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Spoopy Times Part 2, Wrapping Up September
Sunday night was Halloween Horror Nights with our friends Paul and Alanie.
Alanie had made us each a bracelet!
This "friendship bracelet" trend has been (re)popularized by Taylor Swift recently.
Jameson's was Stranger Things themed and said "Hellfire Club."
Here is mine:
We had dinner at Cowfish first, because they're always delicious.
It's like a burger-sushi fusion place, they have "burgushi" rolls which are sushi rolls but with misc cuts of beef, and then they have one "sushi burger" that's seared ahi tuna sandwiched between some rice-and-nori "buns". It's very delicious but kinda difficult to eat, which explains why they only have one (they used to have many sushi burgers.)
The other three got bento boxes,
but I wanted to try their house-made veggie burger.
It was good, but kind of dry and I was disappointed that it was heavily rice-based. Rice is not a vegetable, and there are plenty of veggies and seeds and legumes that can give a nice meat-like texture and more nutrients. Still glad I tried it.
From there it was time for spooky fun!
We started with the themed/copyrighted houses, which this year are Stranger Things and The Last of Us.
Both houses were excellent, but I liked the Last of Us house more because the costumes were just incredible, very accurate to the game. Staging in both houses was great, it felt like you were really in the sets of the two shows/games.
After a break for drinks we slammed through several more houses, only having to wait in line for between 20-40 minutes thanks to Alanie's disability pass which allowed us to use the fast pass lanes. (I don't know Alanie well and have no idea what her disability is and did not ask.) We were all VERY grateful because the park was absolutely packed, and most of the wait times were close to 1.5 hours.
Waiting in line for the circus-themed house, which was a big favorite with all of us.
Jameson and I yapped a lot about the circus because Alanie asked some questions that got us rolling about life on the train, life with the animals, crazy circus stories that we both had, etc. It was fun but I felt like we might have talked their ears off a bit.
One of the haunted houses had a "Yeti" theme that was really cool; the temperature was extra cold in that house to mimic a northern woodland, and they even used pine scent! Plus there were scares coming not only from drop doors and scarers, but also a few yeti arms reaching down from the ceiling or from below a wooden deck that we crossed at one point. It was really well done. There was one scarer in there in a huge bear costume, and for whatever reason they had to shuttle this particular scarer in and out of the house directly through the line queue. There was absolutely no way to hide this 12-foot-tall bear, so whoever was in the costume made the most of it, waving and jumping up and down and hyping up the crowd. It was pretty funny. Everyone started chanting "Bear, bear, bear!" for this random bear scarer :)
The scare zones were unfortunately lacking this year, and we all noticed and commented on it.
There was no cohesive theme at all; zodiac signs were projected onto buildings and onto the ground, and there were these aliens walking around with zodiac symbols on them, but like...so what? There was nothing scary about it. There was no apparent storyline, nothing about an invasion or what the zodiac had to do with aliens. One of the stages had a sort of 60s-70s vibe about it, so maybe Age of Aquarius? But it wasn't clear and ultimately made no sense at all. I felt bad for the scarers, but they were out there doing their best anyway.
Before leaving (around midnight) we visited one of the cooler gift shops; I forget what it's called but it's got kind of a H.G. Wells, film noir, comic book thing going on inside. None of us bought anything but it was fun to look.
We had a great time and it was another lovely night out.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday was lame. I was up at 6:30 after very little sleep so I could shower and do some work.
Therapy in the afternoon was at least somewhat good.
The therapist was able to make a connection between the anxiety that I experience, and the way that I was treated as a child, that he thinks will help me to address things going forward. I know that childhood trauma plays a big role in the way I behave today, but I also don't like to admit that my dad had, and continues to have, an influence on my real-life behavior. It pisses me off to no end. But it's true. I shared with my therapist how I'd started panicking and hyperventilating while waiting in line for our first haunted house last night, and he wanted to know WHY. Because it's one thing to feel freaked out in an enclosed space like a plane or an orchestra pit. But in most amusement park lines, you CAN get out if you need to. There is space around you; you can say "excuse me" and ask people to move, and leave.
Feeling trapped in a space where I can, actually, leave if I need to, is not an anxiety brought on by the space per se. It's a SOCIAL entrapment that manifests through an unconscious fight-or-flight response, because it was imposed on me as a child in similar situations/places. It was conveyed to me, from a very young age, that my presence is an inconvenience already, and anything exterraneous that I may need (needing to use the restroom, feeling sick, needing to eat, etc) needed to be hidden or suppressed, or it would be punished because it's inconvenient, disgusting, or disruptive to family/people around me.
I could get yelled at, as a child, for getting up in the night to go to the bathroom.
I could get yelled at or punished for being sick, or be made to feel guilty for the inconveniences or gross-ness my illness cause caused.
Or if I needed to use the restroom when out in public with my parents (movie theaters, church, restaurants, road trips) I could be publicly shamed in front of their friends or my friends or my sisters.
I wasn't constantly berated for having to pee, or for being sick, etc. Most of the time I could just ask permission to go relieve myself, and that was it. But getting screamed at once, in public, simply for having to urinate, would be enough to make any child fearful and apprehensive for that to happen again in the future, don't you think? Especially if the parent never addresses it or apologizes later, reinforcing that YOU were the problem, not them. Even one incident like that, imo, is enough to establish, "You are doing something WRONG and BAD that will make the people you love disgusted with you."
My entire childhood was walking on eggshells around my dad, trying to do the dance steps that would avoid the most conflict and avoid drawing any attention to myself. And I've worked hard to become my own person, not influenced by that, for most of my life. Yet here I find out that I've continued doing those dance steps without even realizing it, because my subconscious flips a switch that I didn't know was there. I'll be waiting in line at an amusement park with my friends and this feeling of incredible dread comes over me. It creeps higher and higher as we inch forward in the line. My stomach cramps and my heart skips around and it's hard to breathe. Something bad is going to happen. I'm feeling weird physical sensations and fear all of a sudden. What if I have to leave the line, what if it inconveniences my friends, what if it's embarrassing for them, what if they are disgusted by whatever is happening with me.
Because that's how my dad made me feel. Often enough that some kind of subconscious connection was made, and my fight-or-flight continues to be triggered inappropriately in situations where the eyes of people that I care about, or people whose professional opinions I value, are around. And I know it's true because when I'm in my hotel room ALONE, I'm "safe", I'm calm. But when I'm in the house with Jameson--someone that I trust and know does not see me as an ugly thing or an inconvenience--part of me is always tense. Because I could inconvenience him with my existence in SO many ways, at any moment. I knew that my relationship with my dad was a big part of this anxiety, but I hadn't made this specific connection: that 99% of the time it manifests, I'm in a situation where I was shamed, blamed, or punished as a child. Not sure if I explained it all that well, but it's convoluted and hard to explain. It's wild.
Anyway, enough of that. I'm surprised that therapy revealed something somewhat new to me, about the whys behind my unwanted behaviors.
I made shrimp po'boys for dinner, and learned that I've been doing the butter sauce wrong which is why it's been washing all of the marinade off of the shrimp. They were still very good, though.
In the evening we watched The Voice because our friend Deejay Young is a competitor! He is AMAZING. I got to play in the pit for a local production of "Ain't Misbehavin'" where he was one of the leads, and every night while listening to him sing I thought, "What is he DOING here?" He very much deserved to be discovered long before he actually was. After that he was quickly scooped up by the national tour of Hamilton, and has been a star ever since.
Hear for yourself (CLICK HERE)
--------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, another early morning.
Partway through my workday I finally heard back from My Fair Lady's music coordinator, and now it's time to find a sub trombonist. And now everyone that I recruited a month ago is no longer available. Surprise surprise! I'm annoyed. I probably shouldn't have garnered interest so "early". So I had to spend part of my workday looking for subs AGAIN plus reaching out to see if anyone I'd asked initially was still available.
In the evening I made "summer spaghetti" which is wheat spaghetti, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, and a bunch of herbs roasted in a pan and drizzled with balsamic vinegar, finished with some red pepper flakes and basil and ricotta cheese. It was pretty good.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday turned out to be a madhouse for both of us.
I had been working for several hours and Jameson had just gotten started with his work when his boss very suddenly got fired. Nobody did anything wrong, but something like SIXTEEN administrators at his school were let go in Florida. We knew that his workplace had been having issues, but to suddenly fire people like that--with no warning and no one to take over their work--YIKES.
Jameson had to spend most of his day wondering if he'd be next. Fortunately (since he didn't get the promotion he wanted!) he will not be let go. Not this time, anyway. Who wants to work for a company that culls people like that?
So now he knows it's not only a dead end job, but also an employer that is willing to throw their employees out on their asses with no notice whatsoever. Yeah, no. He may not need to look for a job right this minute, but today was definitely a catalyst for whatever happens next year.
On my end, I was trying to do my work but also had planned to make breadsticks for dinner so had to prep the dough, then I kept getting resumes and video samples from potential substitute trombonists all day that I had to vet and forward, which cut into my work hours. Then I got an email from Maestra (an all-female musicians org) because I had offered to be a moderator for them two months ago and they suddenly decided they wanted to take me up on it (not a word for two months, I had to assume they'd chosen someone else.) And THEN My Fair Lady production sent out a bunch of emails that prompted me to quickly do a write-up for Megan's Foodie Finds because in two weeks cast goes into rehearsal and in one week we have orientation, where I had hoped to mention the group.
Then I realized I'd forgotten to thaw the chicken for dinner, so in the middle of making the breadsticks I had to run to Publix. Then I was in such a rush that I undercooked some of the chicken (it also may have been partly frozen from the store), it wasn't the end of the world but it's super embarrassing to me, I am HORRIFIED by the possibility of giving someone food poisoning. At least we caught it so hopefully we won't get sick.
I'm supposed to be doing work right now to make up for all of the time I lost today, but this blog posts tomorrow and I gotta get this all out before I crash from exhaustion today (because I've barely gotten any sleep the last several nights.)
Things will be ok but damn, when it rains it pours.
It feels like everyone suddenly realized October is about to be here and started freaking out.
Half of the stuff that got pressed on me today was stuff I had ready a month or more ago, except no one was ready for ME. Go figure.
Alanie had made us each a bracelet!
This "friendship bracelet" trend has been (re)popularized by Taylor Swift recently.
Jameson's was Stranger Things themed and said "Hellfire Club."
Here is mine:
We had dinner at Cowfish first, because they're always delicious.
It's like a burger-sushi fusion place, they have "burgushi" rolls which are sushi rolls but with misc cuts of beef, and then they have one "sushi burger" that's seared ahi tuna sandwiched between some rice-and-nori "buns". It's very delicious but kinda difficult to eat, which explains why they only have one (they used to have many sushi burgers.)
The other three got bento boxes,
but I wanted to try their house-made veggie burger.
It was good, but kind of dry and I was disappointed that it was heavily rice-based. Rice is not a vegetable, and there are plenty of veggies and seeds and legumes that can give a nice meat-like texture and more nutrients. Still glad I tried it.
From there it was time for spooky fun!
We started with the themed/copyrighted houses, which this year are Stranger Things and The Last of Us.
Both houses were excellent, but I liked the Last of Us house more because the costumes were just incredible, very accurate to the game. Staging in both houses was great, it felt like you were really in the sets of the two shows/games.
After a break for drinks we slammed through several more houses, only having to wait in line for between 20-40 minutes thanks to Alanie's disability pass which allowed us to use the fast pass lanes. (I don't know Alanie well and have no idea what her disability is and did not ask.) We were all VERY grateful because the park was absolutely packed, and most of the wait times were close to 1.5 hours.
Waiting in line for the circus-themed house, which was a big favorite with all of us.
Jameson and I yapped a lot about the circus because Alanie asked some questions that got us rolling about life on the train, life with the animals, crazy circus stories that we both had, etc. It was fun but I felt like we might have talked their ears off a bit.
One of the haunted houses had a "Yeti" theme that was really cool; the temperature was extra cold in that house to mimic a northern woodland, and they even used pine scent! Plus there were scares coming not only from drop doors and scarers, but also a few yeti arms reaching down from the ceiling or from below a wooden deck that we crossed at one point. It was really well done. There was one scarer in there in a huge bear costume, and for whatever reason they had to shuttle this particular scarer in and out of the house directly through the line queue. There was absolutely no way to hide this 12-foot-tall bear, so whoever was in the costume made the most of it, waving and jumping up and down and hyping up the crowd. It was pretty funny. Everyone started chanting "Bear, bear, bear!" for this random bear scarer :)
The scare zones were unfortunately lacking this year, and we all noticed and commented on it.
There was no cohesive theme at all; zodiac signs were projected onto buildings and onto the ground, and there were these aliens walking around with zodiac symbols on them, but like...so what? There was nothing scary about it. There was no apparent storyline, nothing about an invasion or what the zodiac had to do with aliens. One of the stages had a sort of 60s-70s vibe about it, so maybe Age of Aquarius? But it wasn't clear and ultimately made no sense at all. I felt bad for the scarers, but they were out there doing their best anyway.
Before leaving (around midnight) we visited one of the cooler gift shops; I forget what it's called but it's got kind of a H.G. Wells, film noir, comic book thing going on inside. None of us bought anything but it was fun to look.
We had a great time and it was another lovely night out.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday was lame. I was up at 6:30 after very little sleep so I could shower and do some work.
Therapy in the afternoon was at least somewhat good.
The therapist was able to make a connection between the anxiety that I experience, and the way that I was treated as a child, that he thinks will help me to address things going forward. I know that childhood trauma plays a big role in the way I behave today, but I also don't like to admit that my dad had, and continues to have, an influence on my real-life behavior. It pisses me off to no end. But it's true. I shared with my therapist how I'd started panicking and hyperventilating while waiting in line for our first haunted house last night, and he wanted to know WHY. Because it's one thing to feel freaked out in an enclosed space like a plane or an orchestra pit. But in most amusement park lines, you CAN get out if you need to. There is space around you; you can say "excuse me" and ask people to move, and leave.
Feeling trapped in a space where I can, actually, leave if I need to, is not an anxiety brought on by the space per se. It's a SOCIAL entrapment that manifests through an unconscious fight-or-flight response, because it was imposed on me as a child in similar situations/places. It was conveyed to me, from a very young age, that my presence is an inconvenience already, and anything exterraneous that I may need (needing to use the restroom, feeling sick, needing to eat, etc) needed to be hidden or suppressed, or it would be punished because it's inconvenient, disgusting, or disruptive to family/people around me.
I could get yelled at, as a child, for getting up in the night to go to the bathroom.
I could get yelled at or punished for being sick, or be made to feel guilty for the inconveniences or gross-ness my illness cause caused.
Or if I needed to use the restroom when out in public with my parents (movie theaters, church, restaurants, road trips) I could be publicly shamed in front of their friends or my friends or my sisters.
I wasn't constantly berated for having to pee, or for being sick, etc. Most of the time I could just ask permission to go relieve myself, and that was it. But getting screamed at once, in public, simply for having to urinate, would be enough to make any child fearful and apprehensive for that to happen again in the future, don't you think? Especially if the parent never addresses it or apologizes later, reinforcing that YOU were the problem, not them. Even one incident like that, imo, is enough to establish, "You are doing something WRONG and BAD that will make the people you love disgusted with you."
My entire childhood was walking on eggshells around my dad, trying to do the dance steps that would avoid the most conflict and avoid drawing any attention to myself. And I've worked hard to become my own person, not influenced by that, for most of my life. Yet here I find out that I've continued doing those dance steps without even realizing it, because my subconscious flips a switch that I didn't know was there. I'll be waiting in line at an amusement park with my friends and this feeling of incredible dread comes over me. It creeps higher and higher as we inch forward in the line. My stomach cramps and my heart skips around and it's hard to breathe. Something bad is going to happen. I'm feeling weird physical sensations and fear all of a sudden. What if I have to leave the line, what if it inconveniences my friends, what if it's embarrassing for them, what if they are disgusted by whatever is happening with me.
Because that's how my dad made me feel. Often enough that some kind of subconscious connection was made, and my fight-or-flight continues to be triggered inappropriately in situations where the eyes of people that I care about, or people whose professional opinions I value, are around. And I know it's true because when I'm in my hotel room ALONE, I'm "safe", I'm calm. But when I'm in the house with Jameson--someone that I trust and know does not see me as an ugly thing or an inconvenience--part of me is always tense. Because I could inconvenience him with my existence in SO many ways, at any moment. I knew that my relationship with my dad was a big part of this anxiety, but I hadn't made this specific connection: that 99% of the time it manifests, I'm in a situation where I was shamed, blamed, or punished as a child. Not sure if I explained it all that well, but it's convoluted and hard to explain. It's wild.
Anyway, enough of that. I'm surprised that therapy revealed something somewhat new to me, about the whys behind my unwanted behaviors.
I made shrimp po'boys for dinner, and learned that I've been doing the butter sauce wrong which is why it's been washing all of the marinade off of the shrimp. They were still very good, though.
In the evening we watched The Voice because our friend Deejay Young is a competitor! He is AMAZING. I got to play in the pit for a local production of "Ain't Misbehavin'" where he was one of the leads, and every night while listening to him sing I thought, "What is he DOING here?" He very much deserved to be discovered long before he actually was. After that he was quickly scooped up by the national tour of Hamilton, and has been a star ever since.
Hear for yourself (CLICK HERE)
--------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, another early morning.
Partway through my workday I finally heard back from My Fair Lady's music coordinator, and now it's time to find a sub trombonist. And now everyone that I recruited a month ago is no longer available. Surprise surprise! I'm annoyed. I probably shouldn't have garnered interest so "early". So I had to spend part of my workday looking for subs AGAIN plus reaching out to see if anyone I'd asked initially was still available.
In the evening I made "summer spaghetti" which is wheat spaghetti, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, and a bunch of herbs roasted in a pan and drizzled with balsamic vinegar, finished with some red pepper flakes and basil and ricotta cheese. It was pretty good.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday turned out to be a madhouse for both of us.
I had been working for several hours and Jameson had just gotten started with his work when his boss very suddenly got fired. Nobody did anything wrong, but something like SIXTEEN administrators at his school were let go in Florida. We knew that his workplace had been having issues, but to suddenly fire people like that--with no warning and no one to take over their work--YIKES.
Jameson had to spend most of his day wondering if he'd be next. Fortunately (since he didn't get the promotion he wanted!) he will not be let go. Not this time, anyway. Who wants to work for a company that culls people like that?
So now he knows it's not only a dead end job, but also an employer that is willing to throw their employees out on their asses with no notice whatsoever. Yeah, no. He may not need to look for a job right this minute, but today was definitely a catalyst for whatever happens next year.
On my end, I was trying to do my work but also had planned to make breadsticks for dinner so had to prep the dough, then I kept getting resumes and video samples from potential substitute trombonists all day that I had to vet and forward, which cut into my work hours. Then I got an email from Maestra (an all-female musicians org) because I had offered to be a moderator for them two months ago and they suddenly decided they wanted to take me up on it (not a word for two months, I had to assume they'd chosen someone else.) And THEN My Fair Lady production sent out a bunch of emails that prompted me to quickly do a write-up for Megan's Foodie Finds because in two weeks cast goes into rehearsal and in one week we have orientation, where I had hoped to mention the group.
Then I realized I'd forgotten to thaw the chicken for dinner, so in the middle of making the breadsticks I had to run to Publix. Then I was in such a rush that I undercooked some of the chicken (it also may have been partly frozen from the store), it wasn't the end of the world but it's super embarrassing to me, I am HORRIFIED by the possibility of giving someone food poisoning. At least we caught it so hopefully we won't get sick.
I'm supposed to be doing work right now to make up for all of the time I lost today, but this blog posts tomorrow and I gotta get this all out before I crash from exhaustion today (because I've barely gotten any sleep the last several nights.)
Things will be ok but damn, when it rains it pours.
It feels like everyone suddenly realized October is about to be here and started freaking out.
Half of the stuff that got pressed on me today was stuff I had ready a month or more ago, except no one was ready for ME. Go figure.