Day Twenty One

Day Twenty One

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   It is another day on the endless carousel of waking up, completing the same list of limited activities, going to sleep and starting again. However, there was added excitement today when I realised that I forgot what the car looked like, so I stared out the window for five minutes whispering, "it's so blue". 

   I feel like 2020 is just one big swirling cloud of uncertainty, striking the ground with questions and dilemmas that I have never felt before. I feel grateful that I can stay at home to keep myself and my family safe. I also feel guilty and conscious that I am very priviledged to be in that position. I don't want to complain whatsoever because I am very lucky. However, I also feel deeply hurt that I am separated from my partner, and will be for the rest of the lockdown. I feel helpless because my family and I are all too frightened to leave the house because of underlying health conditions in the household. We are all lacking sunlight and fresh vegetables, the latter being something I never thought I would miss. I am stuck on a seesaw of ignoring the news completely and keeping an eye on the news far too much. I see posts both praising and criticising the goverment, and truthfully I have absolutely no idea how they're doing. I've never seen a pandemic. I've never thought about how I would deal with one. All I know is that one death is too many, and that all deaths should have been avoided if it was possible. I don't know anybody who would advocate for anything less, unless of course we're talking about our friends over in the Herd Immunity Camp. I don't know anything about Herd Immunity except it sounds like a fucking terrible idea. 

   In an oddly fitting way, I am teaching a module on Utopias and Dystopias this semester. We have covered technology, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, war, natural disaster and totalitarianism. Next week we are looking at Utopian and Dystopian Music, and I wonder how close we will feel to the desperation, anger and hopelessness we will hear. I wonder what music will be born from this time, and will it be remembered like all of the music we'll be studying next week. Some of us could have a little laugh at the idea of robots or animals taking over the world, but I'm not so sure how close to home we're going to hit in the coming weeks. Incidentally, I just finished reading Fahrenheit 451, and it felt very, very strange reading a dystopic novel in these circumstances. I can only imagine the terror of trying to make it through lockdown without books. I would have liked a little more from Millie and Faber, but I get this story was focused on Montag's transformation. I will probably read it again in the future when my ability to concentrate has returned. 

   I'm missing my partner. I'm missing my extended family. I'm missing my friends and colleagues. So what else is there to do but fill the void with fictional characters? I read something recently about how children who struggle to make friends tend to fix this problem with fictional characters, and I felt called out, and then I accepted it. Not only am I slowly making my way through Supernatural, but I am also watching Gravity Falls, one of my favourite animated tv shows. I'm also being kept company by my virtual villagers on my virutal island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I'm pretty proud of how my island is developing and I'm THIS close to making a YouTube video about it. However, online teaching has taught me that seeing my face and hearing my voice online is one of my least favourite activities. All you need to know is that my museum is surrounded by waterfalls and I love it. 

   Please do direct me to how you are dealing with this situation. Share your blogs, currently-reading, hobbies and Animal Crossing islands!

Stay safe saplings x

Day Thirteen

Day Thirteen of Staying Inside 

   In normal day-to-day life, the little progress I have made since the last time I was here would not be considered as very important by myself. However, I'm takin the small victories. 

   Working from home has been an experience that I did not expect for the last few months of my job. It feels like it's been cruelly cut short and if I had known the end of face-to-face contact was on the way, I would have brought the end-of-semester classroom party forward (which is really just a "let's eat biscuits whilst we sort out your essays session). I hope that when all of this is over, I will still be employed at my current workplace and I can experience a tiny bit of normality there before I move on. I am very tired of grappling with Zoom, because my computer cannot handle 20+ moving images at once and gives up altogether (it used to be a fancy gaming computer but it's pretty old now). I am going to spend some of this week trying to fix it so that my colleagues have the pleasure of seeing my Mickey Mouse wallpaper. If they didn't already see me as a child pretending to be an adult, they will by the time the next staff meeting rolls around. 

   Aside from Work Things, which has the added pleasure of letting me explore Pop Culture for educational purposes, I've been watching Supernatural, clay-modelling, playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, crocheting a chunky cardigan and revisiting childhood books (let's not dive into the psychology of that). I am also exercising reguarly which is something I have never done. 

   I just finished the first season of Supernatural, and I truthfully didn't realise I was going to get so hooked on it. It helps that by "hooked" I mean that I also crochet my cardigan at the same time. It's become a hugely enjoyable combination of activities. Nothing to report on Supernatural yet except I'm enjoying it and that watching with the captions on sometimes makes it more amusing than intended. It is worth noting that the captions are normally at the bottom of the screen, but when I pause it, the pause menu pushes the captions up, which I only found more amusing. 

   I am not quite ready yet to share my clay-modelling updates, but I am taking progress pictures. I've decided to have a go at modelling Legoshi from a recent anime called Beastars. Watching it made me extremely uncomfortable at times, and I'm not entirely sure I'm actually okay with how some of the subject matter is portrayed, but I watched it quite eagerly nonetheless, so there's a reason I wanted to finish it I haven't put my finger on yet. It's definitely a much darker telling of the prey vs. predator story we see in Zootropolis, which is one of my favourite films. I don't believe that stories like this are just for the furry fandom, but I have noticed recoil from non-furry watchers of Beastars. It's an understandable reaction. 

   Animal Crossing: New Horizons is getting me through the endless monotony of the days by providing something different each day. We're not going to talk about the horrifying personification of Easter by the name of Zipper, but I am looking forward to the 13th of April when he goes away. The 13th of April brings other joys though. It is the supposed "end of lockdown" marker. I have doubts that this will truly be the end of the lockdown, but if it is, I will very gladly reunite with my partner. It is his birthday today and I'm devestated that I'm not there, but I ensured that I took many virtual gifts over to his Island in Animal Crossing, to get my appreciation across. 

   When I'm not digging up virtual fossils, creating a cardigan, or working, I am reading and exercising.

   I know the reading is working, because it's the first time in weeks I have felt like reading anything. I re-read Varjak Paw and The Outlaw Varjak Paw by S.F. Said. These were my absolute favourite books growing up (I must have found them when I was about eight years old) and it was a joy to revisit them. I'm hoping to pick up reading again, but it all just feels a bit too overwhelming at the moment, so I won't pile the pressure on myself.

   I know the exercise is working because my muscles hurt if I crochet a bit too vigorously (clearly a scientifcally accurate way of testing results).

   I know my anxiety is working because beneath the aching muscles, working hands, and scrolling of emails, I'm still churning away. All of this is very much an effort to block out the outside world. All of us in this house are too frightened to go outside, and we have all stayed on one side of the front door. I am very much hoping that by the time the lockdown lifts, I will have regained the courage to Go Outside.

Stay safe saplings x

Lockdown Life

IMG (c) Myself - 2016

   Day 6 of Staying Inside. 

   

   During this time of personal and global panic, it appears that a part of my brain I have not met yet has jostled it's way to the front and taken control of the wheel. I don't want to insult your intelligence, but I'll go ahead and clarify that that metaphor was not informed by any sort of expert opinion. I have no clue what's going on in my brain. However, what I mean is that despite having my usual cauldron of anxiety bubbling beneath the surface, I've stopped catastrophising and my autopilot is keeping me occupied. My family and I are in a very privileged position in that we can all work from/stay at home so as time goes on and nobody is showing symptoms, I have been able to calm down a tiny bit. I'm still extremely anxious about my partner and extended family, but for now I am able to focus on tasks at home without too much dramatic pacing and fretting. 

   My days have mainly consisted of working on some online teaching, playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, watching Supernatural for the first time and a bit of crochet and clay modelling here and there. Getting used to this home routine has been really strange. I spent a very long period mostly at home a few years ago when my migraines were a lot worse and I was in a slightly different place in life. However, since then I've been much more active; I have a full-time job and I've been much more nomadic since meeting my partner. In case you're wondering, we do not like being apart but we are coping by sending each other daily gifts on Animal Crossing. 

   The image above is a self-portrait from 2016. I am wearing a hoodie that I still own, some cool jeans that sadly became too faded and shrunken to wear, and some unicorn slippers which also sadly fell apart (I loved them too much). I also had my bright red hair and side shave which I kept for a really long time, but I am now back to my untamed brown hair. Most of the time you can find me wandering the house in unicorn pyjamas, buried in a fluffy, grey housecoat, lugging an enormous mug of tea around with me at any hour of the day. However, one things remains the same. I am always carrying a little fire around with me. The self-portrait depicts Calcifer, a fire demon from one of my most beloved films, Howl's Moving Castle. I was inspired to draw it not only because it's one of my favourites, but because ever since I was quite young I've imagined fire in my hands. I can understand at this point you're thinking, what?. It's not as edgy and superhero-esque as you think. 

I just have really cold hands.

   For some reason, my hands are always freezing and one day they were so cold and they hurt so much that I was Googling how on earth I could warm them up. I saw a random post which described how imagining a little fire burning in your hands like magic would actually help them to feel warmer. So, Google had spoken and I was ready to give this a go. Long story short, I've been doing it ever since. 

   On the topic of Howl's Moving Castle, a friend recently asked me why it's one of my favourites, because theirs is Spirited Away (an excellent choice). I know why, but up until this point I never considered trying to articulate it any more than half-screaming at people to watch it. After she asked me, I've been really thinking about it and I think I've come to a conclusion. Howl's Moving Castle is special because it's familiarly unfamiliar. 

   In one scene, Howl and Sophie prepare eggs and bacon for breakfast and sit at the table to eat it with Markl. These seemingly normal events are interrupted firstly by Calcifer loudly eating the eggshells, then by the lack of clean cutlery in such a large castle, and the sudden appearance of a curse, burning itself into the table. Even Howl, an irritatingly lovable character who plays what appears to be a love interest at first, is punctuated with quite serious political significance, childish reversion, and mysterious legends of heart-eating and star-swallowing. There's no all-encompassing way to describe why the film is so important. However, it's important to me for many personal reasons. 

- The scene where Howl takes Sophie's hand and they walk through the sky.

- The unbelievable soundtrack which, when it builds, is phenomenal. 

- The immersive way that you feel aged alongside Sophie.

- Howl's grey and salmon coat. 

- Howl's bedroom. 

- When the castle opens it's mouth and the tongue sticks out. 

- Turnip head.

- The perfect casting for the voices.

- The way Sophie eats the block of cheese from her little hankerchief hammock. 

- The ever-so-slight character progression. You could argue that both Howl and Sophie are the same person they were when the film started, but after watching it a few times, the subtle ways their characters are tested and forced to grow is inspiring. 

- The very idea of the flower shop. 

- Howl's gooey tantrum.

   I'm hoping in the future that I can write more extensively about Howl's Moving Castle. I read the book last year, and they are very much seperate entities, but I highly recommend both. I don't want to rush writing about it, but I am also eager to go to bed, knowing that we are going to lose an hour in the night. 

   

   Another thing I've been doing a lot the last few days is listening to music so I will leave you with my Lockdown Playlist, which is really just a bunch of songs I've been listening to a lot during my time Staying Inside.

Lockdown Playlist

Take care saplings x