In which Internet friends are just as good as meatspace friends! Seriously! Dude.

Yesterday I had class until 4:30, then Bread picked me up and we went out to the farm. We made dinner together, with chicken from his mom’s freezer and veggies from AmmZon’s garden. Basically, everything save the tomato and the garbanzo beans in the salad came from someone else — —

— the world, it seems, is calculated at moments to make a girl feel all abjectly grateful and shit. I’ve never been so broke in my life, but dinner last night was wonderful, and all made up of gifts.

If that weren’t enough, after the dishes were done I walked down to the mailbox to grab the Netflix vid I knew was waiting there (it turned out to totally suck) and there was a box from amazon.com, too! And since I hadn’t ordered anything it had to be a present! A PRESENT!

I waddled back up the driveway with my prizes and sat on the bed — the bedroom has A/C — and opened the amazon.com box. Two books off of my Wishlist from Vuboq!

The first item in the box was Bags: A Knitter’s Dozen. I love to knit with wool, and I love to felt wool, and I’ve been searching for The Perfect Bag for about 15 years now. Perhaps after knitting a couple-few of the cute bags in this book, I will feel compelled to design, knit, and felt myself the bag of my dreams.

And then I’ll make it in a few colorways so I’ll always have one that matches my outfit. (Because if you know me in person, you know how important matching is to me.) (Which is, like, not at all. No, I mean, I like it when my stuff matches, but not enough to really go out of my way to be sure that it all does.) (Snort!)

The second book was Get A Financial Life: Personal Finance In Your Twenties And Thirties. The karmic grinder that has been my life of late has me thinking that a little self-education, particularly in the area of personal goddamned finance, wouldn’t be a bad idea.

To wit: I’m a few years shy of 40 and yet when I woke up this morning I had no savings, a bunch of debt, and an IRA that wouldn’t if cashed out even buy me a decent car (even before taxes). This strikes me as being less than ideal, particularly since I’m supposed to be a grown-up of some stripe, hence this book’s presence on the wishlist.

Anyway, the POINT is, friends rock! First, dinner courtesy of friends and family, and then a random present in the mailbox. This new theme of gratitude is a nice one; I much prefer it to the ‘everything sucks and this is really fucking hard’ theme.

The past few months have been — and are continuing to be — difficult on a lot of levels. It’s definitely an ego-grinding process; after you’ve spent a certain amount of time feeling like you’re the doer, that you’re the one who makes certain things happen, I guess the universe then conspires to teach you otherwise. In other words, at the foundation, all the things you do that make you feel like you’re doing what you’re supposed to, can just… go away. It’s ultimately out of your control; you really could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Not long ago, I was going to work and doing my chores and paying my bills, and all that made me feel like I was in control. Today, I’m not really doing any of those things but by some miracle I’m still eating. I guess the lesson is some combination of surrender, gratitude, and I-am-not-really-the-doer.

I guess I’m past the oh-fuck-this-sucks-and-I’m-frustrated-and-angry phase and have now ground off enough ego that I’m settling into the oh-this-sucks-but-not-my-will-but-Thine phase. Which is a much sweeter space to be in.

I do sort of wish I could be learning this lesson without being quite so desperately on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy broke, but I do have a rather thick head so it’s likely I’ve missed the lesson the past few times it was offered me.

Class has turned out to be pretty fun. I haven’t really learned much that I’ll actually use about the software, but I certainly will be able to pass the test. And that’s pretty much the point. The people have been really nice, and I like the instructor/s in particular. Too bad the next course I need is so many weeks away.

Hopefully I’ll get a job next week. Wouldn’t that be nice?