Make jam

 The end of last week, I was feeling that I was at the end of my rope. I just did not want to get out of bed or do anything anymore. Some of that was the usual Friday tiredness, and some was the six-month crisis fatigue, and the rest was just ... I'm done with all this.

Of course, I did get out of bed on Saturday morning (albeit later than normal) and I had breakfast and went for a chilly but sunny walk in the park. I felt somewhat better after that, but still not really happy. After all, I had piles of lab reports and other assignments to grade and it takes all weekend and then I just go back to class on Monday and do the same thing again next week.

For lunch, I thought I'd try one of the weird green fruits that came with our Imperfect Foods box last week. We didn't order them, but I had a suspicion they were stowaway guava because I remembered seeing guava in the offerings online. I didn't photograph them but they looked like this (from Google image search):

They were firm when they first arrived, but starting to get squishy and bruised by Saturday. I cut one open but it didn't really say "eat me!" I thought I might get out the dehydrator and dry them in slices, but I also thought those wouldn't be eaten. Then I thought of jam (who can say why?) and found a video recipe on YouTube that looked approachable. It was this one, for what it's worth: 

So I made the fruits into jam. It took about two hours and there was a lot of cooking time where I could be working across the room and just check on things now and then. The fruit smelled really nice while cooking. The most intense part was cooking the fruit puree with sugar because it has to be stirred constantly so it doesn't burn. While I was doing that, I thought I remembered having bought some canning jars a few summers ago when I thought I might learn to can vegetables and never did. I went down to the closet in the basement and found those. And then I did the thing where you put the filled jars in a hot water bath to seal them up, and miraculously it worked! My first jam and my first canning experience.

I'm not saying it cured all my malaise, but it helped a bit. I felt a little accomplishment. A little lessening of the hopelessness. And now I have jam that I can eat, or give away as gifts. Better yet, I know how to do it again.

Apparently there is a 6 month "wall"

 This is what I've been hearing more and more these last two weeks or so: that in any long-term crisis people hit a wall at the six-month point and suddenly feel terrible in new ways. The Twitter thread from which I took this post was helpful:

"If you can meet your obligations and be kind to your loved ones, you get an A+." 

It's week 8 of the semester here. It should be our fall break, a blessed run of days with no students, no meetings, more sleeping, and some attempts at fun. We don't have fall break this year, so it's just more of the same awful work, with additional chaos and stress. I went home last Friday evening and just cried out of exhaustion and despair. I have discovered a sudden inability to deal with emails: students wanting me to fix some score or schedule an extra meeting or "can I please take the quiz I forgot about?" Requests from various offices, colleagues at other schools. They just gather in my inbox until I find the energy and the words to answer, sometimes days later. Never?

The latest stupid idea from our safety committee is allowing any student to go into quarantine on campus for two weeks before Thanksgiving, presumably to protect their family members back home. We received, as usual, a Friday afternoon email from the Provost requesting comments on this proposal. I sent a summary of my department's comments this morning (basically: please don't do this because it will make our jobs so much harder than they already are) and I included what we all believe, that the decision has already been made and there's nothing we can say that will change their minds. The Provost responded by scolding me, saying that we shouldn't assume just because the decision goes against our wishes that our comments would not be taken seriously. Whatever, dude. He's telling me to trust him, and I just don't. He's brand new and I don't even know him, the hell I'm going to trust him. We've been screwed over this whole time and not once has anything the faculty have said made an iota of difference. I'm not going to argue about it.

Today it's absolutely all I can do (maybe more) to just be here and teach my classes. I've made some progress reading a few student papers I need to have read for later in the week, and I'm bracing myself to survive four hours of class in the afternoon (and then more tomorrow and the next day and the next), but that's my limit.