Lake Lewisia #528

They left out nesting material around their home for such creatures as would use it. Mesh tubes full of yarn ends and shredded paper for the birds, wood chips and scrap fabric for mice, large flake glitter and loose buttons for fae. It wasn’t native material, but then, if enough native material had been available, maybe no one would have needed them to help out, so they figured the efforts still came out on the side of good.

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LL#528

plague journaling

Two things today, of wildly different tone.

Firstly, I am made profoundly miserable by the news that Souplantation is closing permanently. There was one near my hometown, and whenever we had to go back down there, Mum and I would religiously stop at the buffet for dinner. It was lovely fresh salads and soup and other such tasty bits. It was the only restaurant at which we were even close to regular customers.

I fear this may mean that the trashy Chinese buffet here in town will also never reopen, which means I shall no longer have a source of pork buns and chewy beef niblets and seafood I would never eat under any other circumstances. It truly is garbage, but it's immensely comforting garbage, my favorite garbage. I'm afraid I love buffet-style restaurants of many stripes.

Maybe they won't all shutter permanently just yet, but it seems inevitable the buffet-style restaurant will become a relic of a bygone age, as surely as Horn & Hardart's automat.

Now then, setting aside my gustatory grief...

I've been reading Warren Ellis's newsletter on my work breaks again, and I've once again found profundity in his signoff that I wish to share with you. Speaking about being kind to yourself in these times, he said,

Don't feel shamed or pressured into being sad or angry about every damn thing. Those people can get on with that on their own while you take a breath and look at the sky.

Orbital Operations for May 10, 2020

Am I making myself angrier than I need to be? I'm an easily riled person, it's true, for whom the first response to fear is anger. And this pandemic and the response to it seem calculated to make me both afraid and angry. But is all that emotion worth it? Does any of this deserve the power of evoking the endless waterwheel of my griping or my fury? And, more importantly, am I still letting myself look at the sky regardless?

As noted yesterday, it's not all sackcloth and ashes over here. I'm doing comparatively well. I have room enough at home to enjoy the sky both figuratively and literally. Perhaps I need to focus on that. I'm bored with my own annoyance, in any case. Sometimes, it feels rude to enjoy life, though--or at least to speak publicly about enjoying it.