Grab the Lapels

Sunday Lowdown #235

THIS WEEK IN REFLECTION

It’s been an interesting week. On Tuesday I needed a break from school and to speak to humans, so Nick and I went to a lounge (bar) where we ate dinner and played music bingo. The emcee gave everyone bingo cards with a theme, like “country music,” “hair metal,” or “yacht rock.” She would put on a playlist for the card, and each song would play about 10 seconds. Not only did you have to have the song to mark it off (just like a bingo number), you had to recognize/know the song. Bizarrely — I think Biscuit scarred me — I did the best recognizing 90’s country music. I want this to be a regular weekly event! I had so much fun and felt lively.

When we got home, we noticed Toadman has a girlfriend! A small, brown toad hanging outside near the garage door. Toadman sitting there like he’s pretending not to notice. Of course, I developed a whole smoochy-smoochy romance for them in my head.

That is, until the next day and there were two little brown toads. Did Toadman have a harem?? And on Saturday, there were . . . two Toadmans. So I guess what I’m saying is I am now the unofficial guardian of a fleet of toads, and I feel like an off-guard guardian. It’s like Toadman forgave me for putting him in my car, hippity hopped right the F off, told his homies about the crazy lady with the garage, and they all came back to co-op at my place.

I’m starting to get school emails, which is exciting — soon it will be all ASL and Interpreting classes! Believe it or not, by come August 17th I’m starting the fall semester, and I’ll actually be less busy with school. Last spring I was watching three horror movies per week. This summer I was glad to get in the one movie for my meetup group.

Lastly, I had my final therapy appointment. It’s been one year of CBT, and I’ve come out with lots of tools, the ability to hope, and a better sense of who I am. I invited Biscuit and Dad down to celebrate with me and Nick. We had a garage sale on Saturday, went bowling (Biscuit won the first game, Dad the second), had dinner, and ate cake and ice cream. I chose a specific cake for the occasion:

Nick and me at bowling
It’s a monster cake!

Nick was upset that I got a monster cake because he thought I was being mean to myself. What do you think about it?

THIS WEEK’S BLOG POST

Well, The Last of Her: A Forensic Memoir by Kim Dana Kupperman is definitely not the book anyone visiting this blog wants to read as it is written. Readers don’t want to be lied to or taken into make believe. Advertising is key, not simply to sell books, but because readers feel they deserve to make informed choices.

NEXT WEEK’S BLOG POST

A book I stumbled upon, Bad Fat Black Girl by Sesali Bowen was unlike anything I’ve read before. I think by having a niche audience, the author paid respect to the people she’s uplifting — the people who are her people. Review Wednesday.

BOOKS I BOUGHT

Books I paid for (that are not textbooks) since January 2023:

  • 22 books totalling $30.55
  • 14 unread
  • 1 recycled (many pages missing)
  • 5 read
  • 2 currently reading

BOOKS ADDED TO THE TBR PILE

24 comments

  1. Not Tuesday yet, but well into work time Monday. Cake looks great, though my grandkids would be hyper if they ate all that blue.
    I’ve done talk therapy and (nearly) always found it helpful. One of the great things about GTL is much you have changed over the years – more open, more cheerful.

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    • I wasn’t a fan of talk therapy when I did it because I felt like there was always something to talk about and never any method to work through things on my own. However, I think some people really do need to be heard, so I see the effectiveness of that process, too.

      I’m glad that you think I’m more cheerful; that’s one I haven’t noticed because I can’t think back far enough to notice a difference. However, I am positive I am more open. I used to be much more cautious about what I said or wrote because I never knew how someone in the future would react if they saw an old blog post. At this point, I’ve been on the internet for about 25 years, and there is no way I can keep account of everything I’ve said and done. I know that I have changed and become more patient and empathetic, so if I ever have to atone for an old post, that’s something I’m capable of.

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  3. Well, it’s a very cheery monster cake so I didn’t read it Nick’s way at all. And, well done on the therapy. I particularly love “the ability to hope”.

    And I do hope you get to go to more music bingos – sounds like it’s more an individual thing than a music trivia night which you do in teams. My kids when to a monthly one for a few years and really enjoyed it. I love events like that which are fun but have some sort of goal or structure too.

    BTW I like your “fleet of toads” but it made me wonder whether that was the official collective noun for toads! So, I googled and I found more than one. Wikipedia says “army” but the most common one I found was “knot”, with the explanation that toads don’t often hang out together – except for breeding when think they form a bit of a knot!! I’d be watching Toadman for knotty behaviour.

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    • Okay, the sentence “I’d be watching Toadman for knotty behavior” had me in stitches! I love how often I really, truly laugh out loud when reading comments on Grab the Lapels. You guys are all a hoot.

      I guess Nick saw the monster cake as former me (as in I used to be a monster) and I saw it more as exorcising a demon.

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  4. I think that looks like a very cheerful monster and a great celebration! Well done on a full year of CBT – a brilliant achievement. I’ve done it in the past and found it kind of patronising (probably because you have to do a short course of it before you can access counselling on the NHS, even if it isn’t the best treatment for your issue) – it’s genuinely really great to hear a different view. And I hope you are looking forward to college starting again and finally getting to your interpreting classes!

    (PS sorry if you get this comment twice – I’m on holiday at the moment and the wifi at this B&B is just terrible – it appeared to cut out just as I hit “comment” before…)

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    • I only see your comment once, and I want to thank you for engaging with me while you are on vacation! I hope it’s another one of those walk-about/Hobbit vacations you’v described in the past. I can see how CBT would be patronizing for some folks. For instance, someone asking you what you’re feeling or thinking, or how you behave, and actually knowing would make the whole process tedious. But when someone asked me, “how are you?” or “how is your day?” my typical answer was “I don’t know.”

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      • Yes, that was exactly it – I knew perfectly well what I was thinking and feeling and why it was irrational; it was a short-term thing, not an ongoing mental health issue, so what I wanted was someone to help me sort it out. (In the end I went to a counsellor through my union, who was great!)

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        • Oh, I’m so glad you found the right person! I’ve heard a few folks talk about British mental health services, and it sounds…dicey? I mean, you guys have health care, but then it sounds more complicated than “we have access to health care.”

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          • Mental health care in particular is a bit of a lottery. There’s a huge staff shortage at the moment, and there have been lots of terrible scandals with abusive behaviour in acute units. This of course both puts people off entering the profession, and also makes people wary of mental health professionals – which means they might not treat their clinician that well – which puts people off – and so on, ad infinitum. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but that is a big problem. Plus the NHS in general is in a terrible state at the moment – for lots of reasons too complicated to get into in a comment, and probably some I don’t know – and mental health services have probably done worst out of the general NHS crisis. Not a very cheery topic! Here’s hoping it gets better after the next election.

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            • Actually, what you’re describing reminds me of American politics pre-Donald Trump. Democrats hated George H.W. Bush, and Clinton was slammed for having an affair in the White House, and then Obama was cool but didn’t seem to get nearly as much done as we thought he could, so people my age just weren’t going into politics. They were put off by it. After Trump, though, Millennials and Gen Z are flooding the political pool, from local government to bids for presidency.

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  5. Well done on your year of CBT, you should be so proud of sticking with it and learning from it. I have found my online course I did in in helpful still as I move forward through life, even with some testing stuff going on. Love the multi-toads – which one did you pick up, I wonder?!

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  6. Wow, you are now apparently a toad landlord! The music bingo sounds super fun. Love the monster cake! It’s a happy smiling monster! Congrats on graduating from CBT!

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  7. Do you think there has been more than one Toadman this whole time? And this is just the first time you’ve seen them both together?

    I think the cake is cute! I wouldn’t associate it with any particular thoughts about yourself. Congrats on a year’s completion! That’s a great milestone! I am interviewing a new therapist this week!

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    • Well, I thought it was the same Toadman because I have a picture of him from last year, and he has this spot on his throat. The toad I’d been seeing had a spot on his throat. Also, last year, there were no other toads around that we saw.

      Thank you for your encouragement! One bit of advice my therapist gave me should I need therapy again the future is that therapists have many different tracks, so if something isn’t working for you, don’t quit the therapist. Instead, tell him or her that what they’re doing isn’t working for you so they can switch tracks.

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  8. Congrats on one year of therapy – an amazing thing to celebrate, and I love your monster cake. I’ll admit it looked a bit like cookie monster in the photo – is this the kind of monster you had requested it look like? LOL

    Also – since you started giving Toadman updates, I’ll say it has crossed my mind more than once that you’ve been potentially interacting with many different toads. Obviously some of them look different, but have you noticed any distinguishing features?

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    • The cake also kind of looks like Sully from Monsters, Inc! The store always has these monster cakes, so I picked whichever color they had that day. I didn’t think about Cookie Monster, although he’s a hoot.

      I hadn’t thought about their being more than one toad until I saw them. I can see how that is naive, but on the other hand, it just seemed so clever for a toad to realize it’s got its very own tiny garage door to wiggle his butt through. Toadman has a big black spot on his throat, which I double checked from pictures last year. To be fair, I now realize sometimes I point out how fat he is and other times I do not, so now I’m seeing the writing on the wall of multiple Toadmans.

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  9. I love that Toadman is spreading the word about how cool your garage is. 🙂

    Congrats on finishing therapy! You should feel proud.

    I’m happy that your workload at school will be lighter this fall too.

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