yesterday was busy

 * I taught my last "big" (FSVO "big") lecture class yesterday. I was surprised at how....empty? I felt at the end of it. This was not a pleasant semester, it was very isolating. For the last month of classes nearly everyone was just "dialing in" from home (or was not "dialing in" at all). I know everyone is tired and sad and burnt out and all that but....it's really hard to pour from an empty cup, and my cup has not been refilled with enough casual pleasant human contact recently.

* And I think that's why the unpleasant interactions loom so large. When you talk to maybe three people in a day, and one of those is less than pleasant, it makes you feel like a failure at human interaction. Monday was not good, I had someone be kind of rude to me via the internet, and I had someone else being demanding. And I was tired, and I wrote BOTH my final exams. And heading home, I thought: it's supposed to storm all the rest of this week, you really need to mow the lawn. But I didn't want to, and also it was already after 5 pm when I got home (because of the writing-of-exams). And then someone drove past me on the road - looked like a high school kid - and flipped me off. Not because I did anything, I was staying in my lane and he in his, we were both going the speed limit, so I assume it was an "I'm doing this because I can" or also very possibly a senioritis-acting-up thing. But it still hurt me a bit in the moment. Even as I knew it wasn't directed AT me. It's just.....evidence of the random ugliness in the world, I guess. 

* Though I also wonder, could I be struggling with human interaction because in my year of near isolation, I built things up in my head, imagined what it COULD be like, and because I tend to romanticize things and want them to be better than they are, I remain slightly disappointed because people are NOT more welcoming or willing to talk or kindly or whatever? Like, I can imagine a better world that doesn't exist and I actually kinda-sorta convinced myself the world was like that and I was just missing out on it, and then when I went back out into the world, I realized it wasn't? So, like, I see the guy screaming at the harried clerk at the wal-mart because she can't open the Sudafed case fast enough, or I react negatively to the curt email from a student, because I've come to expect more? And I guess I just have to retrain myself that, well, this isn't what you hoped for, but this is what you GET. 

* I did get the lawn mowed yesterday. I ran home after getting done with grading the student research papers and did it, with one eye on the sky and one ear out for thunder (and holy cow, do lots of people in my neighborhood have terrible boom cars. More than once I nearly ran for the house thinking it was thunder). I got it done but I rushed the job, and I set off my asthma (coughing, I don't get the true attacks where my airway constricts) and wound up pulling a couple intercostal muscles so I don't feel great today as a result. And I woke up with a hurting back again, not sure if it's because I wore really flat sandals yesterday, or from mowing the lawn (albeit in better shoes than those sandals) or if it's because I flopped over onto my stomach at some point. It's better now but when I got up and felt the twinge I was like "oh no, not THIS again"

* And then, last night, getting ready for bed, I suddenly thought: Wait you never turned off the muffle furnace! And at first I thought, oh, it can sit overnight, it will be okay. But then I thought, no, what if in the very remote chance something could go wrong, I realized that I would not sleep for thinking about "I don't want to come in to find the smoking ruins of the shared Butler building" so I put some clothes back on and drove over there in the dark. It was sort of creepy but at least we do have big security lights now. At any rate I got the furnace turned off, everything was fine, but I was so keyed up after that it took a LONG time to fall asleep, and I am tired today as a result.

Those are spring peepers, I guess, but there's some other louder frog in there. I know at one time the experimental ponds had bull frogs.