Ouch

My poor mouth hurts.

I am in a lot of pain, but I know, from last years experience, that it will get better.

I had to get another crown put in.

I cracked, yet again, another tooth.

This is tooth number two.

My dentist told me that I am grinding my teeth in my sleep.

Great.

I’m not stressed, really.

Bwahahahaha.

Sigh.

So, two weeks ago I got a temporary crown.  What had been an appointment for a teeth cleaning became a three-hour session in the chair.

And cost a fat $1475.

Then today, two weeks later, I got my new crown in and dropped another freaking $465 to get a mouth guard because my dental insurance doesn’t cover mouth guards.

But I tell you what.

When my dentist says I need a mouth guard or I run the risk of cracking more teeth and having to get more crowns, I’ll fucking pay it out-of-pocket.

Happy birthday!

Merry Christmas!

Yay.

Dental work.

Oh well.

At least I had the money in my account to just pay it out with cash and not freak out.

I wanted to sort of freak out, but I don’t have to.

I still have some student loan money left over to get through the rest of the semester and I will be alright.

I always am.

There was a time that dental work of this nature would have blown me out of the water, but I have a touch more experience with padding my bank account with my student loans.

I told a friend today what my student loans were at, around $104,000 and he blanched.  He’s also from country that doesn’t charge its citizens to go to school, so he’s not really accustomed to what it means to be an American with a great big heap of student loan debt.

I don’t care though.

My education is worth it and hey, I took out a big chunk to help with my move into my new place and I have no regrets about it.

I am interning at a non-profit and plan on working for them for the ten-year period that the federal government asks one to do if you want your student loans forgiven.

I can do that.

So it’s ok if I have them.

And yeah, they’ve helped with more than just paying tuition at my super expensive school.

I’m worth it and I still get to live in San Francisco.

So, there’s that.

I’m not on any pain killers for the tooth though and it feels big and hot and ouchy in my mouth.  If I remember correctly from last January it passed within a few days, the big pain by the next day, hopefully that will happen for me as well.

I expect that there will be some tenderness and hot cold sensitivity for a while, but it does pass too.

I will say I am not in the mood to do any homework and since my landlord is having a party I’m not really in the space to turn my attention and focus to homework.  I’m playing some pretty loud French music right now and trying to not think about my tooth.

I also did some apartment hunting on Craigslist.

I’m happy with my new place and not happy at the same time.

I had to move all of my things out of storage in the basement today, which I was not planning on having to do.  When I moved in the landlord offered me space in the basement to store stuff as my unit as no storage space, just a tiny closet that doesn’t fit all of my clothes, I got a big dresser and a rolling garment rack to deal with that.

But I don’t have anywhere to put my camping/Burning Man gear, nor the boxes of notebooks and text books I’m not currently using.  Fortunately my boss offered me space in her storage unit.  So tomorrow I get to get up way earlier than I was planning for on my one day off during the week to take my stuff across town to the Bayview to put in storage.

Two weeks ago I had asked my land lord that the basement be unlocked, I wanted to grab my Christmas ornaments a something to wear to the Burning Man ARTumnal event I went to a few weeks back.

It was at that time I was told that I was going to have to find another place to put my stuff as the landlord’s wife is pregnant and they are going to be renovating a room into a nursery and needing to store stuff in the basement.

FUCK.

I was floored.

I was also fucking pissed.  Where the hell was I going to put my stuff?

And.

I hate to be a bitch.

But fuck my life, I moved in here partially because I was assured it was a really quiet space that I was going to be able to study and not be disturbed and all was going to be chill.

A new-born living over my head is not a quiet living environment.

Now.

Don’t get me wrong, I love kids, I adore babies, for fuck’s sake, I’m a nanny.

AND.

I’m a nanny, I deal with crying baby at work all the time, I don’t want to come home to crying baby.

Ugh.

I might be making too much of it but that coupled with a few other things, like the unit is not nearly as sound proof as I was lead to believe and that the landlord and his wife have had two knock down screaming fights with each other where things were smashed and doors slammed since I’ve moved in that makes me think I will be looking for a new place to live when my lease is up.

I’m not going to break the lease, unless something extraordinary gets dropped in my lap, but I do think I may not be making this quite the permanent place I had thought.

And really, not that permanent either, I wasn’t planning on being here longer than my PhD program.

I sort of figured that I wanted to get settled in and cozy and then not have to think about moving until I was finished with my program and by that time I would be making good money with my private practice and could afford a one bedroom instead of a studio, or even, maybe start looking at what it would take to land a house.

I really do have the  dream of owning my own home one day in San Francisco, crazy as that may seem, I have my hopes and I have seen stranger things happen.

So.

Yeah.

A tooth ache and a loud party upstairs are not conducive to doing homework, but I thought, I can blog!

And there you have it.

I’m back to the blogging and my, it does feel fine and I just realized my tooth hasn’t hurt that much while I was writing.

Win/win.

My Ass is Sore

No.

Not like that.

Get your mind out of the gutter.

My butt is sore from sitting at my table all day and working.

Writing.

And reading.

And more writing.

And taking tests.

Thank God I did get myself to yoga this morning.

Otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten much physical activity in at all today.

Super glad for the yoga, although it did kick my ass a little bit too.

Much ass kicking, however, was done.

I keep thinking of that line from the movie Heat, “she’s got a great ass!”

I digress.

I feel pretty damn happy that I got as much work done as I did.

I did all my CBT reading and took the tests that I had to take for the class and sent them in.  The professor got back to me right away and I was happy I did as well as I did.

Not that the class is even graded, it’s a pass/fail class that is online.

And as far as I’m concerned, thank God it’s pass/fail.

Because it’s too much work.

I was bitching with one of my friends in the cohort earlier who asked me how I had done on the tests, at that point I hadn’t even taken them, because the amount of work for a one credit online class seems way too much.

I mean.

Way too much.

I have a three credit class that I haven’t really even cracked the books on yet.

I will.

I will.

But let me bask a moment more in the fact that I got done what I got done today.

Suffice to say that even though I complained about the amount of work for the class, I did it, I took the two tests that I needed to take, I read the reading that I needed to read.

Then.

Well.

I did some more reading.

I finished all my Jungian Dreamwork reading.

That was dense.

Jesus H. Christ on a raft.

It was dense stuff.

Good.

But it took quite a while to get through the chapters I needed to read.

Fortunate for me I read them on the back porch of my house.

So.

I got some glorious sunshine on my face.

Heck.

I even got a tan line.

Heh.

I took a small “break” in between reading and tests for my CBT class and the Jungian class work I did.

I met with a lady and we read from a different book and talked about some stuff, inventory and how to do it and what it looks like and it was a great hour working with her.

Then.

I ran to Safeway did a little grocery shopping for the week and then over to Other Avenues, the food co-op in my neighborhood that I’m a member of and got the stuff that I like to have on hand that I can’t get at Safeway.

A late lunch and back to the reading.

I also read a huge chunk for my Alcohol and Chemical Dependency class.

Some of the material I have to read with a big grain of salt.

I, um, have some experience with alcohol and chemical dependency.

Ahem.

Anyway.

It was “interesting” reading but I tried to do it without judgement.

When I finished with that.

S T R E T C H.

And inside to toss a chicken in the oven to roast and some brown rice on the stove to cook.

While that was working I read all the articles and readings I needed to do for my Psychopharmacology and Human Sexuality class.

Good readings.

I really like the professor, she who I happened to bump into yesterday at my internship (she has an office in the same building my internships is at), and the readings are really well curated and were quite well written.

I got a lot out of them.

My chicken was done roasting right about the same time I finished the readings for that class.

So.

Nice hot dinner and then back at it.

I wrote a reflection paper for Human Sexuality and Psychopharmacology and sent it in.

Then.

I opened up my dream journal.

Yes.

I have a dream journal.

Shut up.

I only have a dream journal because I am taking a dreamwork class.

I am not a hippy.

Ahem.

So.

I opened up my dream journal and wrote up one of the dreams I had at the beginning of the month.

I have to keep a journal for the class and every month the class meets I have to turn in a dream from my journal.

I had a magnificent dream.

It was at first overwhelming.

I was on the face of a gigantic tidal wave that was about to break over my head.

I was about to drown, I was overwhelmed, I was in a place I had been before and I knew what was about to happen.

Except.

Well.

It didn’t.

Just as I thought the wave was about to crumble and fall on top of me, I had a thought, “what if I swim through it?”

I have never had that thought before.

I have had a similar dream before, tidal waves, drowning, panic, sharks in the water.

Oh the nightmares I have had in my life.

Too many to tell them all hear and horrifying beyond words.

Suffice to say.

I had never had the experience of what unfolded in my dream next.

I started to swim into the wave, I spun around, and then I body surfed it all the way to the beach.

I flew.

I floated.

The water was warm and supple and held me.

I was not drown.

I stood up on my feet in the wake and white foam and laughed, I felt giddy and happy and full of joy.

I looked up and down the beach, white sand for miles, dunes with green grasses, calm, still, serene, the water of the ocean lapping gently on the shore.

It was astounding to me, this dream.

So I wrote about that.

And man.

Ouch.

My ass is sore again.

As I am sitting here, still writing, I’m about done, though, I have to tell you.

And.

I am done!

I just wrote the paper and printed it off, tucking it into my school folder for this weeks upcoming classes.

And yes.

I do have to do more reading for my Transpersonal Psychology class, but I will have the week days at work to do it since I won’t have any charges to juggle until school pick up.

So.

I have time.

And I did so much today.

I am really proud of myself.

So proud.

Even if my bum is a bit tender.

It was worth it.

Yes it was.

 

Cold And Hella Sore

I mean.

Fucking sore.

I got two shots today.

One in each arm.

Flu on the left side.

Tdap on the right.

Tdap is for whopping cough, diphtheria, and tetanus.

Technically I was still in the range to be covered by my last Tdap shot, but new baby in the home where I work and it’s been eight years and so, I got the shot today with the dad at the Walgreens in Noe Valley.

It was sort of a comedy of errors as the pharmacist couldn’t understand why the dad was just getting the flu shot, why I was getting both shots, and who was billing what insurance, and where to stand in line and how to do it and just too many cooks in the stew and too many papers to fill out.

At one point I looked at the dad, who was covered for the whooping-cough vaccine already and said, “betcha they give me two flu shots and you get the Tdap.”

And that was exactly what almost happened.

I intervened on the shots though and corrected the woman, a fourth person in the odd queue of people who had to facilitate the process.

The new family I work with is European and they seem almost as boggled by our American Health system as I do.

“We don’t take that insurance,” the clerk told me when I handed over my card.

“I’m paying for her shots, the dad told the clerk,” who just looked at us and tried to figure out what our relationship was and why we had separate addresses.

It was hilarious.

Until I got the shots.

I know that there is aching that happens, but the mind forgets and my arms got sore pretty fast and now, fuck, it sort of sucks.

Plus a very, very, very cold ride home on my scooter tonight after doing the deal up in the Castro with my person.

“Girl, I’m cold in here, you get yourself home and get warmed up,” he said and gave me a big hug.

I did not want to get on my scooter, but I also really wanted to get home.

It is cold out there.

I know, I know, it’s not Wisconsin cold, but it’s been a long wet, chilly week and the temperature here dropped a lot and is around 39 degrees right now.

That is hella cold for San Francisco.

And add some nice wind chill to that and it felt like I had frozen tears on my face riding home.

I’ve had a cup of hot tea and the heat is on and I’m still pretty chilled.

I could take a hot shower, but I already showered this morning and it’s such a hassle with my hair and I’d rather just not deal with it.

This week has been long, a bit tiring, and a little stressful.

New job anxiety.

But.

I do feel better and better and better with the time I have spent with the family.

They are warm, intelligent, kind people and I feel like I’m being really happily taken into the family.

So grateful for that.

Sore arms and all.

At least I won’t get the flu this season.

My God, though, it’s worse than I remember.

Of course, I also didn’t get both done at the same time.

My arms are on fire.

I don’t want to write this blog!

I wonder if it’s also just being tight from the ride home and tense with the cold, I think once I warm up a bit more I’ll be ok.

I am a bit of a baby when it comes to the cold, I’ve noted recently, be that as it may, I am very happy it did not rain today nor is there any rain in the forecast for tomorrow.

After that.

All bets are fucking off.

It’s going to be a long, wet, wooly, wild, rainy week of storms.

There’s a big storm coming and I am not looking forward to it.

Granted I don’t have to do a lot of stuff this weekend, meet my person at Tart to Tart, do some yoga, hopefully my arms will be back in working order by Saturday.

I’ll be heading over to Oakland on Saturday too, got a speaking engagement in North Oakland.

I’ll be doing the trains and the BART all weekend long.

And probably next week to and from work too, I can’t fathom riding in the rain when it’s been as cold as it’s been.

I’m so grateful I didn’t last night, the feeling of dread that came over me when I contemplated riding home last night in the cold and rain, it was unbearable.

No such feeling tonight when I got on the scooter, just the cold to contend with.

And I did.

And I’ll warm up.

And the rain will pass and it will all be ok.

The train rides will give me opportunity to read.

And not pleasure reading.

That brief time as passed, that window has closed.

I got my first text-book for the next semester in the mail today.

I shall begin the reading for class ASAP.

There’s a good deal to read and school starts the next weekend.

Sigh.

Winter break.

You’ve come and gone so fast.

Oh well.

I did read one book all the way through and a bit into the Don DeLillo, but all the other lovely books I got are going to have to wait until summer time.

C’est la vie.

It was real nice there for a moment.

Damn Gina.

I’m tired.

Cold, and lonely, and the wolves are after me.

Ha.

Just kidding.

Cold though, I’m still cold, time for more tea and a good snuggle under my grandma’s afghan.

Yes.

That sounds just about right.

Night all.

Stay warm.

Snuggle bunnies.

Seriously.

A Reprieve

Not a big one.

But enough of one that my entire body just felt so relaxed I could have melted into a puddle on the floor after I received the message.

Which had just come after I had done a yoga class.

So.

Melting on the floor might have been an entirely appropriate response.

Side bar.

Creeper yoga body aches.

Holy shit.

I left yoga thinking, that was hard, but not bad, and I feel great and maybe an hour or so later I started to get sore and I was like, oh hello, muscles that have never been used before, and an hour after that, holy shit.

I am sore.

Sore.

Sore.

But in a good way.

In that way that means I worked out, even if it didn’t feel like it, even when I fell out of the poses, even when I laughed or just couldn’t get it.

And when I did get it.

That was nice too.

But yeah, so sore that I completely re-thought going to class tomorrow morning.

Instead.

Oh.

End side bar.

Instead I am getting up early to write my second paper.

Yup.

Like that.

And the reprieve?

I found out today that the third paper I need to have written for this upcoming weekend of classes is not actually due until the 12th, two days after the weekend ends.

Granted.

I would much rather have it done before I go to class on Friday, but the odds are not great that I will and also be able to go to work and do the deal and maybe sneak in one more yoga class before the tsunami of graduate school swoops in and scoops me up and what the hell happened to the rest of the world and how is it Monday and I’m back at work?

I have to get my second paper written, no matter what, and yes, I know, I could be writing it right now, but frankly I would rather masturbate.

“You don’t know who could be reading your blogs!” My friend said to me.

Sometimes I forget that.

He’s right.

I don’t.

But I also could really stand to get laid.

Seriously.

And since my schedule is on the tight side, I can do a little self-care.

Wink, wink.

Nudge, nudge.

Besides.

I am not in the school paper writing mode.

I am just not.

I did do school work today, before and after yoga, and I got things organized and looked through notes.

So.

Tomorrow up early and writing and getting the ideas on paper that I need to cover.

I can finish it tomorrow night.

Unless I’m making out with someone.

You never know.

I have faith.

Heh.

And I have a little more time.

For which I am grateful, to write that third paper, and frankly, I am glad for it, I really feel like I need to hear the professor lecture on the topic one more time to solidify what I want to write about.

And the nice thing about work on Monday?

It’s not really work.

My family will be on Spring Break visiting relatives out of state.

I will be going to the house to open it up for the housekeeper and while she’s cleaning, I will sit at the kitchen table and write my Psychodynamics paper.

I have to be at the house from 9a.m.-2p.m.

I did leave the last time they asked me to do this when they were out on vacation, I went to Ritual, I got coffee, I ate lunch out, I ran some errands, and I popped in and out of the house until the housekeeper had finished.

Then by 2p.m. I’ll be free.

I will have the paper finished and I will have the rest of the day off.

I may be doing a meet and greet with the family that I am working for at Burning Man.

They will be visiting the bay area and want to re-establish our connection.

I met them originally at Lightening in a Bottle a few years ago, but until the outreach via a common friend, I haven’t seen them since and they have a new baby in the mix.

Delicious, I love me a new baby.

And a three and a half year old little girl.

I figure that will be about an hour or two and then I’ll be free.

Free from school work, at least for a few days, I will still have one more weekend of classes to go before the end of the semester, and from work until Wednesday.

I’ll have the 1/2 day Monday, then all Tuesday off.

I have been asked to a speaking engagement Tuesday eve, so that’s on the plate, but nothing else.

I could go on a date.

I could get laid.

Dude.

My friend laughed at me Sunday when he popped in for an hour to hang out.

“You can totally come over, but I have school work, so you can keep me company while i cook.”

I actually made him go grocery shopping with me too, it was fun.

We caught up.

His relationship.

My lack of relationship and no problem with it, I am not a maniac, or that demanding and selfish that I think someone is going to swoop in and want to play fiddle to my crazy schedule.

That being said, sex should and can get squeezed in there.

I believe that anyway.

And if not that.

Well.

Ha.

There’s always yoga.

And maybe a day at Kabuki?

Some spa action, some hot tub, some steaming in the sauna.

I still have a lot of work a head of me and that’s fine, but I can feel that it will all get done and I can see the work and really.

REALLY.

I have written 15 page papers the night before they are due.

I do not recommend it.

But I can do it.

No.

I would prefer to get my sleep, get some sex, have a nice breakfast in the morning, write my morning pages, pray, do my job well, and then deal with school.

I am super grateful that I am in graduate school, but I don’t want it to be the only thing happening in my life.

That being said.

I got to get.

I want to go to bed early so I can get this next paper in the can.

And I want to um.

Heh.

Relax a little before I go to bed.

Night.