Day 8(?) of Official Quarantine

I fell out with a bluetooth speaker today because I couldn’t get it to connect to my laptop. I think quarantine is starting to take its toll on me. 

Shortly after this, my dad and I were sat at the dining room table both doing some work and I unplugged my earphones briefly to play him a song I knew that he liked which had come up on my playlist. He responded with ‘this is why you’ll never get a job’. And here I was thinking that I was living my best, most productive life during this isolation period. Not, as it would seem, to some people. I’ve endeavoured to make a spotify playlist for us all with options from each member of the family for an eclectic selection of tunes to get us through these trying times. It’s easy to guess who’s added what to the playlist. Most prominently my brother’s songs just induce a state of rising tension and if it’s at all indicative of his mental state, I’m beginning to think maybe we all need to start taking it a bit easier on him.  

It’s interesting, almost like a sort of anti-social social experiment to see how different families fare when they are enclosed together in their homes for a long period of time. All of us being quite work driven and studious, we’ve thus far passed the ,majority of the days sat at various work surfaces around the house, chipping away at our to-do lists. Whether the tasks we’ve been surmounting have been self-invented or otherwise seems, at this point, irrelevant. It has meant that as a result, the little time we do spend with each other has been in the form of eating dinner together, watching something semi-engaging on Netflix or, when times get really desperate, playing some sort of game. As of yet, none of us have succumbed to my brother’s persistent requests of Monopoly, but I fear that it is an impending fate that awaits us all. 

I actually had contact with people exterior to my household yesterday, on a video call with a couple of my mates. One of the great things my dad and I have discovered about a government imposed lockdown, is that we no longer have to make excuses to avoid social occasions. I don’t think you can technically kindly decline an invitation when you’re governmentally restricted from leaving your home. My mates have been playing more family games together than we have, as well as watching series and drawing. I feel that to an extent, fundamentally, the model across various households doesn’t altogether differ too drastically. However, the capacity at which people can bear each other is unsurprisingly limited. Insensitively yet hilariously, in China the divorce rates have risen dramatically, with upwards of 300 couples having applied for separation in the last three weeks. I hate to say ‘I told you so’ in a cynical, pessimistic fashion, but I was against marriage from the start. For the couples who have chosen to self-isolate together, whilst I commend you, I certainly do not envy your situation. 

Furthermore, I suppose its not technically true to say that we’ve had no contact with anyone but each other. For example, every morning we’re woken by the builders next door who’s tinny radio remarkably drifts through the closed windows. Thank goodness they’re there to make sure that we maintain a regular routine, otherwise surely we’d all fall to slothfulness. As well as this, the house is kindly watched by our next door neighbour who seems to spend hours smoking in his car, occasionally moving it two metres forwards or backwards. A little off-putting but he does wave every time we come out the house, which is a great deal more neighbourly interaction than I’ve had from the neighbours on the other side. That being said, at this point I almost miss being repeatedly ignored by our male muslim neighbour because I’m a woman, if nothing else at least we knew where we stood with each other. Hopefully we’ll be able to resume usual service before too long. 

I do wonder what my cat thinks of us all being home all the time; no doubt we’re just disrupting her usual daily routine of sleeping in alternating sunny spots around the house. As someone who already understood the attractiveness of solitude prior to all of this craziness, I can only whisper a regrettable ‘sorry’ to her, as she once again sits atop my laptop keys whilst I’m trying to type something. That being said, it turns out that when you type ‘xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx’ into google, an article about ‘proof reading and editing precision’ comes up as a result, which could actually be quite helpful. Perhaps the feline knows more than she’s letting on.