Different reasons

Wow, here we are, knocking on the door at the end of August. My old college (Yale) has started its session already, earlier than it used to when I was there... Probably, the high-school where I used to work will be starting itself up at about the same time it always has.

I always did "back to school shopping" for myself, or for my team, or for the school in general... Never huge or voluminous or expensive, but I did my best to pre-emptively solve problems in the "shopping for the team" stuff, sometimes to forestall problems that I expected would come up (and usually did), and always got myself something just a tiny bit special. Yeah, the school always bought a big pile of pencils and pens and Post-its and all sorts of general-use office supplies, but dang it, I liked my pencils, my pens, my Post-its, and getting those for myself added a lot to my "let's have fun starting the school year" process.

And I always picked up a bunch of weird stuff, like 5 1/4" floppy drives--not for the computers, but for the ETC light boards. Light boards still pretty much own the 5 1/4"-floppy space, there are so many of those drives installed in the world but, at least as was true when I was still in the Theater Biz, there was no way to USB them, no way to anything them except using 5 1/4" floppies. Whose files PCs could read and write--not Apple's, suck on THAT, Apple, it had to be PCs.

Of course, given that PCs stopped installing 5 1/4" floppies during the manufacturing process, one needed external, USB-connectable, floppy drives. To read and write the diskettes that were the only things that light boards could read. More "back to school" shopping for diskette drives...

Whose files, by the way, were straight-up ASCII text files. Which one could also read/write with Notepad. Which, on occasion, I did, to play brute-force tricks like "global search and destroy" (I mean "replace") with. We never went to the end of the road getting things like RFU's (Remote Focus Units), just good-old brute-force ASCII editing... which I, as both theater-tech and computer-tech geek, would wind up doing all the time.

But to everything there is a season. That season is over. It's back-to-school season, and I guess I miss it, but I also don't care. Because I'm not supposed to care... it's not my problem, any more. From a bunch of incidentalia that I won't bore you with at the moment, me thinking it was MY problem may not have always been accurate, at least from other perspectives that it horribly sorrowed me to discover, but that's definitely another story.

Spent the day so far doing Business Things. Need to send an invoice  off to somebody; maybe I'll do that today, who knows. Called some Wheelchair People about some stuff, need to call another set of wheelchair people about getting something fixed. Called a few other people. Made some tea. Do I have the wherewithal to work on some music?

That'd sure be nice, wouldn't it. Or maybe I'll go to bed.

This is very much the road I'm on, nowadays. "Or maybe I'll go to bed." I went to lunch with a friend from the mid-80s yesterday (when we knew each other, not how old he is). We had a wonderful time. I was very, very happy to reconnect with him. But as far as the physicality of getting out of bed and going somewhere and dealing with the world, I hated pretty much every moment of it. I loved being with him. I hated being out of the house.

We went to lunch somewhere that made him extremely happy, and we agreed that we'd do this again and try a new place. I barely ate anything, took most of it home where it'll become dinner for maybe two days. Am I eating "enough"? From the outside, what I weigh and look like, definitely not. But much of the time, if I eat anything, I regret it. Immediately, and for hours afterwards. Vague discomfort, not full-on dyspepsia.

Sometimes after a load of my medicinal herbs, I can actually eat and enjoy food. Alas, these are some of the only "with side-effects" herbs that I take; one can get a little loopy, and certainly into a "I really don't feel like driving" state, which is one state one should definitely respect.

I'm amazed that I was able to do this. Should I even attempt to work on music? Eh... maybe I'll send a piece of mail or something, but I dunno about working on music... I'm kinda afraid of the suckitude that comes from, as Jon Stewart likes to say, "I got nothin'." I don't mind writing not-as-good in the service of "making things better," but I don't really know if working on stuff will make me feel better to be even trying to be in a creative space, or make me feel worse for trying to be creative within the world of "already been sucked dry."

Or maybe I'll go to bed.

Always coming back to that, makes me feel a kind of better, but I don't know that I'd even use "sort of" to describe the variety of "better."

So, finally, I'm not trapped in the "sort of" loop. Great, right? Right.......

And as Samuel Pepys was known for saying, "And so to bed." But for him, it was definitely a different reason.