Almost done semester

Yesterday afternoon and evening was almost entirely spent grading.

The good news is the lab books are all graded (and all of them made it in on time). Also all the ecology papers came in ON TIME. Totally on time. Like, everyone had theirs ready at the start of class.("That's an academy record!" - well, not quite, but it's been a number of semesters before I had a class that did that, and had NO ONE claiming they didn't know the deadline was the deadline.)

And yeah, it's kind of sad how much my expectations have contracted that I'm happy stuff is turned in on time, but it is what it is.

My allergies are AWFUL this morning. I couldn't get my eyes to focus for a good fifteen minutes after I got up (this is a common problem for me with allergies, I think it's inflammation). I feel extremely tired - I didn't sleep well, I kept waking up. First, it was because one of the terrible calluses on my heel started itching, so I got up and put lotion on it. Then it was that I had what felt like a migraine starting. I should have taken something, but I felt like "Meh, maybe if I get back to sleep...." (I wound up taking something this morning).

And I had bad dreams. Part of it's just anxiety over getting everything done, part of it is being worn out. Part of it is watching the news*. In one dream I was in a church - it wasn't the one I currently belong to, it was kind of a mishmash (architecturally) of all the churches I have belonged to in my life. People were coming in. At first we were welcoming them in, then they started pulling the crosses and artwork off the walls, and carrying out everything that could be picked up, and when someone asked them what was up, they essentially told us to shut up or they'd hurt us. (No, it wasn't looting, it was more like, I don't know, more like when an invading army takes the stuff out of a museum to take back to their country. Well, I guess that's looting, but not looting like we think of looting in the modern US)  And then I wound up sitting across from some guy with crazy eyes who kept staring at me. (I am quite sure this is because in my half-watching of the news as I graded, there was the mug shot of James Holmes shown, the crazy-eyed guy looked a lot like him)

The unsettling thing is that the dream took what has always been one of my 'safe' places and made it 'unsafe' in a way that bothers me very much - the vague threats, the being told "we will hurt you if you speak out about this," the being stared at by someone who might or might not be a threat...

I'm really ready either to not dream, or to have dreams about less-unsettling things.


(*Two wrongs NEVER make a right, no matter how much the human race tries to disprove that truism. And that's all I have to say about that.)

I'm still working on the hat. I dunno. In times like this I cling to those little projects....I've done much of my charity knitting (such as it is, I have a still-unfinished Red Scarf that I started a couple years back) in response to some awful world news, either a giant natural disaster or (more commonly) some kind of human awfulness. And I cling to these things as some kind of evidence that there's a different way to be, that a person can try to do something, however small, that might make someone else's life better. (I don't know. Maybe the hat I knit will be totally rejected. But at least I'm trying, right?)

There's a saying, sort of based on something Therese of Lisieux said, that every loving act increases the balance of love in the universe and I desperately want to believe that, that by ordinary people doing loving things and making even little sacrifices (donating some money to the Nepal recovery effort, taking part in a Race for the Cure race, going to visit someone in the hospital, volunteering at a school) can in some way fight against the giant cloud - almost like IT from A Wrinkle In Time - that seems bent on consuming humans. (I see it largely as selfishness, I realize IT was different.). We aren't stars that can give up our lives to fight IT, but maybe we can each do something. I don't know. I suppose the only way we can fight selfishness is to fight it within ourselves.