My morning starts with tossing and turning. I blink my eyes a little and focus on the clock at the foot of my bed, and it’s only 6:30 a.m. Unacceptable! I roll over and try again. I’m treated to a brief, disjointed dream involving resource management and small settlements. Very repetitive and not very restful. My eyes open up again: 7:30 a.m. Sigh.
A few more attempts and it is almost 10. Close enough. Not very satisfying as far as rest or sleep goes, but it’s not like I have a high energy day ahead. I grab some clothes from my laundry basket and get ready to take a shower. Maybe the hot water will clear my head and refresh me. While I shower, I hum and then sing a few snatches of the music from the Steven Universe Movie.
After my shower, I am awake, but still in a bit of a malaise. It’s been lingering over the past few days. A lot of it comes from the news, which I compulsively check shortly after I exit the shower. There’s a lot of noise about impeachment, and for once I think it may actually accomplish something. Trump and this Ukraine scandal is….frankly unsurprising. What galls me as I read about the whistleblower and reactions to Trump’s actions is the amount of support (or silence) coming from Republican lawmakers. In the most generous interpretation of events, Trump looks weak for seeking help for something so trivial and is clearly taking a side against his own investigative and intelligence agents. But I digress. The news today is more of the same, complete with posturing from both parties. I do my best to ignore the noise despite the constant headspace Trump occupies any more.
It doesn’t take long to get through the news (and it still won’t when I check again in a few hours), so I grab my recently acquired Nintendo Switch and play a bit of Smash Ultimate. I win a few matches, and I lose a few. Truthfully, some of my losses infuriate me. Between random spikes of lag and encountering bizarre rulesets, I don’t really make any progress in getting a higher rank. An hour passes almost before I know it.
I ponder lunch. I keep pondering it for a while, the t.v. on in front of me. Succession is playing, and I’ve been on and off watching it over the last few weeks. The characters are good, but the show is not, or so I’ve concluded. Eventually I do work up the effort to fix something. I heat up some leftover pizza and cheese sticks. Nothing terribly exciting.
After eating something, I curl up on the couch with a few of the books I need to read. Generally, they are about Native Americans interacting with colonists around the time of the Revolutionary War. A few more hours disappear as I parse through their relationship with colonists, Great Britain, and each other. I frequently shift, twist, and squirm as I sit, adjusting the blanket underneath me or occasionally getting distracted by the need to shift loads of laundry.
At about 4 p.m., I move a total of 20 feet to sit in my computer chair. On days like this, I feel laughably inactive and sedentary, but there it is. On my computer, I scan through some news headlines and YouTube videos as I decompress. From there, I move to typing something up for this diary as an idle clicker runs in the background.
Thinking about dinner yields no results, so I put it off for another hour or two. Instead I find myself getting sucked back into the news and make the mistake of reading some of the comments beneath a news story. I hate social media for the purpose of debate. It’s hard to make a complete point, and easy to simply write off the opposition in a dismissive and infuriating ways.
I really can’t come to a decision on dinner. I settle for mac ‘n cheese. I briefly debate cooking up some sausage to go with it, but it feels too late in the evening. And I’m just tired today. Tired of not doing much, tired of reading the news, and tired of eating the same things over and over. Mac ‘n cheese will sustain me for the day.
I’m about ready to check out mentally, so I begin playing Medieval II Total War on my computer. I’m leading the English to war against France and, unless the AI stops being a dick to me, the Holy Roman Empire.
My sister gets home from her long day at about 11 p.m. She tells me a bit about the work she’s been doing today, but I’m not really listening. I’m off the computer at least. Instead it’s back to the Nintendo Switch, which I play somewhat mindlessly for another hour or so. I get ready for bed and look at my sheets, deciding whether to go ahead and change them, or let them sit for another day. I decide to let them sit. I go to bed and try not to dwell on too much, hoping a nice, dreamless sleep will make the next day a little more lively.