Short weeks after long weekends always feel weird and out of step. This week had a short week, plus the remainder of a moon cycle, and topped by Friday the thirteenth. At the college, it’s the last week before midterms, with the first significant assignments handed in. The students feel stressed and go a little squirrelly. I say no to them, regarding food or room capacity with a calm exterior, inside, well, this Bugs Bunny GIF sums it up:
Sometimes jobs you like have bad days, in my case I had a bad week. It’s enough to think about whether the human race has gone beyond any sort of redemption. Nobody teaches you how to deal with rotten days in the library tech program. That’s as individual as the person dealing with it.
People look at me take out my journal and my current favourite pen, a Faber Castell fountain pen, with a curious look. What could she be writing about? I write things not okay to share on a blog or social media. It’s a way to inhabit vulnerability without making everyone feel uncomfortable. People with bad days just need to sit with it for a while. As a positive person by nature, even I get suspicious of people saying they never get sad, angry, or even feeling blue. My time at a trans-denomination bookstore taught me, good Christian women have a reservoir of rage where those uncomfortable feelings go. I try to keep that place bone dry.
I get sad, angry, and sometimes students and staff test my patience. The long, short, weird, week knocked me on my ass, and I took the time to get up. While the YMCA provided a place to walk it off, despite working with a sore left hip, sometimes grabbing coffee at a nearby cafe and taking a long walk to another bus stop provides a prescription to combat encroaching darkness:
So, Monday will begin another week, another opportunity to start again and again and again.
Unpaused Life 