This is not going as planned.

 My chest x-ray showed haziness in my left lower lung. This is no difference from the last one, except for the region is a bit bigger now. I woke up this morning with cold symptoms and a very sore throat. So, at my appointment to discuss the x-ray, my doctor and I agreed that a covid test to rule it out as a complication was a wise decision. If I have covid again, I am going to be highly irritated. Last time, I was 3 weeks flat on my back, coughing and hacking. I did ask if the haziness the x-ray showed could possibly be scarring in my lungs. The doctor shrugged and said it was possible but given my other symptoms, pneumonia was more likely.

For all these people saying the covid tests administered by doctor offices are awful, it wasn't a terrible experience for me. Irritating, yes, but nothing like when I had my sinuses scoped about twenty years ago. For one thing, it was a lot faster. Secondly, the doctor wasn't wiggling the thing around in my nose. On the whole, the 'real' covid test wasn't any worse than the at home one. Heck, it was kinda easier because I didn't have to do anything but sit there and don't sneeze.

I have my diabetes follow up appointment with the doctor in a month. He wants me to get another chest x-ray a few days before hand to see if the antibiotics that have been prescribed this time will clear up that haziness in the last two exams. I hope it will. This whole time, I've been tired and feeling like garbage with my chest aching a lot. 

When they weighed me at the beginning of the visit, I saw that I gained about three pounds. Now, I know the weather's getting colder but I wasn't wearing my boots and heavy weather gear. This has been stress eating due to a number of things going on right now. I'm trying to stop doing it but it's proving really hard. I'm trying to get back to food logging and that is really hard. Which is stupid because all it is, really, is writing down a quick note when I eat. But between the stress eating and the food logging stuff, I am finding myself struggling with the urge to cut down how much I eat in a big way.

I don't really know how to describe my relationship with food beyond saying it's very complicated and hurtful. Between the diabetes and my history of anorexia (instilled in me by my insane mom who insisted whenever she caught me eating as a child that I was eating too much and my brothers were going to starve because of me, I was 5 when I started skipping meals) my emotional response is mixed. I love to cook for people. But that's been dialed way back by anxiety that I can't eat what is 'normal' food. It's a mess, folks.

I've got the next month to try to get my eating habits back to what they were last summer and lose those three pounds. Three pounds doesn't sound like a big deal, but it kinda is because when my weight goes up so does my A1C numbers. I am scared right now. I hate being sick and I hate how it reminds me of being sick as a kid where things were ugly. 

Hi again, it's been a while.

 My health has been a problem since I had Covid back last year. I am exhausted all the time, regardless of how much sleep I get. I lose half a day to naps just about everyday. It makes me mad. I have things I want to do. I have chores that I am struggling to stay on top of (like dishes) because my stamina is garbage since I had Covid. It's lead to bouts of despair and bouts of high fury. I am not well and no matter how much I rest I remain unwell.

I talked with my psychiatrist about the possibilities of this being side effects from my medications. We reviewed the medications list and their side effects. The conclusion was this is not a side effect of any of my medications.

He mentioned 'Long Covid' and suggested that I talk to my general practitioner about it. I have been running a low grade fever since October. I have this exhaustion that I can't shake. There's increased brain fog, to the point that I am spelling common words wrong and proof reading everything to make sure that it is correct. Brain fog that has me forgetting appointments and to use my glucose meter on a regular basis. I have been struggling to use my planner to compensate for this but it's not working very well.

My anxiety has been creeping upward as this state of affairs continues. I worry about driving and getting lost. I worry about forgetting appointments that are important for the kids. It's been just hellacious to be like this. I feel like I'm utterly unreliable between my anxiety, the exhaustion issues, and the brain fog.

On top of that, we've got a downstairs neighbor who likes to stand out in front of our apartment and talk smack about me to pretty much anyone who'll listen. I have nothing to do with her. I've been polite, almost formal in my dealings where I have no choice but be in her presence. I am furious. I can't do anything about this. I can only hope that the new neighbors next door lets the evidence of my deeds speak for me. One of these days, I may just open up the door while she is going on her spiel about how I am lazy, filthy, and untrustworthy and tell her to shut up because she has no clue what she's talking about.

Re: that emotional train wreck - still haven't figured out where to bury survivors.

 It hit me that I've been stalled in all of my public writing projects because my father-in-law acted like my father one day when we were visiting. I had a emotional flashback regarding his dismissing my writing as a mere hobby and talking over me. I was silent then but now ... Well, I keep thinking about that joke 'What's red and bad for your teeth? A brick.' and introducing the old man to a fundamental piece of building equipment in use since antiquity. That, however, must remain an idle fancy for the sake of peace and keeping frith. He may be a bad host, but I will be an exemplary guest.

So, the emotional flashback to my parents mocking my goals in life hits me. Around the same time, the neighbor ramps up his violence and the other neighbors who are constantly having screaming fights are back in action. This sets off a few months of bad cptsd episodes. Ones where I basically find a place I can hide but still watch what's going on with an escape route. And as I hide, I sit there feeling numb and shaking. Then, when the kids get home from school, dissociation switches on and I'm cheerful enough that even they are a little suspicious something's not quite right. By the time the end of the day comes, I am too exhausted to really do anything.

First, came the five day migraine. After it had passed, I discovered I had zero fucks to give about anyone except my immediate family. It was like my brain reset somehow through all that pain. It prompted me to talk to my doctor finally about my migraines because they were becoming more frequent due to the weather being stupid. (My migraine trigger is changes in the weather.) So, he put me on a generic form of Imitrex and my life's been significantly easier on the migraine front. After it seemed like that problem had been put to bed, something else pops up.

I freaking had Covid-19. Beloved and I are pretty sure it was the Omicron variant because the kids bounced back in a few days and had little more than cold symptoms. Beloved got the sniffles and was taking care of me. Because it happened like every  time I get sick - flat on my back and sick as a dog for weeks while the rest of the family bounces back real quick. I was talking with Beloved about this and we agreed it has only gotten to be more of a pain in the neck since I got diagnosed with diabetes.

So, about week 2.5 into my being sick with Covid, my blood sugar starts fluctuating wildly and the lows are really scary low (at one point I had a 56 when 55 is the point you need hospital assistance). I was worried that Covid was attacking my pancreas. I had seen medical studies talking about how hypoglycemia is an overlooked symptom of Covid because it wasn't well known. To say the least that scared me. I got into contact with my doctor described the pain I was having in my abdomen and the crazy blood sugar drops at random. So, he ordered some tests and told me to come in if the abdominal pain continued. (The tests were put on hold because I wasn't over Covid yet.)

About five days later, I'm in the office and he checked me over. I was just over Covid at that time. He postulated that the problem wasn't Covid itself but the fact that due to Covid's fuckery I hadn't moved my bowels in a week and a half. So, he directed me to keep taking the fiber that I was doing already and get a laxative. I was a little suspicious that the laxative wasn't going to help with  my abdominal pain. But, after a few days, it eased up a lot. As for the blood sugar matter, he halved my dose of Glymiperide because apparently Glymiperide can cause people to have randomly low blood sugars. When I was off it, my blood glucose numbers were higher but they weren't dropping into the scary zone. He put me back on it at the half dosage and things were looking more normal.

Then on the Saturday after I saw the doctor, I went to the lab and got my battery of tests done. I was waiting to do one last test when a massive dizzy spell that nearly knocked me on my butt happened. I was gently guided to a chair and they asked if they could help. I said that I thought it was because of my diabetes (because I had been fasting for some of the tests) and they gave me a juice box of apple juice. I confess, as much as I wanted to grumble about diabetes, I couldn't help being happy because I was able to have my favorite type of juice for the first time in years.

Just this Sunday passed, the doctor called me. At first I didn't answer the call because I forgot I had his cell number. The second time he called, I answered it and he had some good news for me. My pancreas, liver, and everything else associated with the production of insulin tested at normal levels. That was a huge relief. It was also a surprise because I thought I was going to have to wait for Wednesday and my appointment to learn what the results of the test were.

There was also some bad news, that was relatively minor. At some point over the time I was sick, I developed a uti. I kinda wondered how it happened but the doctor discussed antibiotics with me and figured out one that will kick it out of my system. I'll be getting that soon. I just hope that they're not horse pills or like the antiviral pills for Covid (4 pills to swallow 2x a day and they tasted gross). But between mental illness problems and fucking Covid, I haven't been blogging or writing anywhere but in my daily journal. And a section of it was a recording of my symptoms.

It is my hope to get all of this stuff that's been blocking me sorted out. Now, the screaming neighbors have been evicted, so that makes one less trigger to deal with. Since the police had a conversation with the other neighbors, things have been a lot calmer and less violent. I'm on tenterhooks to some extent because I know how the abuse cycle works. I keep telling myself that the guy isn't going to come after me and if he did, cast iron frying pan to the face will drop him like a rock. It's not working super great to convince me that I'm safe, but I'm trying.

Screw Covid with a rusty chainsaw, sideways.

 I haven't felt well enough to write on any platform except quick notes in my daily journal tracking my symptoms since about the middle of last month. My youngest son got sick with Covid during what I think was the second week of school. Within 72 hours, my eldest son and I had it too. Beloved came down with it a few days later. (His case was super mild and all he got was the sniffles.) The boys had mostly cold symptoms and a lot of gas.

I need to back this truck up a bit and start over. Snuggle Bug went to school on a Tuesday and in the time it took for him to get there (wearing a mask for safety, like we've been doing the whole time) and get through two classes, he caught Covid. He was sent to the nurse for flu like symptoms and he was there feeling awful. We got a phone call to pick him up and Beloved got out of work for a little while to pick him up from school. Snuggle Bug was not his usual chatty self. He was running a low grade fever and we did a Covid test. He tested positive pretty much immediately. 

I called our family doctor and asked how we should proceed. He said that as a family we should quarantine for the rest of the week and when Snuggle Bug was recovered he can go back to school wearing a mask for 5 days, with us keeping an eye on him for the resurgence of symptoms. Three days later, the boys have mild cold symptoms and a lot of gassiness. Between the two of them, they finished off the two boxes of gas-x that we had in the cupboard over the course of that week. I had half the laundry list of symptoms but tested negative. 

I quickly reached a point where I was nearly delusional from fever, dizzy, and barely able to keep track of a conversation. I was exhausted and constantly running to the bathroom for my butt to explode for the first few days. Then the diarrehea stopped and I had wicked gas pains.  The dizziness and the inability to think clearly became more intense as did the other flu like symptoms. I was sleeping sitting upright for a week and I hated it because no matter what I did I was coughing and hacking like hell. Towards the end of the second week, the area around my pancreas began to ache. At first I passed it off as just muscular pain from all the coughing.

I was dumb. The ache grew more intense and hasn't gone away. As of last Saturday night, my blood sugar has been dropping into the mid-60s to upper 50s. I knew anything below 70 was bad. A little research and I realized with horror just how bad it was. 55 is the number where you need an injection of glucagon. I have none in the apartment. Yesterday was bad with my blood sugar repeatedly plunging. I've called my doctor's office and I am waiting to hear back from them what I should do. To get through the night, I ate a full meal right before I went to bed. The scary part of this is I am not having the symptoms of hypoglycemia when it happens. I just get a hunch to check my sugar and go 'oh fuck!' when it is low. 

Honestly, I am scared because I have never had blood sugar this low. I still feel pretty rotten. The cold symptoms are clearing up. The fever hasn't broken yet. I am still having dizzy spells. And my guts aren't right. I'm really hoping that my doctor has a good idea on what we can do to stabilize my blood sugar. Eating multiple full meals through the day instead of 3 with 2 snacks is not the way to do it, but it is the best we've been able to come up with. And all of this is happening as I am doing extremely low impact activities.

[keyboard mash] IT IS STILL A PANDEMIC!

 Here's a pretty picture to distract you for a moment from the horribleness of the world. If you can not read the text on the image, it says 'Chasing Hope' and the image is a series of blue butterfly stickers arranged around the text. The sparkly stickers are pop-up stickers, though the pic doesn't do a good job of demonstrating it.

Rant in-coming, if you're faint of heart or can not handle coarse language, focus on the butterflies.

I get why he did it. Dr. Fauci is under incredible pressure to declare everything is fine and that we're done with the pandemic. He said it because if he didn't he was probably going to lose his job and someone more malleable would have replaced him. Still, it's a dirty fucking lie that's going to get people killed.

There's 23 counties where people should be masking in my state. My county isn't one but is surrounded on all sides by them. It's only a matter of time until the CDC says we should bring back masking. My family didn't stop masking when the mandate got dropped. This goddamn disease mutates like nobody's business. It's killing people. It's just not killing them quite as fast. This is why we're still wearing masks and maintaining social distance despite the strain it puts on relationships.

I now understand that the Influenza Pandemic didn't truly go away. People just cast off their masks and accepted that people were going to die as a cost of being comfortable and living life as 'normal'. There is no fucking 'normal'. Until they come up with a damn vaccine that this cursed virus can not evade, I will be wearing a mask because this disease can fucking kill me. My children understand that I am in the high risk group for lethal complications and they're wearing masks because they don't want me to die.

I want you to think about that for a minute, Reader, a 12 and 14 year old have to consider their parent's mortality every morning they go to school. They're part of a very small population at the school still wearing masks. Everyone is real good about not giving them shit. But I'm waiting because at some point there's going to be an issue. My sons shouldn't have to worry about my dying because they brought home a 'common cold' that turned out to be Covid. They've been more anxious about my diabetes since Covid has come into the picture. Every morning when I check my blood sugar, they ask me if it is a good number. I always tell them it is a good number, even if it is running high, because I am not going to have them worried over if I'm ok when they have typical teenager shit to worry about.

I want my kids to be ok. I am working my damn ass off to keep my anxiety about the effects of long term Covid and the fear that if my boys get it, they'll be long-haulers, or dead. I see my neighbors and relatives casting their masks away and going 'It's all over now.' When, no, it is fucking not over. This is how we wound up with surges that killed a lot of people. 

There are mass graves in NYC of people who died from Covid. Over 1 million people in the US have died from Covid. But we're supposed to ignore that and focus on things like what Susie is going to wear to Prom! And the OMG!DISNEY IS GOING TO HAVE TO LEAVE FLORIDA?! I'm sorry, but that shit doesn't matter. Coordinate the prom dress with the mask. Let the professionals hash out what's going to happen with Disney. Focus on trying to be hygienic, focus on trying to be safe, and start thinking long term with this mask business.

Because there's a lot of people who are dead or permanently disabled due to Covid because of stupid shit like people saying that it was 'just the flu' and getting their ass up in the air over the fact that they had to cover their mouth and nose. Let me tell you something, masks are a hell of a lot more comfortable than bras. You can actually breathe with them and you don't have a damn wire digging into your ribs to make your breasts look more socially acceptable (larger). If I have to wear a goddamn bra so that you're not offended by the fact that I have nipples (when every-fucking-body has  nipples, we're goddamn mammals), you should wear a fucking mask so I don't catch whatever disease you're carrying.

Fucking hell, people, we've had two and a half years of this shit. And you're crying about your freedoms? Your freedoms end at the tip of your nose. Social responsibility is part of being in a society. If you're sick, you get it taken care of and avoid people until you're better. It's common sense when something this damn contagious is running around. By the way, the biggest proponents of throwing the masks away and dismissing the vaccines are the generation who saw major national intervention for Polio and Measles. 

The death rate for Polio is the same as the death rate for Covid. But because Covid looks like a cold or the flu, they scorn it. Fuck those assholes. Polio was damn near eradicated because of intensive research and the public realizing that something was seriously fucking wrong. Why can't you morons do the same damn thing? Because you feel uncomfortable and irritated with a fucking mask? Grow a hair on your ass and put on the damn mask. You're going to kill people with this attitude and possibly even die yourself. If you don't give a damn about dying, that's fine. Eat a fucking bullet and get it over with so that you don't kill other people in the process.

At a loss for words.

 This business in Ukraine (and I learned it isn't 'the Ukraine' but just 'Ukraine' because 'the Ukraine' was a Soviet propaganda movement to delegitimize the nation to a minor extent) is making me as nervous as a cat in a rocking-chair factory. I've been trying to focus on domestic things like cleaning up for spring and my daily routine. It's been difficult.

Now, I don't have any family in Ukraine, as far as I'm aware. The family members with all the genealogical records and I are not on speaking terms right now. Still, these people don't deserve what's happening to them. And the rest of the world is doing what little they can to oppose Russia's incursion with out setting off WWIII. I can't help it, though, I'm watching these people taking a heroic and defiant stand against the Russian army when they're clearly out gunned. It's gut wrenching.

It is terrifying the fact that we are a few footsteps away from an open conflict with Russia. I don't want a nuclear war to happen. I don't want this war in Ukraine to happen. I want Russia to close up shop and go home. The fact that they hold Chernobyl is disturbing. Especially with the reports that there's been an increase in radiation being emitted at that site. Who needs a bomb when you can just throw a nuclear powerplant (that is damaged) into chaos? It's a huge threat to eastern Europe and the various Baltic states between Europe and Russia.

I'll not be watching the State of the Union address tonight. My wrecked nerves can't handle it. I'll read about it in the news tomorrow. I'm suspicious about the Republicans and their holding the 'real' State of the Union meeting right now. Things in this country are a powder keg that no on wants to admit. They want to just sweep it under the rug and say that things are going back to normal.

Meanwhile, there's still a pandemic raging. Mask mandates are being discarded left and right for political reasons when wearing a goddamn mask is what keeps you from breathing in the exhalations of a carrier or someone who is sick with Covid. Our school district said that it is up to parents if their kids are going to keep wearing masks. Our family is going to do it because this thing, even in it's more 'mild' version could seriously fuck me up. We've got people around the world doing 'freedom convoys' and using big rigs to block traffic as part of their protest of mask and other covid safety protocols that have been instituted by various governments. These fucking morons are forgetting that we're losing over a thousand lives a day to Covid. They figure it's not happening to them or their immediate circle of associates/families/etc. so it can't be as bad as it sounds.

Donald fucking Trump is out there flapping his gums and encouraging these protests. He's also talking about how great/smart Putin is for invading Ukraine. In the process, he's been talking trash about the US. And his fan base doesn't even notice that. They're too star struck and brainwashed to believe that he's damn near the second coming of Christ rather than recognize that he's a charlatan and a general bastard. We've got people in the GOP talking along the same lines (who are members of the Trump cult). It's getting ugly.

And there isn't a damn thing I can do about any of it.

Still not over the bronchitis.

 The z-pack did a lot of good. I'm no longer coughing up stuff that's ugly colored. But I still have a fair amount of chest congestion and my peak flow meter has me firmly in the yellow zone. I've developed a sinus infection on top of this. But, my fever is manageable. I spent most of last week with a moderate to high fever and I wasn't at the point of hearing colors but it was pretty close. That came down a lot over the weekend and last few days. Now I'm at a low to moderate fever. According to theory the antibiotics stay in my system for ten days. So, according to theory, it should resolve my sinus infection and the last lingering bit of this bronchitis by the end of the week.

Cuddle Bear caught this a few days after I did. I tested negative for Covid-19. Now the school wants him to have a test done before he can return to school. It took some digging, but Beloved found a mostly affordable rapid Covid-19 test yesterday after work at one of the local pharmacies. It was disappointing to realize that the closest pharmacy to us was engaging in price gouging on the tests because this thing was half the cost of what we paid for the last test. Same brand and everything. They're nice people but that was a dick move on their part. I have a feeling that a lot of places are selling these things at cost, because they have a sense of 'this is good for the community'.  The mark up at the other place just disappoints me because they "pride" themselves on being our community pharmacy and being there for everybody. 

It's just more evidence as to why we've taken our business elsewhere. We visit them when we have no other recourse. Their hours are such that Beloved can't stop there after work to pick up prescriptions. They apparently mark things up for profit. And their selection is limited for what kind of things you can get. Beloved found me diabetic cough syrup at the other pharmacy, which we didn't even know existed based on what this place had to offer. (Diabetic cough syrup is seriously disgusting. The only way I can manage to take it and not gag is to throw it back like a shot of high test whiskey.)

I'm going to be really annoyed if this stupid cold turns out to be some variant of the Covid-19 virus. There's been no loss of smell or taste. But, the doomsayer in me is going 'this is it, the plague has reached your house.'  The sooner we get Cuddle Bug's test done, the better. It'll shut up my anxiety. It'll make it possible for him to go back to school (which he's been asking about for the last week since he got sick). I just wish I didn't have an anxiety disorder that is constantly prophesying doom.

Ramblings about life.

So, after spending the last three months having sleep problems and trying different solutions, the doctor has brought me to an ironic solution. This doctor is honest. He tells me that the medication is an antipsychotic that I have been on previously (Seroquel) and he's putting me on the lowest dosage for it's heavily sedating side-effects. It won't interact poorly with the Vraylar or my other medications. I'm temporarily off of the Temazepam because it would negatively interact with that and it's taking over the job that the Temazepam was failing to do (getting me to sleep).

The irony of this is the doctor who first put me on Seroquel lied to me about what it was. He said it was a sedative and that I needed it to resolve my sleep problems that I was having during my postpartum depression. That doctor went on vacation at a time that I needed a new script written. The nurse at the clinic "wasn't comfortable" writing the script, well aware that going off it was going to do bad things to me. I had to wait two weeks for the doctor to come back from vacation. The Friday before the doctor was back in office at the clinic, I had my major crisis with suicidal ideation and psychosis, which were all aggravated by the side effects of going cold turkey off of an antipsychotic medication. Because the side effects of going cold turkey off of an antipsychotic medication are suicidal ideation, depression, and psychosis. 

I was uneasy going back on the Seroquel. I found myself concerned that I was going to be a zombie again and unable to function. When I got to Dr. M.'s office, I was on 800 mg of Seroquel. I have memory problems because of it. The going theory is the fact that I was on that and Geodon (another antipsychotic medication) for about seven years by then that majorly contributed to my developing diabetes. Basically, my pancreas is shot on top of the insulin resistance that I have caused by my psych medications and my PCOS. I'm playing a hard game of manage my condition with meds, diet, and exercise to forestall being on insulin as long as I can manage it.

I was handled real badly by the county mental health clinic. Theoretically I could sue them. I don't have the energy, money, or the time to pursue that. The people who made life hell for a year, screwed over my career in education, and put me on medication that's resulted in my developing a life long medical condition are getting away with it. I'm angry. I'm angry at the people who tried to make political hay off of my suffering. I'm angry at the people who were too damn lazy to do their jobs and put me into that position to begin with. And I'm angry that there's no justice here. They get to keep their jobs. They get to live their lives with zero repercussions for their actions. I'm a bit bitter on that point and still traumatized.

But, back to the Seroquel. I've been on this super low dose now for about a week. I'm actually sleeping through the night. Dr. M. thinks that if we do this for a few weeks, it should be enough to reset my sleep cycle back to what it should be and then I can come off of the Seroquel again. Because he doesn't think it's good for me, which is why he took me off it in the first place. In the meantime, I'm doing journal work trying to process whatever hellish thing my subconscious mind is trying to disgorge. It's ugly and kinda scary writing this stuff. I don't know what I'm going to do with it.

The 'noise' in my head, which is entirely different from psychosis, is back again. I've been feeling fractured in my brain for a long time, like ever since I was a kid. Now the different parts of me are making noise again. I need to process something and at the same time, I need to figure out just how fractured I am. It is seriously making me think I have a mild case of dissociative identity disorder with how I lose time, have conversations that I don't remember, and do stuff that I don't remember. That's been the last three months.

I don't have it happen that I go somewhere and not remember how I got there. I'm afraid to leave the apartment on some level most of the time right now. Which is why I'm on a higher dose of antianxiety medication at the moment. Again, Dr. M. thinks this is something that will resolve as I continue doing my work and we'll be able to step me back down to a lower dosage. He figures that both problems will resolve (the high anxiety/increased PTSD flashbacks and the sleep problem) around the same time. The estimate he gave me, given how aggressive I am about trying to stay on top of my mental health issues and take care of the problems as they pop up, is a few months. So, theoretically, by the time the holidays hit, I should be doing better.

I am just getting to the point where I can start doing stuff a bit more normally again. I'm just getting back into my writing. Of course, this is where I have someone calling me out for being 'aloof' and 'ignoring their efforts to communicate.' So, I have to explain, yet again for my readership, I am disabled and a social-phobe. It's really frustrating because there's some serious discussions that need to happen in the religious community that I've found myself in and there's been push back against it. And there are people in my readership community who expect me to be neurotypical and that I'm just being a contentious and aloof by raising questions and then going radio silent for three months.

Covid-19 has really fucked up my life. I didn't get it. No one in my household has gotten it. But, it's brought up a laundry list of trauma memories because of the isolation. It's made it harder to go out because the air is now lava and people are running around maskless as if there's no pandemic now. There's the looming specter of remote learning with two kids who have very different academic needs and very different learning styles. We did this before, it sucked. It went beyond sucking and into a realm that I lack adequate words to describe. It psychologically fucked with me on multiple levels. I don't have the capacity I used to for rapid switching between student needs because of how fucked my brain is. And there's just a lot of fucked up shit flying around, barely missing us.

We don't get a weekend off. Beloved and I are constantly 'on duty' and it's burning us out. Then I see other people doing shit like going on vacations and acting like the pandemic is no big deal. I get angry. I see other people with diabetes loading up on sugary snacks and I get angry. Some of it is envy. I want that vacation. I want to eat 'normal' food. Some of it is just pure frustration because I can't see away that we're going to get a break or improve the situation. We're just treading water and trying to get by. Covid-19 really brought that out into high relief. I tell myself that I should be thankful because we're better off than some others. I tell myself that I should be thankful because we're healthy (for the most part). I am bitter and angry with the fact that we're just hanging in like kittens on a window screen.

Twenty years later.

 The attacks that happened twenty years ago are still fresh in my memory and in the memories of many other people. They remain a horrendous tragedy. At the same time, the war in Afghanistan should never have happened. It was entered into in a fit of collective rage. The way the issue of Al-Queda should have been handled was the way campaigns against unsavory people or people who are out of favor with the government have been traditionally handled. Putting money out there for the mercenaries to clean up the mess.

I was against the war in Afghanistan from the day it was declared. I had people spit on me. I had people tell me that I was a traitor. I had people tell me that I was a terrorist sympathizer. I had people tell me that I hated America. My position has always been we never should have gone to war with Afghanistan, regardless of the fact that Al-Queda was hiding in their mountains. It would be like a country declaring war on us because of the Proud Boys or the KKK are tolerated by people in our country. 

The few thousand who died this day does not justify the many more who have died over the last twenty years. Don't tell me that the dead wanted this. They wanted to just go about their day and go home to their families. The dead on both sides of the conflict were human beings with simple desires. And now they're corpses.

People accuse President Biden of 'failing' in Afghanistan when he was following up on what President Trump negotiated. The fault of the unfurling fiasco lies on the shoulders of multiple presidents. Al-Queda was trained by the United States to carry out terrorist activities against the Russian forces in Afghanistan and the immediate region. They eventually drove the Russians out. At which point they turned on the United States because they wanted autonomy. They had a taste of it after driving the Russians out of Afghanistan and they wanted more.

So, Al-Queda did what they were trained to do. They carried out a terrorist attack against a larger opponent. As for the Taliban, we should have stayed the hell away from them as well. I'm not sure if the Taliban developed under the same influences as Al-Queda. I suspect that is the case. Now that Afghanistan is back in their hands, I presume their regime will be especially punitive in an effort to force the people back into the state they were in prior to the war's beginning and the complete upheaval of that nation.

All we did was make things worse. Why? Because we were mad and decided that somebody had to pay. It's the mentality of immature people that speak with their fists, if I'm going to call a spade a spade. We punished an entire nation for the actions of a few. And established a dangerous precedent. I'm watching and waiting for that to come back on us. There's a reason I and my family don't live in a major metropolitan center known for some national significance. The closest one is barely a shadow of what it was and only film and photography nerds would be able to identify the significance of it.

And we made things worse in this country. All y'all act like Donald Trump's presidency unmasked the ugliness in this nation. No, it was the zealous behavior in the time after the terrorist attacks that did it. And that level of zealotry is encouraged, even today. I know people who practice Islam and they have to hide their practices as to remain safe. I don't practice Islam but I do wear a head covering. The Islamophobia has spread and grown such that anyone who does so is assumed to be a 'towel head' and are harassed with relative impunity. President Trump's open support of racists, white supremacists, and literal neo-Nazis only made the situation more blatant and ugly. But this attitude has always been here.

The attitude that you're not really an American unless your white, Christian, and live in the right neighborhood. Don't believe me, go ask your black neighbors. Go ask your Asian neighbors. Oh, wait, if you're white you probably don't have neighbors of different ethnicity. Self-segregation is a thing that's only gotten worse as time goes on and economic disparity due to systemic racism and religious persecution persists. What religious persecution? Oh, any religion that isn't nominally Christian.

But, that's all in the past, right? We're mourning the dead again, as we do every so many years, in a form of ritualistic masturbation to justify the horrid deeds that this nation has committed. People die every day. But we don't mourn them. We don't build monuments to them. Not even the ones who've died due to Covid-19. (Which is still a fire raging out of control but everyone wants to desperately to go back to life before Covid-19 that they're willing to sacrifice children for their 'liberty'.)

Long story short, it was a tragedy. All of it. It still is a tragedy. It was also one of the most horrific failures of the modern United States that I have ever witnessed. The other being how all y'all are handling Covid-19. I don't think the Covid-19 situation will take 20 years to resolve itself, though.

Just grinding my way forward.

 I am exhausted because I haven't been sleeping well. I keep waking up at 2am and then I have to take melatonin to get back to sleep. Most of the time, I wake up at 5am when my alarm is set for 5:45. I just am frustrated because being tired makes my brain run slower. I don't do so great in the brain department anyways because of the bipolar and the ptsd. So any detriment becomes a real hinderance. 

So, I'm sitting here with two pots of coffee in me, blinking owlishly as I try to update my blogs. I'm behind schedule but getting things done. I started working on my writing tasks at 7:30 instead of the scheduled 9am just because I had so much to get done. I've rebooted my therapy writing and I'm seriously considering taking some of that to digital. I've been keeping a time-log to check on how I'm doing about this whole 'losing time' thing. 

It's creepy as fuck. I go through the whole day doing stuff and when I get to the end of the day, I can't remember about half of what I did. It's just as bad as when I have a conversation with someone and they are referencing something I said that I have zero recollection of saying. I still feel like my sense of self has some serious fault lines in it and I can't tell if they're getting worse or not.

I've suspected for a long time that there might be more than one 'me' in my head. When things got bad as a kid, I dissociated and let another part of myself handle the shit that went down. Now, I am safe but those different parts of me are still vocal. I'm not literally hallucinating but it's like having a random thought that doesn't belong to you go through your head. I've had therapists question this and suggest that I am just interpreting things wrong because I'm not dressing in different clothes, making rapid hairstyle changes, or doing things like switching from needing glasses to not needing glasses.

I'm sorry, but if you grow up in a household where mental illness is cause for a beating, you learn to stuff as much of that shit into a box and don't talk about it. The shifts that happen between these parts of me are subtle. But they're starting to happen again because of the long term stress of Covid-19 and the isolation of being in my home 98% of the time to avoid getting it. So, I've started that journaling exercise that the one therapist who found what I described curious and it basically doubles my time for journal work.

Blog posting is supposed to take an hour but because of other factors, I'm now a half hour into my book work time for the day. I just keep having little things come up to put me off schedule despite the fact I started early and I am getting frustrated. My hormones being all over the place doesn't help matters any. I just want to get stuff done so I can move on to other things, more pleasant things. But each task I complete, it seems like three more pop up that need done. 

I'm going to try to blog on this one more frequently. I'm going to try to be more social on social media. I need to interact with people. It's part of the reason why I am doing tarot readings on Keen again. It's because I need to talk to people. It's like exposure therapy for social phobia from my own home. The social phobia has gotten pretty bad and has been running the show for the last few months. It's why on social media I have practically zero activity going on. So, I'm trying to force myself to be active. And I'm terrified to do it.

Social phobia sucks.

 I've gotten quiet again. I have stopped talking about things like my spirituality even with Beloved. I'm terrified of being judged. I know that he won't judge me. I know I can talk to him about anything. At the same time, this creeping terror gnaws at me and tells me that no one wants to hear what I have to say, not even the man I love the most.

Since the beginning of the pandemic in our region, I've functionally been housebound. I haven't gone grocery shopping in over a year. After I got the vaccine, I bought some clothes and struggled with this mishmash of feelings. I felt guilt over buying new clothes. I felt excitement about buying them and transitioning my wardrobe to something more authentically me. I felt gratitude that I was out of the house doing something 'normal' for the first time in a long time. And I felt creeping terror that the vaccine wasn't enough and I was still going to catch Covid-19 and die.

My anxiety keeps ramping up and when it does that it gets harder to be social. I find myself reliving the emotional trauma of the bullying I endured in school as a kid. (Including and not limited to people trying to light me on fire and spreading rumors that I was a whore so extensively that I had students from the local college ask me at 16 what the cost of a blow job was in public. It was awful.) I find myself reliving the emotional trauma of how my parents raised me and the scorn that they heaped upon me when I was in a depressive episode. I find myself reliving the mockery they made of my desire to become a professional author.

All of that together, I find I just scroll through social media platforms and struggle to reach out and even post stupid memes. I just lurk and feel left out. I know that no one is excluding me. I just have to post something, even if it's a few words. At the same time, I can't bear the thought of being utterly ridiculed and harassed. I've carefully curated my social media accounts to keep people who are kind in them and yet I am terrified that they'll prove as bad as the harpies that I had to deal with as a kid.

I don't know what to say. I feel lost and afraid. And I hurt very deeply. I should probably be working on this stuff with a therapist but none of the therapists in my area take my health insurance. And I'll be damned if I go back to the county mental health clinic for any reason. They made my life a thousand times worse with their bungling, ham handed, ill spirited bullshit. I'll not go back there even if I was paid to do it. So, I just write in my notebooks and feel awful. I'm going to try to be social, but it is very hard. And I feel like I am somehow defective because I can't bring myself to do it when it comes so easily to virtually everyone else.

Thinking about finding a therapist.

Image from Kat Jayne at Pexels.com

 My psychologist has declared me to be one of his most stable patients. That's a big deal because a few years back my mood cycling was really bad. This Vrylar stuff had done wonders for sorting out my mood. I spend most of my time in a low level depressed state but the lows are not as bleak as they were before and the highs are not as unhinged. He's really proud of the effort that I have put in and how well I am doing.

So, some good news there.

At the same time, he has noted that I'm coming up on about five years with out a therapist. He knows about my medical conditions. He's aware of the struggles that I've been having over the last year with trying to get my blood sugar under control. Between the stress and anxiety that comes with having diabetes and the fact that Covid-19 has a rather high death rate for people with diabetes, my psychologist has strongly encouraged me to find a therapist to talk through the anxiety that I've been dealing with.

This year, the trauma anniversaries have been a bit more intense. I think it's because of how much I have been isolated. It makes for a weird parallel to my youth when I spent a good amount of time isolated to avoid people who were harmful towards me. The doctor is of the opinion that a therapist would be helpful in getting me through all of the emotional flashbacks I have been having over the last few months.

The problem is my health insurance. There are therapists in the city who take my insurance. But my insurance dicks around on paying them. So, I have been turned away from people who could have helped me. I will never darken the doorstep of the county mental health facility after the hell they put me through. I have been attempting to do what I can with journal writing and using prompts that I find on the internet. It's been rough and I often forget to write in my mental health journal. Last year, I had three entries in there for the whole year.

My goal is to have three entries in there per week. I'm going to treat it like I'm back at college and I have writing homework. I am doing a lot of writing across various platforms. I have scheduled time for this type of work. I just have to stay on top of my schedule to get it in. I don't have a therapist but I have over a decade of experience being in therapy so I have a pretty good grasp on how it works. So, I sit down and write like I'm talking to a therapist. I'm going to call my health insurance company to see if I can make arrangements to have a list of approved providers sent to me. I fear that most of them are off in Buffalo, which is a 2 hour drive away from me and that they're not going to take me because of Covid and/or the games that the insurance company keeps playing in trying not to pay people for the services provided.

I'm angry because I want to be on the better health insurance that is accepted pretty much everywhere. But, I can't change providers due to my preexisting conditions. So, I'm stuck with this second tier insurance that isn't going to get me much help with my mental health stuff. I am sick and tired of mental health (as well as dental and eye care) being treated as a luxury. It's necessary for us to be well and get the help we need to function as best we can. Especially during a pandemic. But, what difference is that going to make to the people who are counting numbers and don't see the members as people but as income sources.

You're tired of Covid-19 and all the restrictions, I get it.

 I'll state it again. I get that you're tired of Covid-19 and all the restrictions. I get that you want to go back to life like it was before Covid-19 showed up. I get that you feel stifled with the mask rules and the social distancing. It's restrictive and unpleasant. I can empathize with your discontent and ire.

You do understand, however, that these rules, restrictions, and such like are keeping people like me safe? I'm not the only immuno-compromised person out there. There's a lot of us. The ages range from tiny little newborn babies to elderly nursing home residents. You may think only of the extremes for whom these restrictions are keeping safe but there's plenty of us who are in that in between age group who appreciate your keeping us safe as well.

There's talk of a vaccine. Rumors are its going to go to the most vulnerable populations first. I don't believe our government is that effective. I think it's going to go to the people that it is most profitable to send it to first. I mean, let's look at how testing kits went out way back at the beginning of this. If we're lucky and we keep playing ball, we might see the vaccine available to 70 to 80 percent of the population by next JUNE. 

The trick here is to hold the line. It's not the doctors and hospital workers who are on the front line of keeping this pandemic under control in our individual towns and homes. It is us, the famous We the People. I know you're tired and this is very stressful. It's been very tiring and stressful for those of us who have been trapped in our homes since this began. It's been very tiring and stressful for everyone. We, however, are strong enough together when we work together to survive this.

Please, work together. Please stick with the mask rules, social distancing, and other rules that come along so that we can get through this mess faster. Because the more we work together, the quicker we can find our way out of this mess.

Keep your shield up and push forward. In this case, your shield is your mask. We can do this.

Pandemic Project 1: Dune Litany Against Fear

 I drafted this out in April. It's been busy around here. I haven't gotten as much time for stitching on this project as I'd like. Still, here's what I have done so far. Each petal of each blossom is done in a different stitch, as are the centers and the berries. I'm still deciding colors for the left side. My next 'update' on this, I hope to have the leaves and the buds finished on the right side. 

The right side represents life and growth. The left side represents death, decay, and rebirth (in the berries). All of this is hand drawn and hand stitched. It was just a random bit of cross stitching fabric I had on hand. It barely fits on the frame widthwise. I'm seriously considering getting it professionally framed when it is done.

(All of the blossoms are filled in, I used an ecru colored floss on the right hand blossoms. It's washed out in this pic because of lighting.)

Just some ramblings.

 It's been a tradition for me to do NaNoWriMo just about every year for several years now. It started out as a thing  that I did with Stargazer along side NaBloPoMo. I have about two weeks to prepare for a potential NaNoWriMo project and right now I am editing one book as I am working furiously to finish another. I got something of a casual book contract offer from a good friend of mine. What he's offering is really good in the world of publishing. So, of course, as I flail about trying to pick a pen name, I started writing what was supposed to be back story for one of the fanfiction scenes I wrote.

At the same time, I have been really struggling with depression because it's that time of year for seasonal depression to team up with bipolar depression to create a bucket of suck. I feel awful and I'm exhausted all the time. I am filled with dread of everything from failure to this election going sideways and Covid-19 getting into my home and killing us. I keep plugging away and doing the bare minimum to keep the household going. My humor has been grim but its still there. My psychiatrist said that I am his 'rock' and that he really admires my stability and how well I have been about taking my medications. I was uncomfortable with the compliment but kept it to myself as I thanked him for it.

The kids are doing school "in person" with masks and all of the NYSDOH safety protocols in place. So far there has only been one isolated Covid-19 incident. It was cleaned up, people were sent home to get tested/treated/recover and it didn't impact the school as a whole. The only reason it really was a news story was because of the fact that our school district is the only one in the county (if not the entire region) doing 'in person' classes. Approximately a quarter of the students in the district are doing remote learning. The region is sill below the 1% infected threshold that would mandate all schools going to remote learning only. Gods willing, we'll stay like this because we're a very rural area. 

Downstate in the NYC region, they're experiencing a second wave of cases. I'm not surprised. I figured it was going to hit around now when people are indoors more because of the cooler weather. I can't say if the problem is that the state opened up too early because the numbers are skewed. A big percentage of the state population is concentrated in and around NYC. A big enough percentage that it swings everything from the numbers on how the state is doing with this pandemic business to state politics hard in the direction of NYC and environs. It's been a running joke that NYC should be divided off from the rest of the state and turned into its own state for decades.

Here in the Finger Lakes region, we're doing ok. There isn't much to report in a change in the Covid-19 case status of the region. We are both wine country and cow country. Most of the area here is made up of farms. I think the largest population center in the entire Finger Lakes region is the small city of Canadaguia. I don't think they count Rochester as part of the Finger Lakes region. If they did, the bump in population isn't a big deal because people from Rochester and Canadaguia tend to stay in their cities because there's nothing interesting outside of them. Drive 20 minutes in any direction and you're surrounded by farms. That fact insulated most of my county from the effects of the first wave back in March-April. If we're lucky, it'll remain that way for a bit longer.

Some of the parents who are doing distance learning are giving us parents who are doing 'face to face' instruction the side eye. If I had the spoons to keep doing distance learning, that's what we would have done. My disability is running smack into the needs of the kids and their learning disabilities. It made things hard up until school re-opened. Keeping a rigid schedule was helpful. Doing work at the appointed time every day except Saturdays and Sundays helped. The only way really that we could tell it was a week day was that Beloved was going to work (because he is in an essential industry). The kids did more or less fine through it all. It was me who was having the difficulties.

I just don't have the energy to rapid switch between two very different sets of educational needs anymore. I run out of energy faster because I'm juggling my anxiety and mental health issues even as I am struggling to keep up with the kids needs for stimulus and educational content. That doesn't even begin to get into the problem of how to I keep up with all of this distance learning stuff and still get time in for the things that are restorative and help me regain my personal equilibrium. I'm trying to prepare myself for the next round of distance learning. My intuition and my anxiety are telling me it is going to happen relatively soon.

The school has the distance learning stuff set up differently this time. The kids have a better grasp of how to navigate their digital classrooms. Now the problems are minor bugs like a website being glitchy (probably because everybody and their brother is on it to practice their language arts work). From what I hear of it, things are running more smoothly. The hangups shows up when there are technial problems with the internet access. The students who are in school are working off the same platform and with the same expectations as the students who are working remotely. The plan is for it to be a relatively seamless switch if they have to go to remote learning for the entire district. I am trying to be hopeful that it will work out well.

Every Sunday, Beloved and I go to check on his parents. The kids get to play a bit outside in a really big yard and we don't have to worry about traffic. His mother and I are both fiber arts geeks, so we spend time chatting and working on our respective projects. I have a massive version of the wingspan shawl that I am trying to finish. I have the final triangle one quarter of the way complete. It took a whole ball of yarn to do it (that would be 8 oz if you're keeping score). My mistake with this thing was thinking it would work up faster and lacier with a larger hook. It didn't but it increased the size of it by an order of magnitude. The thing acquired the nickname of the Monstrosity because of how big it has gotten. I've changed that to Mothra. It really was the only logical name because wingspan and Mothra has a GINORMOUS wingspan. It's functionally a really weirdly shaped blanket. I was going to make it in the full spectrum of colors from red to indigo. I'm stopping at green because that's four balls of yarn. Blue would be eight. Purple would be 16. And indigo would be 32. You can't pay me to do that much. NOPE. It's already big enough to cover the couch.

Exhausted and not at the same time.

 I'm not sure what to write at the moment. I have spent the majority of my day doing line edits on a revision/version of a holy book for Filianism/Déanism. Even as I am working on this, I see the community that I've been writing stuff for getting very quiet. I don't know if it is burn out from the anxiety of Covid-19 plus this election cycle. I don't know if I'm just grinding away on something that is ultimately going to gather dust and be useless. I'm tired of editing and I'm only at the beginning of the process.

Even as I am doing this, one of the largest non-Aristasian aligned sects is being orphaned by their leadership who is taking their site and going LOLWERCHRISTIANNOW!1! They struggled under the influx of new members. Their staff were struggling to balance their lives outside of being clergy. They turned the site back to the founder, who had ghosted them once things started moving in a forward direction. After a month of silence, the founder says "yeah, we're leaving this up for 2 weeks and then we're taking the site down" followed a few days later by a post saying that they're converting the entire site to esoteric Christianity. 

Look, I get that Filianism has a lot of similarities with Christianity with that whole triune godhead thing and angelic orders. But, you built a cultus of worship, an entire tradition that people are still interested in following. And that is getting thrown out the window because Jesus. I'm sorry, but that sticks in my craw. I'm angry. I'm angry at the bait and switch this person pulled. I'm angry on the behalf of the people of this tradition who want to follow it as it was initiated and had been running up until Covid-19 hit. You don't build a religion or a sect of a religion and then throw it away because you decide its too much work or it isn't as shiny as you wanted it to be or because not enough people are kissing your ass.

You don't do that when you've got a following. You have a responsibility to those people. You set yourself up as a leadership figure, then you have to lead. If you can't lead, you have to find someone who can within the tradition do so. You don't fake dying (like one person did), you don't just vanish, and you sure as hell don't pull this bait and switch crap.

I had respect for this person. I watched them build this system and do a fair amount of good work in the community. If they had a spiritual revelation that they were on the wrong path, that's fine. You don't force your change in direction onto the people who were looking to you to continue to lead them on the path you started. You say "I'm sorry, but I can't do this anymore. I appoint so-and-so as my successor. I leave you in their care and with my blessing."

Seasonal affective disorder, bipolar, and ptsd super team of suck.

 I haven't been well over the last few months. The high stress levels that go with distance learning and the uncertainty of school beginning has me somewhat frayed. I've been steadily getting more depressed since the Summer Solstice. It has me considering, seriously, getting out my lamp and using it in the half hour in the morning that I don't have that morning sunlight when I get up. And possibly for a while in the evening. I don't know what the best way to approach this, but I'm thinking light therapy may be helpful even though it isn't even really where it's dark around 6pm.

My mood cycling hasn't been great. I was a bit mixed for a few days and then back down into depressed. When I was mixed, I was cranky and restless. I haven't had a full blown manic episode. I'm glad for that. But I do kinda miss the energy that I had during the hypomanic episodes. The Vraylar that I take for my bipolar has evened everything out and I'm low key depressed most of the time now. It' just there in the background and I don't think it will go away. Or at least, it won't improve until the crisis of Covid-19 has passed. 

I'm exhausted from operating in crisis mode all the time. My brain says that the air is lava and I'm reluctant to go outside because of it. I'm afraid to send my kids back to school in a few weeks but I just don't have the capacity to keep doing the distance learning. I feel really bad that I don't have that capacity. Undeneath the layers of trauma and illness, I have the school teacher in me screaming to get out and help my kids. But I'm so tired and it's so hard to focus for extended periods. Add to this that the kids have two very different levels of educational needs that I would have to rapid switch between to make sure they're getting the help they need, and, well, I just can't do it anymore.

I've been having problems perseverating on the general bastardry of some of my relative. I catch myself having mental arguments with them despite the fact that I'm never going to speak to them again. I'm also full of grief over the fact that their toxic behavior has denied me the luxury of having a healthy relationship with them. I am getting super anxious posting on FB because of other relatives, whom I know talk to the ones I've cut off. These other relatives haven't contributed anything of meaning to my life in the last ten years, if not longer. Still, a part of me says I shouldn't cut that tie because they're my family.

I know that if I reveal the ugly secrets about the household I was raised in, they'd try to explain it away or they'd go back to my parents and tell them what I was saying. At which point my parents would do something stupid, like show up at my apartment to start a fight. The trauma of my upbringing would be a bit easier to bear if it weren't for the fact that I regularly find myself in a position where I have to bite my tongue and play nice with "company manners". It is emotionally like going to family gatherings where there's trouble brewing just beneath the surface and no one is going to acknowledge it but they're going to pick at each other to try and make someone the bad guy and the 'trouble' can be their fault.

I catch myself walking on egg shells again. It's got me edgy and anxious. I'm doing my best to manage it but that coaping mechanism of shutting down and being a ghost keeps popping up. I am tired. I'm stressed out. I find myself wanting a cigarette despite the fact that I haven't smoked in almost twenty years. I know I can't do it. Aside from the fact that it's a money pit that has no returns, I'm asthmatic and smoking would be really bad for me. Not to mention, I'm not sure how it would interact with the laundry list of medications I am on. I find myself wanting to drink. Not because I'm an alcoholic but because I miss the taste of whiskey and the sensation of drinking it. It was an occasional treat that I really enjoyed. But now, again, because of the laundry list of medications, I can't do that.

It's really hard to allow myself to do the things that I enjoy like my embroidery. I'd have that tapestry mostly finished by now if it weren't for the fact that I feel like I haven't earned the privilege of doing so. It's all the stuff from how I was raised coming back to the fore. And that's because I've been isolated for months and it's bringing up memories of the isolation I grew up in. I'm frayed a bit and my hot buttons for anger are getting more exposed despite my efforts to cover them up. It's just hard because I feel like I should go get into these fights but doing that would damage other relationships and have a negative net return. In part because these people don't take me seriously and just think I'm a "nice, quiet" person.

Not sure what to do.

Ever since late April, I have been off of Keen. I've been busy minding the kids and falling behind on housework. The distance learning thing was a challenge but I think we made the best of it while we were working through it. Now, summer school is over and there is preparations being made for the school year to begin.

I'm honestly nervous as a cat in a rocking chair factory over the idea of sending the boys into school. At the same time, I know that I don't have the ability to keep providing educational support for them. We're in the process of acquiring masks and discussing the safety features of the different varieties we're considering. It's frustrating because they're all so different. I feel woefully underequipped to handle any of this. Some of this is my anxiety kicking me in the teeth and some of this is I'm depressed right now.

I've been contemplating attempting to do stuff on Keen again. At the same time, I'm concerned that I'm going to be neglecting responsibilities in doing so. I'm back at square one when it comes to this stuff. I theoretically have a customer base waiting for me to return. I post weekly updates on how things are going over here. I just can't get over the feeling that I am not going to do as well as I was before becasue of COVID-19 killing people's income. I have the impending sense of dread that I have been out of the loop too long and the customers who were beginning to come to me on a regular basis have found someone else to patronize. 

It doesn't help that the busy time of day is when I need to be winding down for the night and getting ready for bed. I tried staying up a bit late last night to see if I could possibly do the chat thing for a little while after dinner. I was so burnt out this morning that I was stumbling. I just can't be up for that 7pm to 12 pm window that is when they have the highest caller to advisor ratio. It robs me of my time with my husband and would completely disrupt my sleep pattern (which would be a very bad thing).

At the same time, Keen provided me something of an outlet in the midst of this COVID19 business to do something productive. It gave me a social connection. And it allowed me to make a little money off of my hobby (understatement) of tarot reading. I want to do more on Keen. And yet, I am afraid to try because I am afraid of what the results will be. I'm cautious of abusive clients (because they're out there and they'll treat you like dirt if you don't read their mind and confirm their biases). I feel bad about the pricing scheme that Keen is using because they've gone from taking about 30% of my fee to a little over 50% of it. I could switch to a different method of doing tarot for hire but I don't know the first thing about marketing. And I tend to rely on Keen to drive customers to me (though they're less effective at that than they were in the past).

I don't know what to do. I have this dreadful feeling that we're going to need extra income. I have this anxiety that we're going to need to find away to get more shelf-stable goods into the apartment before winter. I am afraid that someone is going to get sick and we're not going to be able to get the help we need. To say the least, my anxiety is running riot at the moment. This does not put me into a conducive headspace for doing tarot readings. I feel self conscous asking any of the friends I know who do readings for one because I don't know how to repay them. I feel like the days of trading a reading for a reading are behind us.

I am exhausted. And horrified.

 I feel like I didn't sleep at all last night. I just feel exhausted and I have no idea why. My brain was insisting it was Saturday when I woke up to take my morning medication. So, with out much in the way of qualms, I laid down on the couch and fell back asleep. I woke up again as the kids were demanding food telling me it was 8:30 am and Beloved was getting ready for work. I was confused and then remembered it was Friday.

My back is feeling somewhat better than it was yesterday, which is an improvement over how I was feeling on Sunday. I have a pretty arrangement of bruises in the middle of my back and scattered about the rest from all the random crap I landed on. I think I figured out what was in the middle of the rug where I hit. A plastic dinosaur. With spikes on it. I resisted the temptation to throw it the hell away after I found it. I handed it to the resident dinosaur fan (Snuggle Bug) and told him to put it away in a tone that came out a bit harsher than I intended. He was about to ask why and pile it up with the Transformers that he was playing with and changed his mind when he saw the look on my face. I apparently looked angry. I was, with the stupid dinosaur and the whole situation. 

Yesterday was a day of near misses. I kept tripping over my own feet and barely missing falling over stuff. I could say that I kept having near misses with flashbacks too. I kept feeling myself beginning to fade out of the situation and then I would ground myself, partly by making a point to sit in a hard backed chair so that I would feel the sting of the bruise on my back. Not the healthiest method of grounding, I will confess, but it was effective. The bruising across my back was part of the reason why I kept almost having flashbacks because it's pretty much all in the region where mom broke a dozen wooden spoons about my head and shoulders when I was around Snuggle Bug's age. (Speaking of Snuggle Bug's age, when the hell did my baby turn into a pre-teen? Oh, yeah, he turned 11 last week. I'm doomed.)

I kept having near misses with panic attacks regarding the kids going back to school. I know it is the beginning of August and they're still getting everything sorted out. The pictures that came out of the school down in Georgia scared the shit out of me. The school's reaction to the students who shared the pictures made me angry. We're in the middle of a pandemic and these kids have no social distancing measures in place for hallway passing. The number wearing masks I could count on one hand out of at least a group of thirty or so in that picture. At least one school in Florida is shut down because of COVID19 after opening for less than a week. 

We're in the process of trying to source masks for the kids to wear to school. We're discussing decontamination procedure for when they get home from school. We are quietly struggling with enormous anxiety over how the school is going to handle social distancing on the buses because they're not designed to keep kids 6 ft. apart. Rumor has it that they're going to have students sit together by family. That's ok if you have a small family like we do, but what about the families in the district that have single children or more than three kids. (One family my friend knows has seven kids. Gods only know how they're keeping up with all of them. That must take a ton of organization and coffee. I'm struggling with two.)

The school is giving us the option of staying home and doing distance learning for the semester but we've discussed it. I simply can't handle it. I'm getting frayed at the edges. It's effecting my mental health in bad ways. As much as we don't want to do it because of the fact that I am in the high risk pool if I catch this thing, we are sending the kids to school for face to face learning. There's the negative effect hitting me on the psychological front that is pushing us towards this decision. There's the fact that I simply can't provide the two very different levels and styles of educational support that both kids need, that they will get from face to face instruction. And there is the fact that the kids need the socialization with their peers for more than an hour. It's more than "they need to be with their friends" both kids have some socialization cues that they're missing and they can only learn them from experience. We've tried teaching them, but we can only do so much. They need to go back to school for their counseling to help them develop the skills to handle social situations and learn appropriate ways to socialize. They need to go back to school to get the occupational therapy that we can't provide.

There's a whole list of reasons why my boys need to go back to school and it's longer than my list of reasons why I need them to go back to school. I am afraid that this is going to get one of us sick. Not because we're not following safety precautions but because I have watched my neighbors become increasingly lax about following personal safety precautions. I'm thankful that Snuggle Bug seems to have grown out of his asthma problem. At the same time, it can put him in the same risk pool as me. It's scary. I'd make our own cloth masks but I can't get the tension fixed on my sewing machine and, honestly, I'm not as good at using a sewing machine as I am with hand sewing. And the prospect of hand sewing bias tape is hell.

I'm horrified by the way people are pushing so hard to put some of our most vulnerable population at risk for this disease based upon the false assumption that it doesn't effect kids as dangerously as it does adults. I've been following the data since April. It is as lethal to children as it is to adults. Especially if they have a preexisting condition. I get angry when someone says "It's not as bad as polio." The numbers say that it is exactly as bad as polio except that 1/3 number is dead instead of paralyzed. And I'm worried about flu season because there is a variant of the swine flu brewing in Asia that has the potential to be as bad as the Spanish Flu pandemic. Which is thus named because Spain was a neutral party during WWI and only place reporting on it, not because it originated there. It started out in an army base in Kansas. But no body mentions that bit of history.

Not quite right in the head...

I was ambushed on FB by a video of an ambush. I could theoretically track it down but I don't think it would do my brain much good to do it. There's enough videos of this going down, I'm fairly sure that just a search string of "BLM police ambush" would bring it up. There was a black couple driving in their car away from where the principle activity of the protest was going on. They were going away. Neither of them were doing anything of particular suspicion except driving while black. Their car windows were up. The driver's intent was on navigating traffic as the passenger was staring ahead, presumably looking out for pedestrians because there was a lot of foot traffic.

A police officer in riot gear walks up to the passenger side door and starts banging on the window. The passenger looks over, clearly alarmed. The driver is doing their best to keep driving despite the distraction. In a matter of seconds, they swarmed the car. A pole weapon of some sort was used to puncture the tires of the car on the passenger side. They attempted to force open the doors of the car (which leads me to believe they were locked, it looked like a newer model car and those auto lock the doors once you go above 5 miles an hour and won't unlock until the car is put into park, regardless of if you slow back down below the threshold). Then they broke the window on the passenger side and reached in to wrench open the door. As they did this, they broke open the window on the driver's side. The passenger was dragged bodily from the car and thrown to the ground. The driver of the car was tazered multiple times from multiple angles. I couldn't watch the rest of the video.

The majority of the "officers" engaged in the activity here were not clearly marked as police. The only reason why I knew the one who walked up to the car and started hammering on the window with his fist was a police officer was because he was accompanied by a police officer in tactical gear carrying a round style riot shield with the word police clearly printed in bright yellow across the back of his vest. The rest of them, gods only know who they were. But they were carrying weapons. They ambushed this car in traffic leading away from the protest and dragged these citizens out.

I don't know where this happened except it was somewhere within the United States. I would assume Portland, WA because that's where the majority of this bullshit has been happening. The sight of it, however, looked like it could have been downtown of the city just north of us here, of any city in the country. These people were not being violent. They were not breaking the law. They weren't given the opportunity to "obey the police." They were ambushed and violently assaulted under color of law by unmarked agents of the government. Because they were black and in the wrong place.

Witnessing this brutality second hand triggered my ptsd to some extent. I got a little spacey and had a hard time thinking clearly. It brought up memories of my parents brutalizing my brothers and I was helpless to stop them. I am a bit more oriented in the present. I am saddened that my trauma won't let me act in some fashion to stop this. I am terrified what this means for people who would be branded political dissidents. I have the luxury of being fairly inobtrusive because I am a white, middle aged woman. I have over the years moved from wearing my fancy headcoverings to just a bandanna. It helps me blend in better. It keeps me from having people slow down and give me dirty/threatening looks when I'm out taking a walk. I dress relatively conservatively. That with the bandanna has people assuming that I am one of the local more conservative Christian mothers.

I, however, am not what they assume. I don't know when they're going to start coming for people who are mentally ill. I don't know when they're going to start coming for the people who oppose Trump and his party. I don't know when they're going to start coming for the people with autism and other disorders. But I have studied history. I have watched this since the inception of the Department of Homeland Security. They're going to come for us. They were just biding their time until the people who fought against fascism were dying off.

The Boomer generation will write this off as a mad woman's ramblings. They'll call me a "snowflake" or something else stupid. Now is not the time to try to reason with them. It is clear that they have been duped (willfully or not) into thinking that fascism will bring back what they consider their golden era of their youth. Now is the time to pour sand into the gears. Now is the time to lose paperwork. Now is the time to sabotage the machine. Until someone comes and puts them down. 

Of course this has to happen in the midst of a pandemic. Gods help us.