But I scanned the posts today, and I saw this:
I love that image a lot. I know I try hard (and have on several occasions here) to force-fit the Ponies into the Gifts of the Spirit and the like, and yes, it's a secular show that specifically does not reference religion but....it does reference many virtues that are a part of my faith.
Nightmare Muffins wrote the post, but I don't know if they made the image. (I'm guessing those are stock vectors). If I find out who made the image, I'll attribute. But the image delights me and it gets at one of the things I see in Ponies - and in a few other bits of the entertainment I consume - that while it's not *explicitly* Christian or religious, there are things in it that you can imagine (as I think CS Lewis once said) "point that way" (in an essay where he argued it was okay to read "pagan" literature, because there were "good" pagans and some of the story lines contained morals that were applicable to all of humanity).
But yes. That's also a verse I kind of keep as a touchstone and I admit sometimes during the week I sort of forget that....I forget the idea of holding fast to that which is good, it becomes all too easy to see what's bad. (The world is a mess. It probably always has been so, but the combination of the 24-hour news cycle, my being an adult and so having no one to insulate me from it as my parents did when I was a child, and also my own immediate worries about the solvency of my university and the rising crime in my town). But there are good things, and I need to focus on them.
I once opined that I felt happier after watching "Star vs. The Forces of Evil" (which I haven't watched in a while; I hate the new tendency of some channels to schedule things randomly rather than at set times - I grew up with the idea of "appointment tv" and I can't get used to "must scan the listings every day to see if there's something I want" and I am SURE it is designed to benefit those who dvr because their systems will just grab the show whenever it airs...)
But I also feel happier after watching Ponies. Part of it is, yes, it's just cute and has nice colors and sometimes has funny little jokes in it. But also, I do think there is that deeper sense that it is a *moral* world, where there is right and wrong and they are fairly clearly delineated (at least more clearly in our fallen world) and there are also characters like Celestia and Twilight who can use magic sometimes to make things right....And I admit I still have some idealism left in me, because I wish our world was a bit more orderly, that people were a bit more inclined to be good, that there was a bit more "instant karma" for people who did the sort of petty-level mean stuff and clear retribution for those who actually harmed others...
(And I also wish I had a "squad" of numerous friends, like the Mane Six (now possibly Mane Seven). I never had many friends at one time in my life and I admit I'd like that experience....though then again, my experience with having more than one friend seemed to be that there were at least two people who either disliked each other or were jealous of the friendship that one had with another...and it got messy)
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My temporalis-muscle twitch seems to be better this morning; at least, I've only felt it once or twice since being up and yesterday it was happening several times an hour. Probably stress. My neck is hurting again and I kind of wish I had followed through on looking for a massage therapist back when I was having trouble with it before. (I don't have time to go through the rigamarole of that now, and also, I'm sure it's pretty expensive and I'm also pretty sure that without going through rigamarole at my doctor's, I won't be able to get it prescribed for me).
Yesterday was just a bad day because it was one of those "fit ten pounds of potatoes into a five-pound sack" day. And I was so tired and upset when I FINALLY got home that I didn't really relax, just faffed on the internet and...
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Another "good thing" I need to force myself to hold on to is my knitting. I need to try to make myself do that more in the evenings because working on stuff like that calms me down, and also, it makes me feel like my days are less a printer printing out paper and feeding it directly into a shredder - which is what a lot of academic work feels like these days: you do grading and your reward is more grading. And when you've presented a lecture, it's gone into the ether and you have to prepare another for the next day. And when you submit a manuscript, you don't hear anything FOREVER but doubtless when you are at your busiest, you get it back and it's either a rejection (which, I don't care, is still emotionally destroying) or it has a ton of revisions that have to be done RIGHT NOW in order for the journal issue not to be held up....
It made me happy winding off the yarn the other day but now I want to start on a million things, and I should not do that until I finish a few things.
Another reason I like knitting: barring some terrible error (and in a lot of cases there are quick fixes for those), it stays done. There's no having to make it new every morning like it is with teaching.
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I am tired, though. Tired of people. I've dealt with some rather needy people of late and that takes a lot out of me because I often feel like my emotional needs aren't being met. (And I don't know how to fix that.)
I'm telling myself if I can power through, I can have Saturday off and do what I want.
Confession: I am looking forward a lot to it being an acceptable time to put up Christmas decorations. Because once again, I feel like it's been a brutal year. I need a little lightness and prettyness and all that.
I'm considering looking around at various places and getting a "tall but slim" artificial tree - like, a 6' tree, but a skinny one - to replace my nearly-20-year-old short fake tree. I would put the tree in the curve of my piano and it would be nice to be able to fit ALL my ornaments on it, and maybe even have an excuse to buy a few more (or to repurpose, for a while, some of the many small toys I own into tree ornaments. And YES THAT'S TRADITIONAL, it was done in the 1920s.)
Part of me is going, "You really can't afford it and the old tree is still just fine" but part of me wants a new nicer tree....the one hang up will be storage; I will need something easy to put up, take down, and that doesn't require a huge area to store it.
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A lot of it is just that scheduling is Hard when you're an adult and have a lot to do. I get up usually around 4:30 to have time to work out (sometimes earlier, if I wake earlier). I get over here to work at 7. I am usually here until 3 or 4....and when I get home, there's piano practice to be done and usually my daily work on Duolingo and I'm tired and I have to think about fixing dinner and....often by 8:30 I'm tired enough I just want to go to bed, and even if I don't want to, I do by 9:30 or so because I know I need that sleep for the next day. And a lot of the time, I admit it feels kind of like "survival mode," where I'm doing what I have to get done and not getting to what I want to do, and I don't like that.
How does a person fix that? Is it that other people just drop some responsibilities? Or is every adult out there in survival-mode and fun and hobbies are mostly a lie? I don't know any more.
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