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February Reflections

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s the final day of February, and I’m tired. But it’s been an interesting month. Here are some highlights:

  • FAWM, obviously. Unless I miraculously get something done tonight, I’m ending the month with sixteen new songs, plus two that I co-wrote with my partner. I’m pleased with the majority of my songs, and I’m really happy with how our co-writes came out. Collaborating was a new experience for us, and neither of us was sure how it would go.
  • I started seeing a new therapist. It’s going really well.
  • I had some really good times hanging out with friends – I didn’t let FAWM completely take over my life. We had a visit from a Minnesota friend, a birthday party, and I got to play D&D. I am frequently reminded how great my people are. I’m a very lucky queer.

I’m looking forward to getting our apartment back under control in March, and hopefully sleeping more.

Progress

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Sometimes, progress is obvious and happens quickly. Other times, it can feel like it’s not happening at all. This week has largely been one of those other times.

FAWM marches on, and I have been writing – I’m up to 12 songs and it’s the 14th of the month. This week it’s been harder, though. I’ve had trouble waking up early to write. Still, I’ve written some keepers, and that’s exciting. Here are a few of the songs I’m proudest of so far:

Work has been frustrating, not because of anything specific to my job, but because my brain has been extremely foggy this week. I haven’t gotten much done, because I can’t keep my train of thought on the rails long enough to see things through. I feel stuck, and it’s not a pleasant feeling.

I am looking forward to the weekend. A friend of ours is coming down from Minnesota to hang out for a couple of days. I’m looking forward to some low-key hangouts and pizza.

Happy Holidays!

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Somehow, we’re suddenly less than a week from Christmas and less than two weeks from the end of the year. I’m a bit in disbelief. In some ways, this felt like a very long year. In others, it flew by.

I’m going to save my reflections on 2018 for the next post, though.

This week, I want to talk about what I’m looking forward to in these last couple of weeks of 2018.

  • Road trip: Since it looks, at this point, like the weather is going to cooperate for our trip, I am looking forward to the drive. My partner and I enjoy road trips. We don’t own a car, so it’s always an interesting change of pace.
  • Family: I am looking forward to seeing both my partner’s family and mine, even if family events around holidays sometimes feel daunting. We don’t see our families all that often these days, so the chance to get together is great.
  • Friends: We’re scaling way back on social commitments for this trip, but I am extremely excited to see the couple of people we were able to work into the schedule.
  • Time off from work: Work has actually been pretty okay lately, but I’m excited to have some time away from the office.
  • Lights: There’s not going to be snow on the ground for Christmas, but my favorite part of the season is the lights everywhere, at this darkest time of year.

I am not sure if I’ll be posting anything next week – we will be traveling home next Thursday. May you and yours have a merry end to the year, and may we all find some light in the midst of the darkness.

Creativity Abounds

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I am dashing this post off on Thursday morning before I really dig into my work day. I am working from home today (I’ve been dealing with a lot of body/joint pain as the weather shifts, and it’s been exhausting, so I’m giving myself a little break from major activity, and I hear the internet at work is spotty, so I will probably get more done here than I would there, anyway), and am currently enjoying the morning sunlight and the glow of the Christmas lights we have strung around our living room windows. It’s peaceful.

The past week has highlighted how much I love being creative. Here are three ways that’s shown up:

  1. Last Thursday, while I was volunteering in the library area at the Old Town School of Folk Music, I finally finished the sweater I’d started working on over a year ago.  A couple of weeks before I’d been panicking a bit, because I wanted to get it done by Christmas, and I was in what felt like a bit of a black hole with the knitting – I’d knit and knit and knit and it didn’t seem to get any larger. Suddenly, though, it was done, and I got it sewn together, and it fits like a dream and it’s the most successful sweater I’ve ever made. I’m so excited to show it off at Christmas (and I’ve worn it a couple of other times already). Now that I finally have that project off the needles, I feel a little lost as to what I want to cast on for my next big thing. In the meantime I’ve started a new pair of fingerless gloves to replace some that got a hole torn in them last winter (I’m going to repair the torn ones, but I want a non-patched pair, too).
  2. On Saturday, my partner and I attended a songwriting workshop with one of our favorite teachers at the Old Town School, Sue Demel. (Sue is just one of my favorite people, period.) In the workshop, we went over a chapter from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the chapter on “Multiplicity,” and Sue talked us through how we could use Calvino’s insights to improve our writing. We did a bunch of writing exercises in the workshop, and each left with at least one verse. After the workshop, I was once again volunteering in the school’s resource center, and I got a chance to work more on my lyrics. I managed to get I think four verses and a chorus worth of lyrics out before the end of my shift. I haven’t had a chance to go back and finish it yet, but I’m excited about the unexpected places it’s been taking me.
  3. On Sunday, I got together with my D&D group for the first time in a couple of months. I hadn’t fully realized how much I missed these friends and our shenanigans until we were playing together again. I love collaborative storytelling so damn much, and I’m glad to have people in my life who are just as into it as I am.

Low Key

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

It’s been a pretty laid-back week. I feel like I don’t have a lot to talk about. But here’s a quick list of a few things I’m grateful for or excited about right now:

  1. Knitting. I am a few hours of work away from being done with the sweater I’ve been working on. I’m hoping to have it done by the end of the weekend. It’s going to be gorgeous.
  2. Good food. My partner and I didn’t do a traditional Thanksgiving feast last week, but that’s not to say we didn’t cook! I think we counted eleven different dishes between Thursday and Sunday. Highlights that we’ve been enjoying all week: slow cooker carnitas, kharcho (a Georgian beef and rice stew), and about three gallons of borsch. We also had steaks cooked in our cast iron skillet one night to celebrate our anniversary, with a couple of hot dish sides. We’ve been eating well, for sure!
  3. Music. I’ve been reminded many times recently how much I love my Old Town School of Folk Music community. Also, my partner and I are both playing sets at an acoustic show on Monday, and I’m very excited for that.
  4. Nerdy friends. Earlier this week some friends and I resumed a DnD game we’d had to put on hold a couple months ago. It’s been so fun to dive back into the world we’re creating together!
  5. Snow. It may be a pain in the ass sometimes, but it sure is pretty.

That’s it for this week. I’d love to hear from you! What are some things you’re excited about right now?

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I have been super distracted this week.

Some of this is probably the continuation of holidays – having so many extra days off has me feeling a little discombobulated about what day it is. (Which is not at all a complaint, because the days off are lovely. Just an observation that it’s hard to keep track of what day it is when I’m out of a routine.)

I’m also fighting a bit of a cold, which has had my whole head feeling stuffy, including my ears. This is also disorienting, because I have to focus harder than usual to hear and absorb auditory information.

It hasn’t been a bad week, though. The weekend was fun – lots of time with friends, and I was able to make it to my LGBTQ+ rock ensemble class at the Old Town School. This week has been pretty laid back. I worked Monday and Tuesday, and then yesterday went with a friend to the Art Institute, which I’d only ever been to once before (and not under the best of circumstances), so that was a lot of fun.

Tomorrow my partner and I are both taking the day off to go to an all-day songwriting seminar/workshop at the Old Town School. I have not been writing much at all since getting back from Song School, so I am looking forward to that and am hopeful that it will give me some solid inspiration and motivation to get back in the saddle.

I hope your weeks are all going well, dear readers! I’d love to hear about what’s making your weeks fun in the comments.

Days Off and Happy Thoughts

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

This might be my favorite time of year. Not only do I love fall in general (apple cider! sweater weather! pretty trees!), but it’s also when a lot of major Jewish holidays happen, which, since I work for a Jewish agency, means I get a bunch of extra days off. This week, we had Monday and Tuesday off for Rosh Hashanah. I thoroughly enjoyed my days off. Here is a list of some other happy things from the past week:

  • Friends. On Saturday, my partner and I got breakfast with a friend in the neighborhood, which is something of a weekend tradition and time I really treasure. That afternoon, we went to a lovely, low-key baby shower for a couple of friends, and it was so fun to celebrate them and their little-one-to-be.
  • Self-care. I also got a much-needed haircut on Saturday, and bought myself a new book that I’m enjoying quite a bit (The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin). It always surprises me how much a good haircut can improve how I feel in my body.
  • Music. Sometime in the spring I started attending services at a Unitarian Universalist church semi-regularly, and now I’ve joined their choir (jury is still out on whether I’m going to actually become a member of the church). Sunday was the first service I joined them for. I haven’t been in a choir since high school, and since I also haven’t played much piano since then, my sight-reading skills have slipped somewhat. But I’m managing okay at keeping up with the rest of our tiny tenor section, and I’m having fun with it.
  • Knitting. I got SO MUCH KNITTING done on my days off. I am almost done with the second sleeve of the sweater I started last September. Once I finish that, it’s just the front left. I am so excited to be able to wear this sweater, and it felt good to really dig into my knitting again – I think I knit more in the past week than I’ve knit in the past five months combined.
  • Self-indulgent shopping. I bought myself some new work pants in fun colors, because I really didn’t love what I had. I also had a minor manic moment last week and ordered a pair of Fluevog boots. They arrived yesterday, and I am completely smitten. They’re exactly what I wanted. It feels a little silly to be this excited about shoes, but they’re pretty awesome shoes:

    New boots!

     

Temperature Regulation

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers! First, allow me to apologize for the lack of blog last week. The site crashed on Tuesday night and I didn’t have time until Thursday morning to deal with it. Thankfully, we’re back up and running. And now, on to the blog!

As appeared to be the case in much of the northern hemisphere last week, it was HOT in Chicago (with the added midwestern bonus of humidity on top of that). I…don’t cope well with heat. I’ve been having some issues regulating my body temperature anyway (I seem to never be cold when everyone around me says it’s freezing indoors), and then our air conditioner went on strike in protest of having to work so hard to keep up. So last week was pretty miserable a lot of the time, and I was pretty focused on just getting through it. The heat finally broke over the weekend, and that was absolutely lovely.

This week has been more manageable in terms of temperature, and after giving our air conditioner a cleaning over the weekend, it seems to be working better. I still feel gross a lot of the time, but it’s better than last week.

Despite the weather, there’s been a lot to be happy about the past couple of weeks. Here are a few of those things:

  1. Good movies. In an effort to be in better air conditioning than what our sad little window unit could provide, we went to about as many movies in the space of a week as we often do in a year, and they were all great. We saw Ocean’s 8, which totally lived up to the trailers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the Mister Rogers documentary, which left the audience in sniffles, and Incredibles 2, which was hilarious and adorable. All highly recommended.
  2. Good friends. Between seeing movies and just making some other plans, I got to see a lot of friends in the past couple of weeks, including a couple we almost never get to see anymore. That was lovely.
  3. Good news. While yes, there’s been a lot in the news to be horrified about, I’ve gotten some personal good news at work – I got a bonus, and managed to move some projects I’d kind of been dreading forward with a minimal amount of distress.
/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

This is one of those weeks where I feel like I don’t have a lot to say. I’m less down than I was last week, but still rather out of it. So let’s keep this one short and sweet. Here’s a list of three things that have made me smile this week:

  1. Nerdery. Last weekend I spent many hours with fellow nerds playing DnD. Before I went to each of the two games, I was feeling pretty blah. But I’m so glad I went! Few things make me as happy as collaborative storytelling with friends.
  2. Music. On Sunday, my partner and I participated in our songwriting class’s end-of-session showcase. These showcases are always fun and always make me appreciate the songwriting community we’re part of.
  3. Friends. I’ve had a lot of reminders this week that I have a great support network holding me up. I’m grateful for all of the people who stick by me even when my brain is misbehaving.

Allergies and Optimism

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I think I’m finally coming down from my most recent swing into mania. The frenetic activity in my brain has slowed (it never really ceases), and my anxiety has dropped from One Step Below Panic Attack back to Background Hum, at least most of the time.

This week, it really feels like spring is here and summer is right around the corner. I know it’s still spring because even though it’s been quite warm, there is pollen everywhere, which is making my head feel fuzzy and my sinuses cranky. But it’s hard to be too mad when everything’s finally leafing and blooming and alive.

I’m still planning to meet with a psychiatrist next week about a potential med adjustment. I’m still nervous, but I’m also glad I’ve gotten to the point where I’m doing something about the anxiety instead of just drowning in it.

All in all, even though it’s been a weird week, I think things are looking up. The weather has me feeling optimistic. I’ve had lots of reminders that I’ve built a really solid support network, and I’m so grateful for all the awesome people in my life that make the good times better and the hard times livable.