scrubjayspeaks

Made myself sun sick again. It's nice to know that lupus diagnosis everyone is so eager to take away from me will, nonetheless, behave exactly like, you know, LUPUS despite their hemming and hawing.

Honestly, I'm not sure I'm even sorry about making myself sick today. I took my comfy outdoor lounge chair over to the butterfly garden, in the shade of the skinny tree it's built around. For an hour, I listened to a writing podcast I've been saving and watched the bees (SO MANY BEES) flying around the flowers. It was one of the most beautiful and satisfying things I've ever seen, the perfect fulfillment of the whole project. I was comfortable and happy. I'm going to hang onto that, and I'm going to mostly ignore the pain and nausea that came after.

Everything has a price. This one was worth it.

Two thoughts, neither of which has any applicability or importance to our current world, and isn't that a relief sometimes?

1) I think every home should come with an air compressor line installed somewhere. We have them at work for cleaning debris off machines and parts alike. I swear, there are very few problems that cannot be improved or at least blown out of sight by a high-pressure stream of air. I just want to be able to dry things quickly or dust off things that can't be wiped down easily. And no, cans of it just aren't a sufficiently powerful substitute, though I suppose I shall have to content myself with them all the same.

2) My brain tossed up a bit of detritus in the form of a misremembered line of lyrics yesterday, which I had once known but could no longer place the song or the artist. Took me all day to even remember the thought long enough to look it up. Fortunately, google speaks fluent "shit you almost got right" and informed me it is the song "Right Now" by SR-71. This was a one-hit-wonder from my high school years, and I liked it enough to buy the album, "Now You See Inside." Wikipedia describes them as pop punk/pop rock, which seems a reasonable enough description for the INTENSELY early-aughts sound of the band.

Somehow, I have had the disc in my binder of CDs all this time but managed to overlook it for long enough to entirely forget I owned it. Once I had googled the song info, I went looking to see if the disc had even survived high school to make it into the binder. Yeah, it's right there with its x-ray robot skeleton and its yellow background. I had never digitized a copy, though, and so I haven't heard this music in, oh, probably fifteen years or so.

While "Right Now" was the hit, I personally love "Last Man on the Moon" best, with "Alive" as another dear one. I used to blast this album while driving home from school in my VW Bug, windows all rolled down to cope with summer heat in a car that only had a stereo by way of aftermarket additions and definitely did not have A/C. It's amazing how the lyrics of all the songs came back as soon as I started playing it this evening. I cannot say if they were ever much good--I have no real taste in music, only emotional responses. But my gods, this gives me nostalgia face.

On account of problems that were not my fault, the job I was assigned couldn't run today. Instead, I got sent over to a different department to help out on some menial tasks. Tomorrow, I'm already informed, I'll be over there again, learning more advanced tasks. I've never done anything in that department before, so.

It's nice that I can be sent over there; it means there is still work for me to do and get paid for, even though my home department is rapidly drying up due to pandemic-induced sales slumps. Score one for my reputation as a quick learner and generally agreeable person. I pick stuff up easily and I always just roll with whatever is going on. It's ironic because I hate change and breaking my routine and anything like that, but I am nonetheless very good at adapting.

I do not appear to by dying of migraine any longer. Much praise!

Had a cry several times today. Not a bad thing, actually. I am technically allowed to experience emotions, much as I resent the hell out of it. Got very caught up in some things I was reading. Also said overwrought, fond things to a friend, like you do.

Health issues notwithstanding, the weekends are better, I think. The work week ratchets me up to higher and higher levels of tension. I spend most of Fridays sleeping and otherwise deliberately recovering. It was probably like that to a degree before the pandemic; it's much worse now.

Probably gonna need to deal with that situation somehow. Plans pending.

I saw a bumblebee! In my flower garden! Bumbling its way into the poppies!


[click to embiggen]

(Apparently, the next stage of my emotional cycle is "protective distraction.")

The thing I find strange is how fast the rise and fall comes these days. Yesterday, we weren't sure if it would be safe to move through town or if we would be able to get to work the next day. Today, nothing in particular*. Yesterday, the sight of some sort of military plane within spitting distance was cause for alarm and confusion. Today, it's here still/again, and it has become just part of the (deeply weird, disturbing) wallpaper of my workday.

Rise and fall. Panic and desensitization. Urgency and resignation.

There is too much happening too quickly to process. I know I keep saying variations on that refrain, but it's one of the biggest takeaways I've had from the last several months. It's so difficult to figure out how you feel, let alone what concrete things you can do in response to anything, because the next thing has just come up and whacked you across the nose before you even finished registering the one before it.

It is, I suppose, a rather oversized version of freezing, as in "fight, flight, freeze, fawn." (I never remember how many of those there are, but those are the ones I could recall off the top of my head.) Trauma response options. I'm more of a flight, most of the time. But right now, I find myself freezing a lot. Just shutting down in the face of too much stimulus and no clear sense of how to make anything better. I'm not ignoring things, but my reaction is basically wide eyes and a helpless shrug.

Breathe in and breathe out. Rise and fall. The next thing is already here. I still haven't moved.

*I will point out, some of this is merely my perception. (Well, ALL of it is my perception, frankly, but then, that's what this journal is for.) Elsewhere, things have not settled down in the slightest. I have the luxury of not immediately seeing/knowing about those things, though. This sense of rising and falling action is entirely subjective. I'm aware.

I don't have internet access at work. I would have to connect to their wifi network, which I do not feel comfortable doing out of perhaps an overabundance of general paranoia. So for about 12 hours of the day, I don't know what might be going on in the world. This is, allegedly, good for me. It's good to step away from the news feeds and social media.

Problem is, then I come home to things like this (h/t: thebibliosphere.tumblr.com), among other things. It feels like the world's latest sorrows and horrors all come crashing down on me at 4:30 PM, Monday through Thursday. We return you to your regularly scheduled doomsday. This feels worse. I have consistent access to the internet on my days off, and while the weekend probably slows some of the flooding, it's still a point of comparison.

And this? Coming home to find out all at once the ways in which the world is at least a bit worse than I feared in my most fevered, apocalyptic daydreams? This is worse.

I don't want to tune out. I don't want to pretend that none of this matters. I probably could. I'm white. I live in a rural area where protests will not march and cops will not attempt to massacre them outside my front door. I could probably stick my head in the sand, safe in the knowledge that it won't touch me. Not yet, anyway, not until things get still worse. (I'm afraid they may get worse. I'm afraid they will not stop getting worse.) But I do not want to be that person, not least because people I care about do not look or live as I do.

I am supposed to be a fantasy writer. I am supposed to offer escape. I think I've forgotten how. I feel very small and confused. Other people seem to be eloquent and effective even in their fear. I have no wisdom to offer. I do not even know how to offer comfort right now. The world is very large and terrible today.

Ohhhh, I haven't been grocery shopping in a while. It's...it's bad, hey? People are all milling about in confusion, and I can't even be mad because I'm pretty sure I'm one of them. Everything is just very confusing and complicated, where once it was all very rote and routine.

I'm going to watch The Losers tonight, because it makes me happy and because I heard "Don't Stop Believin'" in the grocery store and thought of it. It is a time for familiar, comforting things. This has just been a real hard week, made more alarming by the fact that it was a short business week. Life is catching up to me.

I found my flower press--a little plastic and cardboard job I've had since childhood--while looking for some books. I think I'll press some of the many lovely flowers that are blooming now. Will post pictures if I get something pretty out of the process. I feel like I need to stash nice things in various corners of my burrow so I'm sure I'll have some later when things get worse.

I had an uncomfortably intense first half hour back home after work. The news hits a person like a halfbrick launched out of a cannon these days.

One hundred thousand people dead! That's--that's not a real number, yo. I cannot envision what that number means in practical terms, and I wish I didn't have any reason to try. I do not envy the people tasked with trying to humanize and individualize all those deaths in any kind of media coverage. I try to imagine them immortalized in some kind of memorial, the way those dead in wars have been, for example. It's a very strange idea; it doesn't make sense in the existing frameworks. That's all I can think of, though--the question of how we might one day go about ritually remembering all these dead.

And then! There's some nonsense about an executive order about social media. I don't even understand what exactly was done. I just understand that it's in retaliation for Twitter flagging President Tang's tweets as misinformation. Because that's the level of pettiness that's currently fueling the efforts to turn all media into pro-Trump propaganda bullhorns. I would probably have cogent commentary on something like this, or at least more extensive loud opinions, if I weren't tired like unto death.

As it is, my brain is simply not prepared to process any of this shit. I could do research to understand it better. But on the other hand, I have a chair! Let's talk about my new chair instead!

It arrived this evening just after I had gotten home from work. Assembling a rather heavy chair with the world's worst hex wrench (what the fuck, who designed it like that, it is precisely the wrong length for any of the tasks at hand) was probably not what my body wanted to be doing after a long day of work. But chair. Chaaaaaaiiiiiiirrrrr.

It's got lumbar support. It feels amazing. And I'm so glad I went for a model that has armrests that adjust on width, not just height, because it turns out that makes a huge difference for my ability to find a comfortable position. It's got a headrest, which I am thus far pretty unimpressed by--it just doesn't sit far enough forward to be any good for me. That's my only disappointment so far, though. Oh, and I can lock it into a tilted back position, and if I had tested that out any earlier than thirty seconds ago, I would have fallen asleep before I could tell you about it.

May this chair last my ass many years!

Why. Why am I having another flare. Why do my joints feel like this. Why is my body cursed. These are not questions. They are formally lodged statements of protest.

Can I just say, though, how truly lovely it was to have yesterday off from work? I did all my usual stuff at home F-Su on the normal schedule, which left Monday as a genuine bonus day. Which is how I managed to get a podfic edited and posted. It was exactly what I needed right then, which is a rare and lovely blessing.