#also context is that yesterday was the election (I'm american) so... yeah lol

[duckyfann9871]

Hugs

today in OMM lab to help everyone deal with any negative feeling we might be dealing with the course director gave us the option to hug and be hugged by someone for 7 seconds to get oxytocin release, and said she was available for hugs. She is an awesome person really cool like a "I wanna be like her when I grow up" cool, and I decided to be brave and was the first to go up to the front for a hug from her. it was G l o r i o u s. I was so mellow for the next several minutes. hugs are great

[gen-is-gone]

cut

Diary entry to maintain the decade+ tumblr diary that helps me avoid memory-holing large chunks of my life.

The fifth was weird liminal day and I'm already forgetting it. None of the Chaos Gremlins came in except E and his dad. We talked about why reagan was a terrible president and Laurie texted Marian who let us leave at 7:30. I listened to about half of American Idiot on the drive home, and had three shots of bourbon with dinner. Ferro and I watched episodes of buffy with no context.

Yesterday sucked. I didn't sleep all night the night of the 5th/6th because I kept having panic attacks that would make my heart pound out of my chest and wake me up as I was on the verge of sleep. Probably the booze as much as anything else though. Basically spent most of the morning in the shower then dragged myself to work. It was raining, then snowing/sleeting, and I didn't even get to enjoy it. Marian was sympathetic, offered to let me go home early if my volunteer didn't show up, but R wanted the distraction so she came in and I stayed til closing.

I was really sick and (lbr) hungover all morning. Mom called me at work in tears and we talked a bit. I went to her house at lunch and had a bit of green chile stew but I mostly wasn't up for eating. I apologized for being distant recently. I feel like every older democrat woman in my life has been betrayed, and I feel awful for my mom. She deserved a woman president. She's 73. I don't think she's going to see one. I feel awful for those two ladies who survived the Tulsa Massacre who cast probably the last votes of their lifetime for Harris. I feel awful for R and all the girls old enough to know what happened but too young to have voted. I'm worried about R and her family in particular, but at least they got out of texas.

Storytime happened. It felt like I was wearing a corpse on my face and just waiting for it to slough off in front of the toddlers, but I did it. That sounds wildly overdramatic and probably is, but I guess what I mean is that putting false expressions on my face *feels* like my skin belongs to someone else, and I'm not really controlling it. I dunno.

Cute storytime mom who came in last week as well called a few hours later to like, warn me that the xtian tradwife mommies who are regulars were being smug assholes and saying fucked up shit, and called them 'unsafe women', which was. Weird? Like yeah, I know they're like that, it's not surprising. They treat me like a robot dispensing free entertainment to their children and I know they're all nutso homeschool conservatives but like. I work here. They're regulars. It's a fundamental tenet of library work that we do not exclude people on the basis of any creed or ideology, and that applies equally to conservatives as it does to the left, assuming everyone behaves themselves in public (which, tbf, is not by any means something you can assume). Also I'm not gonna treat their three year olds like shit, y'know? So I dunno. I guess it was sweet that she wanted to warn me, but there's really not much for me to do about it. I know who those people are, it just doesn't make any difference.

On the plus side, A&E and A&S's respective moms came in with them (presumably just to get out of the house for a while, and they turned out to be democrats and deeply appalled, so that's something [positive?] I guess. I like them, so I'm glad they're not evil. The four kids were just happy out was snowing. E was extremely loud, as he tends to be.

R came and basically said everyone was worried about her and wouldn't stop talking about the election, so I gave her hot chocolate and said we wouldn't talk about it, which I think she appreciated. Things were almost normal that last hour. We changed out the drawing table at long long last, after counting a grand total of 52 bill ciphers drawn on it. She made the A in 'Draw On Me' into a bill, and wrote 'on me' in the bill symbol substitution code. She's literally never seen gravity falls, lol.

After work I drove home and it was raining, which made traffic about as nuts as one would expect. Ferro and I hung out and didn't talk about the election (much) then watched more out of order buffy, which thankfully I really don't care about. I was falling asleep by like 8:45 because of the aforementioned utter lack the night before, so I went to bed very early. Still didn't sleep great, but better.

Woke up earlyish this morning to find that Marian texted all of us. Power is out at work and won't be up all day most likely, so the snow day we all hoped for happened. Perks of working in a rural place I guess. It's 10:50 now and per usual, the sky out west is turning blue, but the mountains are gray still and that's the view out the front windows in the new house, so I'm trying to enjoy it as best I can. Under different circumstances I'd be really happy about the weather. No heat still so I'm sitting in front of the space heater just like last winter. I miss Celeste but you didn't hear that from me. I'm being super detailed because I strongly suspect I'm not going to remember any of this week in a year from now, although given the way we store positive vs negative memories, maybe I'm wrong about that and all of this will be in vivid sparkling 4k clarity for the rest of my life. Unfortunately writing it down is probably helping.

Audrey 2 has a lil hat, which is cute.