As Marc Evan Jackson Asked, ‘What’s Good?’
I’m not one for going out of my way to make lists of things that are good, probably in part because they always feel performative although that could be the lingering smell of the era of social media (in)authenticity and wellness woo-woo.
However, after subjecting the blog to the deep hole of birthday depression and then pet-induced trauma response, here’s a short such list.
Two pairs of new shoes
My agitating yielded two new pairs of my shoes as my old ones were severely worn out but hadn’t been replaced due to finances and the fact that they didn’t seem to be available anymore. (Yes, you can still buy me some so that my autistic need for comfortable sameclothes lasts through four shoe cycles instead of two.) I’m a little bit hoping that my backaches and pains of the last couple of months in fact were due to the needing to replace my shoes and their dramatically worn down heels.
My blog design
This case change at any moment and at the drop of a hat as whims strike, but I’ve been feeling generally calm when looking at my own blog, rather than having that gnawing feeling in the back of my mind that something’s just not right. In truth, having a blog design I’m comfortable with actually helps when I need to post my way through dark psychological tunnels.
Aphantasia and SDAM
This is something I referenced in the trauma response post but I firmly believe that while traumatizing events do in fact get laid down in my nervous system through whatever pathways, I’m saved from vividly recollecting or re-experiencing trauma because of the aphantasia and related severely deficient autobiographical memory. In part, I think, this is why blogging through it is useful in much the same way that it is for lesser stressors or triggers: putting it here actually lets me address it afterward at something of a remove.
This is neither here or nor there in terms of the incident at hand, but there was just another brief round of blogosphere chatter about aphantasia, from Ben Terrett and from Neil Williams.
Free coffee drinks
The outdoor seating at my regular coffeeshop was taken the other day and they’re often too warm inside for me, so I went somewhere else. Alas, after ringing me up and making the drink of the person before me, they came out to tell me they’d somehow run out of decaf. This is on a list of good things because I got too full punchcards out of it to use later on.
That donut truck
The midday hours today was trick-or-treating in downtown St. Johns as businesses set themselves up to dole out said treats. I hadn’t even thought about this possibility when I set out to go sit to read over a latte but the fresh mini-donuts truck was out, parked directly across the street from my regular coffeeshop.
All of that said, today I’ve not only got resurgent backache but the top of my spine keeps threatening to seize up during certain movements, and never let it be said that I let a list of good things stand in the way of my autistic need to catastrophize in order to be at least vaguely prepared for the worst.
Fresh, hot donuts, though.
Addenda
- Here’s another: we had a rent flub this month. Basically, the new amount got paid last month but didn’t get set in the autopay. The property no longer being owned by a company but by a couple, the process of being told, being offered ways to address it, and getting it solved was, for me anyway, completely stress-free.