1 – 1680 x 1050 is the resolution my external monitor wants; without it, it goes to sleep. This computer does not offer such a high resolution, but will work with the external monitor at a much lower resolution. Fora indicate this may be a difficult compatibility issue to resolve. I am bored.
2 – The painters are now fixing bad work, so much furniture is moved again and I do not really have anywhere to sleep. There is a hip new hotel and if I were not in debt to the painters and undesirous of spending more, I would go to it. I am bored.
3 – I still have to do the kitchen floor and it means making the yard man, who is going to help me, help me do it right. He already doesn’t want us to measure from the center of the room or put flooring under the appliances, but I do and I am willing to do what it takes to do it right. It was exhausting explaining this and insisting upon it. I am bored.
4 – It took hours to help this yard man get a plane ticket and the operation is not over yet. He has a daughter in college and I am sure she knows how to buy a plane ticket on line with a debit card (he wants to pay cash, but does not want to pay the $30 ticketing fee you have if you buy in person, and does not use a computer – hence the drama). I am bored.
5 – My friend wants a technical explanation of why, in Spanish, you say “la oí cantar” and not “la oí cantando” (I heard her sing / I heard her singing, but “la oí cantar” really covers both of these). I am not a grammarian or a linguist and all I have to say is that this is one of the many uses of the infinitive in Spanish that we don’t have in English. Does anyone have a more technical explanation?
Lament – I guess I could find an explanation of this grammar point myself but I have already spent enough time explaining to the yard man that it really is true, flights leaving in the middle of the day are a little more expensive than morning and evening ones. That was already a large dose of having to insist and repeat to someone, “this really is the situation.”
Fatigue – The summer looked bright at one point but I am tired. This has to do with being imprisoned in a house within which I am also displaced, with having to argue about work quality and money, and with having to explain things, and explain and explain. It will be better when the house is calm again, and mine again.
Huis Clos – It helps to work out but I want fresh air. It helps to do academic work except that I have so much pain transferred onto this that it is hard to see the work itself without leaving the country and pretending I am myself as I was before I got so traumatized. It would help to get an acceptance letter of some kind.
It would help if we knew for certain our libraries will keep access to at least some databases. I would feel less anxious if I had more equity and more savings. LSAT preparation would help more than it does if I were more optimistic about financing law school and about the job market than I am.
Relief – I think I will go and rent canoes Saturday. I think I will call up some well established, energetic full professors in more prosperous departments and invite them to lunch, so I can catch that vibration of stable verve some of them have. I am reminding myself that LSAT preparation and everything else related to work is a form of Buddhist meditation, an end in itself first. Like being at the beach.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
“. I am reminding myself that LSAT preparation and everything else related to work, is a form of Buddhist meditation, an end in itself first. Like being at the beach.”
-This is very profound. I will write it down and put it on the wall next to my computer.
I’m glad you (i.e. someone) get(s) it! I was very good at work-as-yoga back in the day, and it is really the way to go …
God things have gotten tough.
And will get tougher, but you know that.
Like being at the beach. I want to remind myself of that.
The yard man has been calling all day. He now wants to change his flight and he wants me to get this done for him. The theory is that he is not computer literate but the fact is, the way you change flights is to call. I have given him the phone number of his airline.
Between the prisoners on behalf I do activist work but who want various personal favors some of which would be boring, expensive, and capricious to do, and who also want to give me paternal advice on my life, and the painters who treat me like a woman and a non rich one who might not be white, either (i.e. not well), I am already sort of OD’d on making allowances for persons more disadvantaged than I and so on.
I strongly, strongly suspect that the yard man doesn’t actually need me to do this reservation work for him — I think he just wants my care and time … (?). (I cannot prove it but I have a strong feeling this is so.)
All of this has to do with gendered behavior, with how men feel entitled to act, and it’s what I get at work, too.