Yesterday was a unique day in this constant sameness of day after day after day, but today we’re back to the real deal, but now with nothing to prepare for.
This is where the going gets tough for me mentally. I like having a thing to work toward, a goal, a mounting and additive process. To be honest, I also like the deadlines. I will always adjust my own deadlines but if an external force sets them? Blammo — different organizational principles entirely.
This morning I slept until I woke up naturally, which happened to be 5:45 am. I took the dogs outside for their morning constitutional and the sun wasn’t even over the mountain ridge yet, so it was very pleasant. Then I crawled back in bed and rested until Esteban needed to take a shower. The odd thing is that I wasn’t craving coffee, so I just made a hulking gloppy mess of a spinach cherry almond smoothie — and because I eyeballed everything poorly, it was too green and grassy from the spinach and then I countered by adding too many frozen cherries to it, which made the entire thing really thick, so I thinned it somewhat with milk, and by then I had made almost a half gallon carafe of smoothie that was really still too thick, but I toughed through it until I couldn’t anymore (about 35 ounces).
With record temperatures in the Las Vegas valley right now, we’ve been craving cold coffee, but that’s an ordeal and we’re trying to finish the beans in the espresso machine so that it can be properly cleaned and put to bed for the summer. I can always make a few shots of espresso and then dump them over ice, but I decided to make a hot coffee since I froze myself out with the smoothie, but then I could barely finish one latte and skipped the second entirely.
I taught my fiction workshop — this week we’re talking about how to publish fiction — and then immediately had to jump to an All Hands meeting which was notable only because a very famous poet forgot to change the public messaging on Zoom to private when they sent a very inflammatory message into the 35 person room. The bizarre thing is that everyone kind of pretended it didn’t happen, until finally someone was asked to speak about something else and said “I’m sorry, I’m still recovering from what we all just saw.” and I will forever love that person, because apparently everyone else was secretly talking about it via text and IM.
Friends, Zoom chat messages are not actually private. They’re on the chat log later after the session is done and the person who recorded the meeting gets them. It’s a shit show. Don’t do it. Not even once.
After that, I dealt with some of the administrative stuff with my dissertation — although it barely feels like I made any progress with it. Then Esteban and I watched the videos from a house walkthrough that I had asked my sister and brother-in-law to go check out this morning. Then I got depressed, which is what usually happens after thinking or talking about buying a house, because I don’t like anything that’s on the market right now, and everything just feels like making a tremendous mistake and being stuck with it.
We have agreed that we wouldn’t do anything until June because we wanted to see what the housing market would do, but I’m half ready to just say fuck it all and rent a house. Yes, it means we move twice, but I’d rather do that than end up in a house that I dislike or that is poorly suited for us. And also, is this insanity to plan a cross country move in the middle of a pandemic? All signs point to yes. I mean, I wouldn’t even want to get on a plane right now. But even though we agreed verbally not to do anything until June, we’re still looking at houses and we’re still mentally doing the fit check on each one and it’s doing a number on my well-being, to be frank.
The challenge will be to “just keep swimming” until the end of the semester, days counting down into the single digits now. Once I get my dissertation formatted, approved and submitted to the library special collections, then I can check that box and allow my brain to freely chew on this specific problem fully. Until then, I guess there’s always my Marco Polo addiction.
