I don't think I'll ever have the time to truly keep up with this blog the way I would like, in part because it isn't quite a journal, and I find that I have to second-guess myself on whether I really do want to write something that will in all likelihood be taken the wrong way and held against me at some point (and this just bogs me down). Indeed, there is basically nothing so innocuous that someone won't take offense. The latest stupidity is that Hawaiian shirts are making a come back, and the Twitterati are warning that this may be offensive because it reminds people of the forced colonization of Hawaii. I'm so glad I never joined Facebook or Twitter. There just isn't enough time in the day for that much outrage. That said, it was interesting looking a year back at my posts where it was becoming clear that this was going to be much more serious than SARS, though I don't think it had really sunk in just how much this would upend our lives.
In March I was mostly writing about toilet roll shortages and how many things had already been cancelled (and indeed how many of these I had bought tickets for and in almost no cases did I get a refund!) whereas in April I was writing how the summer and fall were already called off (and how I was slowly pivoting to ebooks at the library). I have generally been writing less because there has been so little change - gyms open, gyms close, patios are allowed before they are forbidden, etc. I generally am not that interested in on-line arts events, though I am listening to the TSO play Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and I'll touch on that in the next post. The biggest change for me really was whether I could go in to work or not, and that also got a bit tedious to detail. The issues surrounding the school closings are even more distressing to me, and right now I am in such a funk that it's better just to avoid going into my real feelings about life in general and humanity specifically.
One of the last things I did in the office before it was shut down (or rather second last when counting preparing my taxes...) was to scan a lot of old journals and emails from my past that I had printed out. And I do mean old!
The oldest hand-written journals were from 1984, continuing to about 1988, while the printed out emails were mostly from 1993-4 (as my initial adventures in academia were coming to an end). It's just as well that I went the hard copy route because none of the electronic media from that time would still be readable. As it happens I have scanned them back to PDFs, which probably has another 10 years (?) before it too will be obsolete and need to be upgraded to something else. I'm not going to go into great detail today on these old journals, but I will say that I have forgotten a lot that mattered a great deal to me at the time. Usually reading the journals is enough to help restore my memory, but there was a note about a high-school crush I had (Karen), and the name means absolutely nothing to me any longer...
Probably as I go through the files to make sure no pages were dropped during the scanning process, I'll pull out a few interesting threads. Maybe my thoughts on Desert Storm 1 and how I marched in an anti-war parade through campus or perhaps my trials and tribulations as a high school teacher fresh out of university. There certainly is a lot of raw material, though I am not sure whether it really is compelling enough to do anything with it all. I simply never became famous enough for anyone to care, which is putting it mildly...
And with that, I think it is time to turn back to the timeless Vivaldi.
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