Finally, some good stuff!

While last week wasn't exactly worse than the one before it (I wasn't hit by a bus or anything), it was still pretty frustrating and emotionally confusing. I am so new to this hetero thing (though sometimes I wonder if there's a point where I will cease to be 'new' at it and will commence being simply 'bad' at it) and all the rules and the thing about the calling and not calling and showing interest and not showing interest, I just don't get it. This is where being gay was so much easier because I am kind of, let's say, assertive, and without the constriction of gender roles in place I was free to be as forward as I wanted to be without worrying about being viewed as an overly aggressive woman (we all know the world does not love overly aggressive women). Anyway, I meant what I said last week about not needing to be with anybody right now, but it would make me feel a lot better to understand it all.

This week is already shaping up to be much more enjoyable than last week. Yesterday I actually had a completely positive experience in graphic design class, if you can believe it. We had this project where we had to choose from a variety of black and white shapes to create a design, then we all put our projects on the board and critiqued them. I liked what I had come up with, but it wasn't until I saw everyone else's that I felt reassured that I was actually meant to be in this class and not just a total design failure. There were some really innovative, interesting designs and there were some designs that could use a few changes, but my design was definitely successful and got a lot of positive comments during the critique session. Afterwards we started a new project, in which we are going to redesign an ad. The technique we were working on was thumbnailing which is basically making a series of tiny sketches of the ad layout to generate ideas. For once, I was just as fast as everyone else and I almost completed the two pages of thumbnails before the end of class. The technique works, too, because I have some great ideas now about how I'm going to redesign the ad.

Another enjoyable thing that's going on is we have five new hires starting next week at work. They are all going to be on my team, so this week I've been busy figuring out what training they will need and how they are going to get it. I love a good project, especially if it has the potential to make an actual difference in how our team works when our call volume goes up in two weeks. Last year school started on my third day and it was a real nightmare because we didn't have enough folks to handle the call volume and we had just started supporting this program so everything was a learning process. This time around, hopefully we have learned some things and we will be able to apply that knowledge and have things run more smoothly. We'll see.

I signed on with a new personal trainer this weekend. This one used to be around 300 lbs then she lost about 100 of it with a personal trainer and then decided she wanted to be one herself. I actually read on her website that one of her clients is a prominent (to me anyway) fat activist here in Portland, so I'm pretty excited about training with her. My big goal for the training is to get into shape for the 2009 Portland Marathon, but I'm also hoping being more regularly active will make me less afraid of riding my bike. I'm totally psyched!

xo