Week 44/2022: It’s not happening

Week of 31 October 2022

It’s not happening

I don’t know, I’m just not feeling it at the moment. Unmotivated, uninspired, like I could just sit on the couch all day and feed my mind and body crap.

I know there’s a lot of pandemic fatigue out there and I wonder if this flatness is my version of that.

I’m not “over” the pandemic. It’s here to stay. I can deal with wearing a mask everywhere I go for as long as I have to for the next year, two years, five years, whatever. The world is a different place now. I don’t like it but I can adjust what I do to minimise my risk.

What I’m over, however, is how the mainstream has decided the pandemic has ended and we’re “living with it”. Most of the information I’m seeing concludes that the long-term consequences of this disease are horrific and that getting repeatedly infected is going to have significant adverse health outcomes.

I’m over feeling like very few people seem to recognise this or care about the long-term effects on the health of the entire population. I’m over the radio silence on this. Hardly anyone’s talking about it. No one’s acknowledging that the world has changed and things aren’t going back, can’t go back, to “normal”.

I’m over governments making people responsible for protecting not only themselves but sick and vulnerable people. I’m over careless public health messaging and the line that if you’re vaccinated everything will be okay.

I feel like I’m living on a different planet to a lot of the world around me.

But I can’t change what other people do, so thinking this way does me no good. Yet still I think it.

And to sum up, I didn’t do what I wanted to do this week.

But I did tick one thing off my list, and that was to finish off a photo project I’ve been working on for several months.

The short version is that one morning, I was wandering round my suburb and the signs in the streets caught my eye. I wondered whether I could construct the complete alphabet from within the suburb’s boundaries. To make it fully suburb-specific, I ruled out using any generic signs like road signs and street signs that I could find anywhere. It had to be signs that I could only find here, and only one letter from each place. And so the A to Z project began.

Here’s A.

22 for 2022 update

Last week, I said I was going to do some more work on Tranquility by Tuesday and get back in touch with the nutritionist. I didn’t.

I didn’t think I was setting too high an expectation with those two things but clearly something’s not working. I’ve got that flatness and I’m feeling unenergetic. I’m having dizzy spells and getting headaches, which was happening about a year ago. It stopped around Christmas time, when I started working from home full time. Whether there’s a link between going into the office and these symptoms, I don’t know. I just know it’s started again.

Maybe it’s time go back to basics, which are walking every day, drinking enough water and doing my shoulder exercises. Maybe I just need to be happy with doing the bare minimum and hope things will start to feel better.

22 for 2022 summary

• Things completed to date: 9 (8, 10, 11, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22)
• Things completed this week:
• Things I worked on this week: 1: (21)
• Things in progress: 7 (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 12, 21)
• Things not started: 2 (14, 16)
• Things I’m not going to do: 4 (4, 7, 9, 15)

What do I want to do next week?

I want to write about the next chapter of Tranquility by Tuesday some time over the next week. I think that will do.

Weekly summary

What was the best thing about this week?

I (well, Kramstable) was very relieved when I was able to pull the old Mac apart and retrieve Kramstable’s files from it. It’s clearly something in the computer rather than the hard drive that’s broken.

What did I learn this week?

I learned that if it’s very windy and you’re not wearing your glasses, it’s a really bad idea to clip them over the front of your shirt.

I’m lucky they blew off in a pedestrian area rather than crossing a road, and I’m lucky they weren’t scratched.

What I’m reading this week

• The Little Red Writing Book by Mark Tredinnick
• Tranquility by Tuesday by Laura Vanderkam
• True Stories by Patti Miller
• So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

Habit tracker

• Morning ritual (Goal = 7): 7
• Move before 3 pm (Goal = 7): 6
• Morning writing (Goal = 7): 3
• The Little Red Writing Book exercises (Goal = 5):1
• Listened to writing podcasts (Goal = 2): 1
• Controlled breathing (Goal = 7): 7
• All six physiotherapy exercises (Goal = 7): 2
• Mental health break outside during my work days in the office (2 days): 2
• Finish work by 5.30 (Goal = 4): 4
• Shut my computer down before 9.15 (Goal = 6): 5