When I don’t get up and start writing or editing as soon as I have finished my first cup of coffee, the rest of the day goes to hell. And Covid co-working may well kill me, or my husband, from the other’s hands.
We do not work well together. He is brilliant. I bristle when he speaks to me as though I were a student under his direction. He also has a large presence. The house just feels different when he is home. I swear he gives off thought waves. After 30 years of married bliss, he still annoys me.
We are both still working as we usually do, but he once disappeared for at least a few hours to go into campus even if he returned home to work on publications, or grant writing.
So I stay in my office and feel guilty that I am not working along side him. He has lung problems from a chemical accident in the lab he worked in in graduate school. What if he gets Covid? Will I feel like I should have been there, right by his side, rather than ignoring him and trying to get some work done?
I did not allow guilt to invade my brain space when I was younger, but now that I am older I have had quite a few interactions with people that would have been different had I known that a particular time would be the last time I would see them or talk to them. I try to hold no morbid thoughts in my head, but the times challenge this practice. I bite my tongue and am nice when I do not want to be nice.
So here, in lieu of bitching on the phone to a friend, inciting an argument with my husband, or doing something I will regret, I am posing these questions and releasing them to the ether. This is also called my “Isn’t It List.”
- Isn’t it rude for someone who has been up for hours to wake a housemate (or real mate) to make coffee?
- Insisting that cable news stations be on 24/7 in shared spaces is a type of spousal abuse, isn’t it?
- Yelling obscenities at the TV (tuned 24/7 to a cable news station) loud enough to wake a sleeping spouse is grounds for divorce isn’t it?
- It is okay to throw things at a person saying to no one in particular in the middle of the work day, “Someone should sweep these floors” isn’t it?
- Having a husband sneak to the store to buy chocolate (Well someone has to purchase all that Easter candy, don’t they?) when there is no good reason for him to leave the house only to return to announce that an item he knows he paid $2.87 the last time he bought it now astoundingly costs $13.99. Doesn’t this prove he hasn’t shopped for packages of toilet paper since 1988?
- Deciding to move all the plants in the house outside for some fresh air during the middle of a work day (see pic) and asking for help to do so is nutso or passive aggressive or something, isn’t it?
The main problem is that just before the stark reality of the Corona virus changed our world, I decided to follow a program to get my business up and running in six months. This will force me to restructure my blog articles to fit the more sleek and focused website that is tailored to meet the wants/needs of my client avatar.
I’ve been working on getting to this point for a while. I hired an organizer to help me clean out some over-crowded rooms so I would have the office and workspace I need.
I diligently had been going into my office and working on this program at least from 10 to noon each day, until the University told people to work at home, to use Zoom and Slack. Then it all broke down and I want to throw large, heavy objects at my beloved.
I have some pink duct tape left over from my days in Codepink Women for Peace, and I think I will cordon off areas that are No Man’s Land. How does that sound? What are you coping with these days, besides real fear for family and friends succumbing to the Corona-virus?