sadness cloud

 i got to bed really late last night, so i'm making a point of posting this and trying to catch up tonight.

i've spent more time on my community manager project, and i'm feeling like i'm achieving something.

we had a pretty good start to the day today, and my conversation with mr smear on the way to school about programming was really fun. i think he might be ready for hacknet :)

gd was in a worse state this morning than last night, she could barely talk. we all left the apartment together, she on her way to the clinic, and i returned home to pick up some stuff and wash an oven tray before heading out to join her. then we went to the pain clinic, but had a long time to wait.

i wrote something this morning that i've been dwelling on all day:

we are slowly starting to put together a picture of the scale of the manipulation that we are undergoing in the western world for not just eight months, or twenty years, but almost a hundred years that have passed us by with our eyes closed.

and I'm afraid.

for several months now, I have been seeing protests almost every day pagainst the government regarding the release of the kidnapped, and i ask myself every time: who are they protesting against? who has the power to make a decision, to negotiate, when there is no one to talk to on the other side?

now i think i have begun to understand the cruelty of the situation. the more we fight over how to return the abductees, the more hamas will back away from an agreement to release them. because that's what they want, in the end. to break us, to take advantage of the cracks in our nation and break us.

i don't know yet what can be gleaned from these thoughts, because it is about our abductees, real people in a real nightmare - assuming they are still alive at all - and it is about their families, real people in a real nightmare, and it is about an entire nation that's suffering together with them.

All that is clear these days is that the world has turned upside down from every notion of normal we base our lives on.

the pain clinic appointment went well. then i walked to work and dived in to the stuff i started on thursday, and once i figured out what's being demanded of me i at least know where to begin. i worked on that most of the day, then got stuck into fixing another surprise bug (a breaking change in an upstream dependency that we hadn't version locked), and then into feedback for a code review on the stuff i finished last week.

i ended up leaving the office an hour later than intended. straight into another protest. i got home just in time for dinner, it was a pleasant evening overall, and i almost fell asleep reading to mr smear. then i woke myself up by showering, and having made some more progress on the personal project i think i'm ready to call it a day.