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.

 

Every Body’s Outside*

*This blog written last night, posted this a.m.*

I just got back from the beach and I did not have the time I was expecting to have.

I expected to go down, take a walk in the surf, and shoot some sunset photographs.

Get right with God.

Instead I had to avoid clouds of pot smoke, heaps of garbage, drunken revelers, hipsters, tourists, dog walkers, dramatic high school girls who were underage drinking and texting, empty pizza boxes, surfers coming in from their last sets, and the entire world of San Francisco.

I might exaggerate a little bit.

But everybody played hooky today and went to the beach today.

Except me.

I went to work.

Although the park sand box did seem like a kind of baby Rivera with most of the kids slathered in sunblock and sporting sweet little sun hats, many bare toes, a rare sighting of miniature pink huaraches that were so sweet I wanted to snatch them off the little girls feet, and sun umbrellas with nannies and grandmothers peeping out from underneath them.

It was a day of unheralded warm weather.

That won’t last much past tomorrow, maybe tomorrow afternoon.

We almost never get three days in a row of hot weather in San Francisco.

The heat inland sucks in the cool air from the ocean and then the confluence gets stuck in the Bay and whomp!

San Francisco is slathered in fog.

Which is why July is so freaking cold here.

It’s hot and summery everywhere else, it’s July in California, but the city sits swaddled in chilly fog like some grand dame at the opera in a pashmina.

It was a gorgeous day.

I spent quite a bit of it outside with the boys.

Although one little monkey had a three-hour nap in the middle of the day, which is when we should siesta a little anyhow, and I was inside for that.

Thanking the heavens that the employer has a soda stream.

Something that I have never been compelled to use, except at Burning Man with them last year, until yesterday.

Yester day it was hot too and I broke out the crushed ice and the carbonated water, plucked a Meyer lemon from the tree outside and had myself some effervescence.

I love bubbly water.

Especially when it’s hot.

I also had an iced coffee when I got in to work this morning.

I brewed extra when I made my morning cup and had a great big glass of crushed ice with pour over Stumptown Holler Mountain and organic full fat, whole milk.

I don’t normally drink milk, I drink almond milk, unsweetened with vanilla, but since I had taken all my supplies home last night thinking I would be at a different venue than the one I was at, I had no supplies.

I dipped into the milk in the fridge.

Holy bats.

That was a treat.

I could have licked the glass clean.

It might have been that I was also pouring sweat from the bike ride coming into work, but man, that was a tasty way to start my day.

Tomorrow is supposed to be hot too, I will probably also brew up the extra bit of caffeine and let myself indulge at my Thursday gig as well.

That’s my idea of indulgence, really.

It is nice, too, to be sitting here at the studio with the door to the back yard open and my feet in flip-flops.

I don’t often walk out the house without a layer or two stashed on my person, but not tonight, there is no need, currently anyway, it will drop, I can feel the cool sliding in through the backyard, but my instincts about this seem right on, I think tomorrow will be one more day of warm, then mid to late afternoon, it’s going to get chilly.

I was just reflecting that there must be something else for me to write about aside from the weather, blowing bubbles in the park, and the sense of serenity that floated around me all day long.

But aside from the internet not working, yes, this blog is being written on my laptop in hopes that at some point it will come back up, maybe it played hooky too at the beach today.

The only other thing that comes to mind is my ink.

And I did reflect on that a bit today, as there was so much skin on display out there.

I saw a lot of really bad tattoos.

A few good ones, too, I won’t lie, but I have to say, I got a lot of comments about mine.

Something about them does incline folks to comment, what I have discovered is how I respond to certain people certain ways and how I deign to not respond to others.

Homeless guys really like to talk to me about my tattoos.

I suppose homeless guys really like to talk to anyone, but I seem to invite comment.

Then again so many of the homeless folks that I interact with on my daily get out to the park are homeless due to what seems to be drug use and drug use, active anyway, seems to affect a person’s filter.

Like they don’t have one.

Maybe once upon a time certain types of people were the recipients of tattoos, now a lot of folks have them and it seems unnecessary to make such a big deal about it.

I don’t mind a compliment, but I am not interested in it becoming a topic of conversation that then segues into us being new best friends.

Especially if you appear to have not washed in the last few weeks.

A bath in the sink at the Page Street Library branch does not count either.

I do try to not be a snot about it, they’re nice tattoos and I spent a lot of money-getting them, and I got the friends and family discount too, but I do like to keep a little bit of a distance from it all.

Tomorrow I already have my sunny day outfit picked out.

One will be able to see the ink, but it should be a little more offset.

That’s it, that’s all to report for today.

Now, fingers crossed, ankles too, let’s see if I can get this up online tonight.