Day 19: Tuesday 3/31/20

I think I posted yesterday about pressures to do an unrealistic amount of things during this “Quarantine”. I may be repeating myself, but I read about “Productivity Porn” in an article from the Chronicle someone texted me:

Productivity Pressure

It was great to read this. As I described, I,like many others are reeling from and constantly inundated with overwhelming amounts of things to do: work to start with, then for enjoyment like live parties or webinars, Instagram events and participation things, free Ivy League classes, creative groups doing something I’m missing and will be more isolated due to them, plus the things to be doing creatively, like make new work and put it out there, look for online galleries or start one, . Then there are my own productivity pressures like, write your book proposal for altered books including this altered book you’re doing during Covid, start a YouTube channel for something, get back to the Art Box book and stop writing random diary items, take a self study wordpress class on fixing your website, fix your art website, check social media more, do your Pinterest, exercise, clean parts of the house every day, cook new things, eat healthily and go to bed earlier, daily yoga… and remember breakfast and lunch. It’s reaking havoc on my ADHD.

The list goes on forever. Then there are lists of things I need to do that I don’t even have time to do. I mean the regular stuff like food shopping, cleaning, etc. Plus I did get the email of a person to contact from this group I’m in called COVID Cares 2020. They posted an email of a medical worker so I volunteered and  I contacted them and haven’t heard back. I have heard from the referral source and havent had time to contact her. I assume all these volunteer support groups/therapy/checking for the most part will not be receiving a lot of frontline workers wanting support because they’re too busy and if they have time in between shifts they’re resting or doing family stuff or their own tasks.

Covid 19 Mental Health volunteering. I signed up to something else to volunteer free therapy for the front lines people. My prediction based on my knowledge elf trauma and PTSD is that I will not hear from anyone in need for a long time until things slow down a significant amount. This is the pattern. You offer help but someone in the middle of trying to fight a fire with a burning fire extinguisher does not have time or need therapy right now. They need sleep and food. What usually happens is the “after period” when things slow down and people are “back to usual”. Then it’s like people coming home from battle, which it actually is. This crucial time  is when there are PTSD symptoms showing up because people’s brains are wired to get into gear when there’s a lion about to attack and slow down when they’re safe and the lion is long gone. It happened with 9/11 and all the wartime caused by it. People started having time for PTSD groups and therapy when they had done all the emergency work and came back from battle to families, friends, etc. and symptoms set in.

That’s when you see people have flashbacks, hyper vigilance, depression and loneliness from now having to re enter life as usual, feeling nobody understands what you went through, etc. Saw it with 9/11 front line people feeling isolated even when with family members, not unlike the beginning of that Homeland show when the guy comes back and can’t re enter his family. That period is probably when the spike in suicides happen, so we as mental health workers, should be braced for that and wait out our volunteering for those momentss that will be quite dangerous and when there will be a big need for support groups, therapy, spiritual counseling etc.

The other people who will be vulnerable will be survivors, the ones who survived the Covid and lost people to it, whether they had the virus or died. I heard of a family where the grandmother and mother are likely to die and the other people starting to get sick. It will resemble wars where a person watches their family members die and is left with survivor’s guilt. I’m sure there will be other unforseen mental health/PTSD issues including a spike in addiction like behaviors and other unhealthy ways of coping people reach for when exhuasted and overwhelmed emotionally. We see it now with people sitting at home. Imagine you’re a medical professional who survived all this and how much more the idea of drinking, overeating, etc. is appealing and sometimes the only coping skill ones has.

 

 

Day 18: 13 Minutes Stay Home, Stay Home, Stay Home

Just finished watching this week’s John Oliver show, very sober in the sense of the word that means taking what needs to be taken seriously very seriously, and ending with a painting of rats in a compromising position from a 1992 auction in Pennsylvania somewhere in the dark caves of Netflix…

When I discussed doing a ‘Covid 19″ Crazy thing, I definitely meant in your house because you should be there if you’re not doing something on the front lines. Like cutting your hair weird because you are not going out to get a haircut and the only way you’ll get a good one is if you are a haircutter or live with one.

I did cut my bangs last night, very quickly with a pair of scissors lying around. I don’t have haircutting scissors even though I am obsessed with scissors and there is a pair I desperately want sold in the MoMA design store (online of course).

I had a good day today because I had work to do and felt good about being distracted by work with clients. The weird thing is that while doing remote sessions with clients, I am of course sometimes talking only about Covid19 and its effect on their lives or briefly checking in on their situation with it, BUT, it’s not the same as hearing the news or reading it and does not bother me because I like hearing how my clients as individuals are managing it and what their points of view are as well as helping them mange dealing with stressors around it if that’s where they’r at.

.Some people could tell of course that I am not in my spacious art studio office but a very cozy little tiny makeshift office. I even dodged being asked if I was home by saying I was in a spaceship. Of course my clients know I’m not at work, but who’s to say that I’m definitevely at home. I still like that boundary of the potential for the fantasy that your therapist exists only in either my spacious cave on Franklin Street or in a space capsule, as both have no windows. I once had a client who said she imagined me sleeping in the paintings stacks and always being in my studio.

I don’t know if I’ve written about it, but way before today, after an initial few days of manic energy posting on list serves about remote therapy, as I have been doing it for years, and posting about online therapist classes, etc. and very hyper quickly starting a Facebook group of Covid response art and an starting my Covid I Ching Altered book, I am now in the second stage of my own stuff with this, being overwhelmed by the news and everything else. This includes all the emails and feeling bad that I can’t make masks. I signed up to voluteer/give free therapy to Covid workers who of course have no time for therapy, I am at a point where I am not demanding much of myself (I considered finishing my book proposal about altered books and working on some other big works as well as trying to arrange art face time hangouts with my friends…) That went out the window.

My new, low bar for self-esteem: I am just showing up at my office, working with my already enough batch of clients, trying to keep up with paperwork and doing this writing daily as well as yoga, remembering to eat, and also sharing the family cooking. Not yet caught up on my comic strip.

That’s it. The rest is just stay home. When outside only every few days, wearing mask and gloves and stay away from people. It’s called Physical Distancing, not Social Distancing.

My days feel even fuller than before. My last big challenge is going to bed at some fucking decent time as I’ve gone into the 1am zone and I should be in bed now at 10:45. That’s it. I’m just a little person trying to do the right thing, happy to have my clients and family and friends and grateful to be healthy and alive another day.

Stay home stay home stay home.

I can edit this tomorrow. I just edited it at 11:39 am. Time to go put together a cool work outfit with makeup and jewelry as my own self-care.

 

Day 17: 13 Minutes: What’s Your Covid “Crazy”?

Warning: Narcissism, Vanity and Frivolity- no Disrespect to the Bad Covid Crisis sweeping the nation and world

Living in NYC, seemingly the epicenter, the worst area in the entire planet to be with Covid 19, doing worse than Italy or maybe even Wuhan, is a weird feeling, especially as I’m “quarantined”ish in the same apartment I was living in when 9/11 happened, down the street from the trade crenter. See yesterday’s post for photos from the 9/11 Memorial Area. I mention this to say this is especially surreal as the majority of people livng in my neighborhood were not here during 9/11…

So according to the Primary Source info I mentioned last post, I am a primary source from 9/11 now writing as a primary source for Covid 19 downtown World Trade Center NYC.

FYI New Yorkers, be careful out there. I think Whole Foods got the memo; they have long lines because they’re only letting few people in at a time and have a 7-8am senior hour. At first I thought, what about seniors that don’t wake up so early? and then realized, they get to come to the store when it’s cleanest and least dangerous at the beginning of the day, so very wise idea.

Anyway I just got back from the nearby Target as the Whole Foods line was too long. Be careful in Target. The employees aren’t wearing gloves or masks and the same goes for most of customers. We now leave our house with masks and latex gloves on; upon returning, we leave everything in bags except for perishables and wait a day or two to take stuff out.

The masks totally fog up my glasses, so I’m lucky to not be on the front lines not being able to see. I guess those folks have better masks; I hope so. I have a 6-month long runny nose,. so that plays into it too. My nose runs inside the mask and I can’t use a kleenex. Not a big deal; I’m grateful to go outside at all, but after we saw Whole Foods was too long a wait and thought about walking to the river, we decided to go to home, stopping at Target on the way home. That in itself is depressing, to finally get outside but be too demoralized to go on a longer pleasant walk to the river and grassy knoll.

Are we just lazy and unable to walk far due to confinement and lack of exercise? Maybe. I thought that until I realized the real reason is that the masks are so uncomfortable they make the concept of a nice walk to the river unpleasant, plus you have to look out for other humans to stay six feet away from. I guess the trick is to go later in the day but not too late as to get mugged/attacked because it will be deserted. I also live close to the area near PS 89 where that terorist guy ran his truck into people on Halloween a few years ago.

That was just an intro about going outside today with a list of food to get and adjusting with a detour to Target.

Here’s the topic I was going to write about: my Friday escapades and forays into the territory of what I call, “Do crazy things because it’s Covid 19 so anything that is safe – go for it!” Full confession: I love hearing about modelling and I do love fashion and probably as a young kid was jealous of people who were so perfect to be models. Part of this was being best friends with a kid so gorgeous people stopped in the street to stare at her. She did one or two modelling gigs probably age 5 or less and then stopped because she didn’t like it. At the time I probably would have liked it as I was a little exhibitionist/attention seeker. Around age 7 I would leave the kitchen then listen near the door to see if people were talking about me.

Fast forward around 45 years later. Last week an open casting call from Dollskill shows up on my phone: “Dolls Kill: Wanna Be Our Next Model?!? #BEADOLL ONLINE CASTING CALL startz Now!! Bring Ur Phone & Ur best Angle 😉 Peep Deetz Here>> http://www.dollskill.com/beadoll”

I shop a lot at Dollskill because I like the clothing on their site that I would call “PG13”, as there are plenty of items for young people into showing flesh and/or S and M types of lingerie, so something for everyone, from long baggy t shirts to g strings.

I debated whether to try the casting thing mostly to have fun picking out an outfit and taking photos. There were some sample photos people had already uploaded and they ran the gamit. I took it very literally and put on pants I just got from their website and earrings by them as well as my skull/key necklace from them. I think a lot of people were focused on the photos and not the clothes. I had a week to change my mind and almost decided to not bother but got some encouragement, “How can you win if you don’t try?” meaning, just do it and don’t chicken out. The goal was obviously not to win. I’ve been in art contests and never won first prize and that’s my career/talent/wheelhouse.

With Covid 19 and being in the house all the time, putting together an outfit with jewelry makeup and shoes (ah Shoes: We shoe people have been hit hard by being homebound. How can you wear your cool boots/platform converses if you’re not going outside? I wore my pink vegan Doc Martens as they sell a lot of Doc Martens on their site. Then we took photos in the hallway right outside my front door. This loft building means each apartment occupies one floor and there’s not much to touch or worry about and we constantly clean all doorknobs.

Anyway I did the “photoshoot” and picked some photos to post on Instagram iwth the hashtags and all. I got a lot of likes and it turned out to be my most popular recent Instagram post which just proves that people are bored and like weird photos over the usual posts of artwork. Anyway, it was fun and I posted it on my Weekend Self-Care Thread in my DBT class and got nice reactions. One person said the photo of me on the floor made her feel grounded, probably the weirdest reaction so far.

Of course I will post the photos here. I refrained from posting them to my personal Facebook as I am always paranoid about cousins thinking I’m always posting self involved narcisistic things. No evidence to this except overhearing conversatiosn at a funeral. I have an aunt and some lovely cousins who see my posts and like them, so why the paranoia about the other people?

So this is my first, “Covid 19 Made me Do this” do this at home activity… What’s yours? I hope I come up with some more in the coming weeks.

Day 16: My Walk Outside

Going outside:

Everyone knows it’s dangerous to go outside or do just about anything outside in NY State, but even more so in NYC, where I am, a few blocks from Ground Zero.

My goal for self-care for the weekend was to go outside. Living with a higher-level person or whatever language they used that I forgot, who has a pulmonologist, that really says everything. The other day we found out the pulmonologist had never seen anything like this and was scared (for good reason; all of his patients are at risk.)

I put on latex gloves and a mask used by people who sand and make stuff

So toady I had 2 packages to return to two different online stores. There is a UPS store down the street and they’re open. I dropped off one return there. (Side note: when I got the packages of clothes I hadn’t yet heard Faucci say, don’t worry about your packages. He was referring to the usual boxes like Amazon, not plastic ones. I was confused as to how to open them, whether to wear gloves, etc. and put the bags in the garbage. Luckily once I figured out there were clothing items that need to be returned, I got the bags out of the garbage which hardly had anything in them, waited two days and wiped them with Clorox wipes.

These mundane things are now part of daily life,. My 12 year old pointed out that we are now primary sources, so all my writing, art and comic strip are primary sources from the Covid 19 period of global history, like in the Handmaid’s tale book, it turns out it was a cassette tape from that time. Anyway, I needed to pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy and go to the post office. At the post office I noticed the person weighing the stuff and dealing with the price was not wearing gloves but the guy moving packages around was wearing blue gloves.

Then, already being outside, I decided to take a walked down the street to the twin tower pools/9/11 memorial. Of course there was a chain thing around it barring anyone from going close to the pools. Usually people walk around reading names, searching for names and looking into the falling water. It was raining a little. Then I walked to the closed fountain near the freedom tower which has a 9/11 Dedication.

 

I guess this is my weekend post for today and tomorrow, to be continued. Photos to be posted soon.

Day 15: 13 Minutes

I always have topics to write about, then I forget them or write them somewhere and forget them.

I know one topic was about video sessions, an aspect I tend to forget about that a colleague mentioned, looking at yourself on the screen while the client is doing a video session with you.

No matter which platform you use, Zoom, VSee, FaceTime, WhatsApp, etc., you always see yourself as well as the other person. It happens with hangouts with friends too.

To some degree, you need to see yourself to make sure about the lighting and how much of you is in the screen, what does the other person see? What background are they seeing and is it distracting. Today I found out from a client that they can pick a background from their own photos.

Over this past two weeks of doing video sessions especially at home, I’ve noticed the lighting is very important, especially when it got dark and I was in my bedroom. The back lighting made my face even darker. It got better when I put up a backdrop with a red sheet and faced the other way. In making my home office, I had to put on Facetime to see how well it would work with video sessions for the height of my “desk” which is a steel shelf with full shelves on top as I don’t have a shelf the exact right size for it.

Anyway once you start your video session, you have a small box on the screen with you in it as well as the bigger box that is your client. Today I thought about how there are three people in the session, me, my client, and my video reflection caught by my computer camera. It’s like when you look in the mirror too long and start wondering who is on the other side? It can seem like it’s someone else. I saw a Twilight Zone where the guys mirror refleciton started talking to him and telling him what an asshole he was and how he’d wasted his life doing what other people told him to do.

I’m sure Rod Serling would enjoy making new Twilight Zone episodes right now. One could just involve something about a video session between a therapist and a client and some weird thing happening, maybe similar to the mirror one, where the therapist on the screen gets up and leaves and comes back and does weird things, and the client only sees that one and then you’re in the Twilight Zone.

So if that kind of thing happened, would the client be interacting with me or with the me they see on the screen as they only see one therapist; it would make sense that the one I see on the screen being the same as the one my client sees, I in the real physical world don’t really exist during the session. And with the camera on me and my office everythign is backwards.

Of course there is the added obvious Twilight Zone that we are all in this Covid 19 Twilight Zone that Serling already foresaw, maybe not a virus but other similar metaphorical “pandemics”.

13 minutes up. To be continued…

More photos of my office next week when it’s more organized…

Day 14: 13 Minutes, My New Home Office

It isn’t very easy to conduct a Supervision group with 4 people on a video platform from my bed. I put a tarp down and found a big plastic cover to put my altered book in in case I used inks and didn’t want to get them on the sheets. I had been doing my phone and video sessions at home from my bed. The other day I figured out better lighting and a simple backdrop with a red sheet.

As of yesterday night, I now have a cosy little office in what used to be a large-ish closet. It’s amazing how creative you can get when faced with many limitations. The idea was to have my office away from living areas of the home and this closet is private and sound proof plus it’s near the bathroom. It was more work than you’d think, setting up a surface for my computer, getting all my random art supplies I keep at home and organizing them.

I don’t have a little home studio as I have my own gigantic two room office art studio on Franklin Street. So I gathered supplies from various areas; real awareness of how easy it is to be disorganzied and put things all over the place. As of now, the only collateral damage was the loss of a favorite fountain pen, which is probably somewhere in the apartment. Obviously there is no window here, but I had no window in my real office so I’m used to that. I have excellent lighting from these great sunlight light bulbs.

Today was my trial run with it and it went very well. I will post photos of the office on here.

Speaking of getting organized, I have noticed my own change in sleep and meal times, and have heard similar accounts from some clients who like me are used to more structure and waking up early, going to bed early.

Last week I stayed up late (which for me is anything after 11pm) almost every night. One night I stayed up until 1am. I don’t eat much breakfast these days and have lunch later in the day around 2 or 3 unless I have a snack at 12. Today I had clients back to back and ate something in between. It’s now 8:49 and I haven’t made dinner for my 12 year old, but she had “Linner” a few hours ago.

I also watch more TV and was watching more movies last week. I have heard of so many different movies and shows from clients that I want to see, such as “Mickey and Nicky” and “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie”, revisiting my fascination with Cassavetes directing, which I haven’t checked out in years. There are a few shows and documentaries.

It’s all overwhelming. I have noticed that two days in a row I haven’t been on Facebook or Instagram due to being so busy. I haven’t watched the news either, as I hear it from family which is a better way to get it. Usually if I see some morning news or catch a bit of a press conference, I’ve forgotten it by the end of the day.

Days and weeks are longer; at the same time there is no time to do all the stuff I want to do. I got in this writing and won’t even edit it. Time to make my new great avocado toast.

Day 13: Wednesday 3/25/20

FYI some of these posts are going to be/seem frivolous during this serious period. The intent is to share my mundane experiences and model the coping skill of daily writing and taking time outs from seriousness as well as sometimes writing but about mental health/cognitive challenges (ADHD) with Covid 19.

So here’s ADHD part 2. I’m going to give myself points for actually following through with part 2!

I last went to my office Monday to do all remote sessions. The super Kendroid was the only other person in the building. I talked to him before leaving but we were both wearing masks so it was hard to communicate. I hope management lets him stay home. He has 2 young children.

Walking home around 8pm that night was scary and surreal. It had rained and the wet streets were empty; I’m down in Ground Zero territory usually filled with people. I left my studio knowing I might not be back for months. I didn’t take enough art supplies and had no system for what art supplies to bring home, due to ADHD not being able to plan ahead or prepare.

Just a side topic but I love dollskill clothing, They texted that they’re looking for models. Despite being 52 and awkward and not especially photogenic, I was excited to try to get an “audition” because it’s Covid time so why not try to model?

I also forgot to set a timer for 13 minutes.

I said in yesterday’s post I would talk about ADHD “magic powers”; I think “neurodiversity” is a real thing. There a book about it I gave them read. Every mental “disorder” has its side benefit, like, here are your perks. For example, people with eating disorders- here’s a great article about using symptoms positively in recovery: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/blog/eating-disorder-traits-strengths-recovery

What are strengths of ADHD people? Creativity is up there. My inability to follow sequences and quick boredom with things works well with art making and always having sometime to make with whatever materials are at hand. That comes in handy now. Energetic, spontaneous, inventive, hyper focused and ability to jump into the middle of something. I join people in the middle of a show’s season or movie, watch it with them and catch up later or forget to catch up.

I’ve always had a lot of energy and been over enthusiastic with new ideas. Then I get overwhelmed and crash. It’s happened with Covid 19; I started an art therapy Facebook group and got all these other ideas and now I’m overwhelmed. Especially with trying out social stuff. When should I plan a special art hangout w friends and happy hours (sober and drinkers)? When try to have meals with family members in other homes?

13 minutes are over. I have to make ADHD morning coffee which means remembering to make it whether it’s right after waking up or 2 hours later..,

Day 12: Tuesday 3/24/20: 13 minutes

Personal Information Warning

Covid 19 and my ADHD: everyone with ADHD has different issues and strengths. I can’t put anything back in the same place most of the time. Other people know where everything is. I mix up Tuesday and Thursday all the time in my weekly medications box and stubbornly haven’t bothered to make the boxes look different.

A client was telling me how they have a list of leaving the house and coming back, which I’d call a “Covid 19 Ritual”, involving having one set of outside clothing and other great cautionary measures. Always doing the same things in the same order with the hand washing.

I have no ability to do that. Quite often I don’t even put my shoes in the same place. My safest bet now that I’ve left my office is to avoid going outside as much as possible.

I’m not able to use the same song or counting method for washing hands 20 seconds. My favorite was from the beginning of Hamilton, but I’m not an 8 year old who knows all the words to every song. Plus, one of my ADHD issues is not being able to memorize anything, which was why I gave up acting after college.

I have wondered whether the official guideline for washing hands is 10 seconds but we’re told 20 seconds as a lot of us will only be able to do around 10 seconds. I do all amount of time and try to at least count some numbers. I don’t have any organization around washing hands less often being confined at home. I also don’t understand when to use hand sanitizer instead of washing, and the jury is still out about the liquid soap versus old school bar soap. The good news is that nobody bought up all the bar soap probably because most Covid 19 early hoarders don’t think of bar soap for hands? Maybe they only use body wash in the shower anyway?

In arranging my stuff for a home office, I’ve used one box for several kinds of items and still don’t have it figured out. The rest of my things aren’t organized either and I keep changing where I put things. Right now I’m using me bed to do sessions from so I give myself a pass for that.

I do have some magic “stuck at home” ADHD abilities, which I will discuss on Wednesday as I’m over my 13 minutes.

Day 11: Monday Morning, 2/23/20

1. pediculophobia: fear of lice
2. arctophily: study of teddy bears
3. ventralof: like or pertaining to the underside or the belly
4. sudoriferous inducing or secreting sweat
5. derrick hoisting mechanism using a boom and a central post
6. twaddle rubbish; nonsense
7. regnal: of a reign

I woke up much earlier than usual, around 6:15. Today I want to break out of the habit of writing about Covid19, whether positive or negative. Part of me wanted to continue the weird dystopian narrative I started yesterday. I still may do it.

Today I’m going to use some of the words, the list generator gave me.

I don’t have pediculophobia. Lice are on my top list of fears; the first three are lice, bedbugs and getting audited by the IRS. Because “Stranger than Fiction” is one of my favorite movies, where I get to see what happens if you do get audited, I’m a little less afraid. The other side of fear is curiosity. I have no curiosity about lice or bedbugs, but getting audited is something I wonder about. Will I be assigned one person like in Stranger that Fiction? How will I deal with trying to show them my disorganized paperwork? Will the person find my paintings interesting? Will this be a Kafka-like person totally bored with being an auditor? Knowing I’m a therapist, will this person start spilling the beans about their life? It must be the only situation besides parties where I would welcome a stranger treating me like I’m their therapist.

I also have Tripophobia, which is the fear of many holes put together. I can’t look up info about it because there are always photos, which creep me out and bring up my tropophobia. There’s an aspect to this phobia where just thinking of it brings up horrible images you’ve seen and that starts up your tripophobia. I found out about it from my kid who told me she had it. When you look it up, they have a photo of a foot filled with holes that haunts me. It varies from person to person in terms of what images trigger more fear than others. It can also be a pattern of lots of uniform circles next to each other, which I used to like doing in drawings and try to steer away from now. A weirder version of it involved seeing a face filled with googly eyes. The person moves their face and they jiggle. That photo is also disgusting. Thinking of it makes me feel sick. I used to wonder why I got so grossed out by clients putting a lot of pompoms in their art work gluing them next to each other.

I also have a rodent phobia, musophobia, mostly of rats and mice. The mice are not so bad, as I’ve had experience with them. I do like the movie Ratatouille, but the scene with the myriads of rats running around in the restaurant I have to close my eyes when it comes. Rats come out of nowhere near my street because of the digging and Con Ed. The other day one big one ran towards me. I screamed while being on the phone with someone.

I do have a fear that my writing is “twaddle”. The more I write in here, the more I feel that my writing is mundane and I’m not really employing things like synecdoche, another great word. Graphophobia and Scriptophobia are related. Scriptophobia, is a fear of writing in public involves agoraphobia, which is a huge category of phobias. Graphophobia can be fear of writing or handwriting. I can’t find any description of what fear of handwriting involves but it probably isn’t the fear of looking at other people’s writing. Scriptomania involves writing so much that it takes over and you are compelled to write all the time. I don’t have either; just a fear that my writing is worsening.

By coincidence, upon waking, I saw my ladybug Beenie Boo, a little stuffed animal, and decided to take her to the couch with me. I have not heard of nor engaged in arctophily but I am very curious about whether there really are people who are arctophiles. I found a review of a Teddy Bear company investigation written by a retired homicide detective. It seems like the word pertains to teddy bear collectors more than people who scientifically study something about Teddy Bears. There was some article pertaining to a hoarder who has a lot of teddy bears. I do love stuffed animals but am quite anti teddy bear when it comes to my own stuffed animals. I seem to have all animals but teddy bears.

I just found out I have plushophilia, the love of stuffed animals. I do not have any sexual attraction to stuffed animals, which was in the next sentence of the paragraph I found on Google. I may have written before about my first and most beloved stuffed animal, little red squirrel I had from a young age. It is among my regretted items that I let the 9/11 cleaning service confiscate for possibly having the dust you’re not supposed to have. I also should not have let them take away a very loved Snoopy that was grey from age and had black ink on it from when I brought it to drawing class at Harvard. The teacher asked us to bring in an object that had a lot of meaning for us.

I heard that every conversation eventually gets to the mention of Hitler. For me it feels like every time I write, it gets to 9/11.

That was 22 minutes of writing; being confined increases the time I write and how often. Later today I will do a prompt with my 12 year old. This doesn’t count editing which I have started implementing more, at the very least to deal with spelling.

 

Day 10: Sunday Evening 2/22/20

Warning- I broke my “Positivity only rule” with this piece of writing but it was super fun to do, this a positive thing for Coronavirus Time!

This post was ambling about movies I like so I’m erasing it for the prompt game: Remember this is fiction writing! I haven’t done fiction in years. I’m redoing this post as another writing prompt I’m doing with my writing buddy.

We picked a line from a Conan Gray. My 12 year old wants me to say she’s obsessed with his music. His album dropped the other day.

After I was done I realized it needed editing but here’s what I have so far. There seems to be a theme with food shopping in both of my fiction pieces…

The line:

We are the worthless cursed with too much time. We get into trouble and lose our minds.

This is a letter I’m putting in a bottle. I live near the Hudson River so I could toss it in. I don’t know how to put it somewhere where someone can read it 100 years from now like The Handmaid’s Tale, which gets found by future people, except I think it’s a recording.

Anyway hi from 2020. I’m 27 years old. I am indeed worthless cursed with too much time. It’s August 5, and I haven’t been outside my Brooklyn apartment since March 20. I remember that day. I put on a mask and waited at the Whole Foods line to get food. I can see the whole layout of the store; I have my list that I wrote in notes- the last food I bought at a store in person.

Am I losing my mind? Am I worthless? Do I have too much time? The internet has been out since July 17. It “broke” but Russia was involved, Im sure of it. I haven’t watched TV meaning Netflix. I think they’ve figured out how to spy on us in our homes when we sign in and watch their shows. They’ve made new ones with the Covid 19 and Covid 20 in them.

I watched one of them last 2 weeks ago. The internet breaks every few days.

I haven’t talked to anyone since June 21. I took some of my sheets. I put them over the windows. I got rid of my microwave a long time ago. The waves emitted have always given me migraines. Before all this I avoided the 9/11 memorial down the street. I can hear the dead; it started when I was 5. My grandpa died and he followed me around and talked to me until I was 8. That movie about the bus crashing and the dead people hanging out with the Robert Downey Junior character that’s real. Except Grandpa didn’t need me to help him with unfinished business. He came back in April. I got him to leave as I had my sister’s friend that ODd in 2015, my mom’s best friend who died of cancer right before the Covid 19 hit.

It sounds morbid but since being home bound and living alone, it’s lonely and these two people were each pretty great.