beyond the wide world's end

My stress level is currently so high that this week I've had surprise joint pain in my fingers, back pain (which was pretty bad for me all through undergrad, then went away for a bit these past few years, and came back this year, no idea why), headache, constant low-level jaw pain, and then on Thursday I woke up partially deaf in one ear with much worse tinnitus than usual in that ear. Given everything else I'm assuming it's stress triggering my usual earwax issues, so I'm going through my ear drop treatment for earwax removal which is...not really helping anything, so I will probably have to call student health services tomorrow or Tuesday -- maybe after I turn in my prospectus. (They stopped doing online appointment scheduling because of covid, probably because they need to have a person determine if it has to be an in-person appointment or if it can be telehealth, but I hate calling people so this is just another level of misery for me.)

All of this is not making me any less stressed and tense, and also making it really hard to work on my prospectus revisions. I'm hoping after the prospectus is in I will be moderately less tense, though current events are not exactly helping at all.

Ironically I was supposed to be home this month to see my dentist about my jaw problems and also my eye doctor to renew my prescription, then go to Anaheim for SWCA and Disneyland before coming back to Atlanta for the new school year and Dragon Con, then WDW in September. But, as you know, This. I'm trying to figure out my feelings about flying Right Now for the possibility of going home for a month or two after the prospectus is in and the defense is defended and hopefully I've passed to candidacy because I'm just...miserable. I was doing fine until my body fell apart this week and at this point I just want to hand the prospectus to my advisor, tell her to distribute it and take over scheduling the defense, and lie on the floor and cry.

(Also, by the way, for anyone wondering, my father? Still in Thailand and will be there at least through the end of September. Knowing this not helping anything at all, either.)

Is anyone else (especially in the U.S. South) having a spectacularly bad allergy summer? I'm not sure if this year is worse than usual, if I'm just more aware of it because ha ha, you know, That, or if my body finally acclimated to being in Atlanta and has decided to be allergic to everything. (It's entirely possible it's the latter -- I think Year 3 was when I started really feeling allergies in New Orleans in college, too.)

Trash pickup update: called the city and it turns out that it is, in fact, Ye Olde Covide, because the city moved to curbside only (rather than leaving it up the driveway) and started enforcing it in June because there was, and I quote, "an incident." (I assume the incident was that someone from that department got covid.) I feel like there were more efficient ways that they could have gotten this information out than posting it on the website and in the newspaper, but to be fair I say this because I frantically checked the city's Twitter page and could not find it anywhere.

Well, I'm hanging in there.

Right now I'm just exhausted all the time, to an extent it's a little worrying, but I'm 98% sure it's just stress and general malaise. I'm doing what I would have been doing this summer anyway, working on my dissertation prospectus, except it's proceeding at a snail's pace because my executive function is shot and I can't concentrate on anything for very long. This is obviously somewhat less than ideal, since I have to have it defended by early September in order to keep my funding. (I'd also be thrilled to be working on something other than post-Roman Europe at the moment, since it just feels kind of vaguely uncomfortably thematic. Should have stuck to classical magic, sigh, nothing thematic about that.)

There's just a lot going on right now and it's really overwhelming, especially when I have something I absolutely have to do.

I miss my mother. I miss not being in Georgia. I was supposed to be in Disney World last week, which obviously got cancelled, and Star Wars Celebration Anaheim just got cancelled and postponed until August 2022, which I'm just really sad about even if I know it's the best thing to do. My father is, by the way, still in Thailand, much to despair of literally everyone in my family. And he's talking to my mother and to his mother, but not to me, which is NOT making me happy, and since Father's Day is this week I'm even more annoyed about it.

I'm just really tired. I feel like I'm having that early quarantine haze that everyone else had in March now in June, because I had other things going on in March that made it less of an option at the time. It's...not helpful. And at this point everyone just expects you to be used to it. (Plus reopening, etc. University is going to be on campus this fall but I'm not in coursework or teaching, so all I care about is library access.)

I can't stop crying today.

I'm fine, my family's fine, my dad is still in Thailand (the airports in fact had NOT closed when he told us, but he's decided to stay there for now and no, of course he hasn't told the embassy he's there, agh). Georgia's not in a shelter-in-place (because our governor is incompetent), I just can't stop crying. I'm definitely pre-menstrual which usually comes with existential sadness anyway, it's just way dialed up at the moment; it only really started being this bad last night and hopefully it will go away in a day or so.

I need to renew my passport, and I'm freaking out because I haven't sent it in yet. Passport Agency website says expedited service is not being offered, but seems to say that regular renewal is fine, just potentially delayed? Am I reading that right? I don't trust any of my own perceptions right now.

I'm spending too much money, but I have money in the bank from my grandmother and I'm still getting my stipend, so it's not smart but whatever, the world is on fire and commissioning art makes me feel like there might be a future.

I'm still teaching. Today is supposed to be the return to classes via remote, and I just finished revamping the Canvas page and sending out the revised syllabus before our Zoom session on Wednesday. I'm being very upfront with my class and my advisor about the fact that I'm a mess right now, so I'm not operating on the schedule I should be. Just got an e-mail from the department about having to designate a successor to take over the class if I get sick or otherwise can't teach it, which a colleague in the classics department had to do last week except more hardcore, and now I'm even more depressed.

I'm really depressed about the fact that I spent, literally, more than a year working on this syllabus and now half of it is out the window, and I don't know that I will ever get a chance to teach it again. I'll ask my advisor if there's any chance that the department will let me teach a ~normal class again in my fourth or fifth year, assuming we're back to on-campus classes then. (I understand why Emory is making this decision, but among other things Emory told us to cancel most scheduled exams and replace them with projects or papers, and I specifically wanted exams and justified them multiple times in my pedagogy class and in my portfolio defense.)

I'm glad I'm at a private university with one of the largest endowments in the country and which specializes in medicine right now, since I'm reasonably certain that Emory will take care of its grad students as much as it can; comparing Emory's reaction to CWU's (where my mom is teaching this year) is a huge difference.

I'm going to go blow my nose and start making pulled pork.

My heat got fixed two weeks ago and seems to be holding steady -- they replaced the last part in the furnace that could possibly be replaced, after replacing all the other parts in the interim, so after five weeks of Furnace Hell it so far seems to be fine. I do keep reflexively checking both the thermostat and the vents whenever the heat actually kicks on.

I've had bessyboo visiting for the past few weeks (she actually arrived the day the furnace was fixed), so that has been fun if occasionally anxiety-inducing since she came to help get the house and also my life in order.

Basically everything in my life slipped while I was dealing with the furnace saga. I saw my advisor two Fridays past at a workshop on medieval facsimiles and I think my level of near-hysterical apology actually impressed on her that the furnace situation had been more serious than e-mail had made it seem. Last week I had my in-class observation on the class I'm teaching, and then a meeting with her afterwards about my preliminary dissertation prospectus, both of which seemed to go well? Mostly because after the furnace got fixed and Bessy got here I went into a hysterical work state over the course of a week and produced a ten-page preliminary prospectus and a four-page preliminary bibliography in order to prove to my advisor that I actually did care and had been thinking about it, on top of all my usual class prep. (writing two seventy-minute lectures a week is a lot, actually.)

On spring break now -- another friend came for the weekend and left yesterday; we've been making Disney ears for a trip to WDW in June and then Disneyland in August along with Star Wars Celebration Anaheim. (I have accidentally become a Disney Parks person.)

I am, understandably, pretty high anxiety right now because I'm fairly high anxiety anyway, and, well. *gestures at COVID-19* I'm glad I didn't go back to Washington for break like I had initially hoped for. My university has been warning us we may have to switch to online teaching and has been running emergency online teaching workshops; I took a six-week class on online teaching and taught an online class last year so if we do have to I'm probably better prepared for it than anyone else in my department. So far Emory hasn't closed campus or moved to online classes yet, but we are on spring break at present. My department, as of today, just cancelled our admitted students visit next week. (And I just checked the website and between when I checked yesterday and now Emory Healthcare does have a patient with COVID-19.) Emory is...well, Emory, and this is a university and a university hospital that are so highly noted as being ~on top of medical things, with the CDC literally next door, so this is probs one of the better case university scenarios? IDK. maybe our undead genderqueer skeleton patron god will help somehow. (Emory is very weird at the best of times.)

It is not exactly a great time for my anxiety at present, and it's never great. (Especially considering I have an on-and-off cough that I've had since the furnace situation started and which has never fully gone away. FUN TIMES.)

ETA: Well, Emory extended spring break by a week, is closing the dorms, and moving to remote learning, so *screams*

Furnace update: Repairman came, fixed it again, left (he's very nice about it), then four hours later it stopped working again, so I called him and he's coming in the morning.

*puts head in hands* *screams*

Well, my heat is out again.

Ironically, my mother's heat back in Washington went out on Wednesday night, but hers is now fixed already and meanwhile I'm on Week Three of on-again, off-again heat. (Yes, my landlord knows, he's gotten like...so many messages from me over the past few weeks. And the repair guy has been out here five or six times.)

This is exhausting. And cold.

So, the heat got fixed on Thursday -- I didn't have functioning heat for almost a week. Fortunately it was during a relatively ~normal temperature span in Atlanta (high 30s at night, high 40s/low 50s during the day), and between two space heaters the house was more or less fine. Not ideal, but I always run cold anyway so it was just throwing on more knitwear and baking more frequently. I mean, it sucked, obviously, and I kind of hit a point where I was just convinced that it was never going to be fixed and I was just going to have to live like that now. The poor repairman was at my house again Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday before he got it fixed. (After also having come the previous Tuesday and that Saturday.)

I've still got my landlord's space heaters so I need to give them back to him -- I could only actually use one of the borrowed space heaters + the one I already have without overloading a circuit, and I didn't feel like experimenting more to figure out which outlets were on which circuits, though you'd think I'd know that from when the electrician was here last summer upgrading all the electrical. At least the HVAC repairman actually tells me things and doesn't make any weird racist or sexist remarks, unlike the electrician. I am veryI had to call him), etc. And that's just...exhausting. On top of teaching, which means lesson prep and lecture-writing and trying to figure out what's appropriate teaching wear, and even though we're going into week 4 there are still things I haven't yet done for the class (students should all be fine, it's just backend stuff that's going to bite me later) that need to get done.

I'm just tired, and stressed, and I miss my mother, and none of my local friends are currently talking to me, which isn't doing much for either my self-esteem or my socialization. My neighbors on the other side of the duplex are moving in a week and a half, which depresses me because I like them a lot; my landlord is apparently going to turn that side of the house into an office, which makes me nervous because IDK if it's going to affect my side (I've got another year and a half on my lease). And the weather is depressing and I'm just tired, and also now I seem to be down with a cold as well: delightful. (I can't take cold medicine, though I'm also having some concern that it's not a cold, just stress and weather/temperature changes hitting me, but I'm just not sure. Or that because it started just after the heat got fixed that it's related to that somehow.) And I desperately need to clean the house which, well -- every time I start to do something else breaks so there's no point, why bother sweeping when something is just going to break and require repairmen to tromp through the house again sometime soon? And then there's shame because of that. And the fact that I still have all of my comps books out, and there's just...books everywhere. And I can only take them back to the university a few at a time due to the lack of car. And I have messages I need to reply to but I'm just really tired, and I need to do lesson prep for tomorrow. I'm just tired.

Well...the house is At It Again.

Last week I spent three days fighting with the post office before I finally managed to get all my mail from them after getting back to Atlanta, then this week...well. This week already feels like it's lasted a month.

Monday morning my heater stopped working. This was in the midst of a cold spell in Atlanta, so it was, actually, legitimately cold (low of 22 F); I've got a space heater from my ex-housemate and my landlord brought a couple more over, but I can only run two in the house and have to be careful where they're placed so I don't trip a circuit. (Ask me how I found that out.) It wasn't GREAT, but the repair guys came on Tuesday and replaced the thermostat and the heat was back.

That was Tuesday. Wednesday was fine. Thursday was mostly fine, until I abruptly look up a little past midnight and realized I could feel cold air blowing on me, because the furnace had stopped working but the fan was still running. Turned it off, turned it on, went down to the basement to look at the furnace, not that that helped anything because I don't know anything about furnaces, turned it off, texted my landlord, went to bed. Landlord came over Friday afternoon to look at it and troubleshoot it while on the phone with the repairman, since he was at another job and couldn't come that day, but no dice. Saturday afternoon (yesterday), the repairman came back, did some work on the furnace, and got it temporarily working again, but said it was just a temp fix since he needed to get another part that he wouldn't have until Monday. The temp fix should hold until then, though, and I should call him if I had any problems with it.

As you can probably guess, it died again two/three hours later.

I texted the repairman, he said he would call me in the morning (it was around 8 pm when I noticed it had stoppeed), and he hasn't called me back yet (12:45), so I guess I'll call him in a bit.

I'm just...exhausted. And cold, obviously (I don't keep my winter temperature that high in the first place), but the constant vigilance of waiting for the repairman, having the heater functioning and then not functioning, having to call my landlord, having something else go wrong with the house, not being able to leave the house because I'm waiting for the repairman, having to have my phone on, on top of all the other normal stuff that stresses me out is really wearing me down. I'm teaching this semester, so I have to write my lectures (I'm not experienced enough to ad lib just based off bullet points), but this is so stressful that it's constantly occupying a portion of my brain even when I'm working on something else. I'm just so tired, and the terror of actually blowing the class I'm teaching because I can't concentrate on lesson-planning and lecture-writing isn't helping. And I can't leave to go somewhere else to work because I have to be in the fucking house. The cold house. (And I can't put a space heater actually by me because I work in the dining room and it's on the same circuit as the kitchen.)

I'm just really tired. And really stressed about teaching, because I have to do so much prep but half my brain isn't on it right now. (I'm teaching a 200-level class on Roman Britain, two 75-minute classes a week, and prepping 140 minutes of lecture is...not really doable for me at the moment.) I'm just so tired. And cold. And feeling terrible about being cold because I should be better about this, or something. And feeling terrible about being cold and being stressed about the furnace affecting lecture prep, because I don't have any leeway there.