(no subject)

I had to put air in my tires this morning, which is not a difficult task but is one that I don't do often and doing anything I'm not familiar with in public makes me anxious. (Because most of my anxiety manifests as "someone is watching you/listening to you and you are somehow irritating them" - that plays in a loop at the back of my brain all the time.) So, while driving up to the gas station, I gave myself my normal peptalk for those kinds of situations - no one cares what you're doing, this is a completely normal activity that no one will pay any attention to, no one is going to watch you do it or be upset that you're doing it slowly, etc.

So I pull in and start reading the instructions on the machine, checking everything several times, and another car pulls up right behind me. And the lady inside stared at me the entire time I was filling my tires. And sure, I get that you also need air - that's fine - but could you not have, I don't know, parked one of the nearby parking spaces for five minutes so that you don't have to stare at me like the physical manifestation of All of My Anxiety?

I ended up only filling two of the tires before getting so flustered that I decided it would be better to do the rest after my other errands. And when I came back to the gas station, there was no one there at all and I could take all the time that I wanted. (After giving myself a second pep talk about how there was no way the gas station attendant was going to notice or remember that I had been there twice.)

Oof.

(no subject)

I have started a Project, which is to catalog All the Books I Own. Which is something I've wanted to do for a while and, for whatever reason, today was the day! Or, at least, the day I started.

So I've made a big spreadsheet and have begun entering books - I spent about four hours doing that today and got about 150 books cataloged. That about 1/6 of the total collection, probably, though that estimate is really only taking into account things on actual bookshelves and not scattered in random places. Or ebooks, which need to be added as well. I've also purged about 20 books so far that I don't need to own anymore and rediscovered several that I had forgotten I owned. Which is good, as I am between books at the moment and might as well read one of the ones I already have.

Once they're all cataloged, the shelves also need to be rearranged. They used to be organized by genre once upon a time, but everything has gotten all higgledy-piggledy over the years and it needs to be redone. But the catalog is going to take a while, so reorganization doesn't need to take up any space in my brain yet.