Mental health afternoon

 I spent most of Saturday working, and I thought, Well, maybe I can take Monday afternoon and go home a little early but then stuff came up and it was after 4 that I got home (I go in to work at 7 am).

And I find, I can't work as long any more as I once did. It affects both my emotional state and my cognitive ability

Cognitive ability: I was printing out the court case assignments for folks in my EPL class and was stapling, then suddenly I couldn't find my stapler (I had set it on the corner of the desk). I got up and turned all around (I can see my whole office if I do a 360) and finally I spotted it, but the whole "set something down and it immediately disappears" is a bad sign I'm overtired, and not in a way sleeping would fix. 

Also, I am making a lot of typos. And I even got up early and did a full workout, which usually gets the neurons connected! (and piano practice went okay, so I don't know).

At least I am ahead on work stuff - I have a little prep to do for the one class tomorrow but if I get to that soon I'll have that done. 

Emotional state: I discovered that not one but two people chose identical court cases after I told them "it's first come first served, look at the sign up sheet." In one case it's my mistake, one case has two names and I thought the more generalized one referred to a different case (it does not), but that person should be amenable to changing and I found a comparable case dealing with the Colorado River instead of the Red. (And he and the other guy are kind of buddies, so I can tell them "you can decide who does which one")

The other one? It was a guy signing up for the same exact case by name after a woman had signed up for it the class day before. That tells me he did not bother to read the list of who had signed up and thought he'd just get what he wanted. I am just tired. I don't know whether to give him another chance to pick (I have a list with about 1-1/2 times as many cases as students) or just assign him one as the price of not paying attention to instructions. (I ran off two prospective cases because I think there's at least one person who hasn't chosen one). 

But it's just, it's the tiny being pecked to death by ducks thing, the "go through this arduous process with lots of form-filling to choose textbooks for next semester" and then "oh BTW, check to be sure you did it right" and "oh, BTW, BTW, check that the bookstore has the information on file" and I am fairly sure there will be ANOTHER "BTW, check the books are in stock" later on. It's just.....nothing is EVER done. It's all entropic work forever. It's Sisyphus, and I cannot imagine him even remotely happy.

And people are sniping at each other. Over on a place I hang out someone is threatening to block people who interact with another person. There is nothing very wrong with the other person; they are just someone who annoys the would-be blocker. But this kind of thing, the "you can't be my friend if you're their friend*" is the kind of thing I dearly wish we could all have left behind in fifth grade. Something like that actually DID happen to me in fourth or fifth grade and it still affects my ability to make friends. 

(*I mean, barring that person being a flaming racist or something, which is not the case. I can see someone saying "if you are friends with someone who actually wants me to be unsafe I can't really hang with you")

but more and more, I feel like......I don't know. Maybe we're not supposed to have friends? Maybe we really aren't social animals? But I get sad and weird when I'm alone too much. 

Just in general I'm realizing how messed up some of my friend interactions were when I was a kid and how it's affected my ability to make friends and maybe that's why I'm so lonely? Like, for example: every compliment I get I have to scan for sarcasm or backhandedness because there were some girls I went to school with who were like that, they'd say something that SOUNDED nice and it was only later on you realized it was meant in a barbed way. And I've once or twice had someone pretend to be my friend either so I'd do stuff for them (I still often feel like a condition of someone being my friend is I do stuff for them) or they do it to get me to say personal stuff that they then laugh about with their friends or use about me. I mean, I have always been cringe which means I'm the butt of jokes. I should be immune to it but I am still not. 

I've also spent a bit of time this week having to manage other people's emotions and I hate having to do that, especially when I find it difficult at times to manage my own - I will get sad and tell myself I cannot cry, or I will get angry at something and tell myself that the other person, the one who actually has the power to fix the thing, will be angry with ME if I display anger, so it's all a lot of stuffing down. 

Maybe it's better off social media? Except I'm always at work so I don't have time to make real world friends any more.And the ones I have I barely see.

Also just feeling the weight today of having lived through the past few years with everything that happened. Wondering if there will ever be Good Things again. 

So I'm taking this afternoon off. Gonna eat a nutritious lunch at home, gonna do a little clean up of my house (that should help my mood), gonna do the accumulated laundry. Might run out to the little local gourmet shop for any additional little Christmas presents for folks. Will spend some time this afternoon/evening relaxing and trying to get more done on the cowl for my niece (I am almost through the second chart, so I am roughly 2/3 done)

If I didn't have the housecleaning and knitting to do, I'd go somewhere for something fun but alas, that will have to come later. <<Spaß kommt letzt,>> if I am remembering a long ago sentence from Duolingo correctly.