Catching up in Going public

Current situation: Sitting on my couch after having baked a bunch of cookies. I did Halloween cutouts, which I will decorate sometime this week. I don’t care for Halloween but I do like buying new cutters and themed sprinkles and having a bit of fun with the designs. Cosmo went to the vet last week for an ear infection and now has a cold. Where the hell does a cat even pick up a cold? Must have been from the vet, right? Sophie has been having a gagging/coughing? problem that I haven’t quite figured out yet. Vet gave us new food and I’ve been trying a mineral oil paste.

My body is so tired. I’ve been hitting the gym pretty hard. All summer I cycled outdoors every Saturday morning, but now that it’s rainy and dark and cold, the outdoor season is over. Instead, I’ve been lifting on Saturday morning. Sunday mornings I go to cycle class followed by yoga. So I have become a person who wakes up earlier on weekends than weekdays.

I am in a weird situation with personal trainers. My original trainer, Alex, quit the industry and got a sales job. He was replaced by Olivia, and everything was great. When I returned from Spain, she had ghosted. Basically she was suicidal and her husband was awful so she got a divorce, and thus took a leave from work. I got paired up with another trainer named Joseph. He was very competent, but I didn’t feel much chemistry with him. When I was in Florida, I noticed Alex was posting on Instagram again on his trainer account. I DM’d him and found out he was back working as a trainer, so we arranged for me to start a program with him. I don’t have to pay for the gym he trains out of - just show up and use the facilities and pay the fee for his time. My first weekend back home after the Florida trip I went to cycle class and saw.. Olivia! I fired Joseph and figured I’d catch up with Olivia. We got dinner one night and swapped stories and caught up. I have some sessions at the gym already paid for, so I trained with her again. I’m pretty torn on what to do! I have to fire one of them which sucks because I like both of them so much. I’m giving it a month and then I’ll see how I feel about everything.

Let me update you on medical stuff. My throat culture results did not come back before my trip to Spain, so I was sick the entire time I was there. Sick in the sense that there was an abscess in my throat leaking pus into my mouth :D My doctor helped me realize that I could push on it to clear it out. So I would stand in front of the mirror and press under my ear and see it seep out into my mouth.

It was a long journey to Spain. I went.. Seattle -> San Francisco -> Madrid -> train to Valencia. I don’t know how many hours it took. A lot. Maybe I will do a separate entry about the trip. I started to write a bit about it now but there’s a lot there, and in some sense it’s a blur to me. I tried so so hard to make the most of that trip - I didn’t EVER complain, I tried to have good energy and optimism. But internally I was definitely suffering, so worried about my health. Every day of that trip I counted down the days until I could go home.

When I got home I had a voicemail from my doctor saying they had the results of the culture and had identified the bacteria, and he ordered a different antibiotic for me. I started taking that, and it cleared up my infection within a few days! Unfortunately it was a two week course, and the medication itself made me feel pretty terrible - nauseous and fatigued. I had my birthday during those two weeks and got together with a bunch of friends for dinner. Another situation where I felt like, man, I don’t wanna do this.. but I did it anyway. A few weeks later I saw my doctor again so he could look at my hopefully healed throat, and to advise on what to do next. He said it looked “amazingly” good, and I definitely agree! He scheduled an MRI which I had last week. I should get a call from him early this week to hear the results. I do feel like the cyst is still there (just not infected anymore), so the possibility of removal is on the table. It would be a much more serious surgery than what I had last. So.. we’ll see what happens.

The day the meds ended I got on a plane to Orlando. It was for a women in coding conference, the biggest of its kind. That entire week was just existing in a state of low-grade discomfort. There were 25k people at the conference, milling about a huge conference center and hotels. Everywhere I went there were just HOARDS of people. Absurd lines to do anything. Badge pickup? 2 hour wait. T-shirt pick up? hour wait. Food line? 50+ people in every line. It was hard to find a place to sit or water to drink. On top of that, the talks weren’t even very good! The conference seemed much more suited to very very early career women who maybe don’t work at a big tech giant like I do. The other women I went with from my company felt the same. So that was unfortunate. There were pretty fun after parties though - Microsoft, Twitter, and Google were the ones I went to. At the Google party my cat sitter started blowing up my phone - he started his voicemail with “we’ve got a problem..!” and I was like OH GOD WHAT. Turns out he was having trouble getting into my apartment building :/ Bro do you have to be so dramatic?

I stayed in Orlando an extra day with a few of the girls and we went to Disney. I had been to Disneyworld as a kid and overall remembered it as a cool place, so I was interested in going back. Well..... not a fan. We went to Magic Kingdom and it was just not nice. I swear I’ve had more fun at a county fair. Again with the lines and crowds. Their ‘fast pass’ system is super broken if you’re going as friends and not family, and the food was so terrible, the lines so goddamn long. I swear that place must be running on pure hype at this point.

So since then I’ve just been trying to get back to normal life. Trying to drop weight and get even stronger. But mostly just figure out what I want to focus on in my life. It’s a big question and there’s so much I want to do, and so many areas in which I want to achieve more. Every little imperfection in my life bothers me and I’m obsessing on how to solve them. I’m also ~thinking~ of getting back to dating. With all of my health stuff it was just SO not appealing. This is the longest I’ve gone without dating or even having sex in quite awhile and I haven’t even minded it.

Now it’s time to wrap some things up before the new work week starts.

Last updated October 21, 2019