Last week had a lot of ups and downs. I finally feel like I’m over the burnout I was feeling earlier, and at that point in the summer where I can really accomplish a few things that felt impossible earlier. I had a wonderful time attending a teaching seminar online (even though I don’t consider myself a bona fide Suzuki teacher, I take full advantage of their teacher training opportunities as the ideas and teachers are top-notch) and am working my way through a few other webinars on video. I signed up for two more seminars in July on teaching, so I look forward to learning more and being inspired.

But the virus surprisingly hasn’t simply gone away when we ignored it, and as you know numbers are rising everywhere. And it’s shown to be because people aren’t wearing masks in public, but yet this is a political issue, because why not, why not make whether or not to die from a virus a political issue, everything else about life is. I sometimes feel like I must be going insane when people say things like, well, how could anyone have predicted this? And then they will go on to espouse all manner of conspiracy theories and propaganda about not being able to breathe properly and all kinds of bull, while I’m sitting there thinking, but he disbanded the pandemic task force! I sometimes think people really just don’t understand how much other people really DO know…they don’t know things so they assume no one does. I assume the opposite, that somebody probably knows the things I don’t.

So it’s hard to focus on anything positive. I worry I won’t be able to go visit my sister again in July or do anything else. I worry that I will be teaching online for the whole next year but half of my students will quit because they don’t want to deal with online anymore. I worry that people I know will get sick and die…I am still thankful I don’t personally know anybody who has died of this illness and I hope it continues (I, unlike so many, don’t actually need a loved one to die to take it seriously, even though I know I haven’t been taking it as seriously lately as before and have done a few riskier activities lately, which would be LESS risky if everybody around me wore masks).

And during all of this, we have a mayor who is threatening protestors, we have people waving guns around threatening demonstrators who dare walk down their streets, we have a government trying to take health care away from freelancers and small business owners and unemployed people IN THE MIDDLE OF A PANDEMIC.

So it’s nice to sit for a few hours and listen to a more experienced teacher than myself talk about how listening to music helps a child learn. And I try to read books instead of the news and twitter…and I am still doing a lot of physical activity and trying to get outside.

I think what hurts the most is feeling like all the drastic life changes we made in March were for nothing. And I’m tired of the people who say, oh, my life is about the same. If that’s true, they are likely part of the problem. My life is completely different and I don’t see how or when it will ever change back…do we really think that there will be musicals and concerts in the fall?

So I forge ahead. I can read. I can cook and bake and jam. I can exercise. I can keep an eye on my garden.