It's Never Enough in Life

Never enough time, or hugs, or kisses. About 3 months in and still feel lonely when he’s not around.

This weekend, I headed over pretty late to his house on Saturday night, because his son was supposed to come hang out and I wanted them to have time alone. They have rebuilding to do. But his son bailed. So I did nothing all day (did get some cleaning and stuff done around the house), and could have been there hours before I went. Sunday he slept really late, I left while he was still sleeping, and then him and his 16 yr old came down in the evening.

I made shrimp scampi for dinner (he seemed impressed, she didn’t like it), we did a horseshoe crab rescue/beach walk. Watched some tv. Me and 16 yr old made cookies- she likes to bake but doesn’t have much experience making things from scratch so I showed her how to measure correctly and we did it together. It was nice and she seemed to enjoy it, and she loved the cookies. I went to bed at like 2 or 3 or something, and he still stayed up til 5. He slept in yesterday and I got up to work.

Maybe it was a lack of valuable alone time that has me feeling like this. But, I also kind of have that feeling like I’d like to be with him all the time, which doesn’t always happen for me. I often wonder if I even COULD live with someone, but I kinda wish we could. (I don’t know how we’ll figure that out though because he works pretty far from my house and I’m not about to give my house up, at the beach!

His daughter stayed with me when he left yesterday and is staying until wednesday morning when we’ll head back because I usually work from his house on Wednesdays. She’s still sleeping but I guess that’s what teens do. haha. I made dinner last night while she was standing around talking to me, and we went to the ice cream shop after dinner, watched some tv. I have been SOOOOO tired lately so she went to shower and was hanging in the guest room and I couldn’t even keep my head up. I think I’m not sleeping too good with the state of the world right now… it worries me a lot.

I’ve been spending some time picking out some nonfiction books to read about being a better ally. I spent the past two years on my reading challenges trying to incorporate more POC authors and protagonists… and it really had such a profound effect on my reading. Just much richer, much more varied, much more valuable feeling. And I don’t mean that I felt some sense of like pride in having picked these choices or anything- it just resulted in me reading really much better books for the year. Which makes me wonder if POC authors have to be a LOT BETTER to get noticed and that maybe it isn’t a coincidence that I felt like pretty much every one was amazing. I bought from a local black owned bookshop (Harriet’s Bookshop in Philly), and also bought some kids books on Amazon (that I couldn’t get there) to send to my new niece because her mom was unsure about what to talk about with her… figured that was a good starting point for the conversations. Also bought from Beauty Bakerie which I’ve been meaning to try, their lipstick is AMAAZZZING and I had always heard that. It did not disappoint.

I’m also trying to have difficult conversations with friends. I wasn’t exactly sitting back before but I’ve been pushing harder, and that did actually result in a good interaction with one friend where she sat with what I said and felt like she gained something from that conversation.

I’d like to sit and do some thinking about how to more meaningfully address race issues in the classroom- we talked prejudice, we talk discrimination, we talk stereotypes. I’ve always found it important to address it in a real way and I always talk about police brutality in a way that I think will get some students thinking about it (that one in particular took some time for me to call to attention on, and I know that other people pushed me along until I “got it.”) But, I only teach one chapter on Social Psych and it’s difficult to cover that much material, so I’d like to think about ways to maximize it, because we can always do better.

Well, that ends my short break from the work day for a diary entry… am I supposed to wake this teenager up? lol.

Last updated June 17, 2020