It’s raining and grey and windy and I’ve been inside trying to keep myself from teetering into an abyss of no return. Really that’s too dramatic or is it dramatic enough for this crummy day and how I feel, eh? The picture of the zombies in Night of the Living Dead (the original version, of course) keeps coming to mind as I move from room to room in my tiny apartment trying to think of something to break the monotony of being with myself yet again.
I’m always convinced that I am the only one in the group of folks I call friends who is not doing exciting and productive and imaginative things during this pandemic. I’m sure that when the Olly-Olly-in-Free order is given and we can once more sit in the same room for a glass of wine and conversation, they’ll have stories of books they’ve written, Lego towns they’ve constructed, on-line diplomas they received from Cordon Bleu or Oxford or Cambridge or maybe Harvard, and pictures of perfectly made French pastries and loaves and loaves of sour dough bread. My telephone doctor/therapist always snorts when I make statements like that but she would, wouldn’t she? She’s going out to woman the barriers and heal the masses every day.
It’s all about having a purpose to your day, right? Knowing that I’m perfectly able to waste away a lot of hours during a day, I decided early on to make a list of things I wanted to accomplish during this time. I even wasted a perfectly pristine yellow file folder to make the list so I could not avoid seeing it. My logic was that if I didn’t actually do the things I put down, I would, at least, every time the yellow folder appeared, feel the guilt from not doing it.
So far — the pandemic is not over — out of the twenty odd things I had on the list, I’ve accomplished five of them satisfactorily: (1) Made scones and cinnamon buns (deliciously) for the first time in my life; (2) Made a call to Bell Hell and did not get snarky with the agent — perhaps also for the first time in my life; (3) Cleaned every leaf or almost all of them on my ficha tree that the nasty little aphids had “soiled”; (4) following the advise of my Social Media and All Things Technical Guru, I cleaned up my password list and secured it where no one will find it; and (5) I finally, finally, finally finished reading Middlemarch.
Having written that I feel like I have accomplished something. It might not be as spectacular or newsworthy as some of the stories of people on the radio, but it works for lifting my spirits this afternoon and that’s worth a lot.
Annie's Odyssey 