Monday evening melancholy

 I didn't get as much done on the quilt top this weekend as I might have wanted to. Saturday was mostly cleaning house (which needed to be done; I vacuumed up all the sticky leaves that got tracked in on my shoes and washed the floors that could be washed and put a lot of things away) and also did a little prep for this week that had to be done. 

Sunday I planned to do the rest of the blocks if I could, but other stuff got in the way, and when I finally sat down, late afternoon, with BBC 4 on the app on my phone, the program switched to one about surrogate moms, and....there was a speaker on there who gushed about "when I became a parent* I found out the meaning of life!" and I've dealt with way too many people who assume that if you're not a parent you didn't grow up all the way, or you're incomplete, or something, and it just hit me wrong, and I had to walk away from the program for a while, and I never really got back into sewing on them.

(*Yes, I should cut the person some slack; he was a gay man in a committed same-sex relationship that used a surrogate to have a child, and he's probably been dumped on enough by life in other ways. But as I said, I've dealt with too many who act like I'm somehow not-whole because I didn't have a child** that it annoys me)

(** I never TRIED, but it's likely a medical issue I had would have made it very hard or impossible to conceive, so....it may be I kind of gave up on that possibility when I got that news as a late teenager)

Anyway. Between that and remembering, because of discussion elsewhere, having something bad that happened to me when I was 13 (not too much detail will I give, but it was adjacent to sexual abuse, at the hands of another student, and I never realized until some years later that I should have reported him) and that brought up bad memories and....yeah. 

I also worked hard today; in addition to my regular classes (gave an exam in one, lead a discussion of sorts in another thought much of the class was absent for various reasons) I wrote three exams for next week (partly by taking very old exams from a past year and updating them and changing questions) and I did some grading, and I was tired when I got home. 

I knitted a bit on the current simple socks but didn't get much done. Sat through an episode of NCIS with an unpleasantly high body count (I find I am much more sensitive to those things than I used to be).

Hopefully tomorrow will be better. I have my exams written so before and after class I can pretty much just work on systematics stuff. I might grab a few more boxes when I go home for lunch, as well - I would really like to get the unit emptied before the end of the year. 

But this has been one of those days where, between the stuff going on in my head and the stuff I see out in the news it would really help to have a sympathetic person right here to talk to me and distract me from all that. I think one of the really hard things they never tell you about living alone is that if you're at all prone to rumination, you have no one to talk you out of it the way good families/spouses/housemates would. And I find that one thing 2020 did to me was made me ruminate even MORE, which I would not have thought was possible.

Anyway. Time to go to bed and try to put myself back together for the next day by sleeping.