pick up aqui

 

Leon

Coffee

House

bonkers creative

This was a two-parade weekend and as my pal and I watched paraders and brass bands and floats go by, they remarked that it was all happening too fast, we needed more time to really see and take in the floats, the puns, the glorious explosion of creativity and hilarity and fun.

Yes.

Yes yes yes.

I participated in a 3-day writing workshop last week exploring queries and submissions with agents and about 300 other participants. It felt overwhelming most days, because my actual paid j.o.b. went from great to demanding and frustrating and unrewarding, and I want to dwell in creative world and then putting myself in editing world felt icky and frustrating. But I hung in there, watched the videos, submitted my homework, and met some possible new collaborators.

It’s important to remind myself that creativity isn’t comfortable sometimes (MOST times!) and a lesson from the weekend is that I love simply beautiful moments, like the float with a dancer behind sheer mesh, clad in green glitter and moving so beautifully to trance-like cello music. It was a moment that passed too quickly but maybe the quickness and the fleetingness was what made it so supremely wonderful.

 

Beauty simply for the sake of beauty is Yes.

if only it were possible

 

the shrink who called me

A former shrink called me this week. Now that’s a feeling, the phone ringing, a former shrink’s name onscreen, a person I parted ways with years ago pretty abruptly. I was curious, but wary, so I let it go to voicemail.

All therapists in my experience make it difficult to end the relationship. I dislike ghosting and won’t lie, but what options do I have when it just isn’t working anymore and they refuse to hear it? One shrink I really liked (not this one) just could not keep appointments. He completely forgot our second or third session and I forgave him after he apologized but the next week I again sat in his waiting room well past my appointment time, wondering where he was. He hurried through the waiting room, saw me, yelled he was coming right back, he just had to get to the medical marijuana place two floors down. I said nothing, just packed up my stuff and took the stairs down to the street and ignored his phone calls pleading with me to come back. We’d been discussing boundaries and I guess I learned that lesson.

*

Anyway. The calling shrink. I’m retiring, she said, and thought a nice way to close her practice would be to call her clients. You and I, we had a few conversations, she added, to encapsulate a relationship that had lasted for several years.

She helped me with a few things but I ended it after I realized she was never going to try to learn more about a neurological condition that has caused me huge amounts of pain and grief and shame. When I mentioned the shame, in particular, and how I struggled with it, she said well she didn’t want me to feel shame. Neither do I, I replied tartly, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was, in my mind, I DID feel shame. But I don’t want you to feel shame, she said again. We went around and around. I left her office weeping with frustration.

I called her a few days later and left a voicemail cancelling my upcoming sessions, and telling her I needed to take a break. She called me to ask me to come back a few more times, but I didn’t pick up, but wrote her a card reiterating that I was done.

And I was, until the other day.

Her call brought back all those feelings of frustration and anger. At first I was inclined to call her back, to be honest about how it ended, but now I wonder what good it would do. Is she looking for absolution? Closure? Well, join the club. I feel my choice is binary, either to lie, thank her for her service and blithely wish her well, or be a meanie and tell her I’m still battling the thing she wouldn’t help me with.

Neither feels good. So I’m just going to leave it. The way, maybe, she left me.

king cake mania

The king cake mania around here is something. I’m a cake lover so trust me, I’m not complaining. My first ever king cake was from a New Orleans grocery store during a visit six or seven years ago. Now I know that this is a gross insult, but one taste of the tender, faintly-spicy cake, the crunch of purple sugar, the sweet icing, the search for the baby -- I was hooked.

*

Nearly every establishment I’ve been into is offering a version of king cake. People have their favorites. So far I’ve tried so-called plain, and also slices with chantilly cream or praline, and even a vegan cream cheese. They’ve all been delicious and I’m excited to try more.

*

Today I was walking home from a bakery stop with a box of pastries and a dogwalker shouted, What’d ya get? Assuming that the flat box I cradled contained a king cake. I said it was birthday pastries, not a king cake, and we shared a laugh. It was her birthday, she exclaimed, so we congratulated each other, fellow Capricorns, and continued on our sunny walks.