a tough week
The election was kind of terrible, and its aftermath pretty much cast a pall over the whole past week. I didn't write about it much here, but I was all-in on voting for Clinton—excited by her policies but even more by the tone of her campaign, and of course by the chance to have a woman in the White House. And naturally I'm disgusted by Trump and everything he seems to represent. So the results were hard to bear, even before I started to hear that friends are wondering if they should leave the country.
Other minor things contributed to my feelings of dislocation. I made some stupid mistakes in trying to bring my computer into the current decade through a series of updates—until a few days ago it was pretty much stuck in 2007. Despite that it was at least deeply familiar to me, and fairly well-customized; now with the botched update it's still out-of-date but strangely unfamiliar. And my camera's not working, so even when we did have moments of delight this past week I wasn't able to capture them for posterity (except with my crappy phone camera).
I don't mean to suggest those little annoyances are anything like our national catastrophe; far from it. But as I wandered around the house in a stunned daze I often found myself sitting down in front of the computer only to realize I basically couldn't do anything useful with it—it had no comfort to offer me. It didn't help that I've sworn off the news, because it turns out reading about politics online occupied maybe 20% of my time over the past couple months. Avoiding it now leaves me with lots of time to wonder what I'm doing with my life.
But we had a good day today, even if I didn't manage to photograph it. And I'm beginning to accept that my elderly computer is as updated as it's ever going to be, and make my peace with that. At least it won't ever change again! The national picture's no better, but I'm encouraged by what I hear from friends in person and online about how the election results has made them think harder about what they're doing to be kind to people and to make the world a better place. That's small consolation in the face of Tuesday's catastrophe, but at least it's a start...