Done This Week

Too fatigued to function, and yet I still got everything done. It's just that all spare time is spent either napping or wishing I was napping. Hmmm...

Lewisia: 3 new pieces written, rapidly this time, with most of the pieces needed for the next month and a half sketched out

Gratitude journaling: 35 new entries

Tumblr queue: 35 posts added

Day job: 42 hours

Cooking: I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this, but I did at least independently hit on the idea of adding crushed up freeze-dried fruit to the marshmallow for crispy rice treats--strawberry is good, raspberry is better

Gardening: Pandemic Garden Club, repotted and moved outside three aloe, repotted the five dorstenia in the office collection

Reading: I'm giving up on rereading Going in Circles, trying to decide what to ineffectually gaze at next

Other: got blood drawn

plague journaling

I've been thinking about this for a while. We're coming up on the three-month mark for the quarantine/shutdown/etc. here, though, so it's particularly on my mind. When I started doing this, this plague journaling, it was at the suggestion that one ought to keep a record of such times. Which is all well and good, except I sort of already journal? Just not very consistently before now. That's been a blessing, an improvement, in any case.

But I'm not sure this is a plague journal anymore. I'm not sure it needs to be. This is so much more than a plague now. This is the world on fire, and this is life as we know it. The memorable and the mundane, all muddied up together.

(And if philosophizing about the nuances of a personal blog are how I want to distract myself from the more existential dread-y bits of that, so be it.)

What I have found helpful, beyond the self-imposed pressure of "do this every day, you PROMISED," has been the limited decisions required of me. I do not have to figure out a post title. I do not have to pick the tag, unless I talk at particular length about something particularly relevant to my usual interests. I only have to say whatever it is I'm going to say, which will be something I've thought about on that day. It might have been percolating for a while; it might have sweeping implications beyond that day. But it's just the day's chief thought.

Daily scribblings? Today's Keyboard Smash? Something radically and nonsensically else? And what of the tags? The dailies? Day to day?

In a way, this is a fitting topic for the final entry of the plague journal. This is life when the plague doesn't end, when what changed doesn't go back to how it was before. This is what it looks like, for me, right now, to find a way forward into the new normal. (It mostly looks like stressing about names, which is one of the most fiction writerly things I could do.)