You being me, being her, being me, being you?

That line is somewhat garbled, but it comes from The Parent Trap 3, where there were triplets all pretending to be each other for good or for evil and then trying to explain it at the end to their respective boyfriends.

It's also sort of how I feel on my blog. I want to write about what I'm really thinking and feeling and developing and sharing, but those days are past. For 1, nobody wants to read that shit and for 2, it's all so much better with pictures and snippets.  We do all digest our content in 140 character moments that are witty and that means our blogs are shorter and sweeter and probably more people read them than they would if I detailed my last counseling appointment here.

That's the part that really sucks. I feel like I can't even really say that I publicly go to counseling because of the stigma that surrounds it and because I don't want people to think I'm a freak. But holy hell. I have been through a lot and need a way to process it if I'm ever going to come out on the right side of everything.
I also feel like the friends that I have that know what has happened sort of think it's time to just move on and get over it and I agree--and I have. But there's also a bunch of stuff that I can't share or haven't shared with anyone and thus I am still in counseling, talking about life.

Here's the part where I get nervous. Should I go back and delete that last paragraph? Does anyone need to know? What if my parents see this? 

I will leave it up for a few hours to see how I feel about it later. I can leave this entry with one moment, where my therapist said that talking about things and recapping them doesn't actually always make it better.  For many 9/11 survivors, talking about it made it a lot worse, they felt even more imprisoned by their grief and emotions. We definitely didn't want me to feel that way and luckily, it hasn't felt that way yet.

But it also feels different and scary and I feel brave and afraid and vulnerable and strong all at the same time. And I want to talk about it with my friends, but I can't, mostly because most people in the world are not ready to handle that depth of experience.  However, I do have some really good friends who have been through hell and I think they get it. At some point, I think almost everyone can truly say they've experienced trauma and survived, but I also fear that by sharing my stories, other people will scoff and tell me something 100x worse about their lives, and then I will compare myself to them and wonder why I needed therapy to move on and they didn't.  In the past, I've made that point, but the thing I've forgotten is that many of them are also injured in some way and  thus my experience cannot be compared to theirs.

Really, this entire blog post can be tied back to Dessa show, since I saw her live and realized I had so many things to still discuss. 

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Immediately engrossing, immediately intelligent. If I have no plans, I will hopefully finish it this weekend. Bought it for $5 last weekend and couldn't put it down, save for the fact that Dan wanted to borrow the kindle so he could finish his book.


I  also finished Man of My Dreams and the short story, A Perfect Couple, by Curtis Sittenfeld. Sounds like chicklit, but Sittenfeld is way too cool for that.

A Thousand Acres

FINALLY! A movie from my netflix queue came that I actually want to see.  I was too busy in KC to watch movies or really too much TV, so I let Dan control the queue and never bothered to watch anything. January in Minnesota changes all of that.

So today, A Thousand Acres came for me.  I may have mentioned before that I adore the book, so I'll be curious to see how the movie turns out. They will probably botch it and ruin it,  like all splendid books are ruined, save for Fight Club and some of the Harry Potter versions. Will keep you posted!

Tomorrow I am going to GUSTER in DSM and driving back for work on Friday afternoon. I thought about taking the entire day off, but it's the training group's last day of training and thus we're celebrating with Happy Hour. Happy Hour is capitalized at my company. I love it. The new group is going to be so good at their job.  We shall become the best at our business. We love corporations. :) For realz.

Then we had enough food to eat for a year!

In progress in our kitchen right now:
Chocolate banana bread
African Peanut Butter Soup
Pot Roast with carrots & potatoes


I think this week, I'll probably be successful with bringing my own lunchy poo.

Year End Review

Sadly, my work has been a huge chunk of my social life lately. That's ok, though. I found out that my year end review was pretty good. This means a bonus and a raise. I haven't frivolously spent a bonus yet.... so I guess I won't start now. But damn, is it ever tempting.

I wasn't kidding

Really, EVERYONE is getting married in 2011. I love it x100.

First Friday, Minneapolis Style

Our friend told us about a Photo Co-op gallery opening last night, so we went. The new friend  said she loves art galleries and I remarked that it was a great way to shake off corporate America after working all week. Love at first site.  Dan drove into the city to pick me up and I noted that it was odd that of the 3 times he's come downtown for me, all 3 times it's been snowing profusely or intensely icy.  This makes both of us anxious to move to the city, but apartments there are no less than 1k/month and it's more than we want to spend on a place we won't own.

Pre-gallery, we grabbed some dinner at The News Room downtown. Expecting a Kansas City-esque experience, where people in The News Room were drunk and feeling like stabbing other people, I was surprised to find it the opposite. No wristbands, no drunk hipsters. It was a semi-swanky place and the scotch, wine and mixed drink list was longer than the menu, which tells you that you're in the right place after work on Friday. My drinks were mixed pretty well and they didn't use well tequila. It didn't take much this time for me to feel drunk and we drove into the warehouse district in north Minneapolis.

A few years ago at the Leedy-Voulkos gallery, there was an exhibit of photographs of old brick  buildings. It said something like "The abandoned and forgotten spaces in our city illuminate the potential and beauty of the vacant areas around us." I am butchering it, since it was far more eloquent then, but it really made me respect and look at all cities in a completely different way. The manufactured workplace architecture space is cool, but it's way more interesting to see older buildings and what they're used for now. It's way more interesting to look at old neighborhoods and imagine the people inside than to imagine the same cardboard cookie cutter homes that cloud my hometown.  This was how it was for me at the art showing Friday, too. Forgotten old buildings in North Minneapolis housing a photo co-op, producing great art. Love it.

Even though it snowed all afternoon, it was still going strong after dinner, which made parking difficult. But we managed to find a vacant lot. I got out of the car, Looked up, saw a gas station sign that said "gas 3.09" I laughed out loud. I was standing in the middle of heavy snow, surrounded by snowbanks, in an warehouse parking lot and realizing that gas is $3.09 a gallon and really having a great time. The novelty of this much snow hasn't worn off yet.  I swear that Minneapolis isn't as cold as Iowa is, since IA has the most vicious wind that eradicates your coat and skins you to your bones in a heartbeat or two.

The exhibit was a perfect way to scrape off corporate America. The first floor had huge, panoramic terracapes, where the photographer researched what the water table underground would look like and showed photos of what underground NYC looks like with condos on top of it.  The second floor was full of photos of people, buildings and nature. One photo was the world's smallest house with a tent in front of it and another was an old woman visiting a decayed house that she'd grown up in, these are the standouts for me.

This weekend is the 2 year anniversary of my maternal grandmother's passing. It is strange that she died on MLK Jr weekend, since MLK has long been my favorite American and a personal hero. I strive to mix the 2 events by recognizing charity and hoping to fight the war on poverty.

Sick day, please?

Your sick days at work should be saved for those days in the middle of tax season when you're completely drained & everyone else has already called in sick once, so you're not shirking your work when you do it.
They shouldn't be used for days when you're training new people with 2 uber-tough men that hardly ever call in sick, even when they have pneumonia or holes in their lungs. Especially when the day ends with Jeopardy gameshow powerpoint.

Thus I dragged my sorry self into work today. I'm glad that I didn't break down in tears, beg someone to drive me to the busstop, or beg Dan to come pick me up, especially since he's feeling equally sick. I found out that I'll have my 4th new manager in a year, though not because anyone has left, but because we keep hiring more new managers. I also managed to survive grocery shopping, carrying the groceries up 5 flights of stairs because the elevator wasn't working, and then collapsing into a chair to write this. Alas, I can manage no more, even though I have 24 pages of work left to enter by Monday and a long tax meeting tomorrow. I am going to stop whining before I cross the point of no return.

The lasagna

Our friends had us over for delicious lasagna this weekend. Or rather, their parents did. It was so welcoming and cozy that I practically teared up when they said grace. We finally met Buster the Parrot and I decided I'm going to move in to their house when they're gone. They live in rural Iowa and it felt almost like Monticello from last year, except several degrees colder.



Today, I bought stock in an oil company. I have indeed lost all sense of humanity. Oh, the oil. The oil.

Off with a bang!

I resolved to work less this year.  I know that's crazy, but I really have been working too much and  I want to get back to doing things that I actually like. So far, this resolution isn't working out so well, because every OT opportunity that I see equates itself with splendid, irresistible cash.  Cash that buys my Birdies Lingerie, cash that pays for my graying root-concealment, cash that justifies pretty much any expenditure that I make beyond necessities.  And...cash that pays the bills.

So I've signed up for 3 weekends of work so far this year, which can't be that bad, I imagine. I've been training new employees for the last 3 weeks and it's fun because you get to train them for everything you learned the hard way. The bad side is that training them for everything you learned is difficult when you just want them to get the basics first and then remember all of the little details that make the job hard. But I think this group is going to survive and be ok on their own.

My other resolution is to run a marathon, which might be stupid or might be amazing. So far, I've made zero progress towards this goal.



I also resolve to watch more movies, and we started out by going to True Grit. Tonight I'll watch some library movies and this weekend (when I'm not back at work!) I'll be watching other stuff on Netflix.
The extra reading has been taken care of by the Kindle, which has transported Alison Weir to me nonstop. I'm reading her fiction book right now, but the nonfiction is much better. This book is a novelization of Elizabeth I. If I didnt hold Weir in esteem for her nonfiction books, I'd throw this one in the trash.

I resolve to sew pillows from the pillow book, knit with my yarn from 2008 and walk the dog more. I resolve to bike to the bus when it's warm, canoe and swim and fish this summer, make Dan a t-shirt quilt, take the nieces and nephew to snowboard, ski more, clean more, and be on top of everything.

I also resolve to volunteer more, but not so much that I get entirely sick of it and hate it. Not so much that I hate other people. I resolve to save more money instead of spending it on dying my hair, buying clothes and going to movies.

Does anyone ever do anything they want to do in these lists? I doubt it. But god bless us all for trying so damned hard.