We live on the 3rd floor. The 2nd floor neighbour is a hoarder and the new 1st floor neighbours weren't into it so they (I assume) called the city. Last week a couple of (cute! i'm sorry, i know it's cliché, but still) firefighters showed up to "check my smoke detectors". Which they did, and then very casually, as they were about to leave, said, "oh, we need to check your fire escape, too". Of course, the fire escape is hella blocked because the 2nd floor neighbour has SO MUCH STUFF that it completely fills her balcony and the steps going up and down.

It was a pretext, you see. So then they went down and said, "it's not safe, you can't live here". They got a social worker involved and changed the locks, and now 2nd floor neighbour is locked out of her apartment until she can make it safe to live. It's so stupid.. she's obviously needed help for so long, but there are no mental health resources available until it's a complete crisis. As far as we could tell, she couldn't get into her front door anymore, so she was scaling the back stairs to get into her apartment. She's lived in that space since 1991 (I assume her rent is 500$/mo because the rent here is controlled), so if she has to move she'll lose her community because you cannot live anywhere in this area for 500$/mo anymore.

So now she's got a dumpster outside and has been throwing out bags and bags and bags of everything. Must hurt her so much. It's lots of trash, but also there are paintings, pieces she uses to make sculptures, old furniture she was refinishing. It's essentially a giant pile of stuff she was going to get to someday. The whole thing just makes me want to give up and accept that i am never going to get to any of the projects I thought I would, and just give away everything and strip my life down to the bare essentials. Who am i kidding with my sewing bag and my box of things to fix and my baking supplies and all the spices and my shoebox of paints and pastels?

***

I got out of the netflix hole and even better, I got back to work. Last night I biked down to meet Bt at the canal for a picnic and then we went in for a grueling 3 hour therapy session. We essentially spent rent on therapy this week, which is really so insane that I can't even get my head around it, except to say that i went into the wrong field. Working on "I" statements, the bane of my existence.

Afterwards the 45 minute bike ride home had 3 long steep hills and it felt like such a damn slog, when usually I charge those those hills because they trigger some kind of alpha-competitive thing in my brain. I thought i was so depleted because of the therapy session and that's why I was exhausted but once I finished the long slog home, I realized that my front brake was rubbing the tire the whole time and so I was fighting unnecessary friction the whole way and that's why it was so hard.

8:27 a.m. - 2016-08-12