Monday evening things

 * finally got back to doing the PT stretches this afternoon; I had kind of stopped after the shingles shot and I was achy for a few days, then it got so hot, then I had no AC. 

But then today, my hips were really hurting and I figured I better make myself do them.

 

Yeah, I need to keep doing them, at least a few times a week. At least I can get down on my knees and back up a lot easier now; I'm hopeful maybe I just need more time to heal.

* I'm almost  done with the sportweight socks. I know I have at least two partially finished pairs kicking around in my various knitting bags and should probably find them and try to finish them. I need to complete a few projects before starting anything new (though I do want to start the crocheted Bluey some time)

* Some talk on Bluesky today about the "fallout" from living through the pandemic. Naomi Alderman commented on there;

"If ever you find yourself thinking "why am I so x or y in the past few years?", or "why is that person so weird now?" please remember that we did actually genuinely all go through something pretty traumatising but because it was all of us together it's normalised & we don't talk about it."

And yeah. I was just speaking the other day with a colleague, and I bemoaned how bad my concentration and memory had gotten, and he said he had noticed the same (we are about the same age - he is a year younger - so it could be our ages, but I don't think that's just it.) For at least a year after 2020 I found it very hard to read - not just that anything slightly distressing upset me (I had to put Gulliver's Travels aside, for goodness sake) but also my ability to read complex sentences totally tanked.

I read a lot of cosy mysteries during that time. I'm getting back to being able to read more complex things but it's slow.

I also think my ability to follow complex knitting patterns kind of went away, which is why I have a lot of unfinished lace or colorwork projects hanging around, some of which I may never actually finish.

And yeah, I'm still carrying some emotional trauma; just the other day I was thinking about my older cousin (~20 years older than me) Paul, who had had hip surgery in early 2020 and was in a rehabilitation center and caught COVID. And he got bad, and by the time they got him to the nearest ER that was open, they were full up, and he wound up spending his last hours on this Earth alone, on a gurney in the hall of an ER, and his wife couldn't even go in to say goodbye.

And I know literally millions of families have a story like that, and Paul and I weren't close in the way some of my other cousins who were closer to my age and I were close, but it still makes me profoundly sad to contemplate.

And I know I spent some weeks in the late spring/early summer in a mood of - well, I won't say I was actively suicidal, because I never had a "plan," and also I knew I needed to stay at least for my mother's sake, but I remember wondering just how much I wanted to go on living. Especially in the bad times, when I put on the news and heard about thousands of deaths or refrigerated trucks serving as supplemental morgues or that one guy who was allegedly a medical researcher who was basically doomsaying the potential of their EVER being a vaccine (that was the worst, because I thought about how it might mean I stayed stuck at home forever, trying to teach from a small corner of my living room, and it was AWFUL)

And yes, I think it changed my personality. I'm not as lighthearted (not that I ever was, very much) and I find my mood plummets a lot more easily now.

And as I've said before: it's as if I've forgotten how to have fun. I go do things that should be fun but sometimes they aren't. Or sometimes I feel like "I should be happier than I am to be doing this?"

I mean, maybe it will come back with more time. There were also a lot of OTHER things I was mourning during 2020 that were unrelated to the pandemic. But I do see that I'm a lot more sensitive now and a lot more likely to be saddened by hard times others I care about are going through. And I'm a lot less resilient, or so it seems, than I once was. 

* I do still try. I go out thinking "this will be fun" and while it maybe is for a while it's.....it's not like "before," where one good trip out could keep me going for a month or more..

I did go out on Saturday. Went to JoAnn's and to Michael's, mainly just to look at stuff, I didn't really need anything (and I was wanting to go to Kroger, anyway). I did buy some sale yarn with sparkles in it with a vague idea of yet another scarf (I don't need more, I don't have anywhere to donate them - donation places seem to want money, or failing that, hats). But it was pretty, like I said, it sparkled. 

And I bought a couple fall candles, this is one

 

It's mildly amusing to me that the French for this type of scented candle is "Bougie."

Yeah, I guess I kind of am, given that I like this sort of thing, and if I drank coffee I'd probably totally drink PSLs. 

But I do very much want it to be fall. It's a bit cooler today, and dryer, but it was really hot again over the weekend and I admit I am extremely tired of it. 

I also admit I felt a pang walking around the Michael's, about how much nicer and, yes, more fun it would be if I had someone else there with me, so we could laugh at the ridiculous things they sell (they have, inexplicably, figures of "movie monsters" like The Mummy and The Headless Horseman, and also a depiction of Edgar Allan Poe, sitting on TOILETS. (They are fully clothed, which caused some consternation with one of my Bluesky mutuals, but really? do you even want to see Poe's, um, wedding tackle, even alluded to?) They're really kind of dumb but I admit if I had a "guest bathroom" with space for seasonal decoration - well, they're dumb enough that for me they kind of loop back around to being slightly wonderful, and I might have been tempted by the Poe one. 

But I have to do that alone, now, or, at the very outside, make a post on social media about it and hope people respond.

And again, something I think the pandemic did do - it fragmented a lot of us a bit more; there are people that were kind of on the fringes of my friend circle who MIGHT have become more of a friend except either (a) they had very different ideas about the vaccines to me or (b) one or two people locally, when I texted them, really really needing just a friendly chat, they never responded.. And while it's not impossible they were going through even worse than I was, being totally ghosted like that told me that they didn't really care THAT much (I mean, even if they'd replied DAYS later I'd have been fine with it) so I decided: well okay if they don't care about me then I'll not bother them any longer. 

(And that is part of my issue with trying to make friends. I worry I am bothering people. Because I had other kids tell me to go away and not bother them when I tried to make friendly overtures in school, and you REMEMBER that. Or at least I do). 

* Maybe it'll change. But I don't know, it's been three years since the vaccines became widespread and there are no new social groups that fit my interests or schedule, and I've mostly remained alone, so I assume people have locked down in their nuclear families and I'm just.....the spare giraffe who gets left behind to drown once the ark is full. And I admit that at 55 realizing "this is my life, this is the only one I get, and....it's getting closer to being over" and it worries me a little. But I don't know how to FIND friends, and I honestly don't know if braving the inevitable rejection isn't WORSE than remaining alone. 

Some of us were just not born under a lucky star, is my conclusion, and there's not much I can do. Anyway I am weird in a lot of ways and most people don't accept other people who are weird; most women my age don't know what to make of someone who never married or had kids. 

But I still feel like the pandemic ruined a lot of things, and 2020-2021 very nearly broke our society (if it didn't actually break it; I think the jury's still out on that)