I'm absolutely furious.
…is the sort of thing I'm likely to say any day of the week. About a week ago it was particularly appropriate, and occasioned by the start of term at uni and receipt of the timetable for my subject. The timetable is quite sparse, consisting of a single tutorial a week and the due dates for assignments. Ordinarily it causes no distress until I approach one of those deadlines.
I don't socialise for socialising's sake very often, so most of my real time interaction with other human beings is via the unsatisfying medium of the Brady Bunch opening title sequence (i.e. Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc.). The major exception over the last year or two has been the two or three classes a week I do at U3A. The problem is that due to the twin burdens of study and my extremely disorganised and undisciplined approach to study, I tend to absent myself from these classes around deadline time, which is really not fair on people who are on the waiting list for a place in them.
So late last term I withdrew from everything but my weekly philosophy discussion group, because I know that if I don't have at least one guaranteed sit down per week, in a single physical space with actual living human beings, I will go quite potty.
So last term ends, and with no more deadlines looming, I'm happy that I can again enjoy a lively exchange of views about the eternal verities without worrying about an essay that was due a few days earlier. Except that my psychologist, who I see every month or two (via the Internet, of course), has scheduled our next appointment for the same time. He does this repeatedly, and each time I reschedule with a polite reminder that Thursdays are out, but in the normal course of events, any other day is likely to be fine, and the next time he duly puts me down for Thursday again.
Why? Does he have some vague recollection that I said something about Thursday and leaps to the wrong conclusion? Is it some sort of unconventionally provocative new style of therapy? Or do I just seem like a compellingly 10am Thursday sort of person? I don't know; I have no idea how grown-ups manage their affairs, and it's too late to learn now.
In the case of this particular Thursday I didn't bother to reschedule, because I was under a particularly weighty deadline and thought it not unlikely that by the appointed time the accumulated stress will have seen me off to join a touring troupe of avant-garde mime artists or something. So I resigned myself to missing a class and didn't mention the clash, instead waiting to see what eventuated.
What eventuated was an appointment the following month at 10am on a Thursday.
I fired up my email client to reschedule and noticed I'd received my uni timetable. With my tutorials for the next twelve weeks set for 10am Thursday.
I don't know what is going on with me and 10am Thursday, but I am determined to get to the bottom of it.
If the fates want to mess me about, I have plenty of other options. I already own some horizontally striped tops and light foundation, and I daresay I could rustle up a beret at short notice. I reckon I could make a pretty powerful show of being trapped in the transparent box of patriarchy, or struggling against the fierce winds of British resistance to paying reparations to former colonies in the Caribbean. And I am more than prepared to take that show on the road.