Day: April 3, 2020

I like things to be a certain way.

I like to wake up in the morning, check the newsfeeds, play a game on my phone–all before that first cup of coffee. After there is usually a brief return to bed, because Covid-19 gives me the freedom to further explore being in love. Then… well, we are here to talk about what happens next.

Flexibility and adaptability are corporate buzzwords to me, but they still hold some meaning. To me those words mean that I can change the way I do things in response to what is happening around me in the wider world. Oddly, this particular plague has shifted my reality from the wider world to the much smaller world. My physical universe consists of my partner, my kids, and the weekly jaunt to the store. This is working for everyone, because it really is not all that different from the pre-covid world.

In one way my kids and stepkids are treating this like summer: Wake up late, play games all day, watch shows as a family, repeat. This isn’t about them being flexible so much as it is about them doing what they want to do and in a sense always do. A few of them have already shifted to the online schooling everyone will eventually fall into and those kids will step away from the console a few hours a day and put in actual work, if only briefly. Then it is back to summer mode. We are probably a few weeks out from the pool being warm enough, at which point it will be indistinguishable from summer.

Is this how it ought to be? Should we be doing this differently? Use this time to develop new routines perhaps? Change the way we live in order to find the best way to live? How to even start that conversation?

I personally ought to be using the time to transform my life deeper towards the writers life I initially set out to change towards in this 4th iteration. Yet here I am talking about what change and how to make change when I started the blog talking about how I haven’t changed and like things a particular way.

Change is uncomfortable. Even good change shifts you away from comfort, the way that getting into or out of a pool prickles your skin. Yet this season of illness invites only possibilities for change–good or bad. I believe that I need to adapt to the now and grab hold of what I want my universe to look like, less I find myself in staring in the rear view of this and wondering what could have been.

CoronaBeard is going to be a thing. I, like so many others have become a part of no shave lock in days. I haven’t shaved in at least a week, and have no interest in doing so in the near future. The beard is coming in with lots of salt to mix around with the pepper. Nobody cares. The new look is not looking at all. We are become a society of people who do not want to interact for fear of catching death. I am a man whose energy has been thoroughly depleted over the course of this the longest of work days.

Once again I should’ve blogged at the start of things. I wouldn’t be here hacking away at the keys trying to at once not make mistakes in the typing and figure out something of value to say. It is a grueling process. Meanwhile I am suffering from occipital neuralgia and trying to balance out how to relieve that pain.

Part of that drain is certainly caused by absorbing a ton of corpspeak today and refusing to code switch to play along. It was a noble struggle. In the end nobody cared and we did nothing. Kind of how that stuff works it turns out.

Some Thoughts:

1. This work from home stuff is great until you are forced to endure 8 hours of remote meetings in one day. That is really just too much.