Day 21: no control
Gods, but this epidemic thing is weirding to the mental health. I have spent two weeks quite happily noodling around at home, surviving interminable Zoom and Teams meetings (Tracy, I completely agree that Teams is horrible, it's severely clunky and the sound quality is awful), and tempering the faculty's disfunctional flailing by cuddling kitties and prodding my garden and reading fanfic and rediscovering my piano. Then this morning the milk in my tea tasted funny, which is fair given it's five days after its sell-by, so I sallied forth to do a grocery shop.
And that was fine, keeping distance and disinfecting hands a lot, and filling up my trolley with the wherewithal for another two weeks, and then I came to the till, and the nice lady behind her plastic screen apologetically informed me that I couldn't buy the three kinds of plant food in my basket, it was considered non-essential. And I lost it. I managed to tamp down the response to the poor woman, it clearly wasn't her fault, but I loaded the car and drove home in completely irrational tears, shaking and furious.
And that's a weirdly complicated response to a very minor thing in all this. It's clearly demonstrating how close we all are to the edge, how stressful this is, how thin is the veneer of functionality, but I also think it's pushing two very specific buttons for me in particular. One: I have a pathological need to trust the systems I am a part of, and I've generally been OK with how this country is handling things, and feeling to some extent held and protected by the precautions, but this is a completely irrational exclusion, why the hell will they let you buy seeds and bulbs but not the food to feed them? so my faith in the logic and integrity of the system took a knock. And, two: the only thing I can bloody well control in all this is my homespace. I can feed my kitties and sweep my floors and wash my linen and water my considerable container garden and feed it every two weeks, which is starting to really make a difference to its levels of green. And now I can't. I can't control my space, and I can't properly nurture the things which depend on me, and aargh apocalypse it's all falling apart.
So it was a brief storm of disproportionate woe, and was materially assuaged by (a) driving home the very long way round to charge up the car battery a bit, and playing loud Manic Street Preachers at speed on the freeway, and (b) the fortuitous memory that the above grocery expedition had enabled me to take shameless advantage of the supermarket's post-Easter array of discounted Lindt chocolate bunnies. So I'm fine now. But will have to feed leftover orchid food to my non-orchid potplants until lockdown lifts or I can find an evil quisling supermarket which isn't keeping such strict tabs on its product categories. And am making mental notes to be kind to myself, because thin veneer of calm. The chocolate is helping.
This entry was originally posted at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/978909.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
And that was fine, keeping distance and disinfecting hands a lot, and filling up my trolley with the wherewithal for another two weeks, and then I came to the till, and the nice lady behind her plastic screen apologetically informed me that I couldn't buy the three kinds of plant food in my basket, it was considered non-essential. And I lost it. I managed to tamp down the response to the poor woman, it clearly wasn't her fault, but I loaded the car and drove home in completely irrational tears, shaking and furious.
And that's a weirdly complicated response to a very minor thing in all this. It's clearly demonstrating how close we all are to the edge, how stressful this is, how thin is the veneer of functionality, but I also think it's pushing two very specific buttons for me in particular. One: I have a pathological need to trust the systems I am a part of, and I've generally been OK with how this country is handling things, and feeling to some extent held and protected by the precautions, but this is a completely irrational exclusion, why the hell will they let you buy seeds and bulbs but not the food to feed them? so my faith in the logic and integrity of the system took a knock. And, two: the only thing I can bloody well control in all this is my homespace. I can feed my kitties and sweep my floors and wash my linen and water my considerable container garden and feed it every two weeks, which is starting to really make a difference to its levels of green. And now I can't. I can't control my space, and I can't properly nurture the things which depend on me, and aargh apocalypse it's all falling apart.
So it was a brief storm of disproportionate woe, and was materially assuaged by (a) driving home the very long way round to charge up the car battery a bit, and playing loud Manic Street Preachers at speed on the freeway, and (b) the fortuitous memory that the above grocery expedition had enabled me to take shameless advantage of the supermarket's post-Easter array of discounted Lindt chocolate bunnies. So I'm fine now. But will have to feed leftover orchid food to my non-orchid potplants until lockdown lifts or I can find an evil quisling supermarket which isn't keeping such strict tabs on its product categories. And am making mental notes to be kind to myself, because thin veneer of calm. The chocolate is helping.
This entry was originally posted at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/978909.html. Please comment there using OpenID.