Wednesday midday things

* I ran across the story about Arepo's god again today. I don't know the real name of the author(s). It's....a sad story in its way (it made me cry, re-reading it, but then, lots of things make me cry these days) but also, I like it. There's a....niceness....to it. And a reminder: that sometimes "useless" things have their value. (Somedays I feel a certain uselessness to everything I do).

If I only had more time. I probably need to bake some bread, or get out and work in my garden (if it ever cools down), or do more things that are the old, old motions, the things my great-great grandmothers would recognize, because those things center  me. (Thinking about Arepo and his farm, and his little offerings to the funny little god who took up residence in the temple he built). 

* I think it's just so much of the news these days, and people's reactions, and the general snark-n-meanness that seems to characterize the late 2010s gets me down so very much. Meanness feels so unnecessary to me: life is hard, we're all fellow-travelers to the grave, so what's the point in making someone else's life harder or less pleasant? Would you want that done to you?

That's my main question I ask myself these days when getting ready to do or say something: would you want that done to you? And yes, I get that some people have very different perspectives but when someone snarks about something I hold dear, or tries to "police" some purely-aesthetic choice people make, it just makes me tired. Because I would not want it done to me. So I try not to do it to others.

* I think also some of my mid-week distress is that, yes, I am asked to do a lot of things (give extensions, go to meetings, do tasks, take on extra work) and sometimes I feel like I never get asked what I want. Or that what I want only matters to me....and even then I have to put that on the back-burner for what must be done.

I gave an exam today in class. I could take it home and grade it tonight, but I am teaching for five solid hours today, and I'm tired, and this is the night my mom makes her weekly phone call, and I still want to do 40 minutes of piano practice....so grading the exams mean I do nothing BUT that piano practice and phone call tonight and I just don't know. I like getting stuff done soon, and I like being able to feel like my plate's cleared (as if it ever is; it's like you eat up your vegetables hoping to take a few bites of bread but whoever is serving heaps more vegetables on your plate).

So I don't know. I could do it tomorrow afternoon, but tomorrow brings grief and trouble of its own. I'll see how I feel after I walk out of lab, I guess..

* I do think I'm going to take this weekend off again. I give no exams the week of the 14th, and my Monday exam is already written (well, it has to be, at least by Friday) and I got the last of the soil samples sorted yesterday. And I really, really want to go antiquing. (There was no time last Saturday as I was getting "necessities."). I just want to take a day and be somewhere that is quiet and nice and if I find a nice thing to buy it for myself. And probably go out for lunch again. (And I can stop for big grocery shopping on the way home).

More and more I find I need more downtime. I'm sure PART of it is the grief; I get tired more easily and overwhelmed more easily and I walk around a lot feeling kind of as if I have a low-level cold. (And I *ache*. I'm hoping it's just age/high humidity/stress and not that I actually have something low-level illness-related going on). But even before every bad thing happened, I did find I didn't bounce back as fast as I once did from long days of hard work. It's probably an aging thing.

* Which is also why I side-eye the raft of articles I've seen lately about "the end of retirement" and yes, I get that some people can't retire because they don't have enough of a safety net but the thought of trying to teach four classes a semester at age 70 would make me want to weep - it's hard enough to do at 50. And I wonder, when I look at this articles: cui bono? Is there someone benefiting (maybe the economy? Maybe the tax rolls?) from people working themselves into the grave?

I can't keep doing this much longer. Or at least not at the level that I'm doing it now; something is going to have to give. Either I will have to just say "that's it, no more research" or teach fewer classes or have some of the administrative tasks that have devolved onto me (like have onto all faculty) lifted because I feel like I'm never caught up.

And yes, I get the "needing a sense of purpose" thing but I can find that easily enough through my church or through limited volunteer work. I would not want to work full time. And I would argue, people who can afford to retire but keep working full time in good positions are maybe preventing younger generations from getting decent jobs...When I get close to retirement, if the possibility of tenured positions even still exist (if my university even still exists), I am going to agitate for them to offer my position as tenure track and not do something idiotic like split it into two adjunctships or something....

* I did break down and order another Creatable World doll. I got the dark-haired one (that is apparently supposed to be Asian.) I have tentatively named the doll Alex.

(And yeah, I know I'm being traditional here and will perhaps offend some people but I think again, Alex is going to be binary-gender and is most likely going to be a boy. I kind of like the idea of Skye having a friend-who-is-a-boy though not really a boyfriend. I had a lot of friends-who-were-boys growing up. One or two became kinda sorta boyfriends (in a very innocent sort of way; back when I was a kid 10 and 11 year olds didn't really date but I remember holding hands once or twice with my "first" boyfriend Mark) but there was something kind of sweet and nice about having a friend who was just a friend but was a boy. Or maybe I was just weird that way.

Of course, I might change my mind when Alex gets here and I might decide that Alex should be an Alexandra instead. But tentatively the doll is Alex, and is Skye's friend-but-not-boyfriend, and Alex is also good at learning languages and wants to be a writer when he grows up.

* You take your happiness where you can find it, and I guess right now for me it's things like making up backstories for pre-teenaged dolls and dressing stuffed animals in silly clothes.


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Added, about 3 pm:

* Lab made things a little better. It's just nice and fun seeing students get excited over stuff (this was bug-catching day: we catch insects, identify them to order [about as far as a non-expert can get things] and I teach them how to do diversity indexes. We go to two different locations on campus so we can compare the diversity). I don't know if it helps anything or fixes anything or is even all that useful but at least it was nice to see the students happy and get excited about stuff like how many grasshoppers there were.

*  I am REALLY ready for the weather to change. It was in the upper 90s (heat index) again today and I had told the students at first when we got done with the bugs we might go out and I would give a little lecture on tree identification because in a couple weeks we go out and do a tree sampling lab. But it was so hot, at the end of the lab I said "I don't feel like going back out there" and they kind of laughed so I think they felt that way too. I did a little chalk-and-talk about it and next week we can probably do it as part of lab.

We're supposed to get a big cold front early next week that will drop it into the 70s; I am so ready. I am ready for cold nights where I can put the blankets back on my bed. I also sleep sounder when it's colder and I think part of my issues is I'm just not sleeping soundly.

* I also want to do more advanced cooking. I bought an Amish cookbook on my last bookstore trip and there are a couple of bean recipes in there I really want to try, but some of them require long cooking, and I don't want to heat up the kitchen. There's also an apple-butter bar cookie recipe that sounds good - I bought some apple butter on my last trip to the Amish store near me specifically for that.

And I want to use my slow cooker again and make soups and stews and things like that.

And yes, maybe, make time to bake bread from scratch again; I remember I enjoyed that and there are few foods more satisfying than homemade bread.

* I keep hoping I can get out-from-under a little (out from under EVERYTHING: not just work but also my moods) so I feel like doing more involved cooking again, and knitting/crocheting more, and all of that. And cleaning my awful house - I did 25 minutes on Sunday and worked on the guest room and it's some better, but I need to be disciplined enough to do that more often; ideally set a timer every day and work for 25 minutes, and then I wouldn't have that awful hours-long cleaning (which is mostly putting junk away).

* And you know? I'm tired. There might be time enough to grade those exams tomorrow. I am taking this evening off; I was in class for almost five hours today.