Yesterday
Yesterday morning, I attended the Families Belong Together rally at San José City Hall. It was pretty good, although it took me a while to find a place to stand where I could hear the speakers.
Came home afterward. (Traveled to and from via light rail; took a lot longer than driving, but (a) could read while traveling, and (b) didn’t have to deal with driving around downtown San José looking for parking. As it turned out, there was a parking garage a block away from City Hall that had 250 open spaces. But I would only have spent the extra time reading at home.) Hung out for a while, doing nothing much; I’d been in a weird irritable mood for the previous day or two, and didn’t want to do any of the things on my task list. Finally got my act together enough to leave the house again.
Stopped by a social event, chatted with friends for half an hour (which cheered me up somewhat; surprising, given how very low on social energy I was feeling), went grocery shopping, went home, put away groceries. By which point I was half an hour late to the 7 p.m. rally in downtown Mountain View.
So I walked over to Mountain View City Hall, only to find the plaza mostly empty. I wondered if the rally had only lasted half an hour, but eventually managed to find info online that said that things were starting a couple blocks away, and then moving to the Civic Center plaza starting around the time I arrived.
So I waited a while, and lots more people arrived; probably a few hundred. A resistance chorus sang some songs, which I couldn’t hear very well. The people running the rally began to speak, but they had only a small portable speaker (maybe a foot wide), and even though someone was holding the speaker up in the air over their head, it was hard for me to hear anything. (This was a problem at the last Mountain View rally I attended as well; I gather it’s hard to get a permit for using a better sound system there? Though the mayor was one of the people speaking, so I would think something could’ve been arranged.)
(My hearing is not all it could be; I realized too late that I should have brought my Bose Hearphones (review of them to follow at some point) to have a better chance of hearing things. But I was far from the only person in the crowd who couldn’t hear much of what was being said.)
I wandered through the crowd until I found a place where I could mostly hear. But I was tired and hungry and dehydrated and starting to get a headache, and had shifted back into irritable mode, and couldn’t find a place where I could both sit down and hear the speakers, and eventually I gave up and headed home.
Had food, which helped. Then I watched Logan Lucky, which had arrived from Netflix the day before. I had seen previews of it that made it look like a terrible dumb-hicks-doing-dumb-things-and-screwing-up wacky comedy, but a friend’s description had made it sound more interesting, and I decided to give it a try. I figured if I was too surly to enjoy it in the first ten minutes, I would give up and sort photos or try to do more Hugo reading or something.
But it started out charming, and got more charming and more entertaining as it went on. There are a couple of dumb-hick characters, but I feel like for the most part, it treats the characters respectfully. (I’d like to hear what real rednecks think of it; did a quick search but didn’t find anything useful.) Overall, I found the movie charming and funny, with a couple of very sweet moments. And it does a good job of handling all the standard heist-movie plot points and twists.
So that left me in a much better mood, and I seem to be doing better this morning. We’ll see if it lasts.
(This is the second time I’ve gone into a couple days of irritability and inability to focus in the past couple weeks. The first time lasted for several days, but mostly went away for most of this week. It may be time for me to increase my Lexapro dosage, not sure.) (No advice, please.)
Today, gonna try to get myself to be productive. There are a bunch of things that I’m way overdue on—some day-job work, some tax-related things, answering email (apologies to those of you I’ve failed to respond to in the past few weeks), straightening up around the house, laundry, etc. Not sure whether I’ll be able to get myself to do much of that, but gonna try.