Piercing

It was a rage-y sort of day, and for no good reason.

I was in a good mood this morning, but sometime around eleven it all came crashing down, down, down.  Actually the emphasis should be on crashing, because that's the sort of rage it was.  Violent rage.  And again- for no particular reason, let alone a good one.

The mood was not helped by my lunch break, which was spent dashing home to let the dog out (because Nathan, who typically works from home, is out of town).  Letting the dog out (and feeding her lunch) wasn't so bad- no, what kicked me into "I'm going to strangle this stupid animal" mode was that she finally got wise to the liverwurst trick.  So rather than take her flea medicine (which I really need her to do, because I found fleas on the cat last night) she just ate all the liverwurst and spat the pill back out.

Multiple times.

(Please don't give me any tips on how to get her to take her pill- as I told multiple people today, "Let's just assumed I've already tried everything and am still really pissed off.")

So.  My mood worsened, and I returned to work, and continued to feel general hatred towards humanity, the world, and just everything for the next two or three hours, at which point I just felt exhausted.  I'd already decided that I wasn't going to go climbing, since I was pretty sure that the only thing that would accomplish was me being bitchy towards people who love me.

...buuuuut I ended up going anyway, because Nathan mentioned I might feel better if I had chocolate, and I thought, "...maybe," and then I thought, "I can get a gluten-free cookie on the way to the gym, and if I don't feel any better I can just say hello and then leave.  And even if I don't leave, I'll only climb easy routes, so that I won't get frustrated."

(There is a kind of rage that can be constructively channeled into a challenge: this was not that.  This was the kind of rage that just gets further inflamed by a challenge.)

So I walked to the gym and got my cookie (and was grudgingly pleased that the cafe owner remembered me), and had a nice chat with a fellow climber who was also in a Pissed Off Mood, and we decided maybe it was a combination of last week's solar flare and tomorrow's full moon, because why not?

And then I found Bridge, and I'm pretty sure it's because he's a cat owner that he knows how to handle bitchy females by giving them their space and letting them be pissy, because he did that.  And I climbed my easy warm-up route, and then, because I was like, "I don't even efifn' care," I tried my current project.

I fell on the first attempt, in the exact same spot I've been falling in for the past week or so, but Bridge didn't try to give me any advice: he just let me swing back and forth, finding my breath and contemplating my movements.  And then I just... did it.  Very calmly, very smoothly.  I reached the top and he lowered me down, and there was this beautiful techno music playing so I closed my eyes and let myself be lost in the smell of chalk and the feel of the rope, and I felt infinitely better about life.

("You always feel better when you climb," says my husband, and he's right.)

So yeah.  It was a good climbing session.

I came home and did some cleaning (which also helps me feel better about life), and then I settled down to work on some embroidery,

It's not what you think it is... or is it?

I feel like the alone time helped as much as anything else... and now it's time for bed.