One of the things I'm struggling with right now is my need for control. I've found having a schedule for the day and a list of tasks I need to accomplish has helped me get through the past through years — the ways in which my life has veered out of control, what with Isaiah's death, the pandemic, and so on. Planning has become a coping mechanism, and while I realize "the best laid plans" blah blah blah, I still feel as though I have control of the uncontrollable if I'm organized enough.

And then, of course, life happens. Plans change. Everything changes.

Kin and I are very much "in flux" right now for reasons that I can't yet detail here. It's been challenging, and it'll be challenging for the next month or so. I told him this morning as we were walking around the lake that one of the ways in which I managed this as a child was to anticipate being done with things rather than having to do them. (This is also why I say the best part of being a writer is having written, not writing.) It's not that I have a dentist appointment in three days, for example, it's that I'll be done with the dentist in four.

In preparing for change, I had a psych evaluation this past week and had Poppy formally declared as an emotional support animal — it's all sorts of problematic, I recognize, but Poppy is pretty key to both my and Kin's mental and physical health. So there we go. No plans to take her on an airplane yet, and terrify all the passengers with a giant creature that looks like a Rottweiler.

I'm not currently training for any races or anything, which also has me feeling a bit weird — I've put so much effort into doing so this year, and while I suppose my body enjoys the break, my brain isn't thrilled with it. My body's not thrilled either, truth be told, but I think I'm just taking longer to recover from this past half marathon — partially because I don't have my brain kicking myself back into training mode.

We watched the new Michael J. Fox documentary, Still, the other night. (It struck me the other day that back in the 80s, I thought that Alex P. Keaton was the worst possible Republican I could imagine. Ha! How fucking naive.) We're also flying through the latest season of The Great, which I absolutely adore — except for last night's episode in which — I won't spoil it, but damnit. And we've started watching High Desert, also dark and funny.

In food news: a follow-up to last week's post, we did indeed stop at Jollibees on our way home from camping, and the fried chicken was as good as people say it is. (I mean, I can't tell you the last time I ate fast food fried chicken, so really listen to other people when it comes to this type of dining.) We ate at Lovely's, our favorite burger joint, on Saturday night, and I ordered a fish sandwich — and having just eaten the "famous fish" at Mama T's, it's a toss-up there. I made the PB-and-miso cookies from The NYT as I have miso to use up; I still have miso to use up so I'm making pseudo-Milk-Bar corn cookies today, substituting some of the butter in the King Arthur Baking recipe for miso. But that's a story for next week...