(no subject)

Nothing terribly exciting to report today, except that I spent too much time in bed yesterday and had to skip dancing today for my breathing is not up to the task. I have no apparent infection and no fever, just an idiot virus (it wasn't a cold, after all). This morning is better than yesterday was and I shall take care today and be much better again by tomorrow.

My grumpiness yesterday was mainly due to viral aches and pains. Also because I didn't have the energy I wanted, to get things finished.

I'll be fine, workwise, for I try to allow for these things. It's annoying, however, for I want to finish everything and move onto exciting new things.

The best thing about yesterday was working on the Beast with K. We're at the stage where we can actually see how things will look. What this means, of course, is that there's massively big work ahead, but we can see that it's going somewhere and will end one day. Even if we were just updating it (which we're not, as it turns out) there is such a lot of research in this kind of project. I don't know about K, but it feels as if I've got all the background on the Middle Ages I thought I had prior to that first doctorate. I understand a lot of basics in a lot of areas. This means that my actual specialist areas have much more solid ground to rest on.

Oddly, it also means that I understand how the Catholic Church in Australia got to the stage it did, institutionally, where it could fail to address child abuse. This doesn't make *any* of it forgiveable.

One of the reasons it can't address problems of abuse is because it hasn't sorted out some basic issues that were problems (often of jurisdiction, often of addressing power issues) in the twelfth century. Jurisdiction in the twelfth century should not be at all relevant to the protection of those who hurt children in the twentieth and twenty-first. It is, however. Tragically so.

I had read of church reform and now I understand that it wasn't as deeply structural as it looked, which means that some potential problems were swept under the carpet. Well, now we have a Royal Commission. It's not just about the Roman Catholic Church; it's about institutions in general, but the Church will have to look under that carpet.

(no subject)

Today is officially a not-good day. I'd say it was a bad day, but the wrong things that keep on happening are all quite small. They add up and up and up, however, and my virus now is at the stage where I have to sleep a lot and have miserable fever dreams, so it all feels much worse than it is.

It will be over tomorrow. The virus, I mean. My fever has just broken and I can breathe almost-properly for the first time in days. Also, I shall be happier tomorrow, for teaching always makes a difference and tomorrow is the best class in the known universe. One of my students wrote me a poem at the beginning of term wanting me to find a job, but also wanting me to stay with them and keep teaching. In the mood I'm in, that made me cry. that's when I realised it was not a cold I had, and that it was not a good thing to ache so much and to breathe so little. After reading that poem, I started sleeping and discovered (again) that fever dreams when one is depressed are not necessarily a happy experience.

I didn't realise that I kept the miseries at bay by hard work, and something as simple as the fatigue from a minor illness means I can't do that.

My problems are fewer. I have enough money to get through the summer. I've done a ton of things to improve my life after the impossibility it reached a few years ago. Most of my things-to-impove-my-life (the PhD, the job applications, the being courageous about my work) haven't turned into realities yet. And they may not.

Days like this, I see the unlikelihood of getting a job in the current market and wonder what on earth I should do with my writing when I have no shortage of publishers who want to see it, but a dearth who want to actually publish it.

I keep reminding myself that I do know where I'm going. I just need the job and the publications to get there. And also, I need fewer days like today.