Looking for comfort

 Part of it, I suppose, is that I'm just tired. This semester has been long, and it's been full of unpleasant things - having to truck across campus every day to teach in unfamiliar buildings where there aren't good bathrooms or working drinking fountains, feeling displaced, the added cognitive burden of "okay I need every piece of paper I might remotely need because there's no running back to my office"

And also....a friend of mine here is ill and while she sounds like she's on the mend, I won't relax until she's back doing what she's always done. And dealing with the difficult person was more upsetting to me than I think I realized. 

And hearing today that the unelected, unvetted group of wreckers in the government apparently now have control of public lands including the National Parks....

(One of my vague "do in retirement" plans was to travel around to a number of the National Parks. If the worst happens? I won't get the chance)

And yes, darnit, I'm still mourning JoAnn Fabrics. 

And I drove by our little downtown the other day, and there are so many empty storefronts again. 

So yeah, I regretfully put aside "The Poison Squad," though I think I'll try it again before the summer's out; I wanted to read it for  the environmental policy and law class I teach (I also cover workplace safety, like OSHA, and food/drug safety). But right now I can't with it. 

I think it's also been a really brutal allergy season; I wake up congested every morning and I think there's something in one of the "exile rooms" where I teach that sets it off. And I know having bad allergies makes other things look worse to me. But I do think also a lot of people are struggling right now; there's a lot of chaos, and there are some people who seem to feel empowered to be rude and nasty again, and I dislike that.

I admit I also feel a lot of ... dynamic tension? or cognitive dissonance, or something. On the one hand, I look at the world, and I see the liars and the dirty dirty cheats prospering, and I see people who try to be empathetic and to help others called "losers" and similar. And then I go to church. And hear about what God is calling us to do. And when I can be kind to someone I feel good that I was able to help. And them I think, "well, maybe I'm not the loser." But I do increasingly find it hard to live in this world when you have a particular set of beliefs at your core, and the world seems to hammer away at those, and try to make you feel bad, wrong, and strange. Or maybe cringe? I mean, I've always been what people now call "cringe" - I liked juvenile things way too late and I remember being mocked for talking about some of the television programs or book series I liked when I was in junior high, and I realize now that I was bing , you might say "cringe policed" by the other kids. 

So anyway - I'm reading a couple nonfiction books now in the stead of the one I had to put aside; one called something like Mississippian Beginnings which is about the early First Nations people in the southeast (Some of them lived this far west, the people who became the Caddos and others). Distant past history like that interests me, and it does feel somewhat removed from modern problems (though I am sure the people of the past had different and sometimes worse problems than we do). I tried to read it a couple years back but my brain was still melted from the pandemic and I found it too slow going; now it seems to be working. 

And I'm reading Judith Butler Bass' "Freeing Jesus." I'm not very far into it but it's good - I've read the chapter on Jesus as Friend and Jesus as Teacher (she's essentially walking through the different ways she viewed Jesus over her life). I like it because it's not sentimental in the way some Protestant writing tends to be; it's very real, but also....I'm not sure how to phrase it than that she takes her faith seriously but also doesn't idealize things. (One of my problems with how Christianity is sometimes presented is the idea that if you have problems or concerns or upsets or doubts once you're a Christian, you're doing it wrong and your faith is too weak, and....again, that seems judgmental to me)

I've also been picking away at the couple of socks I have on the needles. And listening to a lot of the "background music" streams on YouTube (the "quiet jazz" and also the lofi stuff; again, it kind of shuts up the bees in my head sometimes). 

I probably need to be sleeping more; I've been staying up past 10 and that's not great when you get up around 5:30....