2023-04-17: the april state of things
earlier in the pandemic, my brain was muddled. that pandemic fog people talked about. i never had covid, at least officially, but for a while my focus and memory was kind of shot. the last...eight months, say, it's been getting a lot better. something about breaking out of the routine of going down to my basement office ever day with the dogs working, coming upstairs at the end, eating, doing a few things, going to sleep. a cycle i followed for a couple years. and a lucky one, in all honesty, because i avoided crowds and i'm still fully remote, which is a blessing for the dogs. but that and the constant cycle of bad news/covid numbers i think took its toll.
since i've been getting better i've noticed i'm getting better at multitasking again, at finding the energy to do useful things. last night i worked on a book review i'd promised a poet for his lit journal; this morning i'm practicing viola and i've been working on my long-term project. suggestions from users in my discord channel: one seemed great, and a low effort fix, so i implemented and tested it in about half an hour. let them know it'd be in the next version.
outside, the weather's pretty poor. feels like fall. we've had a couple of days over 10 degrees in the last month, the rest hovering around 0 incessantly. a dump of snow a week or two ago. rain on and off. the voles have been at work in my back yard, digging their tunnels through the grass all winter. the yard looks rough. it'll be a couple months before it's back to normal.
but it springs back. it always does. voles are cyclical. 3-5 year population booms. we've dealt with this before. by july the grass will be full again, and i'll be wondering what i was worrying about. kind of like how at this point last year my brain was still in a muddle. i was trapped in a job whose demands were unravelling me, i was deeply unhappy, i wasn't sure how things were going to work out. but then i got a job offer elsewhere, switched, and have been much happier. my focus has been better. i feel like myself again. just to say that when things are bad, it doesn't have to be forever. something good might be just beneath the surface, looking to break out.
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