parallel opposing

personally: i feel pretty good. as much as i'm hating my job, things are pretty good.

work-wise: goddamn. i couldn't focus today because i was distracted by bullshit and anxiety and demoralizing passive-aggressive "conversations" with coworkers.

...

today started with rain. no, it started with me actually getting most of a night's sleep. then i woke up and it was raining. i took mr smear to school, while it was gently drizzling, but as soon as he got in the skies opened up and i was trapped outside the ridiculously posh foyer of a building near the school. gd came to rescue me with an umbrella, but she almost got trapped herself by the poor (practically non-existent) drainage.

i decided i wasn't going to brave the wet to go to the office today, and it's definitely better that i was home because it was much easier to handle some of the aforementioned "conversations" without anyone seeing the expressions on my face or reading the choice words i ultimately decided not to send.

in the afternoon i took mr smear to his mma class, dropped him off and traded in our old, broken ipad to the istore for zero shekels, then returned to work while mr smear did his thing.

this is the second time i've seen his instructor getting pissed off at him, and the second time witnessing the same frustrations i experience from a third-person perspective. for the most part, though, he was good, and i was particularly impressed by the fact that he went and showered by himself afterwards while i continued working :)

we waited almost an hour for the bus, discovering only just before it arrived that the previous buses had been trapped by protests...

then we did some basic grocery shopping, and walked home, and did the evening routine, except he got into bed quite late so there was no story. as i was saying good night, he told me he was afraid and i tried to reassure him.

i fucked up.

how? by repeating something that i've said many times before, starting with "even when i die one day", only this time he just burst into tears, which was both sweet and mortifying, and began saying things like "we should all die together" and then calculating how old i should be when i die so that he'll be the age he wants to be when we all pass on simultaneously. it got creepy and weird, and it took a while for me to get him to go to sleep in a more positive frame of mind...

so that happened. i spent the following three hours working, finally making some progress untangling the crazy-awful mess that some of my ex-coworkers left behind, and for the past half hour or so i've switched computers and have been alternating between writing this and doing random internet things.

...

i asked mr smear's teacher for a quick report on how he's doing, and while she didn't give me details it sounds like she's very excited by how good things are. this is very exciting!