controlling the narrative

sea point promenade on a sunday afternoon with my six year old, a strong-looking, very aggressive 6'4" man came towards us and started threatening me, yelling about how i stole his phone yesterday amidst a bunch of other things. i kept backing up and trying to get away without getting into a brawl in front of my kid, and after thirty seconds he just walked away with an ugly laugh then angrily repeated "i'm just joking" until he was out of earshot.

according to the policeman i spoke to (this happened across the road from the station), they know who this guy is and there's literally nothing they can do even if i could press charges.

ha. ha.

...

 that was earlier - i seem to have handled myself well enough that mr smear didn't feel scared, and i tried to take him for a double-thick shake at royale right afterwards to bring us back into a positive space but sadly they had two cashiers who didn't have a clue how their vegan menu worked... we got a nice drink from newport instead and enjoyed the walk back. he certainly hasn't forgotten the incident, but at least he doesn't seem phased by it.

thursday and friday were pretty straightforward as far as workdays go. friday morning i tried and failed to get in the car to take mr smear to their class outing at sanccob, i really don't like our car, this time the battery was drained by the front inside light which i must have turned on by accident, and of course there's no warning light or sound and no mechanism for it to turn off automatically after a set period of time... and, of course, i hadn't charged the emergency battery pack since i bought it so we had to wait for someone (my mother and a neighbour) to come to the rescue with jump leads.

gd's been feeling sick, and the weather yesterday wasn't great, so we watched the goonies (which was even better than i remembered!) and pirates of the caribbean: on stranger tides, although mr smear got bored halfway through and missed the mermaids because he was busy playing lego batman.

we had a bit of an incident at shower-time last night, and while i was feeling horrible about the whole thing (not the first time), i watched "you are the creator" - nothing new, just very well-packaged and well-timed. i've been reactive and exhausted for years now and it's long past time to retake control of my narrative.

i woke up this morning feeling better about life, the universe and everything and i spent a few hours putting together the script for the next couple of pages, including spending a fortune on the license to the only script i could find (gd helped) that made any sort of sense for use as a stand-in for shakespeare's handwriting (his actual handwriting is practically illegible for most of us). one thing that gd and i both found amusing is that i had a great idea this morning for the pages before i reviewed the existing script (that i wrote about six or seven years ago) which i sketched out for her, and when i did get to reading it i discovered i'd had the exact same idea back then and recorded it in pretty much the same way.

this afternoon i decided that mr smear was ready for invader zim, and we were not disappointed by the first few episodes ^_^ (only the original season or two, beyond that the writing stopped being clever and original)

we're also halfway through the heaven's arena arc in hunter x hunter again, and mr smear is super-excited about the idea of nen :D

right, it's dinnertime. i'm a little sunburned from taking mr smear to visit my mom and her friend's pool. after the evening routine i plan on being a little more productive than usual and then gearing up for a new week with a better attitude.