Pressure: The Prequel

 We are going to Hamilton tomorrow and moving Eve home on Wednesday, for today's entry in the Time's Lost All Meaning Files. She will be sad to leave her friends there, which is a good thing, and happy to get home and reconnect with her home friends, which is also good. She is working on her last exam which is a paper right now and, predictably, I am getting a steady stream of aggrieved texts about how hard and stupid it is. It is an Argumentation course, and she's read me some of the prompts, and they do sound odd and convoluted and difficult to parse. I am very much on the side of it doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be done.

I slept badly and hardly at all last night, so I felt weird and out of phase at work. I'm a little weary of working in a library with no students. Even the relatively high number of challenging students at my other school are preferable to wandering around like a ghost doing library stuff that feels pointless (it's not really).

So, an amusing anecdote about the night before my 24-hour blood pressure monitor that illustrates why I might have needed a 24-hour blood pressure monitor.

Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows that Eve and I have gone to Bluesfest in July for quite a few years now (here's my post about the first time I took her. I thought there would be more but apparently I don't really blog in the summer.) It's been amazing. My friend Zarah (HI ZARAH) often comes with a kid or two, and we go to see bands on purpose (absolutely transporting experiences watching Bryan Adams, Pink, Blue Rodeo, Melissa Etheridge, The Lumineers, Marianas Trench) and by accident (discovered new favourites Foy Vance, Moscow Apartment, other stuff I can't remember), and basically discovered that even if the music isn't your favourite, listening to live music outside in the summertime is one of the very best things in life.

So after the first year we would always get a link to a pre-sale and buy our tickets super early for the best possible price. Naturally, in 2020 this didn't work out so well. We had the choice to let the tickets ride for the next year or get a refund. We let them ride. The next year still no dice. We still let them ride. It would be great! At some point we'd feel like we were getting to go to Bluesfest for free!

It likely comes as no great surprise that I am not the best record-keeper and that I often have to scramble a bit to find receipts or locate confirmation numbers. I finally made an email folder called 'receipts' and I try to remember to put every email confirming tickets or gifts or whatever in the folder right away so I can find it if something doesn't arrive in the mail or whatever. Often this results in me searching my regular inbox and swearing when I can't find the email, then remembering it's because I put it in the 'proper' place. 

With Bluesfest you buy the tickets and then the wristbands or pass cards show up in the mail a few weeks before the festival. I've never had to actually find my confirmation email. In my head, I was the tiniest bit nervous about letting this all go for two years and having it all work out when Bluesfest went ahead again, but, well, denial is a comforting, welcoming place, and I dwell there overmuch.

So Zarah texted and asked if she should come this year, and I said yes, and she bought her pass, so now I really had to stir myself to locating some kind of reassurance that Eve and I also had tickets.

I've become increasingly certain over the past few years that I have undiagnosed ADD - more on that later, maybe. But a thing I do is forget to do everything I'm supposed to during the day and then lie awake all night thinking of things I was supposed to do, and vowing to do them the next day and then...well, you get the idea.

So the night before my cardiology appointment, I was reading in bed on my ipad and at 1 a.m. I decided to have a look at my emails and see if I could find the Bluesfest one. Because I am very intelligent and this was a very sensible thing to do at that time. 

I found nothing on the first pass. I tried something else, and came up with an email whose subject line was "Your Bluesfest 2020 Refund".

Uh, what now? 

Of course, on my ipad I only had the subject line, and the body of the email had 'not been downloaded from the server'. Super convenient and helpful.

So I got up and came downstairs to my laptop. A thing that you have to know about my email is that lately it has been glitchy and annoying, in that my email address and password autofills but it still often says 'you have entered invalid credentials' and won't let me in. The first time I did a bunch of what Matt (rightly) calls 'panic clicking' and buggered everything up even worse, then figured out it was a problem on their end. Now it's just a thing that happens annoyingly often, and I do something else for a bit and then try again. Which is fine, except when you just want to find a fucking email and go to bed because it's 1:30 a.m. and you have to see a health professional ABOUT YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE the next day.

Another super fun thing, in addition to the email fuckery, is that my laptop started having issues connecting/staying connected to the internet a few days before this. So before the will it/won't it with the email I have to play will it/won't it with the computer itself. It may have been Bell Canada tearing up the neighbourhood installing fibre, which they've been doing the past couple weeks, because that part seems to have resolved. 

So here I am, tired, panicky, about to have an aneurysm, refreshing basically everything for fifteen long minutes until I can retrieve the email and see that it was only a refund for the bamboo wristband for like nine dollars. And then find the proper email saying I have a full festival pass for an adult and not one but two U19 passes for Eve and someone else. I had checked to see if I could still buy tickets if I had to (under the banner of 'throwing money at the problem') and I could have, but it would have been a full hundred dollars more just for my pass, so it was really nice that I didn't have to.

So now all was right with the world except that I am a crazy person and I need so many different kinds of help I don't even know where to start (well, with blood pressure meds maybe. And making some better life choices.)