Longing for cozy

These are just busy times, I guess. I would like for them to be less busy. I would like to have a few long afternoons at home, sitting with my feet up, either reading or knitting or SOMETHING, with a cup of hot tea at my elbow and quiet music and a chance just to relax.

I don't know. I've been thinking a lot lately about life and stuff. I guess losing people you are close to does that. Especially losing my dad; more than any experience in my life it really brought home the "someday you are going to die, too" greeblies and I admit a lot of times this fall I've been doing one of the many things I do more out of a sense of obligation than a sense of joy, and I've wondered: "You're spending your life-energy and your limited time on THIS?"

It's kind of the reverse of that Shiba Inu I posted the other day, where the dog was saying something like "If you enjoyed the time you 'wasted'....it wasn't a waste of time." But in this case: if you're being productive but it doesn't make you happy, how productive is it, really?

Oh, I know, I know: long training has taught me that sometimes you have no choice, and we live in A Society, and so as a result, if you're a remotely-responsible adult, you do stuff you'd rather not because it needs to be done. I can't go all "Eat, Pray, Love" and blithely drop my responsibilities - what would other people think? and more importantly: I rage when people "flake" on me, so I should not do it to others.

But yeah. I would love to have more downtime. And not downtime where I am thinking of other stuff I could/should be doing.

And I want to start something new, or at least pick up one of my "selfish" projects, but I feel duty bound to finish the Christmas socks for my mom: one pair is knit and I'm maybe 1/4 of the way into the second pair. I might make a third pair, I don't know. But I really do want to start a new project, or at least have a  "new to me now" project of one I've not worked on for a while.

I also find myself deeply tempted to go to Loopy Ewe or another favorite yarn-site and just buy myself a (as I said on Twitter) crapton of random yarn, partly because I NEVER get to go to Rhinebeck and I feel sorry for myself about that, partly because I've read about some small dyers closing up shop these past few years and wondering - is there a future for yarn?

Is there a future for hobbies? I hope there is. I remember a few years ago when I walked into the big JoAnn's and found most of their craft-books section had been replaced by coloring-books-for-adults and felt a slight bit of despair - I couldn't decide whether it was "coloring books are cheaper to make because no technical editing, and also people will use them up and need to buy more" or, more insidiously, "Even the craft stores are admitting none of us have the time and energy to make stuff any more, and the best we can manage in the few moments of free time is a little coloring"

It's changed back - there are still coloring books but now they've also moved their magazines there - but still, yeah. I find I have a lot less time to knit/sew than I once did, and I don't know what it is. Maybe I spend too much time online in the evenings, though I can often do that and knit at the same time (and I need even the limited interactions from hanging out on Twitter or the Ravelry groups). Or if it's that I'm remembering before I had the piano and the times I didn't try to fit an hour of practice into each day. (Don't get me wrong: I enjoy it, and I like feeling like I am getting better at it, it's just....I'd like more time for other things too). Or if indeed, there's been "creep"of what we must do as faculty....there are many more days when I'm still up here at 4:30 or 5 pm (after coming in at 7 am) than there once were. And I remember a time when I had Tuesdays totally off - the fall I bought my house, some days I stayed home there and scraped and painted and worked on stuff in the house. And my colleagues knew where I was if they needed me, I remember once my department chair even driving over there with some paperwork for me to sign because he didn't want to make me come up to campus...but yes, sometimes it does feel like there are a lot more "asks" on my time than there once were. (And of course I have more obligations at church since we split and are so small now. Not that I dislike them, it's just, again....I wish I had more time).

And I do find myself wondering, if I get time "at the end" - lying in a hospital bed or whatever, and reflecting on what my life was, maybe doing a sort of last-ever Examen...what will I think of as the "spirit of Consolation" from my life, and what will I think of as the "spirit of Desolation"?

I admit right now a lot of the "desolation" comes from some of the stuff I have to do (like the attendance reports) that feel like "busywork" - all I ever hear back on them are complaints from students saying I recorded them as being absent one more day than they were, never any kind of "we are looking in to why this student has been absent 1/3 of the time and are getting them help" from TPTB that I send them on to. And at that - I've had students come and claim they "never knew" that they had so many absences or that their grades were so low. And so I often feel I am required to be aware of all these unpleasant things, which aren't really my responsibility (I get my own self to class every day), and which the people who have some responsibility some times ignore.

At work, I am happiest, I guess, when I am in the lab or out in the field with students. That's when you see more of people's personalities and what they can do; sometimes students who do not do that well on exams turn out to have outstanding lab technique, and somehow that makes you feel better. Or when I'm preparing something that matters to me or interests me. Sometimes analyzing data or writing.

Off work, the things that make me happy these days: bell choir, practicing piano when I'm not having to do it with one eye on the clock (having to get off to work or back to work after lunch), working on a quilt top or a knitting project when I have long hours open (and again: am not over-tired from the day and not doing it with one eye on the clock so I get to bed at a decent hour). Cooking, again, when I'm not pressed for time.

Actually, a lot of my happiness comes down to: can I work on one thing without having to consider the many other things I feel I must do?

And I'm not sure how to get that, at least not during a working-full-time-and-then-some career.

Retirement, I suppose, though more and more, I wonder about that. Because what happens if the market utterly crashes? Most of my retirement money (TIAA-CREF, a Roth IRA, even my state's teacher's-pension fund) are tied to how investments do, and if we have another 2008 or worse....well, that means I keep on working. And also, we're not promised even another day of life (one of the things I low-level raged over when Charles Hill died was that he didn't get a chance to enjoy even Day 1 of the retirement he had put in for at the end of this year). And so I think it behooves us to be happy now....but it seems so much of how life now is structured works against that.

And I realize I am even talking from a position of unusual privilege: I can take most Saturdays off (and have done so, this fall); I don't have to skip church because I'm scheduled to come in to work. I have enough money to meet my needs with the one primary job, and I have good healthcare thanks to the health insurance it provides, and while I have some annoying bureaucratic things to deal with, it's not the nightmare that dealing with SNAP and Unemployment and SSI and everything else is for some people.

But yeah. One of the things I object to these days it the push to do more, be more, make more money (usually for someone else, though), to take on more and more tasks. There was someone posting on Ask MeFi this morning about "how do I break out of it" and they referred to it as "Capitalism" and while I am NOT anticapitalist in the way many (most?) MeFites seem to be*, I will say there are things I look at at what has happened to "capitalism" here in recent years and am not really very happy....the idea, for example, of most entertainment "properties" being owned by 2 or 3 companies, and "streaming" basically re-inventing cable because everyone wants their own take, so they pull their programming off other streaming services and create a new one, and the idea of keeping up with the Joneses but on steroids. (I saw someone go off on a rant about "don't push this style of shoe with this name until billionaires are gone" and I looked up the shoe and it cost almost $400 and I have never paid more than $150 for even a pair of field boots....and the rant wasn't about what they cost but about the style and the name....). And just EVERYTHING. I know part of this is that post-tenure review next spring is looming in the back of my head, and so I am also buying into the "more, better, bigger, more prestigious" mindset as well, and it's not even because I WANT it, it's because what I WANT is a post-tenure review that fundamentally says "you're fine; keep on keepin' on" and I know the only way to have even a prayer of getting that is the "more, more, more" thing.

I don't know. Sometimes it does seem adulthood is a plot to make us do things we'd rather not do just to have a  hope of getting what we want.

(*And some of the responses, yikes. Telling the person to travel overseas to poorer countries so they appreciate what they have, or to take on 'social justice work' - which is just another form of the pressure to 'do more' that they wanted to resist. But it does seem the "why don't you just" is strong in many people, where the "just" is telling the person to load up their life with MORE things that won't make them happy)

But yes. What I really want some days is just to be able to sit down and do something, ONE THING, for like an hour, and not think about all the other things I'm expected to do. Or better: have a whole entire day of nothing I MUST do and just be able to, I don't know, go into my sewing room and finish that quilt top, or pull out my long-stalled grey sweater and knit on it, or re-organize my yarn room. (That might also help fight the urge to buy All The Yarn, reminding myself of what I have and also going "oh, I wanted to start this project!" and maybe just start a thing or two...)