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Random bits
Signed up for a lampworking class at Public Glass. It's on my birthday!
I tried to do it last year but it got canceled. Actually, I feel like my whole birthday got canceled last year. I was turning 40, and my birthday consisted of taking OH to the hospital for an elective surgery. But I've done several fun and worthwhile things for myself this year, so I'm making up for it, and the glass class will be another 5th decade present to myself.
Spent 3 hours shoe shopping on the web last night because my brain was fried and I needed a mindless activity. I now have a better understanding of Douglas Adams's concept of the "Shoe event horizon." I enjoyed the flame wars in the Zappo's Doc Martens reviews about whether it's worth it that Doc Martens are difficult (i.e., painful) to break in. Some people seemed to assign a spiritual value to the pain of breaking in their Doc Martens.
Got a smog check for my car. I've had the car four years, and the first two times I had the option of waiving the smog check if I paid the government a little convenience fee. This time I had to actually do it. I didn't have to submit any paperwork -- it's submitted directly from the smog check station to the DMV. And I got my registration over the Internet. Gaah. I have a love/hate relationship with networked databases.
Planned my trip to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
serenejournal's womboink in San Diego for next week. I'm being "leisurely" and taking two days to drive to San Diego. I'm going to be stopping overnight in Oxnard (mainly because it's about halfway, and it's not Solvang and not Santa Barbara, and it has a marina with an inexpensive hotel on it). I'm looking forward to traveling alone again, and meeting/spending time with many wombats, and spending time with my sweetie kyubi, who will also be there, and (not wombat-related) seeing loveandlight for the first time in, geez, something like 8 years.
On Saturday, went with my girlfriend N to the International Gem & Mineral show. Several hundred businesses selling jewelry, beads, and various other things, all stuffed into one building of the San Mateo Expo Center. Completely thronged with people of a wider ethnic variety than I usually see in one place in the Bay Area. Lots of Indian women in beautiful saris and other traditional garb. I love Indian costume and I wish I felt comfortable wearing it without feeling like a cultural vampire. A number of times at the show I tried to buy something and failed because I couldn't get the attention of someone who might be willing to sell it to me. I bought an amber chunk necklace.
Last night attended PolyShy, a support/discussion group for introverted polyfolks. We played a game where each person drew a card and answered the question on it. It was a good way to get shy folks talking; some of us tend to do better with structure built into a conversation. I kind of disagreed with the prevailing opinion at that particular meeting that there was something wrong with being slow to approach people one is interested in romantically and that shyness was equivalent to insufficient trust in other people. I've been realizing over the past while that I'm simply not interested in making fast approaches. I want to see how a person behaves over time, get a sense for them in the context of their social circles, and feel some familiarity with them before I'm willing to invest the energy of asking them to make room in their life for me.
I tried to do it last year but it got canceled. Actually, I feel like my whole birthday got canceled last year. I was turning 40, and my birthday consisted of taking OH to the hospital for an elective surgery. But I've done several fun and worthwhile things for myself this year, so I'm making up for it, and the glass class will be another 5th decade present to myself.
Spent 3 hours shoe shopping on the web last night because my brain was fried and I needed a mindless activity. I now have a better understanding of Douglas Adams's concept of the "Shoe event horizon." I enjoyed the flame wars in the Zappo's Doc Martens reviews about whether it's worth it that Doc Martens are difficult (i.e., painful) to break in. Some people seemed to assign a spiritual value to the pain of breaking in their Doc Martens.
Got a smog check for my car. I've had the car four years, and the first two times I had the option of waiving the smog check if I paid the government a little convenience fee. This time I had to actually do it. I didn't have to submit any paperwork -- it's submitted directly from the smog check station to the DMV. And I got my registration over the Internet. Gaah. I have a love/hate relationship with networked databases.
Planned my trip to
serenejournal's womboink in San Diego for next week. I'm being "leisurely" and taking two days to drive to San Diego. I'm going to be stopping overnight in Oxnard (mainly because it's about halfway, and it's not Solvang and not Santa Barbara, and it has a marina with an inexpensive hotel on it). I'm looking forward to traveling alone again, and meeting/spending time with many wombats, and spending time with my sweetie kyubi, who will also be there, and (not wombat-related) seeing loveandlight for the first time in, geez, something like 8 years.On Saturday, went with my girlfriend N to the International Gem & Mineral show. Several hundred businesses selling jewelry, beads, and various other things, all stuffed into one building of the San Mateo Expo Center. Completely thronged with people of a wider ethnic variety than I usually see in one place in the Bay Area. Lots of Indian women in beautiful saris and other traditional garb. I love Indian costume and I wish I felt comfortable wearing it without feeling like a cultural vampire. A number of times at the show I tried to buy something and failed because I couldn't get the attention of someone who might be willing to sell it to me. I bought an amber chunk necklace.
Last night attended PolyShy, a support/discussion group for introverted polyfolks. We played a game where each person drew a card and answered the question on it. It was a good way to get shy folks talking; some of us tend to do better with structure built into a conversation. I kind of disagreed with the prevailing opinion at that particular meeting that there was something wrong with being slow to approach people one is interested in romantically and that shyness was equivalent to insufficient trust in other people. I've been realizing over the past while that I'm simply not interested in making fast approaches. I want to see how a person behaves over time, get a sense for them in the context of their social circles, and feel some familiarity with them before I'm willing to invest the energy of asking them to make room in their life for me.
Re: Random bits
oh, fun! i hope it doesn't get cancelled (and neither does your birthday). too funny, i'll be imitating lampwork beads in polymer clay, no doubt. well, it's one of the things i could be doing, anyway. i'd love to some day learn to work with glass. and with metal, i mean, the welding, smelting, casting type of stuff.
I kind of disagreed with the prevailing opinion at that particular meeting that there was something wrong with being slow to approach people one is interested in romantically and that shyness was equivalent to insufficient trust in other people.
hell yes, i definitely disagree with that on both counts. though i also don't think there is anything wrong with not trusting strangers right off the bat. it's sure not hurt me at all to go slow regarding trust and romantic involvement, it's good for me, and i have excellent relationships without a lot of up and down and drama oozing out of every pore.
i hope you have loads of fun in san diego!
Re: Random bits
I love the way glass flows.
I agree with you about going slow and taking trust slowly.
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I kind of disagreed with the prevailing opinion at that particular meeting that there was something wrong with being slow to approach people one is interested in romantically and that shyness was equivalent to insufficient trust in other people.
My thoughts are... why do we all have to behave the same way... if you like to approach slowly then carry on doin' it and to hell with the critics. :-)
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I guess a lot of the people at the meeting were unhappy with a dearth of romance in their lives and thought their shyness was partly to blame for that, so wanted to change the shyness. I can understand that, but I also think that it's not something that can easily be approached head-on. It seems, for me at least, more a matter of finding a social venue that matches my social style than a matter of forcing changes in my social style.
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silliness aside, you said: I guess a lot of the people at the meeting were unhappy with a dearth of romance in their lives and thought their shyness was partly to blame for that, so wanted to change the shyness.
i've been able to change the way that i behave without ever succeeding in changing my shyness. i was telling
and when i got there, the first person i talked a lot to was one of the husbands--safer person because i won't run into him online--i know that it is easier for me to talk to strangers that i need not feel that i will ever encounter again than people who i am meeting for the first time but may "see" (in quotes because the encounter may be online) again and again.
in terms of not approaching people quickly when it comes to romance--i think that is a separate behaviour from the shyness for me--shyness is an element, but even after i get over feeling shy around them, i don't exactly ramp up quickly--i think what you said in an entry i can't see from this screen about wanting to get to know someone really well is far more of the reason than shyness. for me, it's much easier to get into something than out of it most of the time--so better to be cautious getting in.
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Yes, inducements get me to go to social events.
I agree that slow-to-approach-romantically isn't necessarily a shyness trait. I guess I got the impression that some folks in this group were conflating the two.
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Also feel free to add me to your chat list (info is on my user info page), although I'm not on chat very much.
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I have to put in a plug for getting Doc Martens on eBay, because there are usually some really unusual ones there (that's where I got my gold holographic and pink/black/white "snakeskin" pairs), along with a fair amount of "I'm selling because it was silly to buy shoes that weren't my size no matter how cool they looked" price breaks. Though if unusual isn't your thing, or if one of the reasons you enjoyed the flame wars was because you hate Doc Martens, then ignore the previous sentence.
I went to a Gem & Mineral show here in Santa Cruz last year, but all the jewelry/bead stuff seemed way too polished to me -- I found myself wishing for a bracelet made of reasonably-sized rough chunks of all kinds of stones
It's Tané! Yay!
In theory I love weird shoes, but I actually only wear shoes that are comfortable, and weird shoes are rarely comfortable in my experience. Doc Martens historically haven't looked comfortable to me, so I've never tried them. But these days I'm on the lookout for unisex-sized shoes because my feet are D-width but also high at the instep. Maybe I'll try to score an inexpensive pair of DM's. If they're being sold on eBay maybe they are already broken in.
(I don't hate DM's, I just find cultish adoration of products an amusing phenomenon. And I do include myself in the camp, since I cultishly adore Macs.)
The jewelry show I went to had a lot of chunk beads for sale in strands, and some chunky bead necklaces (like the amber one I bought) but not very many chunky things made out of all different kinds of stones. Guess that would be a do-it-yourself project.
Re: It's Tané! Yay!
Yeah, there's definitely all sorts of cultural etc. associations with DM's, some more positive than others, but they are also genuinely substantial boots that you can get in an incredibly wide range of colors/patterns. Besides the two pairs I mentioned getting on eBay, I also have a tall "ruby slippers" pair made of canvas covered in red glitter, and some DM knockoffs in clear plastic.
I don't think I have particularly wide feet or a high instep so I have no experience to pass on there, though I'd think that the lace-up ones would adjust for any instep.
The only beads (on or off jewelry) I remember seeing at that local show were very uniformly cut and polished -- I guess sometime if I was inspired to make my own I could look into whether any special drill bits etc. would be required to drill holes in rocks.
Re: It's Tané! Yay!
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The class sounds really interesting, so I added you to my friends list if that is alright with you. Please let me know.
elizabet'ta
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I am really excited to learn about you and others...
*smiles*
elizabet'ta