Photo by Karen
1) Sleep: Are you sleeping more or less? If you’re an insomniac, is it better or worse? What about dreaming—are you dreaming more or less? Are they more vivid, more easily remembered? Are they pleasant or scary? If you were giving yourself a grade for your sleep patterns during quarantine, what would it be?
2) Food: Most importantly, are you being safe? What are your chances of getting Covid-19 through this channel (that includes how you procure food, not just what you eat)? Are you eating healthier or less healthy than pre-quarantine? Are you gaining weight? (4 pounds here, sigh). Is your daily meal schedule regular or irregular? Has your approach to cooking changed at all? How has food affected your family life during the quarantine? Again, give yourself a grade.
3) Your phone: How adhesive has it become? (I saw two golfers marching down the fairway, one with clubs on his back, the other pulling a cart, both with their eyes fixed on the phones in their hands.) Every Monday I get a notification on my weekly usage with my phone—it has skyrocketed the past three weeks. I get it that it has become our communication lifeline…and even God can speak to us through our phones…but there has to be a line drawn somewhere. If, whenever there is a pause in your life, you look at your phone, then maybe… This grade is only pass/fail.
4) Exercise: A tough one for me. They shut down my golf course (just recently re-opened it) and my gym has been closed for almost a month. But the real problem isn’t the venue—in the days of Corona my body has become sluggish. Karen and I walk everyday, and I’ve gone fishing a few times. I don’t grade out very well on this one.
5) Moods: I can’t be serious! How can you grade yourself on that? No one can really control his/her moods. Like the old song says: “When you’re up you’re up, and when you’re down you’re down.” Ah, but I disagree—sort of. Moods can be like the virus: contagious. How you are affects all your quarantinistas. There’s an old Zen adage: If you want to be, act as if. Feeling kind of down? Fake it! Act cheerful…and watch the results. You get an A for effort on this one.
6) Activities: You have to do something to pass the time (besides just stare at your phone). I give the highest marks to those people who are being creative. I must have seen at least 20 YouTube quarantine song parodies—many of them hysterical (my fave is the guy at the rainy window doing Adele’s Hello), and some are absolutely uplifting. One of my nieces is an art teacher, and she and her two daughters are doing amazing things. Today’s newspaper suggested making your own quarantine video documenting how you are surviving these days—I’ll bet you’d love to watch that in ten years! Since most of my creativity is geared toward writing, I’ve taken up mundane activities like jigsaws and crosswords to keep things moving throughout the day. Again, creativity and collaboration improve your grade in this area.
7) Television: Curiously, Karen and I are watching less TV than we did pre-quarantine, and that is mostly news. Our idea of binging is two episodes in the same night. But I would be very pleased to find something like Game of Thrones or Downton Abbey or Mad Men and start it right now and follow it four or six or eight seasons and ride that baby right through the quarantine. We are trying to survive a lockdown. I suppose you are watching too much TV when you start hating it. Grade accordingly.
Of course, the grading thing is ridiculous. But if you’ve gotten this far, it might be helpful in evaluating your introspection. How are you doing? Can you identify aspects of your life that you need to shore up? I feel like I should get up and walk five miles tomorrow morning. (Wonder if I will?) Perhaps you’ve found something you should put a little more thought and effort into.
I left off one category, but that’s because it transcends introspection: charity. Not how are you doing, but what are you doing for someone else? Putting a little energy into that will do more to lift your spirits (and improve your grade) than anything else I can think of.
By the by… Thank you for this. You’re getting me Writing. That’s an important bit too, and you should be thanked for it. Give yourself a grade up in your Charity eval for inspiration and motivation passed to others. You’ve earned it.
Normally, I’d send cookies as a reward, but I’m not sure it’s entirely a good thing in this case. I’ll think of something else.
I love to hear that you are writing. I believe it is spiritually healthy, unless you are just writing to sell something. Returning to writing has been good for me.
What’s my grading curve? Letter? Range?
Eh. I’ll just wing it…
1. Sleep. B+ I’m not able to get too much sleep because I still have to work. They’re not going to let me do my job remotely, just in a remote location. Seriously, my post is absolutely the gold rated social distancing standard.
2. Food: Big fat solid F. My A1C is hating me so bad I think my pancreas is going on strike. You’ve gained four whole whopping pounds? Doordash is a bad habit I’m going to have to drop. Buuuut, when I have to juggle food or mood, mood wins. That’s what happens when you have depression And diabetes.
3. My phone: *laughing coughing wheezing snorting fit* Um… I’ll put it to you this way. My positive restraint in NOT experimenting to see how fast I can get my phone to bounce off of solid surfaces is mostly an A. That is to say, I’ve gone 83 days without chucking it. Not a record for me, but the betting pool says “Any day now” and is taking bets. Yes, I don’t like my phone. Being attached to it is NOT a problem.
4. Exercise. D- I would go out and hike, but it seems that 1) there’s this quarantine thing that says I can’t leave my town or my county, and that limits my choices by, oh, the ENTIRE Sierra Nevada range. Or, as I like to call it, My Usual Stomping Grounds. 2) It seems that you can’t quarantine stupid. More’s the pity. Hiking in Davis? *Laughs* With everyone else’s entitled selves running around spreading who knows what? Pass. Guess I’ll just have to dust off that treadmill and ruck up on that… I don’t normally hike to the scenery of a library, but it counts as a Form of woods, right?? O.o
5. Moods. A- You can’t get an A+ with depression, but you can try. Living the introvert life? Loving it. Not loving the people flaunting a health risk overly much, but *shrugs* What can you do? Love the traffic and how easy it is to get anywhere now. Love the weather and spring. Love watching the migrations happening around me. I LOVE that there are coyotes wandering around the empty streets of San Fran. I’d love to be on Hawk Hill right now just across the Golden Gate from SF, but that’s three counties away and is pretty much verboten at this point. *shrugs* I love that I have a pair of white tailed kites nesting in the tree in the back yard. So yea.
6. Activities. A- I may not be a fan of my phone for any multitude of reasons, but my computer on the other hand… I tend to get a LOT of stick time in flying simulators. I do survey work on Elite: Dangerous, exploring the galaxy, and I can easily lose an evening or even a weekend doing it. I’m not going stir crazy.
7. Television. I agree with Shaw on this one; “Television, a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done.” I almost totally go without. I can count the number of shows I watch on one hand and have fingers left. Give me books any day.
8. Charity. C+. You shouldn’t have left this one out. It’s good to put it in. I just try and make people laugh. Laughter is a good medicine. Gloom and brooding can rob you of it pretty quickly. I know, I know. It isn’t the mega effort that people have put out in making home made masks. I bake cookies for my vets. I engage in little acts of random kindness. I don’t really do more because I Am that introvert and I Do have depression and keeping myself someplace sane is important to me. Am I doing everything I can? That’s the question, isn’t it? Jury’s out on my end.
About #7 Have you sent Detectorists? Quirky and one of our all time favorites. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s on Netflix anymore. But if you can find it, I highly recommend it.
We recently watched The English Game on Netflix, created by Julian Fellowes creator of Downton Abbey. It was pretty good. Only 6 episodes.
Jean — i’ve added the Detectorists to our list. getting harder for me to watch anything (although we did love The Graduate last night–see blog). hope you all are well. judging from my family, the quarantine is starting to wear a little bit harder on everyone. we need to keep praying!
Thanks, Dallin. Love to you both ( and the clan).
I LOVED THIS!! Thank you!
This is great.
1. Fortunately I’m dreaming and sleeping fairly normally. A-
2. I feel that we have found a good balance of cooking more but also eating out often enough to try to support our favorite, local eateries. A
3. Because I am on my phone and computer so much more for work now, I actually find myself using both less frequently for please. pass
4. My gym also has been closed for about a month, but I have rediscovered my love for running. I would say that I average about 4 miles per day.
5. My mood has been mostly positive, but I certainly could be more patient with my family. A?
6. Unfortunately I have mostly used this time to catch up on my list of around the house to-dos. The good news is that we have never had fewer weeds, the windows never have been cleaner, and the dogs are being brushed about 5x more often. C-
7. I have been destroying my queue of movies and TV. If you haven’t seen “The Wire”, it’s great and my second favorite series after “Mad Men”. “The Wonder Years”, of course, should be rewatched annually. A+
BONUS: I have helped out at the San Antonio Food Bank twice, donated platelets three times, tipped very generously, and bought a young HEB employee some beer in the last month. B