plague journaling

I spent a fair bit of time outside today, hanging out with the ducks and watering the seeds and napping with the Noise Cat. This is not, strictly speaking, healthy for me, because lupus does not love the sunlight. But it's been a somewhat depressing day, and I needed the pleasantness the weather had to offer.

I was reading about people's contingency plans for medical emergencies or deaths of themselves or of their loved ones. And I just don't know what to think anymore. I can't tell if I have my shit together or not, even after having, in fact, weathered some medical emergencies in the past several years.

We've had certain end of life plans in place for a long time, such that I at least don't need to worry about, say, losing ownership of my home or random relatives coming around looking for inheritance. There's less in place in the event of my own death, though I think most of what would slip through the cracks would be my online life and business.

I feel like I must be a bad person for not wanting to make any further plans right now. Like I'm being irresponsible by not, I don't know, updating all my paperwork or emergency contact information beyond its current status. Like I said, it's not that I don't have anything in place. But the thought of dealing with it any further is so wearying, I can hardly bear it. All the same, I feel like I must be somehow shirking my duties.

Is now the time to be doing any of that? Or is it enough to simply live with the established plans and not worry about it further? It's not as though this is the ideal time to try to buy supplies or obtain documentation anyway.

The idea of a go bag or bug-out bag appeals to me on a deep level, but I'm not sure it's actually all that practical or necessary. I would like to get some of the contents for such a thing--I particularly would be pleased to have some water purification options--but having them assembled? Well, I live out in the country. If the threat is close enough that I don't have time to grab anything before I run, it's already so close that there's no escaping.

That's the other thing I thought about today--the difference in experience with shelter in place between urban and rural locations. There was discussion of this on a podcast I was listening to--Even More News, I think--and it actually gave me some reassurance. I had been a bit alarmed to hear some of the protocols of cleaning and protection used by people (mostly more podcast hosts, actually) that VASTLY outstripped anything I was doing. There was comfort in realizing that many of these protocols were in place because the people live in urban areas, including apartment buildings where everything outside your front door is potentially communally contaminated.

That, at least, is not a problem I have to deal with. I have acres of buffer zone around me, and the only people who ever touch shit here are the three of us. So on that count, at least, I'm starting to feel a bit less like I'm somehow failing at the apocalypse. A lot of social distancing comes built-in with my lifestyle, which is probably why I've had the strange sensation of nothing changing even as the world collapses.

Also, I have some orange juice and a rather dusty bottle of shitty vodka from some forgotten cooking project, so I threw together a screwdriver because fuck. I, it should be emphatically pointed out, Do Not Drink At All. I have drunk in the past, on very rare occasions and in small quantities. I'm not sure I've ever been more than lightly buzzed, and that was only once about a decade ago.

That screwdriver? Yeah, I didn't measure any part of it.

I slightly suspect that I drank more than was entirely deliberate or advisable. Hello. Is this how normal humans cope with stress? It's terrible. How do they survive themselves?