May 12, 2024

🌟A Most Unreliable Narrator 💐 #186 Where are my smelling salts?

This week: lack of jury duty, Eurovision, OA, DBSA, and Bridgerton

Welcome to A Most Unreliable Narrator, the slice-of-life newsletter of GenXer around town, Lisa Rabey. I talk about anything and everything with a bit of swears. I’m glad you’re here.

Dear Internet,

Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate and regardless how you define “mother.”

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It’s Wednesday night and not only did I not have jury duty today but there is no jury duty tomorrow. Huzzah! Court clerk said on Monday that they went from four cases to one and it was going to be a light week. I’m on the hook until May 17, which is fine. We’re not leaving for the cabin until the 18^th anyway.  (I hope, I hope, I hope.)

With the free time, I continue hen pecking away at work but no writing. There’s just so much to do and I’m trying to not get caught up in the small stuff but since I’m a one person show, I can’t delegate work to someone to free me up to do something else.

My biggest suck time is my fucking website. I use WordPress and I used a very simple theme to create a skeleton design. I did the tweaking coming back from the feedback I asked for a few weeks ago and it looks what it’s supposed to provide. I’ve got my landing page, link to booking calendar, services, contact, and about pages. I took down my resume and portfolio pages and will replace them with customer testimonials. I’m doing work for a friend for free for exchange for a testimonial and I’m going to approach the president of the non-profit I’m doing work for if she can do a testimonial for me. I’ve got another plan in place for another potential client.

Today I headed to the coffee shop to work since Mr. Lisa and I are getting on each other’s nerves lately. I think it’s less of us getting on each other’s nerves and more that we both need super concentration and it’s too easy to fuck off around each other and with my schedule more fluid now, the opportunity to tease and joke has increased massively.

I head to the coffee shop after 10 a.m. because all the meetings and such that virtual nomads (gross but sadly I am one) are gone and finding a place to sit undisturbed is easy. I grab my 24 oz iced mocha, a bottle of water, and get to work.

I head four things to do today: the class I’m currently taking, make sure skeleton site is clean, manage non-profit’s website, and write. I planned on staying about four hours and then head home for lunch, take the dog out, and continue working on what I didn’t finish at the coffee shop.

I did my coursework and I’m learning a lot. It was nice to have a cohesive instruction on how it works together. Because I am locking in time three times a week to work on the class, I’m able to finish it before the deadline. I got a 98% on my first quiz so I’m pretty stoked.

Making sure the biz skeleton website is presentable turned out to be a nightmare. I wanted to change one style but the theme’s designers made it overly complicated and I spent a fucking 1.5 hours trying to solve this nightmare of a problem. What I was trying to do is turn justification off on text because it was not breaking after the word but in the middle. (Even adding !important in the code to override existing code did. Not. Work.) Example: “UX assessment” turned into “UX ass essment.” Kristin noted that she doesn’t think people want to know about UX ass, and she’s right so I swapped themes and I’m leaving it alone.

I created a staging place for me to work on the production website which I hope will be done in the next week or so. I’m learning new software to do it and it’s one of the better selling page builders for WordPress out there so I’m hoping to master it.

(Reader, it’s now nearly a week later and I have yet to work on the staging site.)

I also managed the non-profit’s website, email, and social media today, so I knocked that off my list.

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It is now Friday and still no jury duty, huzzah!

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It is now Saturday, and no jury duty on Monday. Huzzah!

This weekend is super chill. Mr. Lisa and I went and saw The Fall Guy with Ryan Gosling. I’ve always been a Gosling fan but now I’m a stan. The movie was so fun! Mr. Lisa said “it was fine” and gave it a 2/5 stars but keep in mind he likes watching silent Swedish films from 1919 on Criterion Channel so don’t live by his rating.

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It’s now Sunday and I have verified again there is no jury duty on Monday. Huzzah!

Saturday concluded Eurovision 2024 and…I’ve written this space three times now and it gets political quite fast. Congrats to the winning country not purposely named in case you haven’t watched yet. And yes, we did watch all four hours because we are masochists.

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This past week I attended my DBSA meeting and an OA meeting on body image. DBSA meeting was good as usual. I find myself contemplative after the meeting, quite grateful that I’m in a space where I’m recognized and heard and I don’t feel so isolated. I do hate walking around as picture perfect DSM 5 manual though because I have five separate diagnoses while most in the group have two, sometimes three. Also, those with bipolar one arent’ as common in the groups. Maybe there are somewhere else? I feel like I’ve mentioned this before but I’m high on coffee right now and my brain is a bit fuzzy. Anyway, bipolar one is mainly manic and bipolar two is mainly depressive. I’ve said this a zillion times, but I love being manic. Do I like the ramifications of what mania brings? Oh, fuck no, but that godlike feeling? Even drugs can’t give you that.

Speaking of finding others like me, I dug deep into DBSA’s website and found there are meetings specifically for people who are bipolar so I signed up for one. I like the group sharing aspect so I won’t give up my Friday meetings.

 The OA meeting on body image was also good. The moderator ruled with an iron fist because there have been huge issues with Zoom bombers and in groups where the participants are quite fragile, it’s beyond dangerous. I also discovered that the local DBSA chapter (which I assumed folded since I could not find anything on them before) is still around also have Zoom meetings so I’ll be giving those a whirl.

Also, this week was regular talk therapy with Miles. I told him about joining OA again after so many years and he was glad to see I was taking the steps he’s suggested in the past to finally get myself under control around sugar. OA bases its steps from AA’s steps (referred to within the OA community as “The Big Book”). I told Miles I was not buying The Big Book as I bought it years ago and never used it.  Miles was curious as to why and honestly? Too much God. It’s story after story about how people let go of themselves and found God who supported them when they were week. I’m not going to yuck anyone’s yum so if that works for you, that’s great. Except it does not resonate with me so I cannot relate to many of these journies. (While I was writing this, I took a 10 second break and searched for AA for non-Christians and there is a pamphlet by AA for atheists and agnostics which I’ll give a whirl later.)

Both AA and OA stress heavily they are not a religious organization and the only requirement for membership is the will to stop drinking/overeating. I want, at times, to so desperately give in to a higher power because of the community it brings as well as the support. If you’ve been around these parts for some time, I’ve talked about a higher power ranging back to the early days of this newsletter when it was still on Tinyletter (RIP). I’ve dipped in and out of various practices but haven’t studied enough of one to make a real go of it.

I am drifting today! I’ve marked to bring up woo/spirituality/higher power to another issue before this one gets beyond long.

I did buy OA’s 12 Steps and 12 Traditions which should be here this week and downloaded their beginner’s guide which I have yet to read. They also have pamphlets about the beginning stages of recovery which are sold on Kindle via the devil but not via OA itself so I’ll buy the Kindle editions at some point. I plan on sorting out my reading this week on the OA stuff and spirituality. I mention waaaaayyyyy back in 2017 attending the local UU church which I never went back to, however, I still keep their calendar integrated with mine because you never know. The UU church in TC is very active so I signed up for their newsletters and they do sermons via YouTube on Sunday mornings. It stuck me as I write this in early Sunday afternoon I missed this morning’s service. If I dig the vibe of their services, I may go in person but it’s a hike from our cabin to the church so who knows.

(History buffs: AMUN started out on Tinyletter with the first issue published on December 12, 2014 when I was going to use it to write about starting my own press. Issues were sporadic until around 2017 when I started to post regularly-ish. What you know of AMUN now was started when I renamed it to “In the Year of our Lord COVID” in July 2020 and kept up the regular Sunday posting since then. I moved from TinyLetter to Substack sometime in 2022 and here we are heading towards the middle of 2024 with over 300 issues spread across AMUN, Blotter, and Lisa Writes Stuff.)

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If we do get to the cabin this Saturday, we’ll be spending Sunday getting our lives in order for the season so an issue is 50/50. A Lisa Writes Stuff is still coming out on Wednesday.

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Wonderful Thing

Bridgerton

Bridgerton is baaaaccckkkk!

The Netflix series is based on the eight-ish book series by Julia Quinn. Each book concentrates on one of the eight Bridgerton children and their love lives set in the Regency era. First two seasons of Bridgerton cover the first two books while this upcoming third season covers book four. From the latest gossip, all eight kids are going to get a season so here’s to hoping the show does last eight seasons! Plus, any of the Bridgerton-verse spinoffs like Queen Charlotte is a win in my book. (And they better not make a season two of Queen Charlotte or else I will topple tables.)

My brother asked me the other day what I was looking forward to this week and I told him a new season of Bridgerton was starting on the 16th. I gave him the spiel about the show/books and he teased about people taking baths once a month and picking lice out of each other’s hair. Ha. Ha. He further questioned why I did not spend more time say in the 1920s which caused me to go off on Edwardian era up to the end of the Roaring 1920s. He was not…expecting that kind of enthusiasm in a tease but here we are.

So, yes, Bridgerton! Coming back! I’m super pumped to have one of my favorite story lines fresh and sparkly on my TV screen. One of my favorite newsletters, Drinks with Broads, will be recapping the series with one episode a week. Which, to me, is pain because all four eps of the first half drop on the 16^th and the second four eps in June. Nevertheless, I will persist and watch one episode a week. Give me strength.

Flirting with my fan,

lisa x

(Fuck fascists and Nazis!)

You've just finished reading A Most Unreliable Narrator: the slice of life newsletter from the GenXer about town, Lisa Rabey. You can find me on Instagram, Facebook and Bluesky if you're so inclined. I am everywhere. Copyright © 1996 - 2025 by Lisa Rabey