Is everyone having the worst summer ever or is it just everyone I know? I'm having a bad summer because I transferred to a larger university 100 miles away from my old one and I spent a month living alone in the old house by myself with the cat while my husband worked in the new town and came home on the weekends. Being unemployed since june (and sort of since december bc my boss sucked and ran his lab badly) has left me feeling so lonely and useless. I think most people get the senior year impostor feeling, "somehow i've completed 3 years of a bachelors degree and i feel as if i've done nothing and learned nothing," but in my case i get the added pressure of finishing my degree at a new school and not being able to find a paid lab position for the first time ever (whaaaaaat the salary budgets are maxed out by july ????). I know that come fall semester I'll have a routine and things to do again but god i feel like a little slug in my house.
On top of this general unemployment malaise and inferiority complex, the weather is FUCKED!!! It has been 90+ (often 95+ with several 100F days) since july 1, which is too damn hot. It's also allergy season and I have the worst grass and pine pollen allergies ever and I've felt like I am drowning in mucus daily since mid june. To top off this awesome cocktail, wildfire season truly kicked off this week and the smoke is ripping up my poor pollen addled lungs to the point i need a damn inhaler (also i have to take days off from schmokin and tokin which i find highly disagreeable). It's so hot and the air is so hostile I can't go for any walks which is pissing me off, and the cat can't go outside for his enrichment time so he's a total bastard.
All my friends moved this summer and all of us are handling it horribly. There's something so demoralizing about the lack of autonomy in renting that it makes me (and my friends) so angry i could die; the waiting, fees, approvals, and ridiculous rent prices for disgusting tiny apartments weighs on our psyches slowly sapping us of energy from the mental strain of the unknown (and being so pissed off i could die at least once a day). Packing sucks the very soul out of me and I feel so weird about donating my things (balancing the convenience of goodwill [evil] with my obligation to keep material wealth in my community [donation hours 10am-3pm tuesday through friday]). I spent so much mental energy (and money) dealing with a non-running, unregistered car that I parked in my yard 2 years beforehand out of frazzled stress (protip: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA) that I'm still mentally exhausted on the topic. In the era of convenience and fast internet it's amazing that everything is so hard and so tedious that i feel like i'm drowning trying to accomplish a 3-part task. I think this lack of mental bandwidth and emotional fraughtness is so exacerbated by the environmental disruption of packing that I became a nothing person every moment I was alone. Now that I'm at the end of unpacking in the new apartment I have such a deep resentment of clutter that I'm tempted to burn the boxes of knickknacks without even opening them. Moving sucks because I am a nesting burrowing animal and I should never have to experience change or stress in my life thank you very much.
Now to the meat and potatoes: It is not very fun to live during the collapse of an empire. I live in the USA and shit is just constantly getting a little worse and a little worse and a little worse and a little worse. To cope with how fucked it all is I've joined the despicable legion of those with their heads in the sand. "Wake up America!!! Don't you see how bad it's getting?!?!" I do and it makes me feel so horrible that my only respite is to avoid anything that reminds me about it. I try to live a life that adheres to my moral standards, but isn't so rigid that I die of guilt and resentment. I stopped reading the news a long time ago because the 24 hour media grist mill is not only so stupid it gives me cancer of the mind, but it's designed to be so alarmist and aggravating and addicting that why, pray tell, would I knowingly expose myself to that? When Donald Trump got shot at that rally my friend texted me because her dad was watching tv and saw it live, this prompted me to check the news and it was like a flashbang went off in my face but the flashbang was just an endless stream of news articles with absolutely zero information in them.
This summer is the worst because it is undeniably bad; the climate change, the politics, the general state of fuckedness, they're all bringing me down and the ever present 'be the change you want to see' activist drumbeat is not helping. It is ok to be angry that things are bad and it is so depressing to watch everything continually get worse while you seemingly have no ability to stop it. I guess a hopeful ending to this would be a call to action for community change, but I'm not feeling very hopeful today. Instead my sign off is this: stop consuming shortform media it's pig slop to anesthetize the masses (and make them dumber).