kestrel

Moment of Weakness

Just puttin' this out there because I didn't want to start my day without dealing with these feelings. This is a personal entry.

From the moment I opened my eyes this morning, I knew it was one of those, "eat a square or two of that 95% cacao chocolate with your breakfast" kind of mornings.

Were life not flipped upside down, I would be readying myself for a month out of town essentially living on a campground for a month. It's not happening, and I'm disappointed with the fact that this is not going to be part of my life yet.

At the same time, I've been doing my best to hustle and convert a lot of the material I'd made for the day job into online classes. It's a big shift to go from classroom-only to virtual-only. When I'm the lead instructor, the forward movement of the course and its presence online is left mainly up to me, and that feels like a lot to deal with at times. And to deal with the fact that I've never led online classes before, and I've needed to learn about platforms like Moodle and Zoom simultaneously with creating lesson content... It just feels like a lot.

The organization I work with is one of the only ones still in operation during the pandemic. What's the deal with that? We are not the smallest (having a budget of just a little over $1 million a year), but we are -very- far from the biggest. What's up with those other agencies that basically just closed up shop for the time being? People still need jobs. There is still work out there. The tools to work virtually still exist, and it's not like applying for jobs is impossible when you can't meet immediately face-to-face (companies had shifted to that model for over 10, maybe 15 years now). It's not a convincing argument.

And yes, the US response to COVID-19 is a verifiable clusterfuck, we're living in a failed state that is a slave to corporations and can't even address the bare minimum of public health matters, production and distribution of staples like... well, food. The money that went to financiers and corporations should have gone to the -workers- instead. You know, like it did for the rest of the world. The people in charge here really don't have it together, and it doesn't seem like the folks in charge of the Federal government have a clue how it needs to be done. I shall not dignify him by mentioning him by name. He's the cartoon-in-chief, as far as I'm concerned.

So it's time to bring this back to my own little corner of the world (I start the day job in an hour, after all). I lead a class online starting on 4th May, and yes: the curriculum is coming together. It's just taken some time. I have people rooting for me, for sure. The organization I work for is positioning itself to be a leader and perhaps -the- local authority in terms of response during this worldwide crisis. There will be time for my sabbatical to be back on the calendar after all this has blown over. Whether it will be in a confederacy of smaller coalitions, or in the unified United States, well that's beyond my pay grade to determine.

There are a few other intensely-personal thoughts I have regarding justice, regarding self-love, and so on. I have to save those for another time.