Wednesday evening things

 * Working on the second sleeve for the sweater, mostly. But I also kind of want to start a pair of simple socks - I have put aside (not taken to the storage unit) some yarn with the idea that would be my projects until the house-stuff is done and I can consider refilling my storage areas. 

* When I was driving to wal-mart today (I had to go, I needed some things they sold that Pruett's doesn't carry), I came up to a stoplight. It was red for me, so I stopped and waited. Then it turned green. I was just about to go when a woman TORE through on the red - like five seconds after it had changed, I didn't even see her coming. Luckily I had not started up yet, or I would have hit her. 

But when she passed, she gave me a LOOK. Maybe I over-interpret things, but it felt a lot as if she was looking at me and going “I am taking my turn NOW, wench.”                                          

And it made me sad. Yes, I was glad I wasn’t a leadfoot and almost certainly she’d have been found in the wrong, but the whole agony (and possibility of one of us being injured).        

But also, it does seem to me from what I’ve observed is that people are getting meaner and more selfish – sometimes dangerously so.
Also, again, I didn’t have a whole lot of interactions with people today, so that one kind of weighs on my heart.

* I don’t want to think that people are getting meaner or more selfish but some days it sure feels like it. And I’m not “enough” to counteract that by trying to be kind – more and more I feel like my efforts are like a drop of fresh water in the salty ocean – it changes nothing at all. I can’t be otherwise; I’m not made that way, but it’s discouraging.

*The other night I watched the finale of “Amphibia,” a cartoon I had been watching. I’ve noticed that some “adventure type” cartoons now have a set story arc- two or three seasons and it wraps up. (For those unfamiliar: a group of middle-school friends, all girls, are transported to another dimension via a magic box. The dimension is a world divided into three nations: frogs, toads, and newts. There are other creatures (olms, and I think axolotls? But they are much less common and don’t have their own country. The first season is mostly a fish-out-of-water comedy with some attempts to figure out the magic of the box to get Anne back home, the second season is the frog family who takes her in being transported to earth, so a fish out of water story on the other foot, so to speak – but things get progressively more adventuresome in the later seasons, ending with an attack on Earth.)

The final episode was pretty epic; at one point I said “oh, so they’re gonna let [sympathetic character] die?” which is really weird for Disney. But it wasn’t that….

(spoilers after here)

Anyway: the war is resolved, the big-baddie repents and realizes he was wrong, they figure out how to get the girls back home forever – but at the expense of breaking the link between the worlds, meaning the girls and the various amphibian friends they made would never see each other again. But they decide they must return home, and so there are tearful farewells.

And then it jumps forward a decade or so (in this world, the amphibians have a basically human lifespan/pattern of development – so a pollywog character in the series has become a young teen frog). The amphibian world is at peace and things are better than they were, the “kids” have grown up and are leading their lives. And then we go to the human world, and we see two of the girls meeting up again at the airport after having “grown apart during college”

And they are heading to see Anne, at her job – at a natural history museum; she has become a herpetologist (I wonder how many kids will have learned that word from this show). And they meet up, hug, and….roll credits.

I mean, I’m sort of sad the show is over (but if it’s typical of Disney, they’ll re-run it, and I’ll be able to eventually fill in the episodes I missed) but they ended it in a nice way – no sympathetic characters died, everyone’s story arc more or less wrapped up nicely. It was sort of a satisfying ending – a lot of shows, once upon a time, just got cancelled and ended and you never had closure on them.

*I think one of the reasons I like shows like this is that it extends the possibility of a friend group, or found-family, or whatever. And a lot of days, especially this summer when most of my colleagues are off-campus, I feel very much that I am marooned here all alone.

It’s weird. Before the pandemic I was able to happily spend long periods alone; I looked forward to coming home on Friday night and not have to be on campus again until Monday. But now I often find myself delaying coming home from the office, even if I’m not working over there and no one else is there (when I left this afternoon, mine was the only car in the lot, and I saw campus police pull in – I think they were checking on why my car might be there – but they drove off when they saw me leave the building and lock it up and head toward my car). I think the pandemic summer of 2020 broke my ability to be alone happily, because this summer (weirdly more than in 2021), I am having big “summer 2020” feelings again – when I spend most of the summer seated at my desk at home, reading books with the 25-minute Pomodoro timer running on my computer to force me to stay on track. And I don’t know where that melancholy comes from. (Well, maybe: It’s unappealing to leave town because of all the construction, and I have to save my money for the work on my house, and I also should not be bringing any more stuff into the house – so no antiquing or similar – without getting rid of an equal or greater amount of stuff)

I don’t know. SOMETHING is going to have to change before I retire in about a decade because existing like this every day will not keep me alive as long as I originally intended. (Hopefully by then covid will have receded as a threat, and there won’t be anything else to have replaced it, so I can freely do volunteer work and also go around to different places).

But yes: I don’t exactly have a friend group at the same “place” in life as I am, and I miss that. It’s hard stitching together a feeling of being connected to humanity from online interactions or stuff like the few words exchanged with the checkout person at the grocery store. I’m sure I’m not the only person on Earth with this issue (though some days it feels like I am.)