Tuesday, May 12th, I woke up at 8:38am. I don’t use an alarm clock, I’m a natural riser, and I shoot for about 8:30 so I can get dressed and make a pot of tea and be at my laptop by 9.
This morning, I’m not feeling it. I want to roll right over and go back to sleep, but I have a job, and I have to get work done before my lunchtime workout with Patrick.
Someone walks past my bedroom door. Going to the bathroom. We’ve been surviving okay with five people and one toilet. My older sister is avoiding me. Which is fine by me. I heard her vacuuming her room last night around midnight. It sounded like she was right above my head. She’s nocturnal, which helps us not run into each other much.
I take my nightie off, and my bra, and change into shorts and a sports bra and t-shirt. I dress for the workout, then after the workout I’ll shower and put on “real” clothes.
I’m probably weird that I sleep in a bra. I’m probably weird in that I wear the same bra for five days. When I was biking to work, I’d bring my bra to work in my backpack and wear a sports bra for the ride.
This is too much detail, isn’t it?
Today’s tea is ginger hibiscus with Vietnamese green, two near-empty tins I mixed together. I put two heaping spoonfuls in the pot, pour in the water, and then cover it with a tea cozy to sit for a minute while I log in and check my emails.
Ugh work. Work is work. I feel like everything I try to do these days is garbage. Do my co-workers resent my garbage-ness? Zoom meeting at ten. I wish I was wearing nicer clothes, or that I had combed my hair. I forgot about my tea! I run to get a cup before the meeting starts. Today I’ll use the “Reefedge” mug. It was a free mug for a software package we didn’t buy at work, but I like its shape and the logo has mostly worn off. In the zoom meeting, I use the virtual background to smooth my frizz out.
My husband is in the dining room, on another Zoom call. I sit on the sofa in the living room. Although we shouldn’t, we shout back and forth to each other. Sometimes I interject to answer questions from his co-workers. We talk about Date Night tomorrow. Wednesday is Date Night, and we’re hoping to make a cheese plate to eat together. I think I’ll make a fire in the fireplace and we’ll sit on a blanket in front of it. The cheese delivery hasn’t come yet. Brian orders the groceries.
The kid comes down around eleven. She says hi and drifts into the kitchen, then drifts over to Brian and hangs around him. She’s bored. I want to engage her somehow, but I’m not sure how. There’s not much we can offer to compare with going out and seeing her friends. I am slightly worried she likes Brian better. She always goes to him first. I get it. Brian is a kind and easygoing person to talk to. I’m always trying to ‘teach’ or ‘guide’. I need to stop.
It’s almost workout time and I’m checking the clock every five minutes. This is the high point of my day. I’m still 40% dreading it.
At 12:30 I message Patrick if we’re on, and he says “Heck yeah!” I move my laptop to the end of the coffee table and lay out my yoga mat. Patrick calls via Google Hangouts. Today is Arm Day. I’m relieved. I have a bad knee so leg day is my least favorite day. Today we’ll do curls and side and front raises with hand weights. Soon I’m sweaty and breathing heavy and my shoulders are radiating heat. Patrick was my classmate at Clarion in 2013. He lives in Pittsburgh where he works as a computational biologist. His roommate has moved out to be with his girlfriend for the duration of the lockdown, and so Patrick is all alone, save for his cat, Commodore, who likes to attack his ankles while he’s jogging in place.
We talk about work, about writing, about cats and groceries and what we’re making for dinner. Tonight I’m making tuna casserole. Patrick is organizing a writing workshop for teens to be held online this year instead of in person. There’s a lot of stress and work. He’s excited to lead them in a little workout, though, to take the place of walking to and from classes. He’s bought tank tops to look more like a personal trainer.
I’m so grateful for my daily check in with Patrick. We didn’t talk this often before the quarantine. Maybe an occasional tweet or email. Now he’s really a part of my life again. I think it also helps to have one half hour of horrible exercise so that the rest of the day feels nicer.
My husband goes upstairs to run on our elliptical while I’m working out. He finishes and showers while Patrick and I are cooling down, then I go up and shower in the still-warm tub while Brian makes lunch. I’m a very fast shower-er. Fridays I actually do my hair and shave. Otherwise I just rinse off, soap up, rinse off again, out in five minutes. Hey, I was on a football team, I now how to get out of the shower.
I keep my hair in the braid for this, and hold it out of the way so it doesn’t get VERY wet. I wrap it in a towel as I dry off and get dressed. It’s Tiara Tuesday. I try to dress fancy on Tuesdays. Today I have a red taffeta dress with white piping and a full skirt, paired with a Hello Kitty necklace and my red tiara. I stop in the bathroom to comb my bangs. The tiara hides a world of fizz.
Brian has made ramen with soft boiled eggs. He mail-orders his favorite brand of ramen, has for years. Kung Fu it’s called. It’s good. I like the egg best, though.
I can’t finish my bowl, but I almost do. The cat begs me to open the window next to me. I’m sitting on the window seat in our kitchen. Amber jumps up, poking her head out into the Spring, the sound of birds and trees. It amazes me, too, how alive the world is. We forget. But I just did five sets of sixteen curls and I am not holding this window open forever. I have to push Amber until she gets the point and I can close the window without closing it on her. She yowls indignantly.
Back to work. Another Zoom meeting. Confusion over how to do something. Imposter syndrome. Suddenly something else needs my attention, so I’m troubleshooting the rest of the afternoon and time slips away from me. I look up and it’s 5:15.
Fed Ex comes with a planter I bought to plant some cucumbers. It is in a delightfully enormous box. I wonder if the world’s cardboard supplies are running tight with all the online ordering everyone is doing. I wonder if the Fed Ex driver is angry with me for ordering such a big thing.
The planter is light and plastic, though. I put it on the porch. I have this probably-wrong idea that if the cucumbers are on the porch, the deer will be less likely to notice them. I fill the planter with a bag of dirt I’d already purchased. “Look, honey! I have a box of dirt now!” Brian is not impressed. He’s working on his video game.
I wash my hands and start the tuna casserole. I’ve been planning this casserole for a while. Brian cooks dinner most nights, and he deserves a night off. Casseroles are my specialty. I know how to turn leftovers into edible glop. The green onions are starting to go bad so I grab four of those, stripping off the slimy leaves. There’s some cream cheese that’s been forgotten so I add that, and a cup of ranch dressing from take out. We have fresh celery so I dice a stalk of that. There’s fresh cilantro, also going bad, so I put as much of that in as I can. I boil egg noodles, mix in some crumbled crackers we all hate, all that’s left of a block of gouda and half a block of colby-jack.
I reserve a mixture of cracker crumbs, gouda, and cilantro to dust the top. Bake for thirty minutes.
The sinks are full of dirty dishes so I load the dishwasher, which is another thing Brian usually does, and I have to ask him how to turn the darn thing on. I’m a terrible spouse when it comes to housework, though Brian praises me for doing more now that we’re both home all the time.
This all done, I sit down and do some slush reading for this magazine I volunteer for, until the oven beeps. Dust with crumb-mix, set it for ten more minutes, do a few DuoLingo Lessons. Second beep.
Our ritual is to stand at the bottom of the stairs and shout “GLOP!” when dinner is done. Then I sit down and do another DuoLingo lesson because it’ll be a slow five or ten minutes before the family gathers. I am not-too-secretly annoyed that people don’t come running. When I was a kid, the rule was “you snooze you lose” and a few nights without dinner taught me to come running!
The kid looks sulky. She probably doesn’t like that it’s tuna casserole. I set out four bowls and realize we don’t have a fifth clean. I started serving one. I leave it and search the cupboards for another good bowl. There are some large rice bowls we hardly ever use. I take one of those for me. It’s dusty so I rinse it. I should take the odd bowl. No one has touched the bowl I started dishing. There’s confusion and discussion whose bowl is whose, which bowl for my older sister? The kid eventually picks a bowl and fills it and takes it up to her mom. I sit down with my bowl and try not to shovel it all in my mouth, but as always happens, no matter how long I dawdle and wait, I’ve finished my food before everyone else sits down. I get up for seconds as the kid sits down, having delivered food to my older sister. I am trying not to always get seconds at dinner, but it feels rude to not stay and talk with everyone, and staying and talking with nothing to do with my hands is torture, so I get more food.
The casserole is good. I really like it. The kid pokes at hers like looking at it is torture.
I realize, wholly and completely, that I have no plans after this moment. All my day has been get to the workout, get through the work day, make the casserole. There is nothing left. “Can we watch TV tonight?” I ask the guys. “Can it be something fun like The Good Place or Steven Universe and not Altered Carbon?”
“Maybe?”
But we can’t watch Steven Universe or The Good Place without the kid, because she was watching those with us, and her mom doesn’t give her permission to watch TV with us often. She says nothing, and after she leaves, I say, “Jen looks so sad.” John replies, “Maybe because you’re talking about watching The Good Place without her.”
I’m so depressed. I go upstairs and sort my necklaces by length while Brian and John clean up. It doesn’t take as long as I had hoped, but it’s nice to have them more evenly sorted on their hooks. I have, perhaps, too many necklaces. I put one on.
I have a crochet project, but it requires laying it out flat on the floor to work on and I don’t want to. I have a sewing project, but I did a part wrong and have to un-do it and I don’t want to. I finished my painting project and don’t feel motivated to start another. I should write, but my “home” laptop doesn’t have a working keyboard anymore and I haven’t gotten the wireless keyboard out and charged it. I sit on the sofa where I sit all day “at work,” surfing social media.
Brian and John make popcorn and turn on the TV. We watch two episodes of “Glow.” It’s good. But then it’s 8pm and we still have nothing to do for the rest of the evening. So I write this out on the work laptop. I wanted to have some good things to say about today. Most days I’m doing well, cheerful. I’m getting things done. Crafts. But not today. Tomorrow, I might plant the cucumbers, if the weather looks stable. The three tiny plants are on my bedside table, almost too big for the coke bottle I have over them to keep the cat from eating them. Their tender tendrils give me hope, and fear. I must protect them. I am the only one charged with protecting them, and I am so terrible at everything.
by 
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