the festival of everything being upside down

ugh: it got worse before it got better.

around the time i finally went to bed, mr smear woke up needing to go to the toilet (so there was much messing about with lights). i closed my eyes and let gd handle it.

then, around 3am, i got up to pee, and found mr smear with his light on reading harry potter. i stood in his doorway and (gently but with a disapproving tone) made it clear that that was unacceptable, and that he needed to be sleeping so he could get up at 6.30am.

and that was when he started arguing with me. and on top of the bad vibe, once i got him to put the book away he then complained that he couldn't go to sleep because he'd read something creepy.

that was when i lost patience, and he was fighting back, and i'd been exhausted already, so i called gd in to handle the situation and tried to go back to sleep. but i was too angry, and i couldn't bring that anger down, and then i remembered jordan peterson talking about not letting your kids do things that make you dislike them, and that anger with him slowly morphed into fear for him.

i never really got any rest, and in addition to the psychological/emotional struggle my lower back started giving me trouble too.

i was a wreck come the morning.

i managed to avoid dealing with the issue until mr smear and i were both "awake" and doing alright, and then i took him aside and told him what i'd been feeling and worrying about. he seems to have heard me, he responded well, and the rest of the morning went well.

after mr smear went to school, gd and i left to meet up with one of my los angeles cousins' kids who's visiting israel from new york, and who i haven't seen since i was a teenager and he was little. we had no idea what to expect (turns out he did a little jail time at some point, so maybe both of them did?), but after arriving at his hotel (and taking a quick tour of a tattoo studio / gallery, it's kind of our thing) we found him and walked to a cool little coffee shop, and spent the better part of two hours enjoying a beautiful sunny morning chat with a really decent guy who turned out to be quite a kindred spirit ^_^

afterwards, gd and i took the light rail to my office from where she took a bus back home, and i walked in and immediately began to fall apart,

the coffee didn't help. the fruit didn't help. the hummus for lunch was delicious but certainly didn't help. and then a long meeting in a stuffy meeting room on top of all of everything made the struggle to keep my eyes open very, very real.

not counting the happy hour (and unveiling of our new logo, which is actually pretty cool), i spent the rest of the afternoon in a fatigue haze trying to compensate with lots of sugary snacks and i'm not quite sure how much i actually achieved.

after finally arriving back home, i helped mr smear with a couple more pages of math homework (with no drama!) and we watched an episode of delicious in dungeon while eating "drekfast" (dinner + breakfast), took care of some random things after getting mr smear into bed, and then went to bed myself and passed out.

...

aside from very long, very scary, very real dreams about a dinosaur apocalypse, i slept relatively well. now we're all up and coffee'd and breakfasted, we're off to dizengoff center to see what's happening there for purim.

chag sameach!