Friday, Apr. 24, 2020 - 8:39 pm.
This has been a week of winning on several fronts.
First, I got my first salary from my new contract (paid late, as it came through late)! Andrew and I also got an early tax return, and with it, I got some leftover money from a soul-crushing data collection process from last year. Hell, yes, money!
Second, ties to the above: we got some new pieces of furniture. Stuff from big stores take ages to arrive, we'd ordered ours a couple of weeks ago. We bouth heaters (essential!), a TV rack, and a stair bookcase for the cats, among other stuff. I was worried the apartment would look smaller, but we got some smooth pieces and it actually looks longer, even classy. Home. I'm so grateful for this space of ours. Yeah, ok, it's rented, but the stuff is ours. We can now afford nice-looking things.
Third, we bought monitors and other hardware for our workspaces at home, though they have yet to arrive. Lockdown goes on and on, and I for one I'm bracing for working from home at least until September. I mean, it could be earlier than that, I hope it is! But the way I see it, the only thing that can effectively bring the pandemic fear, and the pandemic itself, to an end is a vaccine, and one affordable for everyone at that. So in the meantime: Big screens for our computers!
Fourth: Something I was personally and sorely missing was books. I mean, getting books. New books. The kindle helps but I need the whole physical act of reading. I was happy to learn today that Book Depository is delivering again to South America, so I ordered four books: One novel, one about a scientist who studied psychopaths' brains and learned that his own brain ressembled that of a psychopath's (his explanation seems close to mine as to why I didn't develop borderline personality disorder despite showing signs). Ok, those two books, and two more about bisexuality! YES.
Fiiifth! My two papers from my doctoral thesis were published online. One paper is somewhat humble and was published in my country, the other is a bit more sophisticated and it came out in a very prestigious journal (for which I may even get paid by my university; that's cool, but also, getting a monetary reward for this shows that producing knowledge is such an exhausting business; oh well, I earned it this time, I'll take it). I think both papers work as perfect bookends to my doctoral research.
Getting these papers out there also got me pumped and inspired to keep doing research along the lines of media and LGBT issues. I should start thinking about the grant proposal application that opens in September (if the schedule remains), the one from which I was rejected earlier this year.
Not pictured in this entry: the stress of this week at work. Nothing too bad, really, but to the point where one has tiresome dreams about work. It left me exhausted at the end of the day, though, so I couldn't work on a piece I wanted. Good news is, the worst of this task at work has passed. Now I can start writing this column I've had running around in my brain all week, about how terrible things are in my country.
The saddest part of it, personally, is that my dad believes the president, and he just repeats the dumbest theories. It makes me so angry and dissapointed in him. Calling my parents every weekend is now a kick in the stomach; hearing him speak like that makes me sick. This on top of his narcissistic, hypocondriac ways (my poor mother!), but I was used to that. Now, this way of thinking that he endorses is ruining lives. He, being a journalist, lived through dictatorships, civil war, exile, censorship, a rain of bullets from snipers on the top of buldings...now he just repeats the discourse of a guy who'd gleefully put the country through all that again just to show he can. It pisses me off.
(I don't know where to put this, but Nephew #1 turns 28 tomorrow. TWENTY-EIGHT! My first years of this diary feature him a lot during certain parts of the year, as to me he was (and I love him) like a younger brother. I'm sorry we've grown apart as he's grown older, but he's a great kid)
Anyway. I'm tired. But to finish on a good note, I want to take the time to appreciate that things are going pretty well for me. You know I'd babble on, entry after entry, about how things weren't happening for me? Well, they are now! -ish. A decent amount of happening. As usual, when it comes to getting stuff published, my work comes out to the attentive eyes of no one, but maybe someone will have some use for what I write.