Weekend Thoughts

I’m catching up on the last few days here, as I decided not to post after Shabbat (the Sabbath) last night.

Over Friday night dinner, I told my parents that I’m back together with E. Fortunately, they were supportive, although I think Mum is a little more cautious than Dad, who is very enthusiastic. But they both said they look forward to meeting E when she comes to the UK to see me, which will hopefully be soon, but is COVID-dependent, obviously.

I went to bed at 12.30, which was reasonably early considering how late we eat dinner on Friday nights in the summer, when Shabbat and shul (synagogue) both start late, but I couldn’t sleep. I’m not sure if I was still tense from my conversation with my parents (which was rather nerve-wracking, as I was scared they would not approve) or if my room was just too hot. I thought a bit about a plan for a devar Torah (Torah thought) for this coming week and eventually I got up and read. I think I finally fell asleep some time between 2.00 and 3.00am. Unsurprisingly, I overslept and missed Shacharit (Morning Prayers) even though I had been hoping to go to shul again after last week.

I went for a walk after lunch, but still ended up napping in the afternoon. I woke up in time for Minchah (Afternoon Prayers) and my weekly Talmud shiur, which was focused on a difficult grammar-based passage of biblical analysis. It was a good Shabbat overall, insomnia and missing Shacharit notwithstanding.

This morning I had an interview with a PhD researcher doing research into how people on the autism spectrum cope with job interviews and how they can be made better for them. As this is an area where I’ve really struggled, I was happy to take part for free, but at the end I was told I would be paid by the university (£15), which is even better. One thing I found myself mentioning at the end of the interview which I hadn’t really thought of before was how social anxiety (which is often found with high functioning autism/Asperger’s) can feed into sensory or executive function/processing issues and make them worse than normal in an interview. For example, I do sometimes miss things people say because I don’t process it properly and have to ask them to repeat, but it seems to happen much more often in job interviews precisely because I’m so nervous.

I wasn’t up particularly early this morning, but I fell asleep for ninety minutes in the afternoon. I felt a lot better afterwards, but I worry I won’t sleep this evening. I also missed the chance to phone the Judaica shop again to see if they can repair my tallit (prayer shawl) although I’m not sure if they’re open because of COVID. Their opening hours have always seemed a bit arbitrary and prone to being shut at odd times even before COVID.

I went for a run, which was my main achievement of the day. It’s weird that, even though I run the same route, the distance recorded by my iPod varies a bit and I don’t always hit my 5km target. I’m not sure if some days I deviate more from the shortest route to avoid people on the pavement or if the distance calculation on my iPod isn’t accurate. I came back with a headache, unfortunately.

I still haven’t picked up work on my novel again. JewishYoungProfessional very kindly read the third draft, liked it and gave me some very useful constructive criticism, which is encouraging, and makes up for PIMOJ feeling so uncomfortable with it (something I’ve mostly erased from my memory, to the extent of thinking that JYP was the first person to read the whole manuscript). Because I fell asleep in the afternoon and because I had an exercise headache, I didn’t manage to make any progress on rewrites today.

Having a headache, I sat and vegetated in front of Doctor Who along with E (on different continents, but watching the same episodes). We are still watching the 2005 season, the first of the twenty-first century series, and we were watching the two part Aliens of London/World War III. It’s probably the most vulgar Doctor Who story ever, and, as E said, a story aimed very much at pre-pubescent boys (Doctor Who is usually pitched more at a family audience), but it’s a story I’ve learnt to accept on its own terms. It’s not the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers chiller or Yes Minister satire that I hoped it would be on transmission, but it is quite fun with a few genuinely scary moments, even if writer Russell T Davies is more interested in the characters than the mechanics of the plot (which is my probably biggest criticism of his writing across the five years he was showrunner/lead writer for the programme — he takes narrative short-cuts and hopes that we’re primarily invested in the characters and won’t care).