Some random stuff

* FINALLY had the dermatologist appointment today. Conclusion: unlikely to be malignant, but can easily be removed. I have an appointment for that on the 8th. The person who does those minor surgeries is only in on Mondays, and only in the morning, so I will have to cancel my morning classes. I don't like that but I think if I wait longer (they were not available over my spring break, so it would be summer before I could do it if I didn't want to cancel) I will chicken out and not do it. They are going to send a sample off for analysis but the person who examined me said it didn't look like it was of concern.

Getting rid of it means I won't have to worry so much about how I comb my hair, and I can start wearing the cute hair clips again (because they compressed the hair too much and it became visible).

* I started reading a new book last night: Looting Spiro's Mounds. I ordered this one through the National Cowboy Museum (I follow them on Twitter, they are in OKC). They are doing an exhibit on Spiro Mounds and I kind of wish there wasn't a pandemic on, and that I was comfortable driving in cities, because I'd like to see it - several years ago I traveled up there to see them - and I'd like to learn more. I find that kind of not-quite-paleohistory of North America interesting.

The book so far is pretty good. I finished (apparently) the section about speculation into how the people of Spiro live (which was the really interesting part to me - some of it was speculation but apparently some was based on what was recorded about the last Caddoan groups by early European travelers). Now it's talking about the guys who formed the "Pocola Mining Company" and dug into the mounds (destroying a lot of the archaeology and scattering some of the artifacts when they sold them to collectors, which I guess happened a lot in the 1930s). It makes me think a bit of the central issue of "The Professor's House," where the Professor remembers Tom Outland and remembers Tom's dismay and feeling of betrayal when his friend Roddy sold the Native artifacts to a German collector....

* Maybe my reading comprehension isn't so trashed? Maybe I'm just having a hard time with the current mystery ("Death Watch" by John Dickson Carr) because there are a LOT of characters and several have somewhat-similar names, and one of the characters is kind of a windbag? I kept having to go back and re-read parts of it to keep the thread of what was going on, and I was worrying I was losing my ability to read fluently. 

* But yeah, I keep finding things that this year of isolation and mourning has done to me. Like, now, I find I worry about people a lot more. Part of that may be ongoing effects from having had a friend who was suicidal for a while (and a cousin who actually did commit suicide) - that if someone expresses what feels to me like more than passing sadness, I want to jump in and try to cheer them up, let them know I'm there and I care about them, even though I realize it doesn't really work that way and there's not much I can do. And then I do worry about them until they seem in a better frame of mind. 

Though the intensity of the worry (given the tangentialness of the relationship in some cases) is kind of new, and I think I am going to blame that on pandemic isolation and the feeling I've lost too many people already recently.

I mean, this is the sucky side of caring about people, I guess. And maybe it is pandemic isolation - that I haven't been able to "spread out" my caring among a lot of people, and so I focus on the few I'm in contact with and then I wind up worrying about them; it's like when I have one project I'm working on and it's not going well, it colors my whole outlook on things. 

* I think that appointment (Coupled with the sadness over the impending death of the family friend I talked about yesterday, and worry over another friend undergoing cancer treatment) was more stressful than I realized (I walked in there expecting the doctor to recoil a little and tell me it was melanoma) and I'm REALLY tired. I should probably just go to bed...I tried to work a little on the Secret Project and I'm getting there, but it seems these days it takes longer to accomplish things.