meghan rose allen

Perhaps I should switch to writing poetry in the style of epic poetry, but about modern day hassles.

Dishwasher repair rescheduled for next week. So I have a whole week of a’fussin and a’frettin’ about this. At least it is a broken dishwasher in summer (a nuisance) rather than a broken heat source in a Canadian winter (possible death).

If it would come in time, and not from Amazon, and not out of stock, I would get this for the front until it is repaired:

which would at least let me know that my dishwasher is as sad as me to have its E15 error and supposedly leaking even though I can’t find it leaking anywhere.

My house is generally filthy and covered in a layer of greasy dust. I have to type up some of my sour story, probably about three thousand words. I should work on fixing all the things that need to be fixed.

And instead, like always, I’m just sitting in one place and working on not having the rising panic inside me pass over the line into panic attack. At the start of COVID, I needs must‘d my way through, gave up my work space at a job, then at my house (that was for approx a year; I have my computer room back), made cloth masks at cost, wrote a short story collection (still looking for a publisher!), volunteered at a program for tweens for a year with no support from the volunteer higher ups (I found the space, I found the kids, I did all the programming, I used my own money for supplies) only to find out they had already lined up their choice for my replacement before my year was even up (their replacement is great though), got a new external work space I never even entered in order to cut down on the amount of particles flying about (and also because my job didn’t give me a computer that functioned in a timely fashion (I once timed it taking five minutes to open a PDF), so I just worked from home since I did have my computer room back), tried to follow best pedagogy for online courses (turns out best pedagogy for online courses directly conflicts with what online course-takers want: no assessments and automatic A’s), got food poisoning (which I tested every day for COVID because what if I had some sort of weird food-poisoning-atypical-COVID variant?), tried (not always successfully I will admit) to be supportive of a family member’s chronic pain condition with the extra work involved (more driving, more chores, etc.), and now we’re here, over two years later and I’m earning less than I did before for more work, have no volunteer presence in the community, have a short story collection that publishers keep telling me is great but won’t sell because short stories by unfamous people don’t sell, a filthy house, a broken dishwasher, and just panic, rising panic, all the time.

Is this burnout? An anxiety disorder?

Fingers crossed dishwasher repair person shows up today and at least fixes that one problem. Then I only have the other infinity problems to start solving.

• my dishwasher broke and I had to spend an hour calling repair places until I found one that would come out and look at it;
• at my day job, there was some nastiness with software not working for end users that I had to deal with;
• I got a migraine;
• luggage still missing.

So, well, yup. Is the result here that I should not be attempting positivity?

I am fairly certain I have become a secondary character in my own life, in part, because I am also fairly certain that this isn’t even my own, original thought, but one I read somewhere else, forgot about, and my brain repackaged and presented as a Certified New and Original Meghan Thought™.

I also realized I’m just the witch or the troll at the beginning of a fairy tale for my students. It’s at the beginning, not worth their time, and by the end of their story, I’ve been forgotten. Likely this is also a false Certified New and Original Meghan Thought™.

I received an honourable mention for a short story:

https://www.dreamerswriting.com/2022-place-and-home-contest-results/

Free to read!