The past couple of days I have ventured to the alley with my little cart of trash and to pick up the last of my arriving provisions from the building lobby (an Amazon Pantry order that took a couple weeks for everything to get here.) Yesterday, the sun was bright and it felt more like spring than it has yet this year, a feeling that apparently had enough Chicagoans hitting the lakefront beaches and paths and behaving foolishly that the mayor shut them down this afternoon completely. This is why we can't have nice things.
So each day I've been collecting my boxes and then unpacking everything near the door, breaking down boxes for the next trash run , wiping things down with a soapy paper towel and then washing my hands again before getting on with life. I'm trying to be practical, but not all silkwood about it. I'd rather save the bleach I have for cleaning if it's harder to come by for a minute.
Inside, I am adjusting to it almost too well, talking to the people I talk to regularly via other means. Keeping my hands busy with various library projects and press work. This morning, I even added a tiny segment to the fiction-ish project, which I am counting as a win for writing again finally. It's a start anyway. And if I have the focus, there is always working a bit on the manuscripts that might be a good use of this time.
I tend to avoid people and crowds and people-oriented things most of the time, but I'm finding the thing I miss most is getting dressed in clothes other than stuff I normally wear around the house. Right about now would be when I switch out winter for spring dresses, winter coats for jackets, but it hardly seems worth the time. I am hardly one for primping, but realized my tendency to tie up my hair when it's wet out of the shower led to a rats nest so tenacious I had to cut it out. I could get dressed & ready, but their doesn't seem much of a point if the furthest I am going is downstairs. I flipped through ebay and poshmark and bookmarked some dresses, but a loathe to spend money frivolously in times of such uncertainty. In anything resembling normal life, I'd be looking to start buying sundresses right about now.
One thing I am doing more than usual is cooking meals. (and the dishes I find myself doing endlessly attest to it.) The first week was a little dicey in the stress binge arena, and all it did was make me feel more sluggish and out of control, but this week is a little less prone. I think the seclusion is actually welcome from my brain, and the time to tend to things that get lost in the shuffle or normal life, but I need a certain amount of stability in terms of the future and what's going on outside my door to be less anxious and hopeful on the whole.
