Lockdown: All we need is just a little patience

I’m mostly doing this for the sake of completion now, but that’s not a small consideration. It’s late Saturday night (past 2:00 a.m.) and I’m sure the details are going to be hazy if not completely erroneous. It’s okay. These next few entries will probably lack the expounding my usual lockdown journals have. This is also okay.

Tuesday, March 16 was mostly uneventful. It was a normal day at work, and by normal I mean I was behind on stuff and stressed out from trying to finish the cancer center story, which you know I didn’t submit until Friday. This tells you what kind of week I had, really. Stressed about it Tuesday. Submitted Friday. Ugh!

It was not normal in one way. My supervisor was off for the second day in a row. I forgot that it was spring break, so a lot of the parents in our company took at least a couple of days off. This took some of the stress off, but honestly I wasn’t productive enough not to feel any at all. Bleah.

“Why are we here? Because we’re here. Roll the bones.”

Uncle Bezos delivered another Rush Blu-Ray this weekend and I’ve got it playing as I write this. It’s their concert video from the R40 tour in 2015 and it is killer. I think a lot of the footage was in the Cinema Strangiato theater film I saw two years ago but this is also okay. What a performance.

I also worked on a couple of proposals, already in progress. I keep thinking I’m done with them, and they keep coming back for more work. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong here, like if this is just the process at work or if I’m not communicating what I need from people in order to make them happy, but there seems to be some kind of disconnect.

I admit too that I’m finding my patience tested, and I haaaaate admitting I’m running out of patience. It’s a virtue in any life. In a teacher’s life it’s one of the things separating the right from the wrong, and I generally have it in abundance. This is not to say I’m virtuous; rather, it’s to say I chose the right profession when I chose the classroom. My job today doesn’t require nearly as much patience, so I should really never run out of it.

“All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted, not so coldly charted; it’s really just a question of your honesty.”

Oh. I also spent some of my day coordinating our office book discussion group’s first reading selection. That was actually kind of fun. Over the weekend, I emailed everyone (there are five of us) with a little survey: Is there a genre you won’t read? For our first book, would you prefer to read fiction or non-fiction? For our first book, if you had to choose, would you rather read a classic or something current? What are some books you fairly recently enjoyed? Will you most likely read a physical book or an e-book?

The responses were fun to read. It got me pretty amped to facilitate this group. So Tuesday I compiled the responses and asked participants to submit one or two titles of books they’d be interested in reading: fiction, published in 2020 or 2021, no fantasy or horror or erotica or psycho.

I texted the other Jennifer to say I was listening to Guns n’ Roses’s Chinese Democracy, and album I was surprised to learn has aged well. It was late so she didn’t get back. I texted a few friends (Jennifer, Sharon, Crush Girl) to ask if they got their stimulus checks yet. I was the only one who had. Mine went in late Monday.

My late breakfast was a boneless chicken plate from Rainbow. The leftovers were lunch. I thought I’d skip dinner because I wasn’t very hungry, but then I stayed up too late and had to eat a couple of quesadillas. The lazy, microwave oven kind. They were delicious.

I was so tired I actually turned in at a decent hour. Still stayed up too long playing Mario Kart 8. Honestly I felt like I deserved it.

Leave a comment if you need someone to connect with. Pandemic daze is not done. I know I’m still living in it!

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