* I realized this afternoon that tomorrow my time is basically spoken for from 8 am to 8 pm and I kind of hate it. I wouldn't mind going in earlier but it's the late afternoon stuff - ESPECIALLY after the time change - that I dislike being out for.
* I did a little (but not enough, and not as much as I would have liked) cleaning up/moving stuff out of my living room, because I realized IF I am putting the tree up this year I better do it this weekend - next weekend I will be on the way to Illinois (I hope, though the strike, if it happens, should be later) and then things get horribly busy for a couple weeks, and then (again, barring a strike by the freight railroads) I go back up to Illinois on the 17th of December.
* I mostly cleared off my sofa. Flat surfaces in my house tend to wind up as dumping grounds for "I don't know where to put this" I may try to figure out an alternate position for my coffee table so the tree can go where it currently is - I could *almost* fit it next to my piano I think.
* But next up will be taking down the Halloween lights and putting up the snowflake lights, and finding a place for the little light-up Christmas card clips (hopefully I get a few cards to put in them). They're on a battery so I will need somewhere to tuck the battery pack - I have a place where I could hang them but there's nowhere for the battery pack and I"m leery of using, like, double stick tape to just stick it to the doorframe or something.
*And I just need it. Right now things are just hard, between teaching four classes, trying to prep a new one for spring, AND do all the assessment stuff that seems to endlessly be needed, I almost melt down at work some days. Also - and other colleagues have noted this - some of the students need a lot more help. Part of it is not their fault: we've heard that "pandemic online high school" here in many communities really wasn't any schooling at all, so people are really unprepared, I'm hearing reports of high school teachers who have just given up and aren't really teaching (I would say I don't blame them - their jobs are hard, they've been maligned by a segment of our society, they're paid abominably - but their "checking out" hurts the kids, it doesn't hurt the jerk who goes "but you have three whole months of vacation, hurr hurr hurr" and it hurts people like me who are having to scramble to try to remediate while watching our DFW rates spike up and WORRYING about the future of our careers)
* I voted on Thursday. I'm not watching coverage. I'll find out soon enough and I don't need that noise tonight. I have a re-run of Dr. Pol on but really, some channel should have like decided to just show Poirot mysteries tonight, or just nice travel programs, or something. Dr. Pol is fine but I really find hearing it unpleasant when an animal has to be euthanized (there was one case of someone's cat getting shot by some random jerk, and all they could do was put the cat to sleep because it had taken too much damage). I feel like it would be nice to have a "special episode" or two (probably would have to be a clip show) where "all the animals live!" where maybe it's just puppies getting their well-puppy visit, or animals with minor injuries that are easily patched up, or animals getting a clean-bill-of-health check before going to the fair.
* Also lots of talk about Twitter dying. Some people are rejoicing, I get it. Some people I know are indifferent. I admit I'm sad. I made a lot of friends over there; it was one of the things that got me through the pandemic where there were literally a couple months where I didn't speak face to face to another person for more than 30 seconds. It was very important to me. And it also reminds me of really how double-standardy everything is: all my life, ALL MY LIFE, when someone was rude or unpleasant to me I was told to "get over it," I was told I was "too sensitive" and when I was in school and complained to a teacher about a classmate or something, some of the time I was told "no one likes a tattle tale" (And it got to the point where I experienced something bordering on sexual abuse, I shrugged, and figured no one cared, so I didn't report it - I was 13). And yet, the new owner of the site is apparently being incredibly thin-skinned and is driving it into the ground because people are mocking him.
And I'm still struggling with Mastodon, seeing a lot of the long timers going EW NEWBS or worse, calling us "colonizers."
I've spent enough of my life being told (implicitly or explicitly) that I wasn't welcome places, well, if I see enough posts like that I'll just leave. And have NO social media, no one to converse with outside of my head. Which is bad for me - when I get in my own head too much I ruminate and I'm sure that's one of the ways I've changed for the worse these past few years.
I don't know. I find human interaction hard, especially since the pandemic. In some ways I AM reverting to that lonesome, unhappy 13 year old who suspects most people hate her.
When I was doing counseling, I complained of having few in person friends, and not knowing where to meet people here, and my counselor shook her head sadly and said "there really aren't any" and ....what do you DO in that case? If there's nowhere easy to find community on the internet (because the old places are gone and the new ones don't want you) and you don't fit in the few boxes in your area (not a mom, not a fisher/hunter). I can't MOVE, especially now, when I sunk my entire life savings into renovating my house.
(Part of this is, yes, money worries; I have almost no savings left and am having to budget more carefully than ever in my adult life partly because of inflation)
* Went to the grocery today. People were pushy and rude, they blocked aisles with their carts diagonally. And a couple things I wanted, Pruett's was out of, so I guess I have to make time Thursday? I don't know? to go get milk at wal-mart. (I prefer FairLife, and I've gotten bad milk from other brands here before - places aren't careful and we're at the end of the delivery chain). It worries me a lot when basic things (milk, eggs, bread) get hard to find - I remember the dark days of April 2020 and how every grocery store trip was a speedrun but also done with five different lists in mind depending on what I could find to buy and I don't want to live through that again.
* I don't want to live through the bad times of the past again but I fear they're coming back. I don't know, honestly, how much more resilience I have left. I made it through 2020 on a day-by-day basis, sometimes hour-by-hour, but I was miserable in ways I'm only fully starting to realize. I don't know how to fix myself.
* I think I'm just over tired and perhaps teetering a bit on the edge of burnout, but there's nothing I can do now other than keep soldiering on because none of my responsibilities are ones I can set down. Adulthood really IS saying "well, maybe next week will be better" until you die.
* I really need some kind of nice success to make me feel better but I don't see any coming. It's just soldiering on and hoping things get better, though that hope grows smaller and weaker as time passes.
* I should probably just go to bed.
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