(no subject)

 I start far too many of my sentences with the word sorry.

 

If I feel a little bit misunderstood, if I feel a little bit like I've offended someone, or pushed too hard, I put the brakes on and try to reframe it either in a gentler or more dismissible way.  

 

And I think that part of this springs from gendered language patterns, I grew up in a household where neither women nor children were really supposed to have opinions that they hadn't been told to have.  And even if that wasn't true, I think I still would have picked up on cultural baggage. 

 

And part of it is a fear-response, that no matter what I do, there's still some small part of me that wants to immediately spring into the placating dance

 

But I also tend to want to be gentle with people, give them as much space to assume positive intent as possible and while that's not so much about the apologizing, it is a lot about how I use softening language in text communications, lots of questions and "I think" and other words that when I'm being more critical of my patterns I call weasel-words.  

 

I used to try to cull the weasel-words from my business emails, I ran into too many people assuming that a generally agreeable female-presenting person who handles reimbursements being the same thing as a secretary and I needed a little more presence than that.  But I've almost entirely backslid on that, and I think it's sometimes an advantage and sometimes a detriment and sometimes just a thing.

 

Today Light and I went to Lowes to start looking at pricing on the things we'll need to do anything to either of the houses.   New house will require us to pick out a flooring for the basement that isn't white carpet, and I like a lot of the wood-look vinyl options.  Some  of them come with 25 year warranties and some of them come with lifetime warranties and I said something about not expecting to be in the house when I'm in my 70s (technically, 25 years is 68) and he expressed some surprise.  But, I suspect with our various back and knee related issues, one of us will eventually need a first floor bedroom and this is not the house for that.  It's the house for many things, but not that.  

 

But we found a decent looking stove and hood to replace the ones in the somerville house, a new light fixture for the upstairs bathroom and I think we found what we need to replace the upstairs bannisters, but we're going to wait to talk to the contractor again.  

 

After I announced my desire to have sex with a kitchen island at lowes and then got a little teary over drawer-shapes, we decided it might make more sense to just tear out the dry bar now and figure out how to renovate the kitchen later, after we sell this house.  Sure, it'll mean we have to do it while we're living in the space being renovated, but we'll also have more money and have lived there a bit, which may give me a better idea of what I actually want.  

 

Light's back is/was out after the erranding, so after he screamed a little bit after shifting positions during his nap on the couch, I sent him upstairs with naproxsen and a heating pack, did a little more weeding of random things and then Abundance and I went to the braintree AMC to watch Crawl, which was ridiculous and kind of fun and not all that badly done for a giant alligators in a hurricane movie.   

 

So far past my bedtime.