Wednesday is therapy day, and I'm not really looking forward to it. I think this is because I feel like there are several different things I want to get into, and I won't be able to fit all of them in, and then Norm's going on vacation for a week, and my group therapist is simultaneously going on vacation for two weeks, which means that I'll go a whole ten days without therapy. Horrors! Well, not really, but it does make me reluctant to get into things, which is ironic given how much lately my thoughts had been focusing on how to get inside the place I need to be. And even more ironic, in that I think I've gotten an idea of how to get to this place, which is something about being soft and letting things come, but that's a poor description of it. The way to get there has to do with releasing my analytical hold on the world and instead providing experiential description. This is entertaining to realise, as I used to periodically compare my journal to other journals I liked and I always came away saying, "You know, I need to write more from my senses and less from my head.", and then never did it. If my suspicions are correct that talking from that space taps into a lot of intense stuff, I know why I never want to do so. And maybe why Chloe is such a powerful character for me to play.

The other thing I'm becoming aware of, in thinking about this in the last few weeks, is how incredibly well-trained my mind is not to go to those places, not to let me talk from that place. It's like reaching towards a flame; every time I get close to the heat I pull my hand back and decide it was a bad idea -- but that's all happening so far under the surface that I'm not even aware of the reaching most of the time.

But none of this is what I'm going to talk about in therapy, because I don't want to get into all of this when Norm's going away. Instead we'll talk about a continuation of the stuff we were talking about last week, which while also very important is much more contained.

I'm back! Therapy went well, and now I'm busy eating leftover black peppercorn tortellini in garlic marinara sauce. Yum. I really ought to cook more often, if throwing tortellini in boiling water and heating up some canned sauce can really be considered cooking. My hope is now that my Tuesday nights are freeing up I'll be able to go back to cooking twice a week, which is what I was doing at the beginning of the year. Before that, though, I need to finish organising the kitchen; Jim so wonderfully put together all the IKEA furniture we bought, so now I need to remove things from the floor and place them instead on the pantry shelves.

And not that you can tell I've been gone, but I'm back again. Jean-Luc stealthily arranged a meeting and forgot to tell us all, so I moved the 20 feet to the conference area (right outside my cube) and listened to the status of exciting business deals, and assured him I wouldn't explode while he was in LA for two days. By the end of the fifty minutes this took I was hungry again, so now I'm eating fig newtons and drinking some pu-erh oolong -- still from the Yamamotoyama bags, alas, since I forgot my tea ball again this morning. Eventually I'll remember it. Really.

In mere minutes I'm going to leave work and drive the long and painful way from Sunnyvale to Redwood City (only long and painful due to the general traffic situation at 5:15 on a weeknight), in order to be oriented into the mysteries of the BAMM scholarship comittee. Hopefully this will end within a few hours, so that I can then get some food and head to Mike & Susan's for a little bit of D&D. After next week my Japanese class will be on Thursdays and so I'll be missing D&D until the beginning of June. After that, well, we'll see; I might be addicted to the amount of free time this gives me.