Freckles & Doubt

Right, so, I lost a cat yesterday (Pandora, kidney failure, not yet up to talking about it), and my house is empty and there is no-one for me to talk to, and apparently I am driven back into the embrace of blogging because Teh Internets may or may not substitute for the largely one-sided conversations one has with a kitty underfoot. I have no idea if anyone is still reading Dreamwidth, I suspect not, but I am a bit of a mess and need to string words together as a coping mechanism.

This is the first time I have ever lost a cat who was my only cat; in all other previous losses I have been able to come home and hug the other cat to fill the void. And I can't, and the void is horrible. I have tried to round up all Pandy's stuff to stash in a cupboard where I won't keep seeing it, but keep running across something I've forgotten, and it triggers a new round of helpless crying. So this is a thicket of words between me and the absence. I think the loss is worse because I'm pretty much alone at home, not working, and have consequently had a fairly close and intense relationship with Pandy over the last six months or so.

The Granny Weatherwax subject line is valid, but I cannot say I've been at full health and vigor over the last year, my inner Granny Weatherwax has been somewhat subdued. I think I blogged the COVID bout I had at the end of 2022, which was, significantly enough, around the time that my blogword reservoirs dried up and I vanished from haunts of blog. That's because I ended up with long COVID, which has rendered the last year or so increasingly difficult. I have been at home for the last four months, not working at all beyond answering the occasional WhatsApp plea from a desperate person trying to fill my complicated shoes at short notice; over the second half of last year I was working mostly from home, with breaks of several weeks when my lovely doctor booked me off, in a desperate attempt to rest and address the fatigue. I'm now formally on disability, having wrestled various insurance companies finally into submission.

Long COVID is a horrible beast, as well as being a diagnosis one arrives at by elimination, after testing for everything else. It's hit me mainly with cognitive issues, with a side order of surprise!diabetes, although there's some physical fatigue. I cannot handle crowds, restaurants or background noise; I cannot do more than one thing in a day, which cannot take any longer than an hour or two; I cannot sit at my desk for longer than about half an hour. I am typing this from my armchair, my feet up, with my computer plugged into the TV screen and the keyboard on my lap. Things I have learned to do in the last few months: persuade PC games to work with a controller. Challenging, because the brain fog is horrible. I can also only play games I have played before, and I have to dial the difficulty down to the minimum, because strategically and in terms of co-ordination, I suck. This is causing shame to my gamer's soul.

My short term memory is shot, my executive function is non-existent. I haven't trusted myself to check a student transcript in about eight months. I am losing nouns in conversation at a horrible rate for someone of my literary proclivities and training; if you give me one of those cognitive tests where you have to list all the words you can think of starting with a particular letter in a minute, I manage about five, slowly, and then blank. I am an English PhD grad with a ridiculously large vocabulary, so this is, to say the least, terrifying.

Oh, and my emotional regulation is also extremely iffy. I will burst into tears at the slightest provocation, or lose my temper when minimal things go wrong. I am on disability at least partially because I should not be around students at this stage of my health crisis, the slightest hint of the average student post-adolescent narcissim and I'll infallibly bite someone's head off and spit out the skull with a genteel "ptooey" before collapsing in a sobbing heap on the corpse. Not, shall we say, professional.

I miss Pandy so much. The house is so empty. My state of fatigue has been emotionally muffling me a bit over the last few months, I haven't had the energy for, e.g., guilt at letting people other than me toss themselves into the crater of the orientation/registration volcano god, but this is the worst cat loss I have ever experienced, it's almost physical pain. I may have to go and find another cat almost immediately because apparently being a home-bound crazy cat lady without a cat leaves only the crazy.

Ok, that's fair. If I have to get COVID, which is completely inevitable given that we are back on campus and no-one is masking, at least I can spend my week's self-isolation entertaining myself by watching Elon Musk get owned so hard on Twitter that his great-great-grandchildren are going to be flinching at birdsong, blue tick marks and the term "free speech" without realising why.

Twitter has always been a cesspool, on which isolate rafts of civility float precariously; at its best, it replicates the pleasures of the Latin epigrammatists, its format lending itself to everything that is pithy, witty and vicious. Elon's blindly self-indulgent acquisition of the platform in the name of "free speech" and the cause of billionaire flexing, appears to have neglected to consider the probable result if those qualities, particularly the last, are trained on him rather than the world at large when he inevitably screws it up, as he has done near-instantaneously and with horrible efficiency. (The parade of blue-tick celebrities "impersonating" Musk has been a sustained and delightful exercise in political, collaborative performance art.) His acquisition of the platform is an exercise in classical hubris, and there is a massive satisfaction in watching him, having chainsawed himself off at the knees in blithe arrogance, topple inexorably into financial and reputational ruin while the gods laugh. Couldn't happen to a nastier asshole. I hope it tanks Tesla. Possibly cosmic justice does, in fact, exist.

In other news, I have COVID, and am, according to the nice pharmacist who stuck swabs up my nose, "extremely infectious", the test apparently bounded so fast and so hard into "positive" that the needle, metaphorically speaking, quivered. I feel like fifteen sorts of crap, and am spending my time attempting, at intervals, to eject my own lungs by convulsion. Also, for some reason this stupid version of the bug is making me cough violently and then sneeze, equally violently, six or seven times in succession immediately afterwards, it's maddening. Apart from the brain fog being an absolutely real thing, apparently COVID makes you explode.

It's a week, is all. About the only thing I can say about it is that mercifully the COVID has hit now, instead of in two weeks' time when I am running wall-to-wall advisor and exam committee training and wading my way through enormous scads of board schedules, cursing. While there is a sort of vindictive satisfaction, not unakin to the Elon-downfall pleasure, in contemplating how hard the faculty would have to jump around to plug the gaps if COVID took me out at the truly active juncture, it's really not worth the mopping up.

Elon won't get to mop up. Elon is going to be in little itty bitty chunks, looking surprised and betrayed, on the floor. Elon is screwed.

Well, that was illuminating. Yet another interminable university-level meeting. During which a higher-up notes in passing, as a frank, manly confession which does not at all suffice to compensate for the actual transgression, that if there is one area in which the upper management of our Cherished Institution has not really delivered adequately during the Current Crisis, it has been in communication, both to its students and its staff.

Armoured as I was by my microphone and camera both being off, the effrontery of this gratuitous understatement caused me to laugh out loud. Still laughing, I rolled my chair back from the desk and proceeded, to my own startlement, to degenerate into a sort of manic, bitter giggling which appeared to be entirely out of my voluntary control, and which persisted in an increasingly hyena-like manner until it rocketed into hysterical sobbing. All of which provided a fascinating counterpoint to the more-or-less irrelevant and pointless administrative wurbling as the meeting continued in the background.

I don't think I've every had full-blown hysterics before. It was illuminating. And surprisingly cathartic. And made me realise how precarious and misleading the calm, featureless nature of my working-from-home days must be, and how much my ongoing irritation with my Cherished Institution is actually quite profound. Under that surface, apparently, is lurking a buttload of stress and possible actual trauma. It's all very exhausting, and now I have a headache. The meeting having fumbled its way though circumlocution and repetition into something resembling an ending, I am now going to go and make consolatory and self-rewarding tiramisu. With berries, because I can.

On a happier note, this morning's 5.30am wake-up and happy two-hour lounge in bed with a cup of tea and two affecionate cats was enlivened by finishing Becky Chambers's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which is an utterly charming space opera with nicely-realised alien races and an intensely millenial focus on found family, and which made me cry rather differently - the happy tears of response to a well-judged and ultimately uplifting emotional punch. I loved it, and have ordered all the available sequels. Do recommend.

I am still slightly flabbergasted by how much being in lockdown basically suits me: I don't have to go anywhere or talk to anyone other than the odd Zoom meeting, in most of which I sit quietly and play a personal game of "faculty self-arsepipe-insertion bingo", and I am really perfectly contented noodling around the house playing The Witcher and poking the garden and chatting to the cats while making odd forays into baking or randomly elaborate meals just because I can. I am not going stir-crazy because the internet, and therefore the world, is in my head. But it is having its inevitable side-effect, which is a noticeable drift into linguistic ham-fistedness. Because, apparently, if one hasn't held a conversation in a while, how does one word, anyway?

I have noticed my emails becoming incoherent at times, there have been two occasions in the last few days when I've sent something I could swear was carefully written, and have had immediately to send a clarifcation and apology when reading back my own words. I had to trundle out to the dentist on Friday, as my annoying crown had done its usual party trick of stashing bits of food under the tooth (usually meat shreds, causing moments when vegetarian actually seems like a seductive option) in such a position that no amount of flossing would dislodge them and the pain levels were actively preventing me from sleeping - the lovely dentist man had to pop the crown off and clean underneath, and kindly skimmed the surrounding teeth to close the gap before popping it back, hooray, no vegetarianism necessary. But there were three separate occasions in the dentist trip which I made some comment which seemed clear enough as I spoke but was completely misunderstood, and in retrospect I can completely see why, the statement was kinda loose and drifty. Framing thoughts for verbal statement clearly needs practice, particularly if you're me and tend to shape ideas mentally on a fairly geological time-scale, which is why I prefer to write them.

Anyway. Tooth now sorted, and possibly I should try and blog more than a couple of times a week, because at least that forces me to compose sentences. And the lovely dentist is also a spectacle-wearing lifeform and gave me useful tips on how to futz with a mask to reduce the glasses-fogging effect (answer: rigid wire nose-piece, and twist the ear loops so the mask gapes very slightly on both sides, allowing another path of escape for all that warm, moist air). So we are, if somewhat incoherently, ahead on points.

A few interesting lockdown realisations today:

1. oh dear, it is becoming rapidly apparent that, for some reason, Teams or Zoom meetings are a massive fatigue trigger for me. I am finding myself much less vocal in meetings than I usually am - generally, over the last few years, the fine careless rapture of not particularly giving a fuck about a lot of this means haven't been inclined to hang back from voicing my opinion. But I don't, in virtual meetings, I simply sit there and observe, it seems to require all my energy and focus to do that in itself, I don't volunteer input. And I'm completely blasted afterwards. The virtual is weird.

2. Having sat through four and a half hours of virtual meeting today, mostly entailing good academic brains wibbling helplessly in the face of a sudden pandemic wrecking ball to the academic calendar: oh dear, this was absolutely the worst year we could possibly have chosen to glitch admissions so we have a first year at 120% of capacity. Our volumes, and the incredible diversity of our student body, would be challenging enough under current circumstances of fuckage without the added complication that we are straining at the seams.

3. It was lovely to play the piano yesterday, I propose to do so again as soon as the current endless Zoom meeting, to the background of which I am illicitly typing this, grinds to a halt. But oh dear, I had completely forgotten how badly an hour at the piano completely stuffs with my typing, I hit the computer keyboard and try to play arpeggios rather than QWERTY. It's surprisingly discombobulating, my fingers have been tangling all day. Any typos in this post are entirely the fault of clashing paradigms.

Gawsh. *blows dust off blog*. Apparently I am not in a blogging space, much, right now, which I attribute to the inevitable fog of exhaustion with which the hell-time of my year enfolds my luckless person. In this particular iteration my post-registration punch-drunkness is manifesting partially as extreme glandularity and frequent nausea, but mainly as my weird insomnia problem, wherein I wake up for no adequately defined reason at anything between 3.30 and 5am, and can't get back to sleep. This is leading to a fair amount of early-hours lying in bed while tea-drinking, fanfic-reading, playing Stardew Valley on the Ipad (not uniformly a seamless port, I have to say, bits of it are wonderful and large tracts of it are annoying me) and haplessly providing a human mattress to my felines, who appear generally to approve of my new hours. It also means I spend a fair amount of time wandering around vaguely and bumping into things, because sleep deprivation.

Last night there actually was a proximate cause, in the form of a pestilential mosquito who managed to get into the net, probably through one of the holes the cats have made in it while climbing unco-ordinatedly up the bed, and who dive-bombed me relentlessly until I woke up, activated light and vision, and stalked and crushed him horribly. The horrible sticky heat of the last few weeks may also, I think, have implicated in the sleep-failure; I hope the current trend of misty, moisty mornings and random gentle precipitation will gradually soothe me into somnia. (I also have to randomly shout-out to whoever it is who writes the weather descriptions on AccuWeather, they clearly become easily bored with "sunny" and "pleasant" and escalate into "agreeable, "delightful" and, by way of gnomic I-Ching style epigram, "after a cloudy start, sun returns".)

Jo pointed out the other day how bad a litany of despair my last few blog post subject lines have been, and registration hell-season notwithstanding, it's a fair cop; today's, of course, replicates the ostensible final words of the Opportunity rover, who ground to halt in a sandstorm a few weeks back after exceeding all lifespan expectations by just under fifteen years. I have empathised to a large extent with the internet's outpouring of anthropomorphising woe over a collection of metal and circuits to whom we attributed not just agency, but character, specifically dedication and gallantry; I particularly like XKCD's take on it. The human tendency to ascribe personhood to the non-human and then pack-bond relentlessly with it, is probably one of the redeeming features of our species. If we could work out how to force certain privileged subsets of us to apply that impulse to certain less privileged subsets of actual humans, we'd be golden.

Randomly cooler last night, thank FSM, cloud cover came up and the air was very mildly icy. Possibly just in time to save both my mental health and my considerably drooping container garden.This weather, I do not like it. It is not friendly.

Other things I do not like: watching my own lecture videos to critique my lecturing style and quality, on the general grounds that since my teaching existence is this weird marginal thing which is utterly unsupported by my institution, faculty or co-workers and no-one else is going to nurture it, I have to put the work into nurturing it myself. I don't like watching myself on video. (a) My general posture and appearance beat me over the head with how physically unfit I am, even allowing for the inevitable weight-gain effect of the camera. I look terrible. (b) Following the thread of my own lecture inevitably highlights how fatigued I am currently; you can see it in the hesitation and pauses, in the way I lose the thread of what I'm saying and have to grope for coherence. (c) The above two points notwithstanding, these weren't terrible lectures, they just could have been a whole lot better. Two of them were quite good. Students asked interesting questions and seemed engaged. But as my output goes they were under par.

They probably won't get a chance to be better, because I think they may have been the last ones I'll ever offer, I cannot continue to be here, it's clearly very bad for me.

Things I do actually like: it's Friday, thank FSM again. My garden has drooped a bit but is still alive, and pleasingly green. The jasmine is in flower and smells delectable, and the flame lily has sprouted again. Also, this lovely article goes a fair way towards at least partially restoring one's faith in eco-recovery, human ingenuity, rational systems and engaged youth.

I woke up randomly at 5.30am this morning, which is fairly standard at the moment, probably because my body actually hates me and refuses to take more than 7 hours of sleep regardless of what time I go to bed, whether or not I set an alarm or how tired I am (newsflash: very, more or less perpetually). What was cruel and unusual was lying awake for ten minutes happily plotting out my Saturday and luxuriating in the feeling of not having to fight traffic to work, which lasted only too briefly before I suddenly remembered it was actually Friday and a work day. Not cricket, brain. I do not appreciate being hoodwinked and conceptually ambushed by my own cerebellum before my first cup of tea.

I am now sitting in my office having a mental wrestle with myself about whether or not I'm going to attend a faculty curriculum symposium in twenty minutes, which will subject me to (a) crowds, (b) political rhetoric, and (c) interpersonal tension, all of which give me hives. I am very, very close to mentally categorising it as "not my problem, I'm not an academic", giving this whole profoundly flawed academic edifice the finger, and buggering off home. Which would be bad, and wicked, and awful, and lovely.

On the upside, tonight I take my sister out for a birthday dinner at the local Italian joint, which is very nice, so I suppose there's that. On the further upside, for the last few days I have been re-reading the entire Drarry fanfic archive of blamebrampton, which is unduly British and frequently hysterically funny Potterslash written by someone I darkly suspect is personally located somewhere in the bowels of the British civil service, and to which I attribute any preponderance of British idiom in the above.