Hmm. So I feel slightly better today - still weirdly and dangerously vulnerable, and on the very knife-edge of tears, but I did a lot of things to drag myself into a better mood. I made it into the gym even though I had no desire to get out of bed, and I trained with Alyssa whilst watching the gym televisions. She and I are going to assess my recent progress on Tuesday, right before I leave for a roadtrip and undo it all. Hopefully I don't actually undo it all; progress is slow, but it's also steady, and I'm at least feeling a difference in terms of what I'm capable of at the gym even if I'm not noticeably skinnier. After the gym, I showered, came home and changed (since I was running too late this morning to put together an outfit to take with me), and then went to downtown Palo Alto to have lunch with someone at Reposado. My lunch date was the woman who is temporarily filling in for my old job part-time; since they haven't hired anyone to replace me, they finally broke down and got a part-time consultant to take care of stuff while they continue the search. I still don't know whether to be flattered that I'm so irreplaceable or concerned that my job apparently wasn't that important, but you can guess which way I've decided to judge it. The woman who's filling in part-time also writes mysteries, and so we spent just as much time talking about writing and the publication process as we did my old job, which was lovely.
Lunch wrapped up around 2:15, and I left Palo Alto and drove down to the southern edge of San Jose, which is where Jenni's parents live. They actually live just a little ways away from Vidya's parents, and Chandlord went to the same high school as Jenni and her sister. Anyway, I had emailed Jenni last night and didn't hear from her, as I expected, but I also emailed Lauren (my old old boss from several years ago, who became more of a friend than a boss and is Jenni's best friend), who told me I should stop by the house since Jenni was doing better if people were around. So, I spent a couple of hours there; Lauren's brother Scott, who also works at our place of employment, was there, as was his wife (whom I met on the epic wine tasting adventure that we did in Napa for Jenni's birthday a year and a half ago). I'm glad I went -- it was good to see people who knew him, and I'm so glad I saw Jenni. She said she kept thinking of the dinner the three of us had last week, because he started feeling sick in the middle of the night after that -- which is unbelievable that I hung out with him on basically the last night before everything started to change. But, it wasn't a heart attack -- it was a pulmonary embolism, and would have been difficult to catch, particularly since he also seemed to have entirely unrelated flu symptoms as well.
Anyway, Jenni was doing about as well as one could in this situation. I'll probably go over again on Monday, since I'm guessing she'll have plenty of people around this weekend but may see the visitors trickle off during the weekdays. But I eventually had to leave her house because I was hosting a Blood of Lincoln evening at my house, and I had to be here to let people in. Luckily, we had already decided that I was not cooking, and so John and Jess picked up salads on the way over. John, Jess and Chandlord all stayed for three and a half hours or so, which was totally lovely even though they are all weirdos. To illustrate: we watched YouTube videos of tap dancing, John made me knit a row of stitches on my first and only knitting project, which he for some reason seemed almost angry to see, and we made far too many jokes about Easter. Both Chandlord and Jess expressed interest in chocolate chip chewies (which I had intended to make, but I was out of eggs and time). So, we went to the grocery store, bought eggs (and Chandlord suggested putting noodles in the cookies, which made no sense), came home, and everyone watched me be a domestic goddess while I mixed up the cookies and got batter all over my shirt. Then, we ate a ton of cookie while it was still hot, which was both enjoyable and sad, because the fuller we got, the closer the cookies got to cooling and becoming what we actually wanted them to taste like.
But now, I should go to bed; there's a lot to do this weekend if I'm going to get ready to go to Iowa, since I need to pack, clean out my car, take care of a bunch of writing-related stuff, etc. Goodnight!
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