I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I know, I know. This is the universal condition that has plagued nearly all of humankind since March! No one is sleeping “well,” except that I had been, until this week!
Unless I am being harassed by a puppy, I generally don’t have sleep problems. I can easily achieve 7-8 hours each night when left to my own devices. Lately, though, I wake up between 1 and 2 am and then stay that way for two or three more hours. I’m just suddenly not tired. My brain, quite constructively, wants to use this time to solve the world’s problems or think through my own non-problems in excruciating detail.
For example: Last night I lay awake making a “plan” for today. But I don’t need one, because every other Thursday the following happens: I get up, get the dogs fed and out of the house to school, come home and do some work and shower and then leave again to get my nails done. And then the house cleaners come. And then I get home and finish working. And for some reason, my brain wanted to go over this very rote process as if it were D Day. Or a space shuttle launch. Or something.
I guess if I fake-worry about regular stuff I can’t be real-worrying about, LOL, literally everything else, so perhaps my brain is in the right here. I DOUBT IT, but I will consider the possibility.
My birthday weekend was very nice. We had Indian carryout and champagne and I was able to do a few hours of quilting, though not as many as I had planned because I was missing a tool I needed to trim and bind the quilt. WHOOPS. So I ordered the tool and then pieced together another quilt top.
Yesterday I had a two-hour work call that only required my listening ears, so I put my laptop on my dresser and turned up the speaker volume and ruthlessly weeded my closet. I really went in on it this time around. I got rid of things with tags still on them, and many nice-ish pieces of work clothing I bought for my short stint in corporate banking last year. I kept two pairs of black dress pants, for funerals. (I literally thought this, I will keep these pants for funerals, don’t say the pandemic hasn’t changed us!!)
I briefly entertained listing a few things on eBay but it is just not worth it to make $4 selling a LOFT blouse to someone else who also probably does not need it. Sorry USPS for the lost potential revenue but I would rather these things be donated or better yet just recycled. If I never see another LOFT cardigan again I will be very happy. I just don’t wanna buy this stuff anymore. This is not to say I don’t retain and enjoy certain Amazon caftans that are certainly made from, as my friend Melissa once said, “disappeared girls’ hair” but I shall strive not to buy any more. It’s all fair trade cotton lounge pants from here on out.
What even are jeans? What is “shapewear,” what are shirts with buttons? What are shoes, honestly, most of the time. I did buy a pair of “winter sneakers” that will presumably keep my feet a bit more dry than my busted old red Chuck Taylors when I trudge through the slushy parking lot at dog school this fall and winter.
Next month, we are going on “vacation” aka a cabin by a lake 4-ish hours away from here. We are going to do there what we do here – cook, get carryout, take walks, and watch movies – only without dogs and with some different scenery. Changing up our personal backdrop, even for four days, even wearing masks, seems somehow very important to making through the winter, which is looming ever larger on the horizon. I am a homebody type, and I like cold weather, but that’s easy to say sitting here with my windows open to a fall breeze. And, you know, there’s no guarantee what The World will look like. There never is, but it seems especially silly to rely on what passes for “normalcy” to endure from one day to the next.
In an ongoing effort to organize my space and reduce personal chaos, I recently bought new drinking glasses. Ours are a hodgepodge of brewpub freebies, parental hand-me-downs, remnants from cheap first-apartment purchases, and the like. It’s not that I don’t have affection for some of them but they do sort of drive me crazy, and this feeling is precisely the reason I donated our old dishes and infinity sets of mismatched sheets and towels in recent months.
The glasses are still sitting in the shipping box in the foyer. Thinking of unpacking them makes me tired. One of the things I will not miss about Pandemic Times is the sheer amount of unboxing and unpacking and then breaking down and recycling of boxes and bags and bubble wrap. Yes, I ordered many things online in Before Times, but not like this. I am just tired of it and it is a poor stand-in for being out in the world, looking at things, buying them or not, and being around people.