Wednesday, July 02, 2008

I decided to take stock of the little squares for the Color-Bar Blanket.



Making good progress on the blue (that was the color I was lugging along with me this week) but the other colors still need a lot.

This is kind of a good "displacement activity" project; the kind of thing to work on so you keep your mouth shut in meetings, or so you don't jump up and try to throttle the tv in the auto-service-center waiting room (while screaming, "Jim Cramer Dies NOW!!!"), or when you're too tired or too bummed out to think of working on something that actually requires a lot of thought.

And I'm a little bit bummed out right now.

Not anything bad happening to me, particularly - as it often seems, my own personal life seems to be an island of relative calm and safety as bad stuff happens to people around me. Two people I care about are having to have surgery in the coming weeks, one of them apparently somewhat-risky surgery. A couple of others I care about are facing progressive degenerative diseases that do not really have a treatment (and certainly not a cure) and will continue to progress and degenerate the quality of life for these individuals.

And while I'm telling myself that they have had long, mostly-happy, and useful lives, I'm still kind of bummed out.

(No - no one in my family. Or at least what you would consider my family, biologically speaking.)

And there's other turmoil - turmoil in groups I belong to, people not getting along, that kind of stuff.

That's how it seems to be - I'll float along for weeks or months with nothing bothering me, and then, WHAM, all kinds of bad news comes all at once.

Were I somewhat younger and considerably slimmer, I'd seriously consider hiding under the bed. (Well, younger and slimmer and less claustrophobic).

And on top of it, something has started flowering that I'm apparently massively allergic to (unless I've caught a cold from one of my students). And I'm TIRED. Incredibly, extremely tired. Tired even though I make a point to be putting out the lights at 9:15 pm. (Which is as early as I can reasonably sleep - thank you very much Daylight Savings and your sun that doesn't set at a reasonable hour)

Which, even in the middle of my sad, makes me think of a poem:

Bed in Summer

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

Robert Louis Stevenson*


Well, Bobby, I WANT to go to bed even though it's still daylight. But as I cannot sleep when my room's still light enough to read in, I haven't much of a choice.

(Though I suppose you could take that poem as an argument against it being all DST's fault - I'm sure that when Stevenson wrote that DST was little more than a crazy idea that that known radical Ben Franklin had put forth.)

Actually, the extreme tiredness (and the general feeling that there's a grey fuzz over the world that shouldn't be there) suggests to me that it is, in fact, allergies, and not some kind of summer cold. Because those are both very typical allergy symptoms for me. (And this is one that Claritin apparently cannot touch.)

So, I'm trying "not to sad." But not being 100% successful.

(*And all the modern educational trends to the contrary, I DO THINK there is value in having kids learn poetry. True, I couldn't recite that piece off by heart but I did remember the lines about going to bed by day. I think having a store of poetry more or less in your head and heart somehow gives you a sense of shared experience, of "I'm not the only one who's ever felt this way." Or, alternatively, gives you a way to transcend what you are currently feeling).

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