Sign of the time : I just had my first ever over the phone therapy session.

I wasn’t happy when I heard the message from my therapist that this was how it was going to be for the near future.

I wasn’t surprised either. Everything is going virtual these days. With all this Covid-19 panic in the air, nobody wants to be around strangers any more.

Welcome to my world, humanity.

Anyhow, I wasn’t happy about phone therapy because I get nervous on the phone. All else being equal, me and the phone don’t get along so good. I would much rather communicate with people in text chat or email.

But it wasn’t that big a deal in this case because I have known my therapist for like a decade now, so it was nothing like talking to a stranger.

It still made me nervous, though. I think the problem is that I can’t express myself the way I want to over the phone.

I’m Acadian. We talk with our hands.

When I answered the phone^[1] for today’s session, I had only been awake for about fifteen minutes and hadn’t gotten dressed yet, so technically, I did therapy naked.

And I was so amused by the idea of naked therapy that I pictured it as being this whole “thing” back in the 70’s, complete with the therapist being interviewed by the sensationalist media and saying something about how nude group therapy helps break down the emotional barriers between people by removing the physical barriers that keep up from truly seeing one another, and so forth.

The session started slow, but they always do with me. It always takes me a bit of time to switch to the necessary mode. I’ve gotten better at it over the years, but there are still times when I slip into intellectual discourse or funny storytelling or some other mode where I am entertaining my therapist, not actually doing therapy.

What can I say, I am a mesmerizing raconteur.

In other news, I have decided to get back into Elder Scrolls Online. It’s a great game and the only MMPORPG that I have ever played for more than a few hours.

In fact, according to Steam, I’ve played it for a total of 995 hours and last played it on October 30, 2018.

And I only stopped playing it because I had done pretty much everything in it. Well, everything you could do for free, anyhow.

Now, it’s been long enough that I feel like going back. So I have reinstalled the game, which was a bit of a trial, because the goddamned thing is 75 gigs and took around 20 hours to download.

And I bet when I finally boot up the game, there will be a shitload of updates too.

Still, I look forward to going back and seeing all the old familiar places. And of course, seeing everything that has changed in the last one and half years.

Think I will go check it out now.

More after the break.

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I fucked up again

And this one’s a classic.

Turns out this was the five week month I knew was lurking out there, waiting to fuck me up. I thought yesterday was check day, but nope.

It’s not till next week.

And the worst part of it is that when I did my little calculation about whether NEXT month was a five week month, I saw that the check day for this month was the 25th, but it didn’t click that this meant my check wasn’t for another week.

I can’t even say that I thought yesterday WAS the 25th, Truth is, I didn’t think about the date at all.

Just shows that you can never be paranoid enough. I thought I was being shrewd and checking for dangers ahead like a smarty pants type like me should, and it turned out that I was looking in the wrong direction entirely.

Le sigh. If I had known it was a five week month, I would have adjusted my spending accordingly. $120/week instead of my usual budget of $150/week.

With such forethought, it’s not that hard to deal with.

Without such forethought, well, let me put it this way : I got 90 cents to my name and a week to go till my next check.

And I might be good at being frugal but I ain’t THAT good.

Luckily. Joe has agreed to lend me money. I am going to borrow $100 from him. Normally that would be insufficient, but Felicity is on full lockdown now due to (The Secret Formula For) Covid-19 and so I get the feeling that I won’t be eating at a restaurant any time soon.

Speaking of which, I took another stab at using my $20 voucher at Foodora again. What inspired me to give it a shot was that I thought maybe I could get around whatever problem I was having by using a different browser.

So I booted up Microsoft Edge, or as it’s known back in the old neighborhood. Internet Explorer. And once more, I came close to victory.

I even overcame a potential barrier when I was selecting the “pay with voucher” option but the “OK” button was below the bottom of the screen (if you know what I mean).

I looked up how to switch screen resolutions for Edge, because it was running at what I am guessing is the right size for tablet use but for the PC everything was HUGE.

Turns out you can’t switch resolutions in Edge. But the answer I read reminded me that I could just hit Ctrl-NumUp to go down a size.

That worked. Victory! But then I clicked the OK button, and it just hung there. Throbber on the screen, going around and around, but never actually completing shit.

So once more, I was thwarted. Damn it. It’s beginning to seem like the gods themselves are working against me.

This, of course, makes me even more determined to make these people give me my fucking free food.

Maybe I will try again Saturday night. I could really use a free meal in place of my usual Saturday night paid-for-in-cash delivery meal.

But I won’t get my hopes up.

Clearly, the wheels of fate are turning against me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.