Reading: Still Lying Lies, though I haven't read any more of it this week because I have been driving my lazy ass to work instead of taking the bus. Watching: The West Wing. I remain hopeful. Listening: To the new Sting CD, Sacred Love. I like it. It usually takes me a couple of weeks to really warm up to a new CD. I utterly despise the duet with Mary J. Blige, but other than that, I think I'm really going to like it. "Stolen Car" and "Never Coming Home" are my favorites right now. Eating: I had the white-trashiest dinner ever in the world. Do you want to know what it was? It was this, and I am not kidding: Mashed potatoes out of a box mixed with barbecue sauce. And that was it. It was delicious. Needless to say, the whole "I will lose 10 pounds before JournalCon!" thing has flown out the window. Second Row Sexie countdown: 26 days!

It is the first day of October. It is 55 degrees outside. I turned the heat on for the first time, and for a couple of hours, got the musty smell of warm air filtered through a summer's worth of dust. I liked it.

And I have quite the month planned. This weekend, I will be seeing not one, not two, but THREE of my best journaly friends. First will be Melissa on Friday night, when I will be seeing the play she is directing, then Lori on Saturday morning (because it's about damn time I met her, seeing as she lives in Philly and all), when I will be having breakfast, and finally Kate on Saturday evening, when I will be seeing the play she is in.

(Confidential to my #1 fan: Kiss my obsequious ass.)

Next weekend, I have to go home, as I have not seen my parents since my grandmother's birthday party a month ago, and will not be seeing them again until probably Thanksgiving.

The weekend after that is JournalCon, where I will be ridiculously excited about seeing even more of my friends, like her and her and her and her and her, and her, and perhaps even make a few new friends as well. Because a girl cannot have too many friends, now, can she?

The weekend after that, Kate and Corina will be coming to DC to see me and Eddie. Though they will be in the tenth row, the poor schmucks. (I will wave to them from the second row.)

And then it will be November. Unbelievable.

Since I mentioned a few entries ago that I was going to start therapy, I thought I should mention that I did start, and now I have stopped, because my therapist sucked.

Fortunately for me, she never asked for the URL of this journal. (Come to think of it, my old therapist in Kansas City never asked for it, either. If you were a therapist and your patient wrote about her life online, wouldn't you want to read it?)

What happened was, I went in for a couple of intake sessions with this one woman, a psychiatrist. She basically let me blather on for both hours, just asking a few clarification questions here and there. She was not particularly warm and fuzzy, but that was fine. She said that she would present my case to the team of therapists there, and then I'd start actual therapy with whoever I was assigned to, so I didn't worry about the fact that I didn't like her very much.

Well, it ended up being her. I decided to give her another chance, because maybe the intake process was different, and she'd be a little more interactive during "actual" therapy.

Not so much. Maybe I was spoiled with my old KC therapist, but she and I would always shoot the breeze a little when I first went in, which made me relax, and eventually she'd say, "So, what do you want to talk about today?" And I'd tell her, and we'd talk about. We would talk about it, not just me.

But that's not how it worked with this woman. During the second intake session, I asked her about her background, because I had no idea what kind of doctor she was. She said, "I have a medical degree and have been doing psychiatry for about three years." That was it. She said not one additional word about it.

So I talked for an hour during the third session, and I talked for an hour during the fourth session. And about twenty minutes into the fifth session, I ran out of things to say. There it was, there it all was, everything was out there, and I was done.

So she sat there and looked at me and waited for me to say something. And I kept saying, "I don't have anything else to say. I don't have anything else." And I got incredibly uncomfortable, and started to giggle, which is my nervous reaction. And I'd hide my face in my hands and get myself together, then look back up at her and say, "I don't have anything else to say. I just don't."

And she'd sit there. I finally asked her if she had any questions, because surely some of what I told her must have been confusing, or she would want me to go explain something a little more, and all she said was that she was confused about where my parents were living at various points in my life.

So I started to tell her stupid shit, like how it took me three hours to get my car inspected. And she said, "It's hard to talk about the important things, isn't it?" And I said, "YES, IT IS, ESPECIALLY WHEN I HAVE TOLD YOU ALL OF THEM ALREADY. NOW IS THE PART WHERE YOU START TO ACTUALLY HELP ME FIX THEM." Or something like that.

And so we sat there for the rest of the hour, with her looking at me, and me repeating over and over that I had nothing else to tell her.

And then I gave her a check for seventy bucks, and decided I was being an idiot. I could have sat on my own couch for an hour and told all of my problems to the television or the wall or the cat or you people, for FREE, and not have to have driven forty minutes each way to do it, and received exactly the same benefit.

I want my old therapist back. My old therapist took a couple of sessions to let me get out all my issues, and then we discussed them. We set out clear goals for my therapy, even wrote them down. She gave me homework each week, things to do to try to figure out solutions to my problems, like the self-talk thing I wrote about here. Or I'd go in and bitch about how stupid I am with money, and she'd make me take out my checkbook and we'd talk about why I needed $12 shower gel from Bath & Body Works instead of a $2 bar of Zest.

I always felt better when I walked out of her office. All this woman was doing was making me anxious. Maybe that works for some people, but not me. So I called and told her that I couldn't afford to come anymore, which is technically true.

I will go back to therapy. I still need it, now more than ever. But now I will not be afraid to ask questions, and I will be clear about what I want out of it, and make sure that my therapist and I are on the same page from the beginning.

And if I walk in and say, "So, are you ready for the hurricane?" and she looks back at me with a blank expression and says "I'm ready for whatever you want to talk about," I'll know it's time to leave.