead by a self inflicted gun shot, now THAT is doing your prep for your suey

[Phoebe]

So tired that while getting the kids to school I've been sitting here listening to Van Halen's jump as if it were some sort of great opera. In a dazed trance state. This after 7 good hours of sleep, but still playing catch-up on so many days of four to five hours.

[akiva]

I just found out that my uncle died a few days ago. I wasn't even a bit close to him--for example, I haven't seen him in more than 20 years. But he was always around when we visited my grandfather when I was a kid, and I have a lot of good memories of him. I always liked him. And now only 1 of my grandfather's children (well, my grandmother's children too, but she died before I was born) is still alive.

I'm not sure how this is going to affect me.

[Phoebe]

Oh, I am sorry to hear about your uncle. It is a weird thing too, moving slowly into this generation of family layers where more people are newer to earth and fewer are the ones you knew growing up. I hope you are getting through the week ok; today feels like a second Monday.

[akiva]

Thanks.

[Phoebe]

You are 2/5 of the way through this week.

[akiva]

Bad night. Hyper aware of how much of a fuck up I am.

Man, I’m incredibly repetitive.

[Phoebe]

Hope things are better tonight. We inch closer to the weekend!

[Phoebe]

The place that was providing child care for two years just inexplicably stopped doing it last month, and I'm officially at the limit of being able to juggle the consequences. I can either quit my job or move my kid to a new school and destroy his life and break his heart. Or I can take him out of school repeatedly halfway through the day so that I can solve the childcare problem, which is what I have to do, until someone complains? Maybe they won't complain. Pretty sure there are attendance rules; never wanted to get this close to testing their limits.

[akiva]

Had to yell at a class today for the first time this year. Barely 2 weeks in. Doesn't bode well for the future.

[Phoebe]

Ooooh what did they do? Does the yelling work, or I mean does it achieve some specific effects?

[akiva]

They were talking and playing on phones when they were supposed to be listening and taking notes.

Yelling works for the very short term. When it’s the only card you’ve got, you want to play it as late as possible. So this isn’t good.

[akiva]

Going to see my shrink tomorrow, so I’m sure everything will be fixed by tomorrow evening.

[Phoebe]

I am happy for you, I should do the same. Instead I made a terrible mistake: I drank a finger of Glenlivet while sitting outside in the relative darkness. I now have four thousand bites from some kind of terribly itchy biter; everything from the ankle down is in fiery agony and I have given up on the usual "don't touch it" advice and am frantically clawing at my feet with a scratchy bedspread to get whatever scrap of relief is possible until the Benadryl kicks in, and that's where the lesser error in having already drunk whisky comes in.

[akiva]

I’ve been at it for a while, so I doubt things will change much tomorrow.

[Phoebe]

Well what happened? Hopefully something good.

[akiva]

Same as ever. I don't think it helps.

[Eliahad]

Do you think you need a different therapist? Have you been going to the same person?

[akiva]

[Phoebe]

Please allow me to put in a plug for actual hypnosis, not the b******* kind that promises to cure your smoking habit in 6 sessions, but the kind that is more like guided meditation. You can take a look at the various building blocks of your psyche from a totally different perspective.