There is So Much

To write about.

And where to begin?

I almost titled this blog, One Hour, as an homage to something quite big.

I also thought about naming it, “Are you Here?” as I suspect my ex is back in town.

At least it feels that way.

More about that later.

Then I thought I should write about my awesome and amazing Mike Doughty experience and having gotten to see him on Wednesday of this week and how I played hooky from clients and went out on a school night.

I didn’t really play hooky, I just rescheduled them for later in the week, I had one tonight and I’ll see the other tomorrow after my regular Saturday clients.

Then I thought, oh yeah, I should call this, “Vive La France!”

As I bought a ticket to Paris last night!

Yeah.

So.

All the things.

All of them.

So much going on.

Plus, of course, the school thing that is happening and how I managed to get all my papers done and turned in on time and also how I got back some really amazing comments on my last couple of papers.

“Clarity, erudition, adept usage of third person, meticulous APA style,” I could go on, but then I think that’s just ego.

I”m right on schedule with school at the moment and extremely happy about that, despite feeling a little disconnected from school since I did not get much time this week at work to do homework.

The family had the flu.

Like seriously bad, fevers, aches, chills, super bad sore throat, coughing.

I do not know how I escaped, but I did.

I also got my flu shot this year so that might have helped and as soon as the family was diagnosed with the flu at the doctors they called me and said call my doctor and get Tamiflu, which is a preventative medicine that will work if taken within 72 hours of exposure.

So I’ve been taking that all week and seemed to have skated by the flu.

Thank fucking God.

I cannot afford to be sick.

And.

I don’t like being sick.

Even the small part of me that rather enjoys lying around all day in bed.

The rest of me drives itself crazy when I’m sick.

So I’m super happy I avoided it.

But man, work was a tough one this week.

Which made it easy to ask off for time to work with a client.

Yes.

It’s official.

This week I got my tenth client.

I took a leap of faith when the person reached out and offered expanded hours beyond what I have available.

Meaning.

Wednesdays I work from 9 a.m. to 5p.m. then see clients at 5:30p.m., 6:30p.m. and 7:30p.m.

I offered the client a 4:30p.m. slot.

Technically I’m working as a nanny, but I’ve been in conversation for months now that at some point I would slowly begin the transitioning down of nanny hours for therapy hours.

I hesitated for just a brief moment but knew, really knew, that I had to offer hours that would overlap into my nanny shifts.

And the client took the Wednesday slot.

Which means I have to be done at the nanny gig by 4p.m. now on Wednesdays.

One hour less of being a nanny.

One hour more of being a therapist.

Plus.

This new client found me on Psychology Today and was not a referral from my agency, meaning the client is full fee.

Yippee!

The more full fee clients I get the faster I will transition out of nannying.

I mean, I love the family, but $30/hour versus $140 an hour.

Well.

I know what works better for me.

Anyway.

That’s therapy business.

Then there’s Paris business which in a way segues into ex-boyfriend business.

Yesterday at work I was checking e-mails in a brief moment of time when I wasn’t picking up used Kleenex, hydrating some small child, washing dishes, drawing, cuddling, or making hot tea with honey and saw an interesting email from a friend.

It was an e-mail that he forwarded that there was a one day sale happening for round trip tickets to Paris.

Oooh.

I wasn’t planning on going to Paris this year, I’ve been planning on going to Hawaii in July,(but still haven’t done anything about it as I’m waiting on my employers to let me know when they’re going to be in Finland and if, probably not, but if they are also planning on taking me to Helsinki with them)  going to Maui and staying in Paia, where my grandmother was born in 1928.

But.

I was curious about the flights and a little bug got in my ear and so I searched and shit, the price was too good to pass by.

So I picked the best time for me to go, end of the fall semester, in December.

Yes.

That’s right.

I’ll be in Paris on my birthday and for Christmas.

I fly out of SFO on December 17th, landing the next day at Charles de Gaulle on December 18th, my birthday, in the early afternoon.  I’ll fly back on December 27th.

So I’ll be there from my birthday through Christmas.

I will sit in cafes, go to museums (the Louvre, the D’Orsay, the Jeu de Paume, the Pompidou–which is open on Christmas, I know where I will be, wandering the galleries there for sure on Christmas day, the Orangerie, the Palais de Tokyo, the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais, the Musee de l’Art Moderne), walk everywhere, read books, go do the deal with the Paris fellowship, hang out with my best girlfriend from my Masters degree cohort…we’ve already made plans to go to the ballet (I messaged her right after I bought the ticket).

I got the ticket from Air France round trip, direct flights there and back for $579.32!

I still can’t believe that!

My girlfriend asked me why December after exclaiming at the cost of the ticket.

I told her that my birthday and Christmas have been really tied up with my ex the last two years and maybe its better for me to be in Paris then in San Francisco and really just do something for myself.

I always wanted him to come to Paris with me and I had even brought it up in the days before we broke up that I wanted to plan a trip with him there.

It is such a screamingly romantic city.

And he’s such a foodie, he would have loved it.

I’m still sad we didn’t get to experience that together.

She understood.

Plus, I told her that it makes sense with my school schedule and it’s the slowest time of year for therapy clients….the last two holiday seasons were really slow and I hear that it’s that way for most therapist.

So.

Yeah.

Booked that ticket.

I don’t think I’ll stay with my girlfriend, despite knowing she’d let me, I think I want a little more autonomy and she’s got young twins, who are super sweet and adorable, but the house isn’t huge and as much as I loved staying with them, I don’t want to stress them out at Christmas.

I figure I’ll Air BnB in the Marais where they live, it’s super central and I know it well enough, and just be an independent lady at Christmas time in the City of Lights.

God.

There’s more to say.

The feeling of my ex being in town, and wanting him to reach out or to somehow bump into him, it’s big, but I’ve not got time to write more.

I need to get up early, lots of clients tomorrow.

So.

I bid you adieu and I’ll see you on the flip.

 

My Gratitude Knows No Bounds

I mean.

How grateful am I for this blog?

So fucking grateful, so grateful I can’t say it without a depth of profanity to back up the word gratitude because it sounds sort of pussy and woo woo to say grateful.

Fuck.

Grateful out my ass.

If only from the stand point of the amount of practice I have had over the last five and a half years of constantly typing.

I am hella fast on the key board.

Grateful too for a forum to sort my thoughts, get my head together and aligned with my heart and to see the places and spaces I need to go and sometimes the things that I need to let go.

I just finished writing my second paper for my cohort for this semester of school, the ICPW weekend intensive for CIIS.

That is Integral Counseling Psychology, when I write about getting a Masters in Psychology, it is within the realm of this program.

Said program, lest you haven’t been paying attention, or have just come to start reading my little blog here, is held on the weekends, except for the week-long retreat that heralded the beginning of the semester.

Retreat my ass,

Boot camp it was and boot camp it remains.

Although, it probably had much better food than boot camps do.

And I was able to get my ass into the hot tub twice over the span of the eight days I was there.

I find it hilarious that though school has not officially begun, it has begun and begun with a roar.

I mean, I had a paper due before the start of the retreat and so much reading that I am still getting caught up.  Part of that was my bad, I did buy the wrong readers for half my classes.

Aside.

My sweet friend who tried to go to Copy Central and pick up the Dubitzky reader for me, I love, love, love you, and am horrified that you spent all of lunch time waiting in line at the counter only to find out that the reader is STILL not in.

Copyright laws my ass.

Get my reader printed bitches I got reading to do.

I really wanted to have it in my sights before I headed out to that thing in the desert, but it seems that is not to happen.

My friend did say he would hop back there while I was at Burning Man and try to retrieve it again, Copy Central said give it another week.  Of course, I don’t have another week, I leave for Burning Man a week from today.

In fact, this time next week, I will be in the dusty dust.

So excited!

End aside.

Work, lots and lots and lots of school work, and yes, I know, this is a graduate program, but it is new for me, and I realize that I am going to have to make a continued, sustained effort at getting things done every day.

I also have to say, I have felt a feeling of dread and anticipatory fear both times that I sat down in front of my laptop to start writing my papers.

Tonight’s paper was on my Integral Yoga and Philosophy class.

“Oh! How’s the retreat going?  The yoga sounds really lovely,” a friend texted.

Are you reading my blog?

Or are you just projecting your desires to do yoga under some nice spreading oak trees in the grass?

Because there was no yoga being done where I was.

Well.

There may have been, but it wasn’t by me.

No.

The Integral Yoga class was a history class on yoga as a spiritual path and the philosophy of said integrated system as informed by the studies of Sri Aurobindo.

Yeah.

I didn’t know who the guy was either.

But.

I took really good notes.

Thank you self for being such an avid note taker.

Also, note to self, need to buy a shit ton of new pens, I must have gone through five or six in the course of the week at the retreat and another two here at work.  I will be continually investing in pens.

However, the notes helped.

And that I paid attention in class.

And although I had no coherent thought about how I was going to attack the paper, attack I was.

My blog and the habit of writing it assists me.

Despite my brief noodling around on facecrack and okstupid, I got down to brass tacks pretty fast.

I opened up a Word document and I typed my name and student id on the top of the page, followed by the name of the class and the name of my professor.

Then I titled it with something that had caught my eye when I was skimming through the main text of the class.

I typed it down.

I underline it.

Then.

A sentence.

A thought.

Another thought, a paragraph, a quote, a look at my notes, another idea, another, and I’m off to the races.

Two hours later, 9 pages, 2,775 words long.

Fuck yeah.

And granted, they, the two papers I have written, are not done in APA style.

If they were, I would still be writing them.

But.

They were both well written and I sent both of my papers off tonight to the two professors.

I was glad I sat on my Human Development paper for a day, it did need a tiny bit of polishing, but tonight, after I had re-read, out loud, my Integral Yoga paper, there was nothing there but lightness and bliss and yes.

Gratitude.

Although.

Fuck.

My arms are tired and my head is a little foggy.

But I was not remiss in my body today either, I had a whole, forgive me, I can’t help it, mind/body/heart kind of day at work.

The family went to Train Town and I cleaned and did laundry, made food, and organized, tidied up the pool area and folded swim suits and basically got the space tidy and when the boys got back and had lunch we went for a long walk and picked black berries again and then dinner was made and I had a great abstinent meal and a great swim.

Yup.

I got back in the water again and the boys cheered me on and asked me to do dolphin kicks and swim butterfly, I almost threw up my dinner, and my arms are going to ache tomorrow.

Swimming butterfly is much different at 42 than it was at 18.

Then.

Hot shower, cup of tea and sitting down.

Showing up.

Letting the words come out.

I am always surprised.

Always.

It’s not the writing that is the hard part.

It’s sitting down to do the writing.

I showed up.

I got it out.

And I’m half way there.

Not through school, I mean, fuck, the semester still hasn’t “officially” started.

But I’m half way through my assignments for the retreat.

I won’t be writing tomorrow as I will be wrapping up my week here at work and heading back to the city to do the deal and then pack as much as I can for Burning Man and yes, dye my hair pink.

I’ve got a hair geographic itching to happen.

Life.

It is good

Big.

Rich.

Full.

Gratitude.

Yeah.

That was my spiritual principle today.

I picked a good one to practice.

Not like there’s really a bad spiritual principle to practice.

But I did good.

I did.

I did.