Afternoon Pages: May 29th, 2021

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the D.C. metro region has been in a state of lockdown. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

Man! The first time writing here in a while! It's a month or so since my last evening pages (and since then most blog posts have been backfilled and not created day of), which is kind of unprecedented for my personal blog. Kinda don't want to think about my professional techblog at the moment. LOL.

So much has happened, and yet I've had some trouble just keeping apace. Work has been busy, and in terms of personal life, I've kind of just barely been keeping up. Life is a lot like a distributed system; you can't just stop it, wait, and then turn it back on with no side effects. I spend hours each week just backfilling my hourly journal and Boss as a Service daily email reports. I used to send out a bunch of them at one time, but now I just send one-line email blurbs about how my day went. Otherwise, TV has also been a big drain in terms of time. That should be ending though. My Netflix subscription (started with the $25 gift card given to me by Netflix) is now run out and on hold (finally), so I can write up reviews of shows I watched. I'm also venturing back out into the world after the pandemic is mostly over because of the vaccine.

I think the biggest change since the end of the pandemic is just my mindset towards life. I don't think I lost too much during the pandemic, and I think maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to have more to lose during the next pandemic. To paraphrase a popular saying, better to enjoy something and lose it, rather than not enjoy things at all. So now I am doing things like going hiking with friends, getting massages, going to the movies, and eating out at restaurants. Geez, when I put it like that, I guess I'm just becoming an ordinary American, rather than living the Soviet lifestyle of voluntary deprivation. LOL.

I'm not quite sure what the future holds, and now I think that's okay, because now there are friends to meet and places to go and things to do that tether me to the present. I feel like this is a healthy change to welcome into the present.