It's not Wednesday.

Apparently today has decided to be Monday, instead:

1. Someone whose help I need on something fairly urgent is out sick, and they are the only one who can help on this particular thing.

2.

3. I had someone this morning remind me just how little what I do actually matters. Oh, I know, it's probably cosmically a good thing to be reminded of how small you really are periodically, but not when you're running around trying to do stuff. And not as part of someone trying to assert how they are "better" than you because what they are doing is more important (or at least they think it is).

And yeah, I suppose in some ways what I do matters to some people (vide the email of last week from a student's mother). But the problem is, a lot of times the "helping" stuff or the "teaching" stuff is viewed as lesser, somehow. A lot of the stuff I do that's important to ME isn't important to the world. And yeah, yeah, that shouldn't matter, except that sometimes it's the world that decides on what your paycheck is.

I think part of the problem with the whole "What you do doesn't matter" for me, and why it hurts so much to hear it (or "hear" it, and that may have been how it was in this case - that I am over interpreting something someone said that they didn't say very well. Then again, other things this person has said to other people in a similar vein....) is that my Inner Critic regularly uses that phrase against me - "You're wasting your life" or "If you were really good at what you did, you would...." or any other number of things.

I think it's harder to hear a criticism you give yourself coming out of someone else's mouth. (That may be why some people get so defensive about certain criticisms).

Anyway. I'm just tired  and tired of dealing with people right now. While invigilating my last exam I was thinking (strangely enough) about how what I really wanted was someone to stroke my hair and tell me it was going to be okay.

As touch-averse as I tend to be, I don't mind people fiddling with my hair - I never really minded getting it combed or cut when I was a kid, and a small luxury I would indulge in if I weren't so cheap (and so uncomfortable at just walking up to an unfamiliar salon - I get my hair cut at a barber's that doesn't really do it, so) is having someone shampoo and blow dry my hair for me. (I did get this done - wow, 20 years ago now - when I broke  my elbow and washing my hair was too hard to do with a cast. I went to the place I was getting my hair cut at the time and the lady who cut my hair did it for me several times a week until the cast came off. And she charged me less than the going rate because she knew I was a broke grad student and I really didn't have a whole lot of other options for getting my hair clean)

(It's funny, but one of the tear-up moments from a MLP cartoon? The bit in Hurricane Fluttershy where she's SO upset and is hiding and crying and one of her animal friends is combing her hair for her to try to comfort her. Because that's something I could actually deal with when I was upset, having someone else comb my hair. It really amazes me how much real human emotion - or at least, what seems like real human emotion to me - is packed into little scenes of that cartoon).

Oh well. I suppose really what was going on with the "what you are doing doesn't matter" thing was probably that THAT person was feeling insignificant and they decided to make themselves look big by making someone else look small. But it still hurt and it still annoyed me.


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ETA: two upsides, one personal, one not personal:

1. When I was at Mart of Wal this morning to obtain donut holes and fruit (all the donut holes have gone; there is still fruit left so I ate some of it), I bought a few more blindbags. Granted, they are probably Ponies I already have (I know, the codes exist out there, but I have a really hard time reading them on the foil bags, and part of the fun is the chance that maybe there's something different and cool in there).

So I will be opening at least one of them this afternoon as a sop to my upset feelings.

2. Charles Ramsey, the overnight celebrity in the rescue of those kidnapped women? Wants to give the reward money that would by rights go to him to them and their families. Now that's a decent guy. (And he's not rolling in dough, either - though in one interview I read, he said not having money was actually one of the things that helped him sleep at night). (I really hope this doesn't "break bad" - everything I've read about him suggests he's just a decent hardworking guy who cares about people. I WANT TO BELIEVE.)

I'd like to THINK that in a similar situation I'd do the same thing, but really, I'd probably be making grabby-hands and thinking "yarn money!"