* Still a little melancholy. We sang "Blessed be the tie that binds" at the end of church yesterday, and there's the stanza in there about "when we are called to part/ it gives us inward pain..." and yeah, too many people have parted out of my life in the past few years.
Also, ironically - my mom reports it was a hymn at her church yesterday (I don't know if they're back to singing yet or not; we are a small congregation and almost everyone in my congregation is fully vaccinated now.) It was the retirement day for their long, long term minister (he started shortly before I moved down here, and I've been here for 22 years).
* Watched a tiny bit of coverage of the condominium collapse in Florida. How terrible. And while I get that it's a very, very different situation (here, looks like the fault is partly poor maintenance, partly unfortunate environmental factors) and the death toll is far, far smaller, I get sort of a 9/11 feeling from looking at the site photo, especially when they were spraying on water because of smoldering deep in the rubble.
I also think back to how some of the DNA technology was newer then, and explaining it to my GenBio class (non majors) and talking about how they were going to use it to identify human remains, and here we go again with that.
Also the people who were waiting at the site, hoping beyond hope their loved ones would be found alive, though I know that hope is fading now. (In the early days of it I was going "wow I really hope a lot of those 150-some people happened to be away from home that night")
I also think back to something I read after 9/11 about the search and rescue dogs (the ones trained to find living people: not cadaver dogs) and how after the first day or two, their trainers would have to get someone to bury themselves under rubble or something at a safe location, so the dog could sense the "win" of finding a live person, because they were beginning to act depressed from the lack of finding humans.
* It's strange realizing I've been in this job going on 22 years now; there are people I communicate regularly with on social media who were very small children when I started this job, and it's just kind of weird to see how history, while it doesn't repeat itself, there's a definite rhyming scheme there. There have been a few things in the past five years that I saw and kind of went "oh no, not THIS again"
(Well, except for the pandemic. But the OG SARS around 2004 could have been that, or H1N1 in 2009 could have been that - they had us actually write up plans for how we'd finish out the semester, in a world with less online-teaching tools - at that point in time)
* I read an article (well, skimmed, mostly, and I'll explain why in a moment) about "living in our post-water future" and yes, I recognize that California and much of the West Coast are far, far worse off than we are here (we actually had a somewhat-wet spring, and are poised to get more rain this week, and when I was up at Chickasaw in April it was heartening to see how active the springs and waterways were).
But anyway: the author described freezing her jeans or laying them out in the sun instead of washing them, because "supposedly that will limit odor-causing bacteria" and also things like taking "showers" (really: sponge baths) with a tiny bit of water. (been there, done that, back in 2011 when the line into my house broke and I had to wait a week for them to repair it). It's pretty miserable, to be honest, and there'd be a LOT I'd give up in return for being able to take (even short - and my showers usually are,) proper showers instead of dampening a washcloth and trying to clean that way. (And: like, I almost never water my lawn, and it's fine. And I don't have a pool. And I generally wait until I have a really full load of laundry before running the washing machine.)
But then: the article author noted that about 10% of human water use is "individual customer." In other words: 90% is industrial, farming, and (I presume at least in some places - I am guessing not California) things like watering golf courses and you know? It's the danged plastic-straw thing all over again, where businesses were harassing parents of disabled kids for requesting straws so their child could drink a beverage "because it kills sea turtles" when really, the main plastic polluters are things like large fishing fleets.
And it's tiring. Yes, doing what you can is good, don't get me wrong. But to me, it feels like giving up one tiny comfort of life (a nice shower a couple times a week, replaced by scrubbing in a chilly bathroom with a damp washcloth) just so people with more money and more innovative ability can....continue to be less-than-responsible. I'm tired of being told to bear the brunt of these things. (It's also like the much-ridiculed "yoga classes over Zoom as a way of coping with the pandemic instead of a recognition that people are stressed and maybe need deadlines relaxed a bit")
I think the other problem is: if you try to be ethical in your choices, you wind up paralyzed, like Chidi Anagonye - there's no way to "optimize" things without doing something "bad" in another way. The author noted her challenges in 'eating ethically in a small water footprint.' But also just....the shower thing is where I put my foot down. I live in a well-watered part of the country. As I said: I am careful with water otherwise. Having a warm shower and being able to easily wash my longish hair* is one of the tiny, tiny pleasures of life, in a time when it feels like most pleasures have declined/been taken away because of the pandemic.
(*If I did have to go to "sponge baths nearly all the time, one shower per month"? I'd probably shave my head. I'm serious. I can't work out or do field work and not wash my hair every other day or so, it's too uncomfortable and allergenic. And yes, you can get used to discomfort, I know - but there's a point where you go "this is a step too far" and I think a lot of us have hit a limit on 'discomfort' in the past year)
But also: I have seen cases of agriculture-inappropriate-for-the-climate being done, I have seen things like water-demanding landscaping when native plants not requiring watering could have been used, and I look at it and "yeah, and you're telling ME to wear jeans I've worn without washing for a month?"
Also, I wonder if anyone is working on affordable large-scale desalinization of seawater, or cleaning up of polluted water. It's not that the water on earth is being *destroyed,* it's either falling as rain in places that need it less, or it's acquiring undesirable additives that make it undrinkable (or unusable in agriculture). Perhaps that's something, alongside of "renewable energy," we need to be seriously considering. People thought I was overblown 20 years ago when I said 'we're fighting over oil now, just wait, in the future the fights will be over water" and while we're not there yet, and I think we could PREVENT ever being there with the right technology and the right distribution of it....we're getting there.
* I suspect that thought - that we as individuals are asked to do big restrictions that will probably do little if anything to solve the greater problem - triggered the dream I had last night, where a bunch of us (extended family) were standing around out in the woods (?) in northern Michigan and were sorting recyclables into carts, only I was standing there with the knowledge -which no one else had and I couldn't tell anyone for some reason - that there was going to be a war, and what we were doing was fundamentally useless, because some to all of us would not survive it. And that feeling of futility, oh, that was what I carried with me upon waking. And yeah, I got up and did part of a workout (it was very humid this morning and I was oddly achy and if I get home early enough after doing more of the VR lab work stuff today I'll try to do the rest of it, but...
* On a completely different tack: apparently someone has posted a video (not sure how they did it, if they scanned the film print) version from the 35 mm film of the early 80s Raggedy Ann and Andy movie - this is the one with the blue Camel with the Wrinkled Knees in it. A couple people on doll-tumblr I read posted it and I watched part of it (it's on YouTube, at least for now)
I watched part of it. I *think* I saw this, or most of it, on tv at some point (surely I would not have seen it in the theater - I would have been verging on "too old" at that point in my life, and my younger brother would have had zero interest in such a movie)
But watching it now - it does bring up memories of that weird, in-between time in my life, when I was old enough to want to pretend to be too sophisticated to care about such things (which is why I missed out on the original release of the My Little Ponies - I would have been 13, which was the peak of me trying to make myself seem "normal" to my peers by rejecting things a slightly younger me would have embraced) but also secretly liked and found weirdly comforting.
Also strangely I'm reminded again of shopping at The Land of Make Believe (a now-gone toy and game store in downtown Hudson) - this was the place that had Smurfs and other little toys like that, and for a while they had Steiff animals (I never could have afforded one but I used to go to look at them) and other things that appealed to me. (And that's where, at around 13, I bought - on a half off sale - a copy of The House at the End of the Lane, a very, very twee and child-themed book, but one I had looked at on numerous occasions there, and loved, but knew if any of my peers knew I had it, I'd be ridiculed within an inch of my life).
I dunno. I think about places like that some times - they were safe places for me and good places. I don't really have anything like that right immediately close to me. Well, the quilt shop, maybe, but also I really need to dial back on buying craft supplies and start using up what I have. The thing is, I don't know how, as an adult, to find that figurative "rock to wind a string around" as easily as I did as a kid and a tween.
* That's what I need to do, I guess: find the things that bring delight, or if not delight, comfort. It's hard right now, though - it's very hot out, and construction is making most of the routes I would take to Go Do Things - I would really like to go antiquing but the best "nearby" antiquing is in Denison and Sherman and driving there now is fraught; I don't know how bad the bridge construction currently is but it wasn't good when I had to go to Mineola to get the train.
The thing is, I don't know how much of this is "usual summer doldrums" and how much is "this is post-2020 traumatic stress," it's really hard to say. I do find I'm knitting less, and less interested in cooking much, and sometimes it takes me a while to get up the steam to do even things I want to do - it's like my executive function took a hit and it's not come back yet
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