I’m having a bad mental health day. I’m stuck in neutral. Let’s see if writing snaps me out of it. Perhaps writing is a form of procrastination and so making things worse. Tomorrow I have therapy. I’ve been like this since last night. It’s not quite depression and not quite anxiety. I might have to go out and get chocolate. That’s how I self-medicate.
I went to turn on the TV today and it wouldn’t go on. I suspected that the battery in my Roku remote died. When I tried to slide battery cover off it wouldn’t budge. I checked online and there was no trick. I went to the other TV set and sliding off the battery cover was easy. I brought that into this room, and it turned the TV on, so the problem was the battery. Now that I was confident that there was no trick I was able to open it up by applying much more force than I had before. Can you put the evidence together to figure out what happened? The battery leaked and was crusted over. I tried cleaning off the contacts and put in new batteries. It still didn’t work. I tested the new batteries in the other remote and it was fine. I tried cleaning the contacts with a pencil eraser but that didn’t help. I searched online and found that you can clean contacts with white vinegar and Q-tips. I knew I had Q-Tips as I bought them to fix the printer. The problem is that I can’t find them. I started looking all over and in the process throwing out accumulated junk. I still can’t find them. When I finish this, I have to go back to my search. I need to fix the remote.
When my psyche is off kilter my toleration for other people goes down. This was not the time for me to call out someone’s Facebook post for being racist, and then reading the responses from his racist friends. I’m usually safe in my bubble so I don’t directly hear from the people that think that Blacks have it so much better than Whites. They of course don’t think they are racists. They just think that Blacks have all the advantages in our society and fare so much worse because of their own faults. Why don’t I defriend him? Because I don’t want to be in a bubble. I want to know what others think. It’s important to know what others think and feel. And it’s important that those that think so differently than me see that everyone doesn’t feel the way that they do. Otherwise we each live in our own carefully crafted fantasy instead of a shared reality.
I of course also got upset at the people on my side of the political divide trying to find new things to get outraged at, as if everything is a conspiracy of the right. Most of what happens is the result of countless forces acting in different directions. Complex systems are inherently chaotic. Every outcome is not planned. There are always unforeseen consequences. Nobody is clever enough to have things come out exactly the way they want. People want to believe that if something bad happens it’s somebody’s fault. Look at your own life, how many accidents are there? How many things times have you done something with best intentions and have cause a problem? That happens to others too.
Time to look for the Q-Tips. Wish me luck.
Wise Madness 