seanessay.com
I’m having
a bad, bad day
It’s about time
That I get my way
From the Despicable Me soundtrack
Partly I feel bad today because my body is sick, too sick to attend a nice party tonight. The only productive thing I did today was make some comments on other blogs. My own blog feels futile just now.
After a survivor of ground zero wrote of her support group of 20 years ago, and how to her work suddenly felt trivial, while others tried to get back to work to support the company, so that the company could support the kids of their dead coworkers, I wrote:
As for trivial, right now I am having trouble getting back to what was once my favourite hobby: Reading fiction. Such a serious change to my quality of life, and I don’t know why.
After 9/11, I well recall how awards shows on TV seemed trivial, and I think they stopped showing them for a while. Folks liked comfort reruns.
At work I am blessed because I find meaning by supporting two mentally challenged men to live in their own home, a house with an outside ramp instead of stairs. One fellow is 83. It is the right work for me.
Reply
Sheila says:
September 11, 2021 at 6:46 pm
Sean, your work sounds AMAZING. Those two men are so lucky to have you. I bet you feel the same way about them. I am glad you brought up the topic of reading fiction. In June of this year I decided to step down from an 8-year teaching career (one in a succession of many.) Now I work as an instructional assistant, which I love. No lessons to prepare, no work to grade, and no parents to email. I just show up each day and try to help students learn.- Meanwhile, however, I publish a weekly essay, mostly about the books I read, but like you, I recently cannot engage meaningfully with anything I am reading. Every read feels dissatisfying. I’m not sure why. One of my skills is curating what had been up to this point an engaging lifelong reading list. I’ve lost my reading mojo.
At least I have enough energy to try for humour… Someone wrote of the Republican Party encouraging it’s followers to die from refusing the covid vaccine. This while everybody at Republican headquarters and Fox News was vaccinated. I quoted a part and replied:
“…and of professional psyops made to look amateur enough to be shared…”
Last week the university of Cardiff revealed research into a (gasp) Russian conspiracy.
Just the other day I found that my local bearded barista, a hipster who likes to know things, was totally unaware that Russia had troll farms… to disseminate disinformation to deluded denizens of the dat burned social media world.
Of course I refrained from leaning over the desk like a desperate Sarah Connor screaming, “It happens!” Troll farms happen. And folks don’t know.
…
As a former university student newspaper reporter, who believes in science, I have little use for folks believing in social media. In the same thread I replied:
It seems to me the people who believe in social media overlap with (Venn Diagram) people who “distrust the government” about vaccines.
Too bad these clowns won’t consult traditional media, where people with journalism ethics interview not merely the government, but also scientists, researchers, nurses and so forth.
As the T-shirt says, “Social Media Kills.”
…
My sources for the above were:
Penelope Trunk for a piece on September 11, 2021 called What We Learned from 9/11 About Quitting Work after Life-Altering Events.
And John Scalzi in his September 10-11 piece, An Actual Party of Death, Now and his September 11 one, 20 Years of 9/11.
…
…
Sean Crawford
Sick, wretched and alone,
9/11, 2021
