"I'm out to learn more"

 My laptop is dying.  Or clinging to its broken monitor state more fiercely than it used to.  (it used to be fractions of a second, now it's seconds)  I thought I was prepared for this eventuality but when it refused to resurrect this morning, I freaked out a little bit more than I expected.   Light can loan me his personal laptop and use his work laptop if it comes to that, and maybe microcenter is still servicing warranties, or maybe we can find a monitor to attach to the laptop so I can still have the two main requirements satisfied, a keyboard large enough to type on and a monitor large enough to be able to passive watch things while I stitch.    But, first things first, when it limped back into a functional state, I went to all the libraries  can check out ebooks from and made sure my holds queues were full and I had checked out maximum-1 at all of the libraries.   

 

Then I went over to the shitpost sampler discord to tell them all that Nonsense now alerts to the type of pants I'm putting on and assumes that jeans mean she's going somewhere, and how I feel lightly judged by this, even if it's an 95% accurate assessment.  

 

I got to see Spark and Delight and Goodhugs in person, at a ten foot distance.   Delight gave me my post-surgery and birthday presents, one of which was a photo album of pictures of me and Spark.  I've cried at it three times, been proud of myself for my attempts to stay in the picture, and been horrified by pictures of myself.  But fuck, that kid.   And then Hips called me!  which was amazing and much less awkward than I normally am on the phone.  

I'm doing asynchronous training for a crisis intervention position right now and failed my first test today.  I shouldn't feel that bad about it, I failed because I was too cautious about what I thought was an appropriate response, not because I wasn't understanding the basics of Joiner's theory of suicidal behavior (though fuck do I wish I'd learned about that trifecta earlier) or because I didn't understand the different between support and advice.    But it's still galling me.   And I'm still on the first week of a three month training, I'm sure it's not the first time I'm going to fail to hit the benchmark on a 9 question quiz, but part of me wants to explain myself to the trainers and it's such a familiar and uncomfortable feeling, I always want to explain things, to make sure people understand my intentions are good, that I deserve the benefit of the doubt, that I'm worth keeping and while it's a matter of degrees, it bugs me that I'm having a modulated version of same reaction to a chapter quiz that I had to being dumped by Asshat, this same uncomfortable combination of desire to grovel and desire to defend.  

 

I wonder if I'm saving contacting some people the same way I'm saving certain recipes, because it feels like it's going to get worse before it gets better and I better have something fun in the tank for later.   Which makes me think of the way that I always save what I think is going to be my absolute favorite bite for last, and I usually segregate it from the rest of the plate.    I did this as a kid too, and that was almost always the bite my mother snagged off my plate and I don't know why I didn't get wily enough to stop doing that then, but I still don't.    And this isn't why I disassemble food when I eat it, but I suspect it's not entirely unlinked.  

Abundance is driving back from North Carolina on Monday, and while extreme quarantine won't be all that different than what we're doing now, it somehow feels more serious.  There was never a chance this was all going to be over in two weeks and I'd be able to touch people who don't live in my house, but now there's really truly not going to be a chance.   So maybe that's what I'm saving cake and crushes for.