(no subject)

Some assorted notes:

I survived my first parent teacher conferences! The parents mostly seemed to like me, and a couple were really lovely-gushing which makes me feel like I'm on the right track. Learning that I'm a really good teacher for certain students is incredibly gratifying (enough so that they tell their parents that, and then those parents tell me).

***

My hair is braided by my own hand for the first time in...probably close to a month. The whole last week, it was done by a friend of mine who came over for hangouts and helping and snuggles last week (this was an excellent thing), the week before it was in the double braids that Cathy and Beth did for the SCD demo team concert, the week before that it was mostly down, and then I don't remember because there are limits to how much I care about my hair.

Apparently those limits are three weeks. ;)

Anyways, it's nice to do it myself, since I know best of all what my hair likes (my hair is not a metaphor for sex, shut up¹) and am one of the only people I know who really has down the trick for managing different thicknesses of braid-chunk so that the braid comes out even anyways. This is both harder and easier than it sounds.

***

I have been off habitRPG for a couple weeks (since Halloween, I think, or just after) and also been off my meds. These two facts are not exactly related. On Tuesday, I bribed myself with chipotle to _go to the fucking pharmacy_, so I'm back on there.

There's a little bit of weirdness in wishing I could do some HIGHLY SCIENTIFIC (or at least practical) experimentation with how I feel with and without my concerta, because I was doing a pretty decent passable okay not actively failing job of getting a few things done without them. And I feel like my vague anxious wanting-to-fall-in-a-heap-and-cry feelings were abnormally high yesterday.

But let's be real, that might just be because this week appears to be the "SO WHAT ARE YOU DOING NOW THAT YOUR JOB'S ABOUT TO END?!" week, and the fact that my job is ending is stressful enough, I don't need the added constant reminders about it. I've pretty much got it into a mantra now though (thanks to all the well-meaning parents last night) --"I'm going back to regular substituting for a while, and then I'll be doing MCAS prep work in the spring. In the longer term, I'm hoping to start grad school soon to help increase my job prospects."

NOTE
TO
SELF:
FUCKING FIGURE OUT GRAD SCHOOL.

(Note to everyone else: You will annoy the _shit_ out of me if you poke me and say "hey have you done any grad school research/figuring out lately?" PLEASE DO IT ANYWAYS. It's been three years since I got my damn teacher's license, and the prelim only lasts for five, and I actually cannot upgrade it without having my master's so YOU KNOW SOR, YOU SHOULD FUCKING FIX THIS IF YOU WANNA STAY IN THIS CAREER PATH.)

At any rate, I'm back to hRPG, and thinking that after I finish the quest my group is currently doing, I might try and restructure my party so it's back to being mostly people I know. Right now, it's half my friend Wil and his roommates/friends out in Portlandia, which is great, but there's a weirdness to cheerleading (and be cheerleaded by) people who aren't actually a part of my community.

***

It's all just a constant struggle to become a ~*~REAL ADULT~*~ who has their shit together and is able to actually do shit. I can't internally motivate for shit, so I'm trying very hard to externally do so. At some point I should go through various things and put together a little self-resource post of comics and things that I feel are good explanations of some of my particular issues.

Also at some point I should go through my brain and put together a little self-resource post of my neuro-atypicalities, and what I know about each branch.

BUT FOR NOW, I GO TO WORK!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: oh gods it totally is. You know, in the same way my room is currently a metaphor for my life (my IM stauts message. dhs is the only one who's asked about it, to which I plainly replied "you see, my room is a mess right now..."

On cooking, on learning, on studying, on skills.

Made potatoes and eggs for dinner^-1, which means this week I have made TWO DINNERS from scratch.

This is approximately the same number of dinners I have made from scratch from the, oh, three years prior to this week⁰.

It is very confusing and I still don't like cooking, but I have an uncomfortable suspicion that I don't like cooking in the same way I would previously say I don't like singing¹. Which is to say, with a underlying current of being a teenaged genius who hates anything they're not immediately excellent at.

Apparently 25 is the age where I start to put actual work into developing skills, instead of just assuming that they should be granted to me instantaneously because I'm awesome. I mean, I still assume I should just get random new skills every time I level up, but I am willing to accept that I am entering more of a runequest model rather than DnD, and only have my skills increase when I actually use them.

Also, I was much younger when I decided I needed to learn how to juggle, and I can do a cascade AND a reverse cascade now and I am more proud of that fact than I am about my kick-ass SAT scores. Because you know what? I have a brain that is excellent at standardized testing. I do not have a brain that is excellent at juggling. But I have a brain that is willing to carry around juggling balls basically constantly for, jeeze, two and a half years now and practice with them in odd moments, despite the surrounding people laughing at me.

I didn't have that skill and now I do, and no, I am not a remotely impressive juggler and might never be, but I can do a standard three ball cascade.

And I don't know how to study. I didn't have to work in school --I failed assignments because they were boring, not because they were difficult. I don't know how to acquire skills I don't already have --and I am blessed with the mind and body to start off pretty good at a lot of skills².

But I didn't know how to juggle, and always assumed it was a lot of flailing your hands around, but no, it's just a lot of practice and trying again and again and again until you can do two catches in a row, then three, or five, or ten.

So I have taught myself how to juggle. And I may teach myself how to cook. I already know some things, I already have some recipes. jere7my's egg salad, Magus's mac and cheese, Natasha's pancakes, Neva's brown sugar icing. My random flailing and throwing ingredients into a pot to make curry.

I might never be able to remember what "simmer" means, or feel comfortable using a "pinch". But I can make a roux and a simple syrup, I can crack an egg one handed, I know how to season cast iron. I don't think I'll ever make pasta from scratch, but you can buy it from the store. The sauce is the better part anyways.

Perhaps the cat ears will become a less foreign part of my costume.

~Sor
MOOP!

-1: You should take this whole entry with a grain of salt, since I am talking about cooking like I'm hot shit, but literally all I did was dice a potato, toss it in some bacon fat, throw on some salt and pepper, stir occasionally. Eventually I pulled the potato off, cracked in four eggs, a dash of milk, more salt and pepper, some shredded cheddar, and stirred a bunch. Culinary challenge, this was not.

0: I assume pasta wouldn't count unless I made the sauce. I made 2 AM chili, back when I lived in Dinosaur Sashay, and I made chicken and rice for SoNSo that one time he was visiting.

1: Granted, I don't ever expect to feel the fondness for cooking that I do for singing, but, you know. I could grow to "neutral to positive" instead of "pretty firmly negative".

2: My ability on stilts is the most recent of these I've observed --I understand the physicality of stilts pretty darn well, and did so from the very first time I was up on them. I pushed myself to learn how to fall, because otherwise I wouldn't know what to do if I tripped.