(no subject)

I’ll just bullet point all my scattered thoughts.

• I had a spell of ill health (dizziness/nausea) related to one of my many fine physical ailments, and had to lie flat on my back for a bit. Luckily I had Friday off work due to … I’ll digress in another bullet. But anyway, I lay around listening to Tolkien’s Extended Edition Letters. I clicked at absolute random, and happened upon letter 131, in which he explains in great detail everything I needed for my talk, actually. It was so relevant and so good that I got the creepy shivers — how did I manage to stumble upon exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it? This ghost in the machine might save the world yet.
  • Speaking of which, I need to plan out my reading and work on that presentation.
  • Friday off for work: My first ever schedule change in my history of civil service is due to the fantastic “return to work” mandate. If I have to be in a building so decrepit that it actually caught on fire, I refuse to be there more than four days a week.
• Health: I have another brain procedure this week Wednesday. As always, my husband can be contacted via e-mail (dave.rezak@gmail.com) if it looks like I haven’t shown up in a while. Just introduce yourselves as friends from fandom, and he’ll give you a status update. 
• Employment: The structure of support systems for our country are coming apart around my ears and I feel this stupid sense of survivor guilt, at least this week. By next week maybe I’ll be fired and no longer have to feel survivor guilt.
  • My fantasies about punishing the people who are responsible for dismantling the National Institute for Health and US AID put Melkor to shame. I’m a gentle soul, but the callous self-interest of the kleptocrats who have taken over our government is … breathtakingly horrifying.
  • There is no Frodo and there is no Ring. We all have to pitch in and kill them with a thousand paper cuts. Acts of kindness, boosting the local infrastructure. Being present for each other. And eventually, resisting.
  • For example, the “millions” of people Trump planned to deport are actually at around 10,000, because zero people are going to turn in their friends to ICE.
• Anyway the stress of continuing on with life as usual when literally everything is falling apart around me is kind of preying on my health and mind. I look frazzled, I feel exhausted, and life at the dawn of the fourth reich is as horrific as one might imagine. 
• Be strong, my fellow Americans. Be strong, people of the world. Resist!