Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

20 What’s a childish thing you still do as an adult?

Ha, I was just talking to Mal about showing affection by being a carefully-controlled amount of mean. Apparently the only difference a couple of my friends noticed when diffrentcolours and I started dating is that I got meaner to him. Which I was horrified by, which made everyone laugh at me. Which makes me laugh. I like this story because if I'd meant to be teasing him more I'd have reveled in it and delighted in my friends noticing. Since I didn't mean to and didn't notice it myself, I was just concerned! Especially since it happened twice, two people told me this and they didn't know the other person had done so!

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Today started out bad -- I woke up to that "Find My Mobile" push notification that, at 6am, had me convinced somoene was trying to hack my phone or stalk me or something, despite how vanishingly nlikely both of those things seemed even to my panicky, sleep-deprived brain. So I spent the hour and a half until my alarm was supposed to go off having an anxiety attack instead of sleeping: chest pains, stomachache, being completely useless at breathing, the whole works.

But, not having been to uni this week, with one thing and another, I had been determined to go today. So I got up and forced myself into the shower: where I promptly had most of a Lush shampoo bar slide of its tin -- something that'd never happened in all the years I'd been using them -- wasting much of it and ensuring I was covered in soap when I'd just turned the water off. I even managed to get soap in my mouth somehow. I turned the shower back on to rinse myself off, but the treacherous thing had gone from a comfy temperature to absolutely freezing in the few seconds it'd been turned off.

I still did the small miracle of being at the bus stop more or less on time and actually getting a bus, which meant I cleared yesterday's obstacle of getting to uni. My lecture was fine, and I even managed to catch up on the same class's (Language Contact) lecture from Monday so I'd be a bit more prepared for its seminar this afternoon.

But then I saw my phone had a missed number from Manchester City Council, which so far has only been the sensory team dealing with my white cane replacement. I thought well, if they've actually found the right size after last week's debacle, I have just enough time to nip over there before my seminar (because it's baically at my uni). It turned out to have been a bad idea: not only did they deny calling me, they also insisted on going through random boxes that'd been delivered to see if they had white canes in them, offered me one that was too short rather than the one I've got that's too long, and were condescending about the phone call; if it wasn't them it wasn't them, they didn't need to say "Maybe it was from we were first trying to reach you last week," as if I couldn't tell when a missed call had happened.

All of this took so long that I'd missed my seminar. Oh well. One teaching session out of seven for this week will have to do.

At least when I got to mother_bones's after lunch, it was partly to see the white cane that diffrentcolours had suggested last week, when I was first having trouble getting in touch with the sensory team at all. They kindly just bought me exactly the thing I had from the sometimes the cheapest way to pay for things is with money!) and it had arrived! Annoyingly it didn't have the tip we'd ordered, but I could swap that with the too-long cane I'd been using this week, and since it folds into four sections instead of six it doesn't fit into the compartment of my backpack that I'd been using for the cane. Everything was still seeming A Bit Difficult and Not Quite Right, but it's still an improvement.

I didn't have the brain for more uni work, but I did help mother_bones with a lot of tidying; I got to move things around and shred a bunch of paper and it was satisfying work that wasn't too taxing and did seem to be a big help: perfect. It really helped my mood too. By the time we tired ourselves out, I was able to start making dinner before diffrentcolours got home. After we ate, he and I did some Plus admin and I saw last week's Picard -- just about in time for this week's to appear! there's so much TV, it's such a chore -- and rather than going out in the cold to go home, I'm just going to go to a nice cozy bed here instead.

Today is certainly finishing on a higher note than it began. I'm glad for that.