It’s been cold here, lately. Not Edmonton cold, or Montreal cold, but cold enough that I’m wearing socks and have to be careful not to slip on ice, even at the end of the day. While I usually wear dresses to work in the basement office, even the sweater dresses aren’t quite warm enough for me , and I caved and wore pants. Socks AND pants – that’s cold.

I try really, really hard every morning to spend an hour after dropping the daughter off at school in the reading room, the sunniest room in the house. I’ll drink my coffee, read the internet, snuggle with the dig, because all too easily I can retreat downstairs to my cave, spending all day either in my office or the TV room, never really seeing the light of day. At least now the days are getting longer and it’s no longer dark when I drive to swim team.

I’m set to get on a plane tomorrow, for the first time in almost three years. I’m going to a symposium at Tulane, to talk about my contribution to the collection, Me Too, Feminist Theory, and Surviving Sexual Violence in the Academy (now available as a much more affordable paperback!). I am nervous about flying, I am nervous about talking about my chapter in front of a group of people, live and live-streaming.

That this book came out moments before the pandemic struck was a blow – the book is so good, so important, and it got lost. I’m hoping this symposium, the paperback version, will renew interest in the collection. I hope people read it, find hope in it. I hope…I hope I don’t blow it on Friday. I hope I get to eat fresh Beignets, walk through New Orleans. I hope that I don’t forget anything, I haven’t packed for myself in so long.

I hope, I hope, I hope.

I have a pile of work I should be doing but can’t because I am in ADHD Wait Mode, which is when we know something is going to happen and we are incapable of doing anything until it happens. So I am in Wait Mode, waiting for my flight early tomorrow morning, waiting for the symposium, waiting, waiting, waiting. This is probably why I often “forget” that I’m traveling, as a defense mechanism against getting stuck in an extended Wait Mode. My trips sneak up on me every damn time, at least when I used to travel a lot and there wasn’t a pandemic, like suddenly not-now was RIGHT NOW. I used to hate it, but now that I’m stuck in Wait Mode, I’m kinda glad my mind decided to work like that.

The cold makes me tired. Wait Mode makes me tired. Thinking about having to talk about trauma makes me tired. Knowing I have a shit-ton of stuff to do makes me tired. Not even two days in NOLA, then a swim meet, then the week starts up again. It’s supposed to be warm, but rainy in New Orleans.

At least it’ll be warm, I guess.