Friday, Jan. 22, 2021 - 10:38 pm.
It's been a long-ass week. Every damn day was so damn long. I had many appointments throughout the week, but all of them ended up with happy outcomes, thankfully.
On Monday, my first thesis group had their defense. They very much aced it and maybe I cried a bit when they were told they were now psychologists. That same day I had to prepare the other thesis group for their own exam on Wednesday. It went well for them, too. Looking after their thesis corrections and their exam rehearsals and the actual exams took up a lot of my time, I was glad to be done with all that. Also, I'm a bit proud about the outcome and now I have two papers to try to get published.
My birthday was on Tuesday. Not a lot to reflect on, I do plenty of reflecting here every week. It was a good day. I got food and gifts delivered, lots of love from family and friends. Andrew got me breakfast and flowers and a globe, which he knew I wanted. My girlfriend got me fancy chocolates, which she knew I'd been eyeing for a while; these chocolates are painted on and they look amazing. Furthermore, she requested that these chocolates resembled the cover of my book(!), which tells you how crazy in love she is with me (also, she's told me).
Oh, Joseph also wrote me for my birthday. Joseph, the ex-boyfriend that I dated for four years and a half and I wanted to spend my life with, until he dumped me --without me realizing it-- the day I graduated from university, because by then he was living with the woman who'd become (and still is?) his wife and the mother of his child, and it took me eight years to fully heal from all the crap he pulled. That one Joseph.
Let's remember that he wrote me last year (or was it the year before?) fully apologizing for everything. I managed to not need an apology from him to move on (but boy, how I struggled), so the apology itself didn't do much for me. Still, it was a surprising, moving gesture and I appreciated it. I'm still very fond of the guy, and he seems to hold a lot of affection for me. Ok, I'll be clear: I never stopped loving him and probably never will. But there's nothing to do about it. I can live with that. I have lived with that.
My friend CR, also a friend of Joseph's (which is how CR and I met), once told me that life made sure Joseph paid dearly for everything he did to me. It sounds like sweet justice, one I kind of dreamed of at the peak of my heartbreak, but I never wished for him to suffer (other than a form of suffering that could be cured by getting back with me). When he wrote to apologize, he did it because his mom had passed away, and now that he was writing to me for my birthday, I learned his dad had passed away last year; not sure if from covid, he was already sick.
So anyway! You're up to speed. So Joseph and I exchanged a few messages on Instagram on Tuesday, and I ended up giving him my phone number to chat on WA or Telegram because I hate the IG chat. Then I sort of regretted it because giving him my number may have come across as thirsty, and it may lead me to open a can of worms. Anyway, he didn't add me and I let it go. Today he wrote me saying that he kept trying but couldn't add me on WA, to which I just answered lololololol because yeah, LOL.
Thursday was a day of leisure, the only day I had no meetings scheduled. And today....Today:
I had two thesis presentations of my boss' master's students in the morning. I managed to squeeze in reviewing a paper, and then I just waited around before a dentist's appointment early in the afternoon. As I was getting ready, my friend A, my closest friend in this city called me and screamed "congratulations!" when I picked up the phone. At first I thought she meant it for my birthday, but she'd called me on Tuesday.
It turns out my funding application for a postdoc research project got accepted!!! I'm moving up on the academic ladder, it seems. I have lots of shit to figure out to get started, but today I'm just celebrating.
Plus, after the phone call I had 45 very stressful minutes of figuring out how to get to the clinic, as we're on lockdown with no Uber and the taxi services are crap. I was assigned a taxi but it never arrived so I was resigned to take the bus, because lockdown be damned and the city is just running as usual. Thankfully the taxi showed up, 25 minutes later, and I still made it on time to my appointment.
Then I couldn't get a taxi home and I had to walk. It was a 40-minute walk with 32ºC and no shade along the way. The worst part was my footwear, though: cute, flat fabric shoes that I wore based on the confidence that the simplest things would work out, that is, that I'd get a ride from and to my home. See, the simplest things don't work out in Latin America. The dentist's secretary tried three taxi agencies and none of them had a car available to pick me up for a 10-minute drive.
When I got home my shoes were more like sandals, one of my ankles hurt and I was limping due to a cramp that persists to this moment. I handled the heat pretty well, and I always wear sunscreen when I go out (self-high-five!), but my feet may be in serious pain tomorrow.
But hey, the week is over! Next week is looking very relaxed (*knocks on wood*) and it's the last one before the university closes down for the summer, for three weeks. God bless.
Also next week, I'm doing an online presentation of my book on Wednesday. Organized by a fellow writer who, bless him, seems to have a lot of faith in me. The publisher sent in a video of the director talking about my book, which I have not dared to see yet. Wish me luck. I hope people buy it after that.