I'm feeling literary tonight, like sitting in a tea house and reading for hours. mmmmm.
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I walked around the hallways with a nervous energy. I've had a fog behind my eyes all week, a froggy fog that doesn't seem to lift until later in the day. Trying to establish so many new routines at once is challenging. Exhausting.
I walked from one kitchen to the other, not sure which one we'd be using. Gathering the ingredients to be used. My boss suggested grilled cheese sandwiches. Not too complicated, fast, and something I actually know how to do.
It's my first "group" at work that I'm doing independently, and I'm scared. A "men's lunch group" with a few older gentlemen, where we'll meet for an hour each Friday noon to make a meal and socialize. "Don't worry about clinical stuff," I'm told. "Just focus on getting to know them for now." Can't build a therapeutic relationship overnight, after all. Those types of things take time. (indeed)
Still, I am someone who yearns for back-story, so I go into the chart room and skim their books, so I have something to go on. Some don't like to do this, thinking it will color their initial interactions, or bias them somehow.
But I love it. I'm an extremely nosycurious person.
Lunch group went just fine. One of the trio was late though...sitting in the lobby and not wanting to join us despite my asking. He wanted to know how I got to be so tan, informed me he had no teeth, and gummed his sandwich after I opened his meds for him.
and later, later...
there is something very intimate about pouring over someone's personal family pictures. Accessing someone else's life.
This woman was hit by a car 8 years ago, airborne forty feet into the air. Her daughter-in-law sent her a friend request on myspace; I showed her the ropes and we accessed her playlist and profile slide-show.
Today she has a vintage suitcase (which is amazing, brown checkered coating with satin pouches inside-- I want) filled with photos and keepsakes of her three kids. There are envelopes for each, and she is organizing them.
It is hard to tell the kids apart, they look so similar. We read the dates in the corner of each photo to determine which child is which....those photos from the 80s, with that grain and that fuzz you feel you could bottle liquid nostalgia just by wiping the surface.
Soon our hour session is over, and she packs everything back into the suitcase. That copyrighted musty smell, duck tales birthday party plates, christmas cards, birth announcements -- all tucked back away for another time.