rolled out to work a little earlier because i had to go to a training workshop at the site in sellwood. this turned out to be a wild overstatement of what it was, which was to have my time wasted by a patronizing dude that understood about half of what he was talking about while we worked on computers that are too crippled and slow and poorly maintained to run the program that we were supposed to learn. about half an hour into it, i was trying to keep down feelings of how is this my life and fuck i hate my job.
work happened. the most notable and best thing that happened during the day was that the 3rd graders were all rockstars, and we had a good time playing scattegories. I gave them a little free time at the end of the hour, and was amazed to see them organize into a group playing legos on the floor and another group playing hangman on the whiteboard, completely self-directed.
I finally ripped the bandaid off my numbers this month to try and figure out how to get back on track after having to pay for medicine unexpectedly, and tires for my car late last month. it was pretty brutal, and i’m a little freaked out. there’s not a whole lot i can do for a couple more days, but its going to be hard for me to relax until then.
i decided to stop by the store and make myself a proper meal. I made a delicious lentil soup:

with chicken stock, whole fresh garlic, cilantro, dried pasilla chile and a couple spoonfuls of sambal oelek. unfortunately, i overate. i think all the time about changing the way that I look, at least I have a sense of how much to eat to stay the same size. last night was the first time in a while that I can remember unhappy bingeing, just eating to numb out feelings. money stuff does that to me.
after dinner, i didn’t feel like doing much of anything, so i read a little more of  Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks. its pretty well written, and I found a lot of the cognitive traps that he describes really provocative. i realized last night, though, that i was getting tired of the formula of description of bias, how we know, consequence, how to hedge against falling for the trap, repeat, and decided that I didn’t want to finish it. i’ve been looking around for a cognitive science perspective book on creativity. I tried sampling Flow by Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, but found it frustrating in the same way that many accessible positive psychology books are, which is that we understand the measurable beneficial outcomes of certain life philosophies way better than we understand how to adopt them or why they work.
i fell asleep to Friends once again, the one where monica dates hot tom selleck and the one with the grumpy cat video.