First, my immediate goal, other than digesting the tacos I just ate and trying to keep my head from falling on the keyboard due to sleep deprivation, is to keep this blog post short. Or at least be finished within an hour. I mean, a girl’s gotta sleep.

Second, I’ve been thinking lately that it would be worthwhile to make an effort to blog about only funny things, you know, to not be so fucking serious all the time. Like, I could probably stand to spend an entire day watching The Golden Girls and picking my nose and not try to make a life lesson out of it. It would probably do us all some good. The problem with this idea, however, is that just about every day, there’s something that gets under my skin, sort of like a soul chigger, that won’t leave me alone, and writing about those sorts of things seems to help.

But good news—nothing like that happened today. Surprising, I know, since Mercury is in retrograde, and that’s supposed to screw with everybody’s life. But really—today was a wonderful day. Like, if you were in a bad mood, you wouldn’t have wanted to be around me because I would have been THAT PERSON that just LOVES Jesus and dolphins and oxygen. (Isn’t breathing GREAT!)

Don’t worry. I’m sure it will pass.

The day started with lunch with my friend Ray. He’s the one with whom I usually have “therapy after therapy.” But today, we had “therapy before therapy,” which my mom later referred to as foreplay. (I’m just going to pretend she didn’t say that, but I guess that therapeutically and professionally speaking, she had a pretty clever point.) Anyway, Ray and I caught up on the latest with each other, and when I talked about living with my parents, he said, “I’m sure that has its charms and challenges.” Isn’t that a great phrase—charms and challenges?

After lunch with Ray, I showed up to therapy early, so I got to hang out for a while in a waiting room that could—quite honestly—use the help of a gay man. I mean, it looks like someone went shopping for furniture at a yard sale once a decade for the last thirty years. (My therapist knows I’m totally judgmental on this point. And to be fair, it’s a shared office space, and they recently got some new chairs that aren’t half bad. And my therapist’s office is LOVELY. Her answer to the waiting room is, “Look down.”)

Anyway, while I was waiting, I ran into a friend of mine whom I must have known in another life, since our paths seem to cross every few years, and it’s always in a different context (dance, therapy, etc.). So we hung out for a while, and it was like even more therapy, since my friend works in the field and is a good listener. Each of us shared about our lives, and we laughed a lot. We were THOSE PEOPLE in the waiting room. The whole time this was going on, there was a lady across the room that was waiting (on an ugly couch) for her therapist, her head buried in a magazine. I kept wanting to draw her into the conversation, like, So, why are YOU here? But I assumed that wouldn’t have been appropriate.

Well, therapy was great. (And we all lived happily ever after.) For the longest time, I almost always come to therapy with what we call “the list,” which is simply all the things that have happened since the last visit that I want to talk about. (Can you say, “Anal retentive?”) When I used to do a lot of construction work, “the list” was always written on a paint stick, and I called it “the paint stick of truth.” But now “the list” is on my laptop because that’s much easier. Anyway, I’ve had a number of things on “the list” that have been there for a couple of months, nothing major, but a lot of times I like to ask questions about psychology or self-help books I’ve read. For me, it’s like an educated version of Fact or Crap. So I got to do that today, and it was like my little heart went skipping barefoot through a field of pink tulips.

We also talked about the blog, which she told me before it went live that she supported, and she said the same today. (#winning) I told her my experience with it so far had been nothing but positive, that it’s helped me to figure out what I’m feeling and thinking, work toward solutions for problems, and even cry (to which she said, “Get the poison out, get the poison out.”) And then she said that the term therapists use for what I was doing was “self as instrument.” When I asked her to say more, she said that I was using the blog as a form of self-therapy, so I was using myself as an instrument of healing. (#morewinning)

After teaching a dance lesson this evening, I caught up with my friend who likes birds. (I’m assuming he wouldn’t want me to use his name, and I can’t think of a better way to describe him at the moment.) Anyway, bird friend was probably my original therapist, as we joke that he has “tell me everything” written across his forehead. I’m sure you have a friend like that—a good listener, a straight shooter, someone fundamentally kind.

Well, before I left the birdcage, my friend showed me a gift someone had given him. It was a Mickey Mouse calendar, one of those ones you have to change by hand every day. (Sounds like a lot of damn work to me.) And at the top of the calendar it said, “My, oh my, what a wonderful day!” (Doesn’t that sound like the cutest thing you’ve ever heard?) And you probably already know this, but bird friend said the quote was from the tune “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” his favorite song. He said you just can’t listen to it and stay in a bad mood. And then he started singing it, kind of moving his shoulders up and down, dancing ever so slightly around his kitchen. (He was THAT person.)

Okay, it’s been an hour, and I’m at twice my anticipated word limit. I’m not exactly sure how to wrap this up, other than to say I think we all need days like today. Ray calls them Self-Care days, those days when you only spend time with people you LOVE being around, your BEST friends. And maybe you get a massage or do something decadent. You know, stop for tacos. That’s what I did on the way home tonight. TALK ABOUT SATISFACTUAL.