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Mar. 30th, 2020 09:41 amSo I am maybe not coping as well as I hoped, because people keep looking hard at me, and asking how are you ~really~ and I have no actual useful answer? I am. I persist, and I am going along, and I have a head full of things I am working on not thinking about too hard, and I don't think I am, right now, terribly far off the mean? I know people who are sick - two neighbors, and Mayor David, and they are quarantined and recuperating, although they were pretty fucking quiet about it last week? I dunno. They were sick. And getting better. But still. We need the flags - I wonder why we don't have a set of international signal flags, or at least Q and the other one.... OK - the quarantine flag is L(ima); black and yellow quartered. Q(uebec) is solid yellow and indicates all aboard are free of disease and customs is requested for clearance. So we need L flags for houses with the actual plague inside, and Q flags for "healthy so far as we know" and then we can elaborate on that because the messages one can send via signal flags have their own delightful brevity that is easy to compose humor from when mixed up and hard ashore. On the hard, Mattie says.
I have noticed my focus on the news gets closer and closer to home as the national and state numbers start accumulating. When the country as a whole was teetering on the brink, the state had a small number of cases and no deaths, and now it is still smaller than the nation and I can only look at the county statistics and see that we have 12 or 24 or more cases identified, and certainly an order of magnitutde or more stealth cases, and it is close enough now. Now we have neighbors and friends getting sick with it, and soon enough, deaths of people I know.
And then it feels like borrowing trouble, and honestly if one more person mentions the grief article i shall bite something. It doesn't tell me anything. It says nothing useful to me. Maybe someone thought it was helpful to recognize that we are about to descend into a national crisis (with a bored toddler at thte helm) and it is ok to feel worried about it? gee thanks. Don't mind if I do. Or Anticipatory Grief - what kind of crap is that, that assigns a name to the lurking dread you are having that the world will change and you will fucking lose people that matter and nothing will be good ever again?? I mislike the grief people anyhow. It could be sueful to ahve some feel for the process, but it is so widespread it feels really stupid to section it and analyze it. So many different cultures have so many different ways of coping, maybe those are the things that should be acknowledged - coping strategies, a whole wide range of them, and also mourning rituals that people use to comfort themselves. It certainly feels like time for cutting off all my hair, and rubbing ashes into it, and wailing for while in a hut in the backyard.
That shouldn't sound like such a good idea right now, should it? Yeah, maybe I am not coping so well. Since no else is either, it doesn't win anybody much to say so. Forge ahead, one step at a time. Don't borrow trouble. Do something for someone else. Do something for yourself. It always boils down to the same advice, and the same basic steps to moving out of the darkness. Or through the darkness, I guess.
I have noticed my focus on the news gets closer and closer to home as the national and state numbers start accumulating. When the country as a whole was teetering on the brink, the state had a small number of cases and no deaths, and now it is still smaller than the nation and I can only look at the county statistics and see that we have 12 or 24 or more cases identified, and certainly an order of magnitutde or more stealth cases, and it is close enough now. Now we have neighbors and friends getting sick with it, and soon enough, deaths of people I know.
And then it feels like borrowing trouble, and honestly if one more person mentions the grief article i shall bite something. It doesn't tell me anything. It says nothing useful to me. Maybe someone thought it was helpful to recognize that we are about to descend into a national crisis (with a bored toddler at thte helm) and it is ok to feel worried about it? gee thanks. Don't mind if I do. Or Anticipatory Grief - what kind of crap is that, that assigns a name to the lurking dread you are having that the world will change and you will fucking lose people that matter and nothing will be good ever again?? I mislike the grief people anyhow. It could be sueful to ahve some feel for the process, but it is so widespread it feels really stupid to section it and analyze it. So many different cultures have so many different ways of coping, maybe those are the things that should be acknowledged - coping strategies, a whole wide range of them, and also mourning rituals that people use to comfort themselves. It certainly feels like time for cutting off all my hair, and rubbing ashes into it, and wailing for while in a hut in the backyard.
That shouldn't sound like such a good idea right now, should it? Yeah, maybe I am not coping so well. Since no else is either, it doesn't win anybody much to say so. Forge ahead, one step at a time. Don't borrow trouble. Do something for someone else. Do something for yourself. It always boils down to the same advice, and the same basic steps to moving out of the darkness. Or through the darkness, I guess.