Am barely functional this morning. I didn't sleep well last night. I almost started to cry when a colleague came in with the scan-trons from the assessment testing and reminded me that I was the person who does this now (because I'm the next-in-line with stats from the guy who "moved upstairs.") I don't have to do it IMMEDIATELY, in fact, I'm better off waiting for the rest of the testing to be done. But I have no idea what's expected of me and the guy who moved on left no directions and I am going to flail and probably fail.
And I also got to thinking this morning about how most of the people I really care about are older than I am, and so they'll die before I do, and I'll be stuck trying to make friends again, and I have such a hard time at that - it's hard for me to open up enough and trust someone, for example.
And little things are going wrong. The projector in that one classroom is still broken (the smartboard set up) so we have to use the laptop with an auxiliary projector and when I went to get the laptop it was out and if it's not back....I don't even know. By the time the previous class ends, there won't be time left for me to drive home and get my laptop, and trying to teach this with a chalkboard - if there's a room with a chalkboard I can even move to; there's no other way of presenting material in the smartboard room - that's almost more than I can deal with.
How do people DO this? I mean, I know people who lost spouses or lost kids and they seemed to keep soldiering on better than I am.
Update: at least the laptop got returned about 9:20 so that problem is solved. But I still feel like I have a band wrapped around my whole torso and squeezing me. I assume that's anxiety as I have no real other symptoms than feeling kind of sad and jump.
Addendum: could not get the laptop and the projector to communicate. The projector would only show the "open screen" of Windows 10 even when I had my file open and visible on the screen of the laptop. I spend 15 minutes trying everything I could think of to fix it. I couldn't fix it.
I give up. I almost cried in front of my class.
****
I called IT and chewed on them a little bit. Now the word is the problem will be fixed next week. I also sent around an e-mail asking if a particular room I suspect is free will be free, and I can move there, but crikey. This just feels like a lot. In normal times I'd be better able to cope but there's nothing normal about 2019.
I also started doing a little research and I wound up spilling one of the samples all down the side of my dress. The only saving grace is I had already scored the sample so no data was lost. The dress is my robin's-egg-blue Coldwater Creek knit dress (so: probably irreplaceable, it's a few years old and CC is only a catalog company any more) and so I ran home and threw it in the wash on cold with gentle soap and I really hope the alcohol in the preservative doesn't "eat" the spandex in the dress. (If it does, I'm going to buy another M Mac dress from Vermont Country Store as a consolation).
I hope this is just grief. I hope this clumsiness I've had these past couple weeks - tripping over my own feet, making more mistakes than normal on the piano, not being able to fasten the catch on one of my necklaces, and now this - is just my brain being a mess, and not that it's some horrific neuro problem starting to show up. (Though maybe the Universe is that random and that unkind)
Grief counseling is tomorrow. On the one hand it will be good to be able to just talk at and cry at someone who won't be judgemental and who I don't have to work with or go to church with regularly. On the other hand I'm kind of dreading having to talk and cry and whatever the emotional hangover may be. I've never really DONE therapy like this of any kind - the only other thing I ever did like this was talk to a campus counselor a very few times at Michigan when I was having problems with insomnia but I gave it up because eventually I started sleeping again.
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