Friday afternoon things

* The thing I had to do today for the university (over Zoom) went about as well as could be expected, but I still feel kind of sad and drained. (I don't like interacting with people over Zoom; it feels so artificial and it makes me sad that this is how it's gonna be for....who knows....maybe six months, maybe five years? I can only survive this thinking "I have to make it through TODAY" and I cannot think about "holy heck, what if I'm still doing this this way five years from now?" (Well, if that's the case? I will take early retirement as soon as it's offered and just be a hermit)

* I finished "Triumph of the Fungi" and while the plant-pathological information was interesting and potentially useful in teaching, I really did not like the style. Some authors can do "breezy and humorous" well and some cannot. It felt very..,..pandery, like the professor who tries to appeal to the stereotypical frat-boy mindset and I found it very offputting. (And I have had some fraternity brothers in my classes, and I know some of them would be put off by it too).


* Doing a lot of self-censorship. There's stuff I'd like to say about how I'm feeling and my reactions to everything in the world but I also feel like it's not my place and people could scream at me about my privilege so I guess I just keep it bottled up. I've written and deleted about five parts of this post. I guess one thing I can say is: fellow white people, do not show up to a demonstration and start screaming at the people there because you don't understand their experience or share it. Things don't need to be about you all the time. (Which is also why I'm not going to talk about stuff like how that old man getting shoved over and injured gave me the memory of my aunt falling and almost dying of a subdural hematoma, and similar. It's just, it seems like everything is terrible ENOUGH without my brain dredging up bad memories from the past and giving me horrible stress-dreams)

Maybe I should send more money to the regional food bank to make up for the fact that I can't do anything to help anyone right now. But sending money, as useful as it maybe is? Still feels kind of hollow.

I dunno. I've been looking around online and in books for some kind of wisdom, as I have none of my own these days, and I am finding none. Maybe nobody has any.

I think a lot of this is that I'm alone too much these days, and I ruminate on things too much. The old thing from Victorian novels about a person being sent to the seashore or the mountains to be "taken out of themselves" when they were suffering from something like dysphoria or mild depression resonates now, except there's nowhere to go and no one to do things with. 

* I don't know. I tell myself "someday it will be safe again to go do fun things" but that comment that one woman made last night about "40 years to come up with an HIV preventative" makes me scared and sad and - what if by the time there's a COVID-19 vaccine and it's safe I'm too old to be able to enjoy fun? Or worse, too dead?

Yes, I know, I give others' opinions too much credence but this is not someone utterly without a science background. I hope and pray she's wrong but the spectre of that statement hung around me today and whispered in my ear while I tried - mostly unsuccessfully - to work.

I suppose at some point I just say "forget it, this is no life" and go out and go shopping and stuff again and if I take sick and die? Well, I might not have lived that much longer in this lonely, locked-down state anyway. The only thing is the guilt of maybe infecting another person....that stops me. I care more about not making other people sick than I care about myself at this point.

* A friend DID do something nice for me - this a far-off friend, in Washington State. She got a bunch of old piano sheet music, and while she does play herself, she divided it up and sent me a bunch - I have a lot of arrangements of 50s/60s gospel songs ("Sweet, Sweet Spirit" and "Do, Lord" and "My Tribute" and some others) and a bunch of 50s-era pop that is mostly unfamiliar ("Brush those Tears from Your Eyes," and "April in Portugal," and "Play Me Hearts and Flowers (I Wanna Cry)" and a few pieces I know - the song from Moulin Rouge, and a piano arrangement of "Moon River," which I am working on right now, and some other pieces.