Today I feel strangely unwell

My stomach is upset

And I think

I don't know how graphic to be

And then my head hurts

And my nose is actively running again

Is that somehow a hangover from all the stress of the last few days

I don't know

He was

Kind of he had this thing he did where he kind of nervously laughed like he wasn't quite comfortable in himself

But then he had these other things that I didn't really see as connected to that in any way the time

This kind of judgmental thing

Finding these little sticking points

To say something to kind of put you down

Without being like super overt about it

I feel like one of the things that we did as a family was have a lot of subtext

So you're saying something

But you never really just saying what you're saying

And you know it came up somehow and was addressed which typically it wouldn't be you know with just random stuff

That I smoked the cigarettes and therefore was

I mean what he did was he turned around to Dad and was like I'm the good kid now

It was just really bizarre and uncomfortable

And he also made it very clear

And again I'm not sure how it came up was not something I was leading around to the conversation but I was a smoker of weed and therefore was a big loser

And I don't know there was just a lot of stuff you know

And then I felt like I was picking up what he was throwing down in the text and that there was more unpleasantness

And you know I understand that I bring a lot of baggage to that and so I spend a lot of time thinking well you know how much of this is just your crazy you know

And then the night before he texted me to confirm 

And so I listed off you know the details of where and when and whatever and was like confirmed and did a little gif of a dancing Christmas tree

I enjoy gifs

And part of the reason why I have found it so difficult recently to try to reconnect with him through Facebook

Is that he does those things where he rearranges the words

Or he'll quote some non sequitous thing

And I have no response to that

The thing he's saying to me doesn't make any sense to me as a thing

Maybe it's just supposed to be a springboard for something else but it doesn't work for me it just I go well that's crazy

And I mean it's really rich since I do sort of do that you know

I sort of do that in my own ways I just don't connect to that one right

But I have so much tension about the crazy I have no boundaries I have no sense of objectivity and so my brain just reads it all is bad

Danger danger stay away you know

So he text me to confirm

And I confirm

And he text me back the entire lyrics of a ween song

And I'm like I have no contacts for this song right maybe it is a song that was played in a movie maybe it's a song that was played in some other context where the context that it happened was important and I don't even really know who ween is

I don't have any context for the song

So the next thing I do is I say okay well what are the lyrics of the song and I'm reading them and they are very threatening to me

The song is like it's going to be a long night or something like that

This means nothing to me but the lyrics are specifically threatening

And I'm literally like

Is he really angry with me

Do I need to be afraid

Is it going to be some kind of big horrible scene

Is he ironically saying it's going to be a long night waiting to see me in the morning

Is this some way that he's being nasty because if I'm getting a reaction from my father or Deborah you know it's at least as likely that what they would say would be some nasty biting insulting thing if they felt like you've in any way slighted them

So

I took an Uber over to the hotel Derek

And I wore my new wool dress

That parade place that makes the bras they had some leggings that were on sale like 75% off so they were like $10 each so I got some and they're really thin for pants but they're a great weight for tights but they're not tight like tights so they're more comfortable so I'm very pleased with them and I got one color that is almost exactly almost the same color as the dress it's a little bit less red and it's a little bit darker so it's not exactly the same color but it's kind of almost like an ombre

So I wore those

For shoes I wore my MBT shoes they're like a very pale bluey gray color with a very pale pink and their lace up and they're I mean for me kind of dainty looking those are kind of like my my girly shoes

But they're also good if you have to stand or walk around all day they're nice shoes

But I particularly like the look of them for some reason that kind of like light gray color and actually it's supposed to be blue but it's reads to me like like gray I really really like shoes that color I don't know why you'd think it would be black shoes but no I like that lighter color even if it doesn't specifically match

I wore the '90s the new '90s earrings and the ring and the chain and I just wore the chain alone as a chain like you would do if you had a really fine chain but this is a really cheap staying the steel chain and it I don't know it really worked for me

And my new silver gunmetally windbreaker which is really one of my favorite pieces of clothing now it was cold it was like 30° and I just wore that light dress and the leggings and the windbreaker and I was fine I was fine I felt so

I started to say modern

And I was like no that isn't what modern means

And then I started to say contemporary

And I'm like no that is what I mean

So then where am I going from there like Futurama

City Chic

I did not wear the hat

I love the hat

But I didn't want to have a bunch of things I had to juggle because I didn't know what the seating configuration was going to be like

And there's nothing that will f****** your cool faster than having extra items you don't know what to do with

I pulled my hair back that way that I do

Pull it into a ponytail I have these kind of neutral cloth scrunchies

They don't pull my hair out as bad as some kind of a rubber band or something

So I pull my hair through twice in a ponytail

And then I go to pull it through a third time but I don't pull it all the way through so it makes kind of a loop and then I put another scrunchie thing around it another direction so that it's kind of contained in a big hair and fabric thing that I don't even know exactly what it looks like but nobody's ever said oh your hair's all f***** up

So I assume it's fine

And then makeup

I've recently rediscovered

Some bare minerals concealer

It's a powder concealer and what I would do is I would concentrate on any area where I need to coverage and then just do a very light dusting on everything else

So I did that

And then I've got this I think it's ciate so-called extraordinary powder

And it does leave a really nice finish so I put some of that on

But then I said well I don't know

And over the top of that I put I have this primer it's a neutralizing primer and it's got some coverage to it

And I put like kind of a light padding on of that over the top of it

So I felt like it gave me a no makeup look

While making my skin look really good

And I was all like okay I really have no idea what this is going to be like but I felt prepared you know something about feeling like you're put together and you you've kind of put on the gauntlet or whatever

But I was absolutely not going into it like I expect this to be bad you know I was just very I don't know I don't know what this is going to be like I don't know what to expect but

I did look at the menu online so I figured out what I was going to do

They had on their breakfast tacos they had an add-on for guacamole

And they had wheat toast

And they had eggs

So I was going to ask them if I could get wheat toast avocado toast with a poached egg on each one well I didn't even ask that I asked to poached eggs

And the guy looked at me and he's like yeah absolutely we can do that

And Ajax looked at me

Like I had dropped from the sky somehow

He turned to the guy and was like I want that exact same thing

And he's like that is so smart what you just did there

Now I had no idea

That that was going to happen

I just wanted avocado toast

And wasn't overly enthusiastic about the rest of the menu

But I enjoyed the hell out of it

And

He baked cinnamon rolls

Did Ajax

And he gave me one of the cinnamon rolls he had baked

Which was also kind of magic

And I also

In addition to buying presents for the kid

And I wasn't 100% certain you know

He's 11

And he's an art kid or artsy kid but that can mean a lot of different things

So I went pretty basic

I went mixed media

So I got him my favorite mixed media paper pad The Strathmore mixed media I want to say it's 180 lb it's white and it's got a big thistle on it

And then I got him a pad of this new Hannemuhle bamboo paper which is you know sustainable and also has a really interesting texture kind of the way it absorbs water it's just very pleasant to paint on

So I got him those two papers that I thought he might enjoy and I also got these they're quite interesting their watercolors

Which really just means pigment that's held together with a gum Arabic substance it's very much a pure pigment

But these are watercolor sticks

Which isn't really a new technology

But it is new to me

And I do not believe it is well-known to people who are outside of the immediate watercolor community

So it's not like oh he's likely to have these you know

But he can draw with them he can wet them and get different effects he can use a water pin which I also got him to do watercolor painting with them they're just an interesting thing that he's unlikely to have played with before I think

And then I got some pencils der went I think they're all charcoally kind of pencils but in different shades of gray and brown and white but not bright colors for sketching or whatever and they're also water soluble so he can get different effects with those

And I'm not sure how specifically interested he was in them but he was you know interested he was interested it was stuff he hadn't seen before so he played with him a little and

And if he doesn't like them Jason will take them and use them because he was all like oh I might have to borrow those so I think we're fine

Also

And this is really telling about the degree to which I need to keep up with the hipsters

I made the wrapping paper

Now I couldn't do the paper pads because I don't have a huge sheet of something I can paint on I only have sheets of paper which I only have in sizes roughly equal to the container of papers front so obviously the only way I could wrap that is if I used multiple pieces of paper and put them together somehow and this paper is kind of thick and I just was like I cannot make that work after having wrapped the smaller ones

So I used my paper that I had on hand which is black with a mat bronze leafy something I mean like that that's the wrapping paper I would use for whatever I needed to wrap

I don't have rolls of Christmas wrapping paper I have sometimes in the past bought rolls of Christmas wrapping paper before I was going to wrap Christmas gifts for people

But I don't have people

So I have some pretty specifically not Christmas wrapping paper but it could work for Christmas I guess it's all purpose paper

So I had that for the for the bigger pads and I just put those together so it was one thing

And then the other stuff the smallest one the watercolor things I painted a piece of paper very densely painted with Scarlet red and doxazine purple and pretty much just those colors but mixed all kind of together and it looked really good and so then I was like okay well that's exciting

But I had a couple of pieces of paper that I had used already to play to see how the agave paper and the bamboo paper compared to one another and so I was like well I have those I'm not really using those for anything and they're white and red and they're pretty so just use those and then it's you know like upcycling it

And then I had all those in a brown paper handle bag

And Jason was like oh the obligatory gifts and I'm like just for the kid

But then you know after he opened the presents and whatnot and even really during that Jason just started talking

Like he hadn't seen me forever and

Wanted to catch up

So he's you know I was all worried about there being a lot of questions of me and whatever because that's kind of you know just what I was expecting that well what are you doing You know how are you not doing what you should be doing or whatever

But he just started talking and oh my God

So last time I saw him was in 2007

At the holiday is time

So I mean it's full 15 years ago

So he was 35

And now he's 50

He got hit by a car

He had really bad sciatica

He started smoking pot as a pain management thing for the sciatica

He had therapy

He had depression

For the depression he took bunches and bunches of mushrooms apparently

So like when I had talked to Jason about my depression in the past this is what Jason said to me about depression

I don't believe in depression

It doesn't work for me

Now I had super bad depression

When I was younger and this whole thing whether it was meant that way or not came across to me as very much the same thing as when my mother is just like decide to be happy

It's like yes decide to be happy that is very good advice if you are normal and you can decide to be happy or you can decide to let things upset you for example

But when you are depressed and you are being crushed under stuff that's going on in your brain and you can't function

Decide to be happy is cruel in the extreme

Because there you want nothing more than to be able to decide to be happy You wouldn't even know what you were trying to decide to be because you can't conceptualize it at all it is not a language you speak

So that did not work well for me and I feel as though that is how he meant it but I don't know you know I mean absolutely he could have just been enthusiastically saying the thing that he was enthusiastically saying to himself all the time you know I don't know

But now he he took ayahuasca

He bought the component ingredients off Amazon and mixed it up and did it himself

Which I wouldn't necessarily recommend

But you know I was like well I have always thought that if I did ayahuasca that the not so much that I necessarily think I can handle it but you know I the vegetal mother is supposed to tell you you know what you need to do to get your s*** together and I have always felt like I could use that information whether I'm ready to hear it or not you know

Only I don't think I said that many words

I think this time I threw in some extra hesitancy words that were not in my initial statement

So he's like well you know it told me to go say hi to my friend Dave

I'm like you're kidding me

But then later after we talked about some other stuff he was like well you know told me I didn't need to be eating so many animals

So I've been kind of working my way to this vegetarian thing

Except that he's not vegetarian he's pescatarian cuz he ate bagels and locks the other day and it's new because the kid

But I mean

That kind of little nervous giggle that I found painful somehow before

It like settled into this slightly movable Svengali quality