Dusting good, cooking bad, I can see through time now

[flexagon]

Kind of a messy week of stay-at-home. I did a bunch of stuff that wasn't quite routine (even New Normal routine), like the emergency vet, and walking to a fairly great outdoor market that did social distancing really carefully and had a lot of local foods. We also cleaned the house super well again, because the cleaners would have come on Wednesday -- having a checklist helps. I find dusting strangely satisfying since it's easy, fast and mindful. For me, it's ultimately about forgetting about what things actually do or are, and paying attention only to the spatial shape of a room and touching all the horizontal, hard surfaces. I imagine a hot, insubstantial rain of glowing blue droplets falling downward through every space.

Wrote a long, long email to someone who's a moderately good friend of mine and a very good, longstanding friend of Lion's. She didn't know the story of the last few months despite a few casual brushes against the edge of the storm -- so, after weeks of failing to set up a 6-feet-away walk together, I finally just wrote her the ENTIRE FUCKING STORY and then waited bleakly to see if she'd already heard a much worse version from someone else. I wanted to melt with relief when she wrote back with empathy and startlement. It turns out (less to my relief) that she felt used by her own one-time encounter with Lioness in a way that echoed my own themes of broken communication around sex. And she's now scheduled a good 1:1 catchup with Lion, which is a relief. He could use a friend, and he still doesn't want to "push it" by talking to me.

Easy to forget how fresh some of that hurt still is. Five or six weeks? And less than that since the corporate shenanigans that redefined my work role? Much of it feels like it happened in another world.

I finished reading Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor. It's a dystopian fantasy set in post-apocalypse Africa (Sudan, we learn at the very end). It's much darker than her graphic novel LaGuardia, and is pretty heavy on both rape and body mutilation. Hmm, and also inescapable destinies, which aren't necessarily good when they involve important deaths. So as far as a recommendation, this one is conditional on content and what the reader is up for. However, this is an author to watch, and I'll mention it does contain one marvelously redeeming scene that would be a happy moment for any fan of the clitoris (really, who among us is not?). I'll probably read the Binti Trilogy.

And I ordered a 30lb BodyBar from bodybar.com, despite the money. Straddle pancake flexibility has been awful to work at home with no weight, and I was literally in the middle of such a thing when apfelsingail told me about a 25% off special there (still running). I look forward to its arrival. I was also looking forward to the arrival of a kick scooter I ordered from Amazon in search of something less than a bike and more than walking, but, ugh, they claim it's been delivered! No scooter. I'll see what can be done.

The only place I think I'm cracking: feeding humans on a continuous basis is punishingly upsetting, and people keep offering me recipes and meal prep tips. Gah! No! That's a solution for a different problem than the one I have! This may be the one area that keeps getting worse for me instead of better.

Comments

[ckd]

At this point 5-6 weeks ago is basically forever. Heck, 4 weeks ago I was at FOGcon; while things were hardly normal even then, there was at least a semblance of normality available.

(One big measure of non-normality for me: I've cancelled so many trips that I have more oncall time-in-lieu than I can meaningfully use, so I switched over to having it cash out at end of month instead. I haven't taken it in cash since 2015, when I was using it to bolster my emergency savings.)

[elbren]

you're feeding yourselves by ordering delivery? any of your regular places up for a subscription service? (like, bring us dinner every tuesday, any one of these list of dishes?)

[flexagon]

No; I see why it sounded like that, but we're mostly buying groceries and cooking them. We tried a grocery delivery service, and that was great except for not getting everything we'd ordered.

We have way more food around than usual, and think what's wearing me down is the need for constant situational awareness: what do we even have, what's about to go bad that we really should eat, what are we almost out of, what goes with what? Plus the constant pressure of dirty dishes.

Setting up something weekly with a local restaurant does sound great. Or at the very least I should look into Oath's new "take and bake" pizza kits, see if they'd make me some vegan-cheese ones. It's one more phone call though, and we do have stuff that needs to get cooked and eaten.

[triesticity]

Yep, I am also finding that need for constant situational awareness exhausting - that is a super-good way to describe it. I cook fairly often normally but yeah, it's normally interspersed with meals out. Luckily I like doing dishes though the increased volume is a little annoying - I'm asking C to help dry more than normal. We've ordered some pre-made meals via Fresh Direct, and I also am asking C to do more coordination with leftovers than usual. (I don't know why I find it super-tedious to do something like: take the veggie sausage and broccoli out of the fridge, divide it onto two plates it, microwave it, and then add the quinoa I just made to the plates, but I find it SO TEDIOUS.)

[triesticity]

Also I think another thing I'm finding exhausting is that because we're currently only ordering via Amazon Fresh and Fresh Direct, the "what are we almost out of" question is followed by "and when can we get more" in a way that it normally isn't, because I'm used to either being able to walk like 3 mins to the closest/somewhat overpriced grocery store, or like 15 mins to Whole Foods. I imagine that even if you're going to the store, the "and when can we get more" question may still be an issue, either because of wanting to minimize store trips or stores being out of stock or whatever.

[flexagon]

Yesss. I was relieved to read your comments -- it's not just meeeee! Of course these things are never just one person. I, too, am having a bit more trouble since "when can I get more" has stopped being obvious. We're less than 5 minutes' walk from either of two grocery stores, both of which I like, but both of which I'm now loath to go to. I think I dislike the "maybe you get it, maybe you don't" nature of grocery delivery enough to risk the in-person hazards, but I'm still trying to minimize trips.

Soon I'll run out of hard cider, too: a whole separate store to visit.

[triesticity]

Yep, the "maybe you get it, maybe you don't" is why I normally avoid grocery delivery - C is more into it in general than I am. I'm a convert for the moment, and the quality on Fresh Direct is better for some things than the stores near us (the fennel we got delivered today is beautiful! I have not seen fennel like this where I normally shop!) but it means hoping for the best/being ready to come up with an alternative recipe/meal plan if we order things x, y, z for a recipe but thing x doesn't get delivered.

[elbren]

ah, yes. that's Work, and the only thing i know of that makes it easier is routine and standard checklists, which are More Work to set up before it starts getting easier.