In retrospect it was a crazy week. It feels like I am not giving 100% in my classes. That happens periodically, I get kind of flat. It also happens when my full attention is not in the room. This feeling grew as the week progressed. It is fine, nothing awkward came up, it was more like my expectations of myself, and my perceived results were not in alignment.
I had a bunch of League meetings and another long in-person one tomorrow. This is a working meeting so not so much social anxiety but still I will be so glad when it is over.
Then there is anxiety about the international focus on us with the National Guard troop deployment. We just had a local judge issue a temporary restraining order in the last hour. She said we are not facing the danger of a rebellion and that our “regular forces” are able to handle the disruption made by protestors at the building in question that house the Immigration & Customs Enforcement people and acts as a detention center just south of where I live. If they do deploy after an appeal it is going to cost taxpayers close to four million dollars to have them here for 60 days.
Yep. Crazy.
I have my new box of sidewalk chalk and have been thinking of pithy but gently resistant things to write around town. Things like “Gaza and Ukraine are war-ravaged. We are not. And we are not afraid. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Somewhere in there an outside device disrupted my Bluetooth and it kicked my Fitbit into an infinite boot loop. I spent hours trying to get it to stop and even got Claude the AI chatbot in on the action. The only options I appeared to have were to let the battery run completely down, (it took over 3 days) or a Factory Reset where I would lose years of data.
So, I ordered a new fitness tracker watch, this time a Garmin. I had done research on this before as what I really need it for is cardio training at a certain heart rate zone. It is very cool, but it is going to take weeks to get used to it. And… a big and… it calculates my heartrate a bit differently, most likely more precisely, than the Fitbit. This means I need to work harder to get the same benefits I thought I was getting before. So now my whole fitness routine has been disrupted.
It will all get figured out but it was and is a lot of extra stuff to add into my already busy days.
In the middle of it all Walt asked for a poem for his newsletter. Okay. Fine. I didn’t feel like I had time to look through my unpublished work and edit one so I thought what the heck, I’ll just write one. I am always thinking about words and phrases and images anyway even if I haven’t been writing and of course I choose a poem to read to my class five days a week and am thinking about poetry all the time.
I wrote this one waiting for an evening meeting to start, revised it the next morning, sent it to Walt, read it to my morning class without telling them I had written it, discovered a glaring typo, sent that info to Walt, allowed him to consider removing a comma later, read it to my class again the next day as prompted by a student who wanted people who didn’t hear it the first day to hear it and then discovered Walt had lead off the newsletter with it.
All this is going on in the background while I am managing my response to the news, all my regular obligations, learning enough to make the new fitness tracker functional, adapting to our first rain of the season and needing to wear sleeves and closed toed shoes and oh my, even a jacket yesterday. The heat came on.
This morning, I took on the melancholy task of taking up the tomato plants and bringing the cages home. I can’t store anything at the garden over winter. I got some new deep seed trays that I understand are good for sweet peas that I hope to start soon. I can put them out in the cold frame in the patio well here if I keep an eye out for frost. I need to mulch the garden now and pull up the eggplant and basil. Everything else is a perennial except the most unusual single Cosmo that is this lavender pink that is still flowering.
My niece started her second round of chemo this last week, one of my students was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and had a biopsy done yesterday to discover what kind. Mr. Sherlock has suffered some setbacks and is much less mobile and in need of more care and that, and the sweet but expensive dog that one of her other friends splurged on and is now barely able to care for, are keeping Mrs. Sherlock quite busy. I still see her in class a few days a week but miss her.
I am grateful for the things I have and am trying to be creative in whatever ways I can.
Did the world seem this shocking and insane to my parents in the late sixties? I know it was bad, and I know in some ways there was real rebellion going on but I don’t remember a time that was as profoundly disturbing as right now is.
The cruelty really really gets to me.
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