Grump o matic

Not in a good mood today, for a number of reasons:

* I didn't speak to another single human being yesterday. Came in, worked on my teaching stuff, went home, ate lunch, came back for a while. The secretary was out when I was passing through, none of my other colleagues were around. I didn't go to a store or anything. Except for "talking" with strangers on the Internet, I had no other communication yesterday.

* And now today, EVERYONE needs me for EVERYTHING. CIDT wants our course syllabi for the fall - ALREADY - even though some departments don't have their schedules finalized yet. Of course most people are off having fun during the summer so I don't feel any great obligation to do it today. A scholarship recipient wants more paperwork that I don't have. And, and, and.

* Got the proofs of my Prairie Conference paper, which should be a GOOD thing, except either the copy-editor or the copy-editing software cut off the last third of my Literature Cited, and then the human copy-editor is nagging at me about "Why did you leave those sources out" and so I am having to go back and manually put them in, and I do not know a lot about using Adobe Acrobat, and it's also a giant pain because the typeface they WANT to use is one my old machine doesn't support, so it's defaulting to a typeface called Minion, which looks slightly different. I'm just going to do it the best I can and e-mail the head editor back with fundamentally "if this isn't good enough then the copy editor needs to clean it up" especially since I think it was HIS mistake and not mine that deleted the sources.

* This article (warning: swears) sums up a lot about how I feel about summer: especially the left-behind, lonely, "everyone else is having fun" feeling. I am not good at "doing" summer fun - I am uncomfortable (both physically - because of spandex - and psychologically - because I have too many fat rolls and am in general too big) in a swimsuit, I don't like crowds, I don't like noise, I don't like standing around out in the heat (I do fieldwork, but that's different; it's something useful, and I can often schedule it for a cooler part of the day).

And I think her point about how the fall/winter holidays are often more extended-family oriented but in the summer it's often more "couples" activities, and for those of us who are uncoupled - yeah, we often wind up left behind.

It's also just hot. I don't like it when it's hot. I'm already sick of all my thin lightweight dresses.

* I finished Paddington's Garden last night but am instantly dissatisfied with it: I ran short on yarn, I could see that coming, so I didn't do the last two rows (a row of eyelets and a row of garter). It's not symmetrical in the way it should be. I also had to find a piece of scrap yarn that kind of matched to finish the bind off. So not only do I have ends I will have to carefully weave in before blocking, but there is a tiny bit of the bind off that is a different shade of pink. Maybe no one else will ever notice (I joked "don't @ me, I'm a tetrachromat" on Twitter, and I really do think I am - I took an online test once that suggested I might be - so color matching is a big thing to me) but I will and it is enough to bug me.

* And it's been loud in my neighborhood. I didn't sleep well last night because of people shooting off fireworks. I tell myself, "Let them have their fun, it's only a couple of days" but sleep is so important to me - doubly so in the summer, when I already sleep badly - that it makes me cranky. (And no, no matter how hard I try, I can't sleep during the day, unless I get sick, and I don't want to risk screwing up my sleep schedule anyway)

And also, yeah, maybe the slightly selfish, slightly jealous feeling I alluded to above - someone else is having fun that I am unable to have sort of thing. Oh, I have my own fun, but it's a different, quieter fun, and I admit, sometimes I wish I were included on some of those things, invited to some parties (even if I might only hang around for an hour or so and then make up some excuse to leave) and I'm sure part of it is the legacy of a kid who felt Excluded: it's really easy to imagine everyone else is having a lot of fun when you're not there to witness it.


* Also having some body-dysmorphic issues. In short, I feel fat. Well, I am, kind of, but in the heat it feels worse than normally, and I come to hate my thighs and my gut and my bustline and everything else and wish that I were one of those tiny, sylphlike women (never mind that I need physical strength to do what I do). And yes, I know: I should diet and do even more exercise and maybe I'd lose some of that fat. But that's hard and miserable too - working out in this humidity is no joke. And as for food - I find myself wanting to "eat my feelings" more in the summer. I know it's partly the combination of loneliness/feeling everyone else is out having lots of fun/long hours alone thing, but it's also hard. (I've been trying to do the "fast between about 7 pm and 7 am thing, on the grounds that some studies have shown eating an early dinner and then fasting all night - at least 12 hours - is beneficial for your metabolism). And that's hard too.

So anyway. The part of me that has been too well-instructed in Sunday school and the like is yelling at me that I'm being ungrateful - that, for one thing, I have a body that more-or-less works properly, and I'm not trapped in a cave a mile underground, and I'm not in an abusive relationship which would be worse then being alone, but that only seems to add to Pity, Party of One.

* The dog attack that happened in May, a couple cities over, where a woman was killed? No charges are going to be filed. Because everyone is saying the dogs were strays so apparently there's no responsible party (or, everyone's CLAIMING the dogs were strays). I don't know which seems worse to me: the idea that there are random packs of dogs that are capable of being violent enough to kill a person (and they were not big dogs: most were dachshund mixes, one was a collie mix) rather than violent dogs that a horrible person especially trained for that. Also, part of me is wondering if the case wasn't quite pursued so hard after they found out the victim had a high level of alcohol in her blood. That's sad, but that's often how it goes.

When I pulled out of the drive this morning there were three large-ish dogs running around. They had collars on (and one had one of those doggie-bandanas) so I assume Not Strays but I still don't like loose dogs because I don't trust ANY dog I don't know. It's one thing to encounter a dog on a leash and their owner say "Oh, she's friendly, she likes to be petted" or even "He's kind of shy so he might bark at you but I have him" and totally another to see dogs running around and not know - friendly? Not friendly? Friendly but prone to jump on you? (I don't like it when big dogs do that. I don't mind my brother's dog coming up to me and putting his paws on my knee to solicit pats, but I don't like a dog that's as tall as I am when it stands on its hind legs trying to paw and jump on me)