I had a terrible week last week, which made it even more difficult than it has been lately for me to focus on anything productive. I’m in more pain all the time from my damaged hip. Which uses up my spoons more quickly. And then there were so many more demands on my spoons in the last couple of weeks. Some admin left over from my mother’s death in September required a trip to the US Embassy here in London to get papers notarized… a chore that had to be done twice because of a foul-up that couldn’t have been foreseen. (This was also a double dose of a reminder that she left behind a small mess for us to deal with.)
There’s been all sorts of repairs and painting going on in the house I live in, which has been disruptive… but my hip means it was also nearly impossible for me to escape it regularly. I did escape a few times, spoons permitting. Usually it was just easier to hide out in my room. But part of the chaos was that my room needed to be repainted, because of several leaks in recent months. Which meant I had to get all my shit out of the room. My housemates were enormously helpful with that, but it was still not something I have the headspace for. And it was a reminder than I’m a 53-year-old woman cramming my entire life into one room, which is extremely depressing. (I had to spend a lot more spoons on that.)
Last week I found out that a film critic acquaintance of mine — not a close friend but someone I would talk to at screenings — died at some point last year. He was around my age. I was floored by this news.
And then, on top of all of this, I just discovered that a ton of reader comments are missing from Flick Filosopher: they just didn’t get transferred over when I moved the site away from using Disqus. One of the problems with Disqus is that it hoards comments in its own database, though you can sync them back to your site’s own DB if you make the concerted effort to do so. Clearly, though, this does not work as advertised. All comments were supposed to have synced. But it turns out that hundreds of comments, maybe thousands, are missing. So now I have to waste time trying to figure out a fix for this.
All of this would be annoying and distracting at the best of times. But now… I’m very close to my wit’s end. Everything is simply a tremendous effort right now, and sometimes something has to give. I’m hoping this week will be better. I’m trying my best to make it so.
