Help desk

It always starts with just one little thing, right? You notice a tiny bit of dirt on the floor, and then six hours later, all of your furniture is on the front lawn, because you had to pull up the carpet to vacuum underneath.

No? So that's just me?

Well, anyway, the furniture's not really on the front lawn, because I'm sitting on it. But the point is that I started doing just one thing, and then ended up down a seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time rabbit hole of what could possibly go wrong. It's figurative furniture, on an imaginary lawn. The less said, the better. Nothing to see here.  Move along.

*****
I learned a bunch of new things today, including some of-the-moment Maryland teenage slang that I won't bother to define here, because what is this, Urban Dictionary? We had hoped to see Barry Trotz win his 700th game as an NHL coach, but what we saw instead was a sad beatdown of my beloved Capitals by the Nashville Predators, of all teams. And why is there hockey in Nashville, anyway?  I'm not worried; they're still the best team in the NHL.

Nashville? Whatever.

*****

I'm now on the second volume of The Cazalet Chronicles. At the end of the first book, the extended Cazalet family and all of its servants and connections were breathing a sigh of relief as Neville Chamberlain returned home from Germany, having made a dishonorable agreement with Hitler that forestalled war, which had seemed inevitable. As we all know now (and as most of the Cazalets knew even then), the reprieve was only temporary.  As the first book opens, the reprieve has ended and the family is readying for another terrible war, barely 20 years after the last one, which was supposed to end all wars.

My computer has been behaving strangely.  I cleaned the disk (I don't really know what that means, but I did it) and ran a virus scan, and now everything is fine, but I'm afraid that this too is a temporary reprieve.

*****

Yes, I know exactly how bad that sounded.  That's the point.

Late last week, I went to check my to-do list, and I realized that I just didn't care very much about any of the various tasks and chores that I had assigned to myself. More than that, though--I didn't even care about the list itself. I had actually already done two of the things, and hadn't even bothered to cross them off.  What is wrong with me, I thought.  But I knew what was wrong. The fog had descended again.

Sadness isn't the worst part of the periodic depressive episodes that plague me.  The lethargy and lack of interest in regular normal things is worse.  And worse still is the inward focus and self-absorption that make it quite normal to compare a potential hard drive crash to a world war that killed 50 million people. Thankfully, this episode is coming to an end almost as quickly as it began. Which means that I have some catching up to do. I haven't crossed off a single thing this week.