something I've realized

 Today was a busy day. I collected a take home exam (and managed to grade them all between classes and meetings), met with and heard the talks by a job candidate, taught two of my three classes scheduled (the third one, we already finished the material, so I told them to work on their final papers instead). 

And mid afternoon, just after 4, as I was finishing the grading, I thought, "I feel really sad. This isn't good"

(Especially considering I kind of agreed to go out to the group dinner tonight with the job candidate)

And then I realized: you felt this before. You felt this when you wrote the exam (which is a very mentally intensive task). Apparently now a new thing for me is when I use my brain too much in a day it makes me sad.

This is suboptimal.

I mean, there are a lot of sad-making things out in the world - the future is a bit alarming. And I still have a long list of things to try to get done this week. And I once again ran across this quotation from Anthony Bourdain and felt sad again that often the interesting and fundamentally kind people leave us early, and the unkind people are always with us:

“Have dinner tonight at a local restaurant. Order the cream sauce. Have a cold beer at 4pm in a nearly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been before. Listen to someone who, at first glance, seems like you have nothing in common.

Try the rare steak. Savor an oyster. Order a negroni. Order two. Open yourself up to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you — but toast them anyway.

Eat slowly. Tip your server well. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. And enjoy every second of it.”

And yes, it's unlikely I'd ever have a cold beer in a nearly empty bar - I dislike beer and feel unwelcome in bars. But I do eat at local restaurants (more often lunch than dinner). I try to understand the people around me. And I do tip my servers well, waiting tables is hard work.

But I do struggle to enjoy every second, and I think a lot of it is that I am just tired a lot. I don't know if I've lost some of my ability to "do" like I once had (age) or if I am just not sleeping enough or if the pandemic did break something in me that won't heal (and there are other bits of News of the World that remind me that meritocracy was a myth, and that I wasn't as "gifted" as I was told I was as a student, and that trying to be a fundamentally decent person probably won't get you far in this world and might even actively hurt you)

Maybe I'll feel better when I finish the gift mitts. Or when I get a little time to relax, I don't know.  Tomorrow is an easier teaching day (one class) but I need to look at one of my finals and fundamentally rewrite big chunks of it (didn't cover some of the material) and also prepare the review guides for the finals in the other classes. And I have to print out my tickets, I keep forgetting that, and check the list of things I need to take and think about packing. And start thinking about moving my supplies for labs somewhere before the construction begins. 

But at least now I know when I feel inexplicably sad after a long day, it is likely just being tired.

Heh - I remember when I was a kid once and I was sad and crying about something and someone asked me what was wrong, and I responded "oh, I'm just tired" which was an oddly adult thing for me to say at like six, but I did. (And now I wonder if I either heard one of my parents say it about me to someone else when I was crying over an actual slight, or if maybe my mom said it on one of the very rare instances when I saw her crying). But yeah. I'm just tired.