This Stay-at-Home Life

Some things in life are not very good at timing. From my personal experience, I have found a few things that are consistently terrible at timing.

So, I spend a small, yet hugely annoying portion of my life trying not to break my teeth eating rock hard bread. I also have to spend a tiny part of my life shouting at the top of my voice through the bathroom window for the delivery person outside to leave the parcel somewhere in the garden. If I am lucky, I will find the parcel right there on the doorstep later and only need to open the door and put my feet through it. I have also spent a bit of time practising the art of making people understand me on the office phone, despite me holding a mouthful of food.

Even though I have tolerated life’s little mis-timers, I took a real blow just a couple of weeks ago. Something called Coronavirus grew large just a couple of weeks before my wedding date. Suddenly, my office is shut, my wedding is on hold and all the shops and tearooms I used to regularly go and sit with friends are all in hibernation. And I was banished to stay at home seven days a week.

After the initial disorientation and gloom, I remembered the motto ‘adapt or die.’ Since I’m not ready to die yet, I decided to adapt to this new strange way of living.

I started with exercise.

Not a keen outdoor exerciser, I have been relying on exercise DVDs where the trainer always shouts that I’m doing really great when I am just sitting on the floor watching them. I’m so pleased that they think sitting and watching them pant is a great achievement. I could do that all day.

But eventually, I got bored with just watching. So, I drew up a list of pros and cons for doing the exercise vs just imagining doing it.

Reasons to do exercise

• It will make me feel better when I eat cake later that day.
• I will burn calories, so more room for cake in my body.
• It will help me maintain my body size so that my current clothes will still fit, no need to spend money and time buying new bigger clothes.
• It will help me keep fit, thereby having more resistance to catching anything especially at this time when catching things seems to be popular.
• Trying to figure out what the highly muscular trainer and the normal humans are doing will help me forget about the current strange world.

Reasons not to do exercise

• I will sweat and my hair will go all frizzy. And I will once again lament in front of the mirror the fact that I didn’t inherit the good hair genes from my mum.
• My legs will be sore for the next few days so that every time I go up and down the stairs, I will have to wince and tire my eye muscles out.
• Watching cat videos on YouTube instead is so much more fun, even though I still haven’t found the one that makes me roll about laughing.
• I’m already hungry. It would be uncomfortable to have to wait another 30 minutes before I could eat.

After spending half an hour deciding whether to do the exercise or not, I ended up doing it anyway. Then I rewarded myself with a glass of smoothie and a warm shower before sitting down to work.

An hour passed and I was dragged into a strange activity that I had never ever envisaged my entire life. I found myself trying to fit a cat’s face to my computer screen. In flipping through my folders, I caught sight of a photo of a cat pulling a funny face. After laughing at it for a few minutes, I got an idea that it would be nice if I set that face as my screen lock picture. Setting it was very easy except only the top half of the cat’s face was showing, missing most of its expression.

So, I tweaked, edited and did a few other things that popped into my head. I even went on to the Microsoft Forum to find the solution. They told me to do exactly that: tweak, edit and do a few other things. An hour later, the cat’s face was exactly as it was in the beginning, but I realized that I had been side-tracked from the tasks that I was supposed to be doing. I quickly abandoned the activity and tried to get back on with my work.

After working for a while, I once again developed an irresistible urge to stray and ended up browsing the internet. I noticed that some wedding dresses had been relentlessly stalking me over the last two weeks.

I had long discovered that on the internet my past actions always follow me and haunt me from all corners. It’s very difficult to reinvent myself. If they have got me down as someone who looked at compression stockings for large legs, the image will stick. Everywhere I go on the net, these compression stockings on large legs follow me. Even though I told the bot countless times that they weren’t for me, they were in fact for my adopted dad who has a circulation problem on his (a lot larger than mine) legs, they still follow me. I can’t seem to be able to shake off this impression they have of me.

It takes ages for the bot to change my reputation. To my relief, my image gradually changed when I started looking for wedding dresses and shoes and anything related to my wedding.

Because of the overwhelming nature of wedding stuff I was looking at, oversized compression stockings reluctantly took the back seat and disappeared from my net-reputation. Instead, I had become the girl who looks at pretty wedding stuff. Everywhere I go, wedding dresses, shoes, earrings and even bridal coats (never heard of such things before) follow me. At least it seems more appealing than compression stockings.

Now my reputation is fixed, I must get back to work. It’s what?? Nearly 5 pm?? Gosh! Where did the time go??