It’s weird and good to be back at RC. My friend is still gone, and they’d understand that grief is a curious beast, but they’d also be quite disappointed if I just dissolved.

Joined coffee-walk check-in group that I’ve been hearing so much about — didn’t check in with everyone in this group, but did talk about what I’ve been working on (not programming, but I still have done things recently!), and what other folks have been working on, and I went outside and walked and got coffee.

And what have I been doing in the last week?

• Thursday, Nathan and I watched Mad Men all day long. We didn’t get dressed, we didn’t go outside (not counting the deck), and we tried to remember to drink water (and occasionally succeeded). This was the most radically productive day we could have possibly had.
• Friday, we went to the Morgan Museum & Library, because it was outside of the house and also there’s a 150th anniversary exhibition about Alice in Wonderland (it’s quite a bit of fun). We saw extraordinarily old books from one of the very first printers (Caxton).Also now I have private library envy (check out the picture at the top here). I have always thought that one neat thing about being disgustingly rich is that you could be all, “hey, you know what is important? Secret staircases in my bookshelves. Heck, let’s have several.”We met a woman who used to work there, who taught us all kinds of incredible facts about the art around the ceiling (Caxton is on it!), and the zodiac women (there’s a woman with, I am not kidding, a rainbow and a unicorn and they’re on a cloud and she’s some zodiac sign?? babeadelic), and where you can see one of the secret staircases.

  We took the East River Ferry to get there, too, which I can now highly recommend as a good use of four dollars (or six, if it’s the weekend). It gave me a new physical understanding of Manhattan, which feels useful.

• Saturday, if I remember correctly, we were mostly useless (hi, feelings; hi, Mad Men) but pulled ourselves outside to go to Brooklyn Contra with RC friends (it was walking distance this time!). We even got a walk outside with Jess. My ankle still seems mad about this, but it was a terrific night. I love contra, and I only feel that way in New England, and that’s where we are, so.
• Sunday probably had things. Probably a lot of them were television.
• Monday, we headed to Cambridge for Nóirín’s memorial, which was too much to fit into one bullet point. Their family is positively lovely, and I’m glad to have met all of them, and so f*cking sad about the circumstances. It felt really right to celebrate life and grieve loss with old and new friends, and I’m deeply grateful that we were able to make it.
• Tuesday we did not head out mega-early as intended, but we did head out early enough to escape the monster hail and also the possible tornado (no joke, I got a tornado warning on my phone).
• And now it’s Wednesday.

Spent, honestly, most of the morning catching up on whatever seemed important or interesting in chat, plus reading a few linked blog posts. Put off eating for too long; my hunger-o-meter is, predictably, malfunctioning a ton, even when I think I’m otherwise okay. (It was one of the first grief effects I remembered and anticipated this time, which makes it a little easier to remember I need to eat food in order to do anything else.)

Finally went to a couple of the facilitators this afternoon, said “who wants to talk about grief and creativity?” and had a really good chat with Tom about some ideas. (Of course, he was entirely unprescriptive, because seriously no one here seems capable of trying to pressure anyone to do anything they don’t want to do for their own reasons.) I don’t want to just mope around here, but it’s also not reasonable to expect to pick up where I left off a week ago, so I was glad to be able to ask for help.

Ideas about what to do when you’re in a tough emotional spot, to be adopted or discarded as appropriate:

• Do easy things. Hard things might be too discouraging right now. That’s okay. Solve little puzzles. Write. Whatever seems accomplishable. Games can also be easy, but may or may not make you feel like you “did” anything later. (Depends on the game, depends on the circumstance, depends on the person.)
• Do repetitive things by hand. You could write a script for it, sure, but sometimes e.g. going through HTML by hand is a good meditation.
• Do things whose results you can see. Maybe that’s a tiny Flask app. Maybe it’s handcrafted HTML. (I haven’t touched it in years! It could be fun.) Maybe that’s something on the command line. Some people love one, and aren’t excited by the other. (Some people are me and love the idea of visually manifested things AND the command line.)

Meant to go to my ol’ pal Codingbat again (which Tom suggested again, and mentioned that Sumana had originally mentioned it to him!), but I accidentally fell into Google Translate’s new (?) Community feature, and spent a bunch of time translating little French things into English and validating translations. Really satisfying, and made it hard to leave.

But I did! Had a reasonably good-feeling end-of-day, and heading to dinner at our friends’ place. (eta: also I did one Coding Bat.) I am going to pet their dogs so much.