Day 225 - Susan Sontag and lab delay

Today I spent mostly running errands and running Ellie around. Not too exciting, but getting the errands done is pretty nice. I learned a sad fact and that is that Byrnes and Carlson is not open on Sundays in January. I think I have learned that fact in previous years and then promptly forgotten it, probably over and over. I did some weaving. It's actually very ugly, but I am still trying to understand doubleweave, now with "block structures" which means that if double weave blew my mind before, now there is twice as much of it, sort of double double weave. Because the point is to learn double weave, I can tolerate some very ugly learning samplers. I will try to make something pretty for my next project, though, because it gets discouraging, making ugly thing.

In leukemia news, I am supposed to repeat my labs tomorrow, but due to my work schedule which has me in Concord at a class all day, I cannot get them done easily. Therefore, we'll have to wait until Tuesday to do them and Wednesday for results. As a stranger remarked to me several months ago, being a patient helps you develop patience. Am I putting them off by a day because I think they're going to be bad and I want to be ignorant of it for another day? Am I putting them off because I think they're going to be fine and it's a bit of an exercise in "we have to check this because it's what we do, but we think they're going to be fine" and I don't want to be inconvenienced for that? Or, am I putting them off because I am going to be spending 8 am to 5 pm with an hour commute on each end in a class with lunch served to us there so we can keep working and am carpooling so I really don't have a single moment before 6:30 pm to do them? I think the true answer is 2 and 3, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that the idea of being locked back up in chemo jail (which is, of course, the threat with bad labs) is extremely unappetizing. I think there is also some "I'm in no hurry to do anything that could put me back there" in play as well. Just for the record, I feel well and highly doubt that my labs will be anything besides fine.

I found this around New Year's when people were talking a lot about new year's resolutions. It's from the NYT: "In 1972, 39-year-old Susan Sontag noted in her diary:

    Kindness, kindness, kindness.
    I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying
for courage."
I am not sure what would have happened to this if it were in a place where it would have been editted, but I like very much the idea that in order to get kindness, you have to start with courage. I think that is a very apt observation that often being kind takes tremendous courage and being mean or apathetic usually takes less.
I'll wish for the courage to be kind for all of us for tomorrow.