Tuesday morning things

* Still feeling tired and jetlaggy from the time change. Doesn't help that I was out at a people-heavy meeting until nearly 9 last night....it takes me a very long time to relax after having to be around people (it's like being in a brightly-lit room for sleep).

I also *nearly* finished "The Silver Branch" and got through probably the most-exciting part of the novel (some spoilers but: Constantius' forces arrive, the rag-tag "legion" that Justin and Flavius have assembled from deserters of Allectus' legions, countrymen, and others are marching towards Londinum, they come upon Calleva - Flavius' ancestral hometown - as the mercenaries are getting there, they wind up participating in fundamentally saving the vulnerable parts of the populace (the old, the sick, the young, the women) and rallying the young men to help them fight off the mercenaries. Several members of the band are gravely wounded or killed....I kept reading because I was very much, "Please let Justin survive" as he was my favorite character and the book is largely told from his limited-third-person perspective. Yes, he does. But I was still keyed up after I put the book down (I assume only the denouement remains, as Allectus has been captured) and it took me a very long time to fall asleep)

And no, unlike other normal adults, I can't do coffee. I don't like the taste, and even if I doctored it with a metric boatload of sugar and milk....the one time in my life I tried drinking coffee it upset my stomach badly. (And increasingly, I find I have to be careful about how much strongly acidic stuff I consume, especially early in the day. Part of the reason I cut out orange juice was that it was giving me indigestion, though also I admit the science-reporting "OMGeeeee  OrAnGe JuIcE hAs So MuCh SuGaR aNd DiAbeeeeeTus!" put me off it, too)

* And so, I am feeling HARD the old Darwin quotation about "But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything." I need to get some work on the data-digestion done today - this afternoon, I guess - but I also would just like to run all the errands I need to run and then go home.

And tomorrow, I am meeting with my student, but she can't meet until like 4, and I have Elders' meeting at 6 so I am wondering if I need to pack a lunch AND a dinner to campus with me. (And also....it's Board Meeting, and after last month, I am super apprehensive, because once again dissension reared its ugly head. And yet: no new PPR meeting has been called, so I don't even know. Though if the head of it tries to call one for tomorrow afternoon BEFORE Elders' meeting, I am going to just have to not be there)

I have some things I have to do, though:

- Biggest thing is get a sympathy card for Modra and get it out in the mail (She lost her mother recently, like in the last year, too, and I remember sending a card for that, and to me, this seems "bigger")

- I will also be faced with the first real test of my "buy no frivolous things" mandate because of where I will probably go to get the card....though I think I can hold firm. But yeah, it is wearing on me. Probably not as much as a "no chocolate" or "no foods with added sugars" would - which I have done in the past - but maaaaan I've had a couple days (and it's not even been a week) when I just wanted to browse some of the yarn shops online I normally buy from, but haven't, to avoid temptation.

- And I need to think about where to make the donation I intend to make. My denomination's Week of Compassion (mostly: disaster relief) would be an obvious choice but there are some other opportunities; there is a Regional mission-trip of kids going to help with some rebuilding after the hurricane last year in South Texas and they are looking for people to "sponsor a seat on the bus" and I might do that - some to that, some to WOC.

- Go to the bank. I have a check I found from my partner-in-feeding-the-college kids from last month that I forgot to cash, and also I need to get cash for tips, etc. while traveling the end of this week

- At some point arrange for a mail-hold, but I think I am going to wait until Thursday to do that, because in the past, when I've done it early....my mail just stopped early and I admit I'm hoping the Doki Doki crate comes in the next day or two, seeing as it's the only "fun stuff" I will be getting until the end of Lent (already paid for; the subscription renewed last month).

- And I need to do a bit more house clean-up....but when? Thursday evening I will need to pack. And probably do some laundry. Argh.

- There's probably something else I am forgetting.

* We also have a search committee that has ground to life, because one of our number has been "kicked upstairs" (we tend to lose people that way; they get promoted to Admin, which is more money for them, and I suppose an advocating voice for us, but....we're down two full faculty lines, have been so for >10 years, and we feel it, and it's hard to advocate for a new line when you're having to replace someone every 5-7 years).

I am hopeful it goes as well as it did last time: we were very fortunate, as it turns out, in the person we hired. He turned out to be a good colleague and I guess (from what the students say) he is a good, if somewhat demanding, teacher. (He is the person on my hall who actually says "Good morning" to me when he comes in - I am usually in already - and YES those little courtesies mean something to me)

* I may need to clarify given Brickmuppet's comment on the post below; I don't know the full story and I may actually be conflating two events, but: Woman who runs a yarn-dying business gets the chance to go to India. Because she is....I would say, perhaps a bit naive?....she expresses her enthusiasm in a way that makes it seem like India is another planet, and understandably, people of East Indian heritage are not happy about that. Calls for her to apologize and recant come, there's a big kerfuffle, and on and on. And it leads to a Vox thinkpiece about "Is Knitting Too 'White'" and implying....oh, I don't know. I read part of it and gave up.

Look, were people of non-European heritage badly treated in the past in America (and presumably, Europe, though I am less familiar with there)? Yes, of course. Are they still badly treated sometimes today? Yes. But I don't see how....shaming someone like me for enjoying knitting....fixes past and current discrimination. (To paraphrase an old, old saying, allegedly said by a blues musician: "The knitting needles don't care what color your hands are"). And yes, maybe publishers (If there are any publishers LEFT that publish knitting content, F and W - which bought lots of things up - is now declaring bankruptcy) need to use more diverse models for knitwear (though I would also note that diversity includes other things than gender or skin color)....again, I don't know. A lot of this stuff makes me feel called out and like I'm weirdly in the wrong, even as I'm just a knitting blogger barely anyone reads, and the only humans whose photos you see here are me....so yeah, not very diverse, I don't know.)

I don't know. This is the kind of thing that makes me throw up my hands a little and want to become a hermit. People are awful, yes, but not forgiving people for making missteps and then apologizing (because they maybe don't know, or are awkward, or are naive or are ignorant) is also kind of awful because people then will just double down, on the grounds that "if I can't win, why should I even try?"

And I don't even know. I knit to get away from the horrors of this world and so the whole thing just frustrates me and makes me sad.

You know what *else* is awfully "white"? Ecology. I know very few people of non-European heritage who are academic ecologists (and the few I do know, they are mostly people of part- Native or part-Hispanic heritage). Why? I don't know. I can guess a couple reasons but I suspect there are many. Some perhaps "nefarious" historically, some probably not so much (I once had a student who noted that the med schools and some of the pharma-research schools are eager to 'throw money at' anyone who shows promise and will diversify them and, yes....if you like or can even tolerate that kind of work, it's probably worth going into it for all the incentives. Ecology tends to be poorly-paid and in some endeavors (agency work) can be kind of precarious)

I don't know. This is one of those problems that people seem to be pressuring other people to "fix," when those other people may not have the power or expertise to "fix" it. (And, pessimistically - I suspect "people being awful to people not-like-them" is a problem that canNOT be fixed, short of the extinction of the human race)

(And yeah, there was some polarizing discussion on ITFF about this, and I kind of held my breath and also thanked God I was no longer a moderator on there, in case the discussion got acrimonious. I don't like arguing. I don't like dissension. And I get the people who say "but we need to stop being 'nice'" but I am not good at being not-nice in ways that are productive because I just start crying when people are yelling at each other. And it takes literally every emotional spoon I have to even express a strong opinion verbally. And I might delete all of this later, I don't even know.)

* And another dissention-source/argumentative thing. There was an article I ran across yesterday in The Guardian (no link, because I suspect now it was meant as clickbait, and you're free to google if you want), where a man in extreme-decluttering mode, apparently invoking The Sacred Name of Marie Kondo (though she would not approve of his methods, I think), rails against his kids having too much stuff, and:

" I’ve stolen cuddly toys from them as they’ve slept; will he notice his Kevin the Carrot family from Aldi is being picked off, one by one, at night? And then there were none."

And, oh my gosh, what a nightmare parent. What a terrible thing to do to your kids. You know what my guess would be in 20-odd years: that former-child will be buying up his or her long-lost Kevin the Carrot family off of eBay (or whatever it is we have in 2040) to replace the dimly-remembered ones that disappeared.

Kids remember.

I remember when I saw a Gumby - as a teen, mark you - I had a deep, visceral memory of the feel of that weird, semi-triangular-shaped top of his head in my mouth. And I asked my mom about it. And she laughed - yes, when I was very small, someone gave me one of those rubber Gumby toys. And I chewed on it, and the wires popped out, and so they decided it was best to take it away and replace it with something safer for me. But the fact that I didn't remember it until the very *moment* of seeing a Gumby t-shirt at, like, 14 - kids remember stuff. (I will also note that "I'm GUMBY, dammit" - the old SNL sketch - was another thing that brought Gumby back to the fore about that time).

But yeah. My parents never took toys from me EXCEPT in the rare case of safety concerns. My mother deplored my messy room but most of the time she was content to just close the door and ignore it. We never did the thing of " for every gift you get you must winnow out one existing thing." If toys were to be discarded or donated, we were consulted - in fact, nothing was pushed for donation unless we chose to dispose of it.

(The parent in that article also hints that when his kids go away for a vacation, he's going full "purgeageddon" and getting rid of most? all? It wasn't clear of their stuff, which is what leads me to wonder about clickbait).

But yeah. I think my mom remembered HER mother giving away some of her toys (times were different then; my mom's family had a lot less money to spend on things like toys, and my grandmother had grandchildren already when my mom was like 8 or 9.) And the memory of that kept her from ever being so draconian with my brother and me.

A related issue, mentioned on Twitter by Charles Hill, I suspect in response to my posting about the Guardian article and my comment that if someone tried to take MY stuffies while I was asleep, I would hunt them down and hurt them: How do I make my 14 year old daughter stop buying and sleeping with stuffed toys. MOST of the responses on that are from young adults (or not-so-young adults: one or two people about my age chimed in) basically saying "She's not hurting anyone, leave her alone." A few more brought in the (possibly judgey) issue of "Would you rather she slept with 14 year old boys?" (Though I would make the argument that almost no people under 21 are mature enough to handle sexual relationships appropriately; for that matter, there are plenty of over-21s who seem not to).

But yeah. A few others expanded and pointed out that having the stuffed toys around, for them, helped with their anxiety, and....you know, there's something to that. I made the comment a while back (in reference to that wonderful video about "A Den of Kittens") that having my stuffies around - particularly now that I've acquired a couple largish ones (Pfred, and Riesige, and Polaris) that I sleep better and more soundly - that somehow, the anxious-lizard part of my brain stops signalling "you are alone and have been cut from the pack and you are in danger of being eaten while you sleep" and I do wonder if there's something to that.

and even more than just the low-level contact of feeling (say) one of Pfred's hooves against my shoulder when I roll over, or something, when I'm having a bad night, or wake up from a bad dream, I can reach out and grab one of the smaller ones, and press it to my chest, and it is somewhat....calming.

And it seems, frankly, cruel to me to tell someone that because of their chronological age, they should be denied that comfort. And instead try to take comfort from "grown up" things - I don't know what that would be - diamond rings? a car? electronic gadgets?

And yes, I get that "normal" people have a partner or others to comfort them; some of us are denied that by circumstance and again, it seems cruel to take even the substitute for that from us. I don't even have a pet because (a) allergies to both cat dander and dog fur and (b) I am not home enough to care for one, and my house is not pet-proofed by any stretch of the imagination.

I've not become less-apologetic about much as I've aged, but I HAVE become less-apologetic about my toy-collecting (especially stuffies) habit, because I recognized something: it's a source of happiness and comfort to me, and it costs relatively little money (especially like now, when I'm holding off on buying anything new), and it doesn't hurt anyone. And it doesn't really have side effects, though maybe I need to at least run a few of the furry critters through the air-fluff cycle on the dryer to try to knock some of the dust mites out of them? (Yes, I am sure that is an issue, though dust mites seem to be the ONE thing I am not allergic to).

Though also: I will say I am cheered to see that I'm not the only one. I'm not the only person over the age of "majority" who still likes and feels a benefit from having a teddy bear or a bunny rabbit or (in my case, mostly Ponies) on the bed when they sleep.

Something we talked about at CWF last night came 'round to the "you see everyone else's highlight reel and only your own blooper reel" and that's something I keep telling myself. (I mentioned that I looked around at other adults, and I saw them managing in the world, and I saw myself going home some afternoons feeling defeated and getting into my pajamas at 5 pm and watching cartoons while I ate Nutella straight from the jar, and one woman laughed and said that if that was the *worst* thing I did, I was "in the rowboat to Heaven already" and while it's not the WORST thing I do, by far, it is one of those things where I look at myself and go "You are such a fraud, you aren't a real grown-up at all, you are not tough enough to handle being an adult" And yeah, I don't know.