People have different dysfunctional approaches to dealing with difficult situations. There's denial, self-deception, blame, bullying, and so on. A couple weeks ago I encountered a bully and have been indulging in my own dysfunctional approach ever since, which is avoidance.

Avoidance has a lot of positive aspects. Many problems go away if you avoid them. The situation is often not as bad as you thought it was, or the other person had time to think, or the natural tendency of living organisms to heal or at least to seek equilibrium solves the urgent parts of the problem.

Unfortunately for my own equilibrium, I don't use avoidance to address my inner life (a side effect of the "I" part of my personality type, INTJ). So, I've known that I have to deal with this fellow sooner or later.

And, of course, another side effect of being mostly introverted and mostly a thinker is that my social and emotional skills are pretty raw. Usually I can get by on sincerity, but that's no good for an unsympathetic audience. There, I need to play the kind of games that baffle me. The encounter I had, for example, included some dominance games which, according to a male witness, I lost. Just because my own sense of what's important doesn't include the kind of territory that this fellow was "winning," well, that's not important a) if that's all he is interested in, and b) if in the future, he'll deal with me as someone he's achieved points over.

It would be so much simpler if I could believe that bluster achieved anything. I just know that I could bluster louder than him!

Peter and I parked at Couch and Park and shoved change into the parking meter. It rejected all the pennies and something that turned out to be from Zambia. We put most of the pennies on lamp posts and gave the last 4 cents to a passer-by, who laughed out loud.

It was the first time I'd ever seen Vruba, Tyko, and me leave Powell's without buying anything. On the way back to the car, there was one of those sudden hushes that happen downtown, when the noise of the city seems infinitely far away.

Exactly opposite to what I tell my students is a good way to study, I'm making a big push to finish my Spanish correspondence course. All is going well except for rules for using subjunctive. Would that I might understand them! I'm also reading Isabel Allende's La Ciudad de las Bestias, which I recommend to any intermediate Spanish student who likes childrens' fantasy fiction.

The other thrilling thing we did today was remove most of the loft in preparation for moving the skylight over a foot to avoid the new house wall. It was messy and noisy but we completed the job including cleanup. Plumosita said, "If I didn't want to do so many other things with my life, I'd want to do demolitions."

And, since I have to take Plumosita south for the holidays, we'll miss both Christmas and Hannukah. So, we decided to celebrate Solstice this year. Anyone want to be the ritually slaughtered king? E-mail me.

At a lavendar cafe in Friday Harbor, getting a taste of the bright lights of the big city.