waiting for the end of the world

I'm actually trying to postpone the end of the world as long as possible, rather than tapping my foot waiting for everything to explode into a thermonuclear fireball, because I don't feel like I'm anywhere near the end of my own personal possibility.

With all these weeks in quarantine and unemployed, I hoped I would have learned a new skill online or made a lot of art or at least organized my office. I did make my office a bit more compact and the pile of paperwork on my desk is now mostly gone and put away where it belongs. I am completely uninspired to work on art to the point that I don't see any stupid object around that I want to dryly sketch or have any idea I can think of a way to clearly illustrate. I really don't feel free to create anything here because my office is the only place I can do anything personal and it feels like an empty cell. Working outside of the house was my only, sad, escape from this place. The person I live with does not even eat the same type of food that I do most of the time.

I don't know why I haven't decided what online courses I can try yet. I look at so many and they seem to be an attempt, for me, to work for someone else who is never going to hire anyone over 45 or 50 and it'll just be another skill I never use and is just left to atrophy in my brain. But learning something would be a constructive activity, hopefully as satisfying as playing online games with this old iMac.

Just before going into isolation, I lost my job when the company I worked at decided to let everyone go at once. I haven't been able to successfully file for unemployment and there is no way to get through to the State online or by phone.

So here I wait, in my office, looking into what my friends in other places are doing via social media on my phone or computer.

My computer has decided to stop allowing me to do any keyboard shortcuts like COPY and PASTE now. All commands now only work if I go up to the menu bar to activate them, so there is something wrong with my keyboard settings and I am trying everything I can find online to figure out what went wrong but I have not had any luck fixing the problem yet. The only thing I haven't tried is reloading my entire OS from an old HD backup because that causes problems of its own with lost data and fishing around to replace individual components at times. I don't know what wrecked my keyboard settings other than having my Wacom tablet in use but I haven't found any useful information on resetting from there.


I'm being more negative than I intended. Sorry.


Some things more positive -

We have been doing more yard work. The four planter boxes we have are now planted with seed again. The hill and back yard have been covered with fresh mulch. The front yard is mowed. The three pallets of leftover soft flat stone from the retaining wall that was taken down a couple of years ago are finally gone and that part of the back yard is mulched too. MonsterMustDie finally gave the stones to our next door neighbor's stepfather and the pallets were chopped up and put into the trash bin that should be emptied this morning.

We decided to spend more money to get the CBS channel on TV just to watch Picard and we've been binging that series for the last two nights and it has not disappointed. It's a great series, so far.

I should at least be walking more when the weather is nice like it should be today. I plan to have a nice walk or two today. 

perspective

Here's the thing:
TV shows and old movies are not and never were reality. That's not to say they are unimportant. They have merit because, in portraying the world not as it is but how it could be or could be, they give us something to strive for or to avoid. No one I knew had a family like Leave It To Beaver or The Cosby Show but those families are wonderful ideals that everyone can see as a personal goal. As children, we grew up with these ideal taught to us. The problem is too many people think the past was actually like that. The 50's were not at all like Happy Days. There was segregation, no birth control, very few legal rights for women, McCarthyism and blacklists. There was massive poisoning of the environment with DDT and lead added to gasoline (not because it was the best solution but because the process was patented and there was more money to be made off that) and the list goes on but that's not anything you'll ever know about unless you actually make the effort to research the archives of that time. We grow up and see things from an adult perspective and think the world is worse now because we only have a child's perspective of the past. Daddy never told us everything he did during his military service.

We should be more imaginative and forward-thinking. We should not be mourning a world or people that never existed. We should be evolving into something better rather than wishing we could regress into myth.