the crest of the wave

 it's been a wild few weeks, i've been feeling overwhelmed even since work pressure eased off just over a week ago. last week mr smear brought home a cold, so that was a bit of a scare, and last tuesday's tattoo session was so intensely painful that i was suffering from shock for two days afterwards (saturday's also hurt a lot, but nothing like no. 15).

i've been stressed about my side project (not that i haven't made any progress, but it's been hard to make headspace for it), i've been stressed about gd's documentation (after giving us the runaround for a couple of weeks, they informed us that the form they'd given us was invalid and that the lawyer who's helping us isn't lawyer enough), i've been stressed about pushing out the graphic novel (although we did just complete a really cool page), and i've been stressed about the awful stuff going on in israel almost as much i've been stressed about the world's ridiculous response to it.

it's funny, though, that through all the anxiety and the day-to-day trials and exhaustions i'm sitting here typing this and feeling pretty okay about the world.

...

in mr smear news:

the past couple of weeks have been easier than before when we were going through a period of particularly difficult behaviour. he's been repeating to whoever will listen that i'm always working and never play with him (completely untrue, but not the point), even though he's (in the same breath!) told someone that i don't have a job. *facepalm*

twice over the course of the past week or so i've managed to get him to come down to the parking lot with his bike, and both times he's had a blast and made real progress. i hope we can gather enough momentum for him to be confident enough to drop the training wheels.

while things have generally been pretty good with him, tonight he pushed gd too far and for the first time ended up going to bed without dinner. to put it simply, he was being an asshole. i don't know how we correct this, but i think this evening was an important step.

...

 right. imma going to bed now.