just in! being self helps

ha! sometimes i really enjoy the environment that comes with my job. customer comes in, buys some books, asks me where "those kids got their ice cream". i tell her about the place up the block that's so fancy you could ask for m&m's and guitar strings on your ice cream and they'd do it. off she goes. a little while later, the drunks outside the pub next door are getting all emotive. we check, and it appears the bookstore customer, parked right in front of the store, has a dead battery and wants to know if any of the drunk guys can help. the poster-child for drunk brits decides they should push-start her car (or at least, he's the loudest about it) and gets all the other smoking drunk people to help. keep in mind this is a major thoroughfare. so this little car goes careening off into traffic with maybe five big guys behind it. it starts! and roars off. and guess where the ice cream ends up? in the hands of the poster-child. that's how community works in big cities, i think.

it's probably a funnier story with the soundtrack of seven or so men laughing hysterically, eating ice cream.

trying to settle into a routine, a summer routine. finding it difficult. i still want to spend most of my time with the queen, but he works days (early starts, getting earlier) and i work largely nights. he gets weekends off (for now) and i get random weekdays off. so we see each other rarely, and not necessarily at our best - one of us is half-conscious. he's very sweet, coming by the store when he gets off work, and coming by for lunch occasionally. i wish i could visit his work, but its nature makes it impossible. more than half the time he isn't even in the far-away office anyway.

and i like having my own time. i do. i just have pre-worry about the quality of our time together because it's harder to be fully present with each other right now. and when i think about the idea of that being all it would take for us to forget the awesomeness, i roll my eyes. i mean, come on. but it's hard to keep teasing my worry when it's really worried. and he'll end up working sixteen-hour days this summer, he's warned me. worry worry.

okay, so find a strategy that helps with the worry, find a special thing that can happen in terms of shared time, and set a check-in date with self after the summer is over, like november, where we'll have had a chance to see each other again in real daylight hours. and show my love in the meantime. acknowledge that the relationship means a lot.

meditate. make dinner. consciously live while time is passing.

it's weird how often my strategies boil down to eating and sitting and doing my own thing. i wonder if that's really the secret to peace? that and trust. trust the relationship, trust my self, trust the person i am with.

caribou!