Guess it's good

 I guess it's good I'm going out today for what might be the last big trip for a long time.

I'm feeling the loneliness and isolation of all this extra hard this morning. A couple of friendly mutuals apparently had to deactivate for personal reasons, and my abandonment issues are all inflamed. I'm again worrying: will I ever make friends again? Or will I just continue to lose existing friends until I am all alone? If this pandemic is ever over, could I HIRE people to be my friends, maybe? Maybe that's what it would take?

I don't know. I'm sure part of this is being kind of burnt out from the first busy week, and having a student who tested positive and having to deal with THAT and also the being-videoed for an eventual VR lab (a little too little and too late, but whatever) and I was on campus from just before 8 until after 5 yesterday, but I didn't really DO anything meaningful to me. 

I don't know. I'm feeling the "third quarter phenomenon" hard today but I also am terrified it's really not even the end of the first quarter yet, and I've got YEARS more of this to endure. (If I can. Some days I really wonder. I read a news story about a person in a nursing home who just started refusing food and drink and saying "I can't do this any more" until he died and yeah, I have days where I say "I can't do this any more" but I do, somehow, keep doing it)

I'm hoping getting inside the JoAnn's and also getting better grocery shopping at the Kroger will help. But right now I'm just lonely. I am planning on going in and working on Monday (we are given Martin Luther King, Jr. day off, and most years there are community-service projects. I guess there are "virtual" ones this year but I can't with "virtual" anything any more) and try to write more on my manuscript. I don't know if that will help. I hope it does. 

I was feeling so good at the start of this week, and now my mood has plummeted. Maybe this is just a thing now? More mood swings than normal? I don't know. 

I also dreamed last night about some of the people I have lost recently and I HATE that. I want it to stop. I don't care if they're "visiting" me or if it's evidence how much I cared about them or what, it makes me wake up sad and then it's harder now to shake that sadness than in the before-times when there were more things to distract me and more people around. 

I'm also more upset than I should be over the news of the alleged "vaccine stockpile" being a giant lie. I mean, I know people in politics always lie. But I was so hopeful there was going to be a lot of vaccine out there and it would just take a little bit of the logistics falling into place. But now? Who knows? My mom is something like 4200 in line to get vaccinated in her county; for me, there's no potential date given which makes me wonder if I'll even be able to get vaccinated this year, or if I have to drag on endlessly. (In the future, people will ask me: "Why won't you trust us?" and I will tell them, "2020 burned through my ability to trust." It was never good to begin with, but 2020 into this year has just made it far worse in terms of my assuming I will get screwed over, or forgotten, or if I break ONE rule the full weight of enforcement will come down on my head even though other people break that rule without consequence). 

I dunno. Many years ago I wrote about how I was discouraged and wished I had a Clarence or a fairy godmother or a magic unicorn to console me in some way....and I had no idea, no idea at all. My life was so much better then than it is now, and I was complaining about it.

Here's hoping I find something nice at the JoAnn's to cheer me up, and can get nice food at the Kroger's.