I found it....

I've commented before on how Peanuts comic strips have kind of influenced my psyche, because I read them A LOT growing up. (they were in the daily paper - back then, in the original 70s and 80s runs of the strips. But also, I had books of the older strips).

And I had been thinking off and on this fall, while I stare into the void*, of an older strip with Sally, where she is doing something, perfectly content, and suddenly starts crying. Someone (I remembered it as her older brother, but it was actually Linus) runs up to her and asks her what's wrong, and she responds

"Suddenly, it all seemed so futile!"

(*I think that's just something I have to get comfortable with now. It's not leaving me. Some days I can more or less ignore it but other days, the whole REMEMBER THOU ART MORTAL thing kind of screams in my face all day)


And yeah, I get that the humor is this: what doe this little kid, in an intact, for-all-appearances-loving family, in a safe town, have to worry about futility? But for me it strikes closer to the bone because I FEEL Sally in this; like I said, a lot of days The Void is kind of screaming in my ears about how everyone I love or have loved is going to die, and that includes me some day, and that the good I do today can easily be erased tomorrow, and even then, even if it isn't, it's pointlessly small in the face of the larger bad that others with more influence than I have do....

But yeah. Sally, I feel you, sis:

I suppose the answer is to just accept the futility and move on, and to strive to be happy, and to ignore it. Some days I am better at that than others. Today is slightly melancholy, thinking of the phone call of last night (I don't like hearing my mom, who is immeasurably stronger than I am, on the verge of tears) and also I'm doing one of the administrative tasks devolved onto us that we're "supposed" to do (I presume we get a nastygram if we don't) but which never seem to help anything.....all I hear are complaints about "but my grade shouldn't be that low" or "you recorded the wrong number of absences for me" and never a "hey, can I come in and get some tutoring? I need to bring up my grade"

At least the weekend is coming...