Tag Archives: worry

Easing towards the baseline…

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It wasn’t a great summer for reading. Honestly, it wasn’t a great summer for anything. From July through September, I had no attention span to speak of. “Long form” TiKToks pressed my abilities to focus. Anything I was trying to get done had to be taken down in extraordinarily short chunks. For someone who normally had the ability to sit down and lose three hours reading a book, it was not an ideal arrangement. Books that would have normally gone back on the shelf inside a week lingered on the nightstand for a month or more.

I’m happy to report that October, even though the 10 days of the great plague, has shown decided signs of the situation improving. I’m nowhere near back to form, but I’m at least finding it possible to sit down for an hour at a clip and really get into something. 

I knew I was off my stride, but I’m just now beginning to realize just how far off I was feeling. I don’t mind telling you that I spent a lot of the summer in full bore worry mode – concerned about my health, wondering when or if I’d stop feeling like hot trash, scared that it was just going to be what post 45th birthday life was going to be. 

None of my issues have really gone away – or even yet been properly diagnosed – but I find that initial fear of the unknown is increasingly giving way to annoyance. I can only assume that’s a positive sign since annoyed is practically my universal default setting. Maybe I’m starting to ease back towards the baseline. 

I’m doing everything the medicos have told me to do, so aside from “wait and see” and showing up for more follow-on testing when it’s called for, it’s well past time to start dragging myself up off the mat… even if my head is stuck firmly on playing out all the possible “what if” scenarios. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Official computing. For being among of our parent organization’s “top priorities” the network that connects us all is something of a capricious jerk. On Tuesday none of my web browsers worked and my computer dumped me out repeatedly into a series of restarts and scan disk sessions. On Wednesday the web browsers worked, but email was down. On Thursday browsers mostly worked and access to email was what I’d generously call “sporadic.” On close of business Thursday I’m still waiting on a return call from the help desk to resolve the “work stopping” issue of a potential dying hard drive that I reported on Tuesday. I’m well aware that we’re under funded and under staffed, but for the love of Christ the thing is still under warranty so just issue me a working computer already and tell Dell they’re going to have to eat this dud.

2. “You Care About X When You Should Care About Y.” Over the last few days I’ve seen a veritable plethora of meme’s drawing attention to the fact that people were commenting on a dead ape when people were starving somewhere, someone was homeless, the Veteran’s Administration is useless, Big Finance is ruining the country, and any other issue you want to mention. So two things about that: 1) I’ll care about whatever I want to care about on any given day; and 2) Just because I post about X doesn’t mean I’m not aware of Y, Z, 37, and a whole host of other things. I like to think as reasonably intelligent person I’m capable of thinking deeply about any number of issues over the course of a day. When you tell me I’m only supposed to think about this instead of that you sound like a moron. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of bad shit happening around the world for all of us to get out quota of worry.

3. Foreign Policy. Secretary Clinton made a major foreign policy address today. That’s good. Foreign policy is important. But after watching the tape I’m mostly reminded that on one side we have someone with no experience in foreign policy and on the other we have someone who led the State Department though one of the most listless and undirected periods for foreign policy in my adult life time. I find myself back in a position where one lacks any capacity for subtlety and nuance and I plain just don’t trust the other.

All shook up…

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One of the really problematic parts of what I do, is that it requires spending a fair amount of your life thinking about all the worst things that can happen… famine, pestilence, earthquake, plague; basically the worst parts of the Bible. After a while you start looking at everything around you and playing a giant game of “what if.” From a purely academic point of view, it’s great fun to match wits against the worst that God and nature can throw against us. From an individual point of view, it’s the kind of thing that leads to ulcers. Finding that delicate balance between academic interest and outright obsession has never been one of my talents. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go to Costco and stock up on bottled water and beef jerky.