I just needed a new project so I started crocheting that Wooloo Pokemon toy I talked about. I have most of the colors I need for it - the last trip to JoAnn's (end of February*)
(*And now I'm glad I stayed put since then; there have been cases detected in Grayson County, where JoAnn's is. Unlikely I'd have come into contact with anyone sick, but still. And I think I'm glad I have a lot of yarn ahead; KnitPicks is closing for orders for a while to protect their staff (or maybe because the state asked them to, I don't know - they are in a lockdown state, Ohio))
Anyway. I dug them out last night (and found some lighter brown for the little horns and the tippie toes. I'll need black and gold for the eyes but surely I have tiny amounts of both, or, failing that, I just make felt eyes).
It was kind of soothing to start it. It will be a small round thing. I am not very far on it yet, but I have the body maybe 1/3 done.
I don't know how much energy I will have tonight. I am hip-deep in trying to record audio-over-slides for my lectures (I have two very short Principles I lectures and two Soils lectures; I might try to finish that chapter of Soils today and maybe do the rest of Principles I tomorrow, and then attack ecology....I need to have at lest one chapters' lectures for each class up by next week, and then just try to record a few each day.) It's far more tiring than I realized and much respect now to cartoon voice actors and voice-over people for things like movie narration who do this for a living. (Also I stress myself out because it has to be PERFECT and I've finally given up and accepted that I say "um" too much and I sometimes hit on the wrong word at first and have to back track but I do not have the energy to write out narration ahead of time and read it).
Mostly keeping the worry stuffed down by being busy though we had some computer issues this morning - could not log into BlackBoard on Firefox (as far as I know, I still can't, I wound up just defaulting to Chrome, which I dislike, but whatever)
I hope someday this is all over and we can go back to face to face teaching, and back to not having to wash our hands 20 times a day and back to not feeling a trip to the grocery is taking our lives into our hands and YES I know in some parts of the world people live like that every day and now I am grateful for the peaceful and privileged life I had now that some of that peace and privilege (but thank God, not all) are gone.
***
Added: I sat through an "Academic Partners" (this is a large firm that does online education) program on running Zoom and came out of it overwhelmed and discouraged. Apparently people who teach online a lot forget how hard it is to gear up for it even under ideal circumstances, and I can tell I am struggling hard emotionally right now - this has weirdly re-opened the not-that-old grief for my dad and I'm falling back into some of the bad behaviors of last fall:
- clumsy, which is bad right now. I cannot get hurt if hospitals get overwhelmed or break stuff it might be hard to replace
- angry, hair-trigger temper. I cursed at my computer today when it wouldn't do what I wanted it to. Normally I am pretty chill and slow to anger, but these past few days I have gone from 0 to RAGE in a frighteningly short time over things. Not at PEOPLE, I am not at that point, but at things or circumstances.
Well, okay, people: but in absentia. Including a couple of world leaders who....seem to be making things worse.
- Crying easily.
- terrible memory, memory full of holes.
- No energy for things. I recorded two 10 minute or so segments for my soils class this morning and I felt like I needed a nap after that.
I am doing my best but it is killing me because I know I am not doing an objectively GOOD job (my lectures are boring, I have a bad nasal voice with weird vocal quirks and a weird north-central accent that's picked up some Oklahoma ways of saying things, I say "um" too much, I don't put in any dancing ducks and explosions like you're supposed to) but at the same time part of me is going "Shhh, shhh, be content with doing what you can even if it's not good" but the perfectionist part of me is stomping around and raging.
My chair reassured me that what I was doing was okay, and the point here is to 'get through' not to 'innovate" but still.
What I am doing feels...superfluous at best in the face of what's going on in the world. Maybe even....actively bad at worst? Like, I'm trying to carry on like things are normal and yet nothing at all is normal, probably some of my students have loved ones in the hospital with the virus right now....and I'm expecting them to sit through me rambling about clay mineralogy when the world is falling apart around them?
And yet, I am still me - even though I regret burdening the post office just that little bit more? I ordered a stuffed Snorlax from the Pokemon Center. It is already on its way even though that place is like in New Jersey or somewhere on lockdown? So I don't even know. I know some mail order places have closed for a few weeks (KnitPicks and Penzey's spices) and that's good for them, they are protecting their workers. (I was expecting a "wait a few weeks please" message when I placed the order, but...nope, got the "it's already on the way")
I don't know. I can't pay much attention to what's going on in the world because I just want to give up then, lie down on the floor and not get back up. Very much what I said earlier about "I wish we could all hibernate for a couple weeks and wake up when the worst of this is past. (Hibernating, if we all did it, would also stop the spread of the virus....)
But I don't know. I don't know if trying to continue teaching is brave or deluded or what. I don't know what to think or feel any more because the contrasts between "people left in old-age homes in Spain with no one to care for them because the caretakers died or fled" and "I am going to grit my teeth and film myself talking about meiosis" and "Yay I ordered a stuffed animal I wanted" are too awful and too much. How do people who lived in active war zones, whether Zagreb or the Gaza strip or Laos in the 1960s and 70s do this, carry on their everyday lives, without going absolutely mad?
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