a lot of my personal “be brave” project has to do with facing my own “ostrich style” of facing stress. right now, for example, i feel like i have a few unpaid bills affecting my credit rating, but i don’t want to deal with that, so i’m not sending in my request for a credit report.
or, i wasn’t.

i know i have an unpaid speeding ticket…

i have to go back to the psych ward to see a doctor about a note she wrote me last year…

it’s probably my least favourite self-trait, but it’s very easy for me to tell myself that “oh, you have so much to deal with already, just do that later”, or to give myself passes on facing up to unpleasantness.

even though i know ostriches don’t actually stick their heads in the sand, this is how i’ve described it.

so today i took the medical notes with the 4 dates on them, and i actually talked to one professor, and made a date for thursday to talk to the other. i made sure that i can still hand in the assignments that i’m working on…and that my permanent grades won’t be affected.

it’s funny because the prof i actually talked to has to be one of my favourite teachers, ever. she’s hilarious in class, really intelligent, and never puts on those “professorial” airs…she’s kind of geeky-cool, with frizzy hair and thick glasses and red lipstick and funky jewelry…

i don’t know why i was so intimidated to talk to her. in her office yesterday she looked at me so empathetically i thought i would cry…

so. not as scary as i thought. good.

in my OTHER class, my non-fiction workshop, i actually showed up an hour late and didn’t realize until the end of class. eep. so much for the clocks at the cafe i was at being accurate.
this class is difficult for me, because it’s the first of its kind i’ve done. (that’s why i wanted to take it. people love pigeonholing me as the “poet”.) plus, the prof who doesn’t like me so much chairs it. but i said some editorial things to my “colleagues” (?) that i was proud of picking out….and i was quoted by other people for the rest of the hour.

that was a nice feeling. it’s rare that i allow myself to be simply proud of anything i do.

and afterwards, well…a few of us got out of the elevators onto the main floor of the building and there was an engineering grad party going on. the main section of the lobby was roped off and there were lots of people in formal wear, with waiters serving finger food and free wine….

it was a bunch of writers facing the lure of free wine….

so we snuck in. of course, that wasn’t such a big deal. the waiters didn’t so much care that we were crashing the party, and since we spoke french with them, they ended up giving us massive more amounts of wine than we could have hoped for. it was a lot of fun hanging out with people that i hadn’t especially before, getting to know them a little better…a little cameraderie was exactly what i needed after that day of facing myself.