* Got the sweater onto the larger needles (the ribbing is done) and started the body pattern. But I'm not as happy as I might have been this evening, because:
* The ONPS advertised that they were broadcasting their meeting for tonight, and since AAUW cancelled, I figured "hey, I can watch the talk!" Went to the site at the appointed time, nothing....turns out the university campus (in OKC) they were using must have had their tech guys go home for the day and something went wrong. I stuck around for a half hour of watching silent guys try to fix it (I sent them a message saying there was no sound, they said they were working on it) but finally noped out after I got too upset with it.
I was looking forward to it! It was something that would be intellectually stimulating. I feel like my brain is DYING because all I do is get my work done and then come home and watch reruns on tv - literally everything I watch other than news is re-runs, and the news is so horrifically bad it's not worth watching; I'd rather not be apprised of the slow descent of the world into chaos. I don't feel like paying for Netflix or any of the other streaming services that might have a tiny bit of educational content, and there's nothing educational on cable.
And I don't have the volition to seek things out. I need things that are a low activation energy to get involved in - I don't want to do twenty minutes of searching online for something.
I was surprised at how upset I was but.....there have been so many disappointments in this and it's just hard to weather yet another one.
And no, I was too tired to read. Sometimes you just want to LISTEN instead of having to make written words make sense in your head. I find it harder to read these days which is another thing that worries me.
* Also half my class showed up virtually rather than in person today. As far as I can determine, I still have two people on quarantine; the rest just decided not to come in. I made a big fat hairy deal about "THE EXAM IS STILL IN PERSON" but softened it with "e-mail me if you are quarantining, we will work something out" but I am d....d if I will spend a couple hours of my life wrestling the exam I wrote in Word today into BlackBoard just so people can cheat their way through it (which I noticed with past online exams, which is why I went back to in person, where I can at least give people the hairy eyeball as they work.
* And yeah, yeah, I know: I still have it better than most people in this. I'm not an MD having to intubate people. I'm not a grocery worker getting screamed at by someone. I'm not a school board member having to deal with enraged parents across the whole political spectrum. But I'm tired and I'm sad and I feel like I gave up a lot for very little return.
* Part of this is it's the height of allergy season for me and it could be that I'm feeling stupid because of allergies but it does worry me when I find myself reading a sentence multiple times to make sense of it, or I make lots of typos when I type, because I worry it's a symptom of something progressive and irreversible. Also it's really hot out and when it's hot like this I get cabin fever worse than I do in winter - even when I lived in Michigan when winter was actually cold and messy.
* Despite that, I MIGHT go up to Chickasaw NRA on Monday (my sole Federal Holiday off for this semester). It's going to be hot but if I leave early I could probably do easy hikes for a couple hours before it got too hot. And I could check out the nature center gift shop - I think they had hiking-staff badges and now that I brought the staff my dad bought for little me back around 1975 back home with me, I want to add badges from places I've been. (I may order one from the Friends of Cuyahoga Valley National Park). Also I could go to the tea and spice shop up there (if they're open) and the Chickasaw (tribal) visitor's center which was nice in itself (had art displays and a small bookstore).
* But I just feel like....I don't know. I want something but I don't know what. I very much want the pandemic to be over but at the same time I'm slowly realizing with horror it will never be over in the sense I want it to be: it will eventually be safer to circulate, but probably every fall and winter from now on there will be outbreaks, and we'll probably be begged to mask up for a few months a year (which the few of us anxious, civic-minded chumps will do, and get laughed at for doing) and there may have to be a "virus forecast" like weather forecasts to help us decide if it's safe to circulate widely or not. And probably much travel is off the table for me forever now. And I don't know how to replace some of the things I've lost or the people I've lost and I just feel like my life is a lot smaller now.
I want to trust there will be good things in the future, things worth going back out for, but I have no evidence to suggest that to me at the moment. I've realized just how small and limited my town is - 20 pot dispensaries but no bookstore, nowhere much doing outdoor dining, and I have to drive an hour's round trip for a large nice supermarket. I don't WANT to have to move away when I retire but I might, though I don't know where I'd go that I could afford a decent place to live.
* Also, I'm a little.....I don't know if angry is the right word? Because it was me being me and misinterpreting? But someone I kinda cared about dumped a BIG piece of their personal life-news on me, and said in the e-mail, "we should get together for lunch at somewhere where we can eat outside some time" and I was like "cool, give me a week to get classes shaken down" and now they're just kind of ghosting me, and I don't know if (a) they're overwhelmed like a lot of us are, (b) they're embarrassed about having revealed the big personal thing to someone who was probably at best a friendly acquaintance but not a deep friend or (c) the "let's do lunch" was once again a polite kiss-off and my literal-minded self interpreted it as an invitation, and it wasn't, and once again I feel like "people I thought cared about me really don't"
I don't know. I wish people wouldn't use 'let's go get lunch some time' or 'let's go for a drink' as code for "well, bye for now, I'll e-mail you again some time" because I ALWAYS over interpret it.
I've e-mailed this person since but it's just kind of ... technical stuff and I made no reference to the invitation in case it was a polite kiss-off, and they've not mentioned it, so, okay then.
* But I can tell my feelings are very raw and close to the surface and I've been a lot more forward about things in class than I was in the before times (like: "You might not realize it but it takes quite a few hours to convert an exam to BlackBoard format, and frankly, at this point in the pandemic I no longer have the bandwidth to do that") and I don't know if I'm saying too much or not but I also don't want to just break down crying in class, which might be the other option.
* I need to learn how to take disappointment again without letting it ruin my whole evening. I used to be better at this. But not being able to see that talk really threw me for a loop; it would have felt like a tiny bit of human connection, but I don't even get that.
now I understand why hermits get weird and become unable to reintegrate with society.
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