Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Awake before six again. I miss sleep.

I spent a couple hours this morning trying to catch up on all the chores I've been too depressed to do lately: laundry, dishes, tidying.

I spent two and a half hours with a couple of BBC people, filming and interviewing first me and Andrew (they were very careful about social distancing, we were in the front garden and they were almost in the road!) and then filming me going to Asda which I had to do for milk and dog food anyway; they were also very careful about not exposing me to any unnecessary risk.

People behaved much better when a guy with a big camera (or a little camera on a really big stick) was following me around, funnily enough. I had to go do work after they left and it was such a contrast. People seem to think social distancing is over. They also seem to think that cycling on pavements is a cool thing to do even when the roads are quiet residential ones anyway and are at their least busy.

I was exhausted before work started (turns out talking about exhausting things, like how society disables me, and then wandering about to demonstrate it, is exhausting!) and my nerves were frayed by the walk there. I had to go to Tesco for work -- not really for shopping, but to pick up prescriptions from the pharmacy there which still meant the queueing and all the palaver. And I worked for a relatively long time for me.

It's been a tough mental health day too. This morning when I went out to walk Gary the air had that lovely summery scent I so associate with beaches and beer gardens and vacations and all the things I won't get this year. By the time the air smells like this, I should be done with essays I haven't started yet. I should be celebrating finishing uni. I shouldn't be writing off the whole year and afraid I'll spend my first Christmas without my family.

I'm having trouble reading or watching anything partly because I still can't concentrate or focus. But also? I can't find a narrative that's "safe" enough to cope with. This observation brought to you by the fact that a podcast episode about Apollo 11 made me cry. And I know if you asked all my friends who of everyone they know is most likely to cry at a historical spaceflight story that they already know, yes you'd hear my name every time! But I assure you this is not normal. I felt a bit better later in that podcast when one of the people interviewed (who was responsible for assessing the alarm code that gives my Mastodon account its name, and also the shoutiest "Go!" that I so love in my favorite song on one of my favorite albums) cried too when he was reminiscing about a speech Gene Kranz gave.

By the time I got home I was too tired to eat more than a quarter of my takeaway pizza and I'll probably be asleep before nine but I don't care. It's been a hell of a day.