9/24 diary
G60
As is typical for me, my diary day starts at midnight. I spend an hour playing a new game I received from a charity game bundle back in March called Verdant Skies. It’s a farming simulator that focuses on relationships with your neighbors— in space! It’s pretty fun for an indie game with graphics that are a bit odd, but it’s a good way to waste a few hours (or a day) at my desk. The only downside is that you’re colonizing an uninhabited planet where no one has stepped foot before, and yet capitalism follows you there. Cool.
I go to bed around 1 but pass out sometime around 2:30 probably. I fall into a dream that’s all over the place and includes, but is not limited to, Stardew Valley, a pool party with a tall fence, witches or something, a girl performing a ritual for a new computer and getting a ghost balloon animal cat demon as a new roommate, and something about gnomes. I get woken up abruptly at 6:30 a.m. by my younger cat meowing loudly (some would say screaming) and bodily throwing himself against the laundry room door where he sleeps every night. I close my bedroom door with my older cat inside, feed the younger one and let him out, and stumble back to bed. I hate mornings.
I sleep until 9, when I was originally going to wake up, and then roll over again and again, telling myself “just another half hour.” I don’t get any rest in those half hour stints, but I’m stubborn. I give up around 11:30 because the younger cat is meowing again and I contemplate pouring concrete into my ear canals just for some peace and quiet but I get up. I run half of a bath and then give up on that. I go downstairs, fill my cup with ice water, and sit down to type.
As I begin typing this diary, I get a screened call from a private number that hangs up before I have a chance to ignore it. The voicemail left behind is from a politician from my hometown where I still technically live and am registered to vote, extolling his virtues. It seems that you can’t even escape politics for the five minutes it takes to write up the lackluster morning events of a diary day. I send some videos to my friends about a game called Among Us, which is a cute little 2D whodunnit, essentially, wherein you either complete tasks as a crewmate or murder all of your friends as an imposter. The goal is for your side to win, and it’s very fun to play while the whole group is on a voice chat together. I’m a very good imposter, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside when I win and the group calls me a bunch of expletives. Ah, friendship. I’ve found a somewhat similar game, Unfortunate Spacemen, that I want us all to try playing— it’s free, 3D, and is more The Thing adjacent wherein you can eat people you’ve killed (as the monster) and assume their shape. Oh, the trolling potential is unlimited. I ask my friend how her interview went this morning and she says that it went well. I don’t fully believe her because she’s very good at lying sometimes when she’s sad and trying not to talk about things, but I congratulate her anyway.
I spend about fifteen minutes reading my old diary entries for this project and they almost seem like they’re from another decade. Riding the bus? Going to a cafe without a mask? Who was this other version of me that was so anxious about what exact thing to say when she ordered her coffee? Now she has become me, and I’m more concerned about anti-mask plague rats who are personally trying to murder me through willfull ignorance. I’ve actually called people during quarantine. Strangers, too! Weird how things can change so quickly.
I look at the dishes and tell myself that I’ll do them later. I put some ground beef in the fridge to thaw for spaghetti tomorrow, make myself a PB&J, and sit down to play some Verdant Skies. I think about Neil Hilborn’s poem “This Is Not the End of the World” when he says “I’ve been thinking about driving nowhere. I’ve been thinking about becoming a box inside a locked room inside a dark house at the dark end of the street.” I decide to go farm in space instead. I play until 2:15, stopping because the cat won’t stop meowing piteously and coming to my desk chair to politely tap on my shoulder with his paw. I bow to the baby’s commands.
I sit with him on the couch until about 4 and spend a bit of time on the phone with my friend B. After we hang up, I get stuck in a YouTube spiral, catching up on news clips and feeling more and more like I am watching the fall of the Roman Empire. I’ve never wanted to live in interesting times but we rarely get what we want. I can only hope that we won’t see the cementing of a fascist government this election. I can only hope that people decide to care about other people when they vote. Canada has its issues but maybe I could escape there— if I had anything to offer, that is. Whatever. Back to space capitalism.
I feed the cat at 4:30 and sit back down at the computer. This day is shaping up to be a waste but who cares? I’m unemployed and depressed about the state of the world. I’ll let myself wallow and be lazy for one day, even if I’ve been saying that a lot since March. I pull up discord but none of my friends are online. They’re probably off being productive or something. Gross. I think briefly about how I’m finishing my degree in May and yet I couldn’t get the retail job I interviewed for last week. Sigh. I just want someone to pay me to grow peppers or something.
I make myself a sandwich at 6:40 after spending two hours hopping around my games library on the computer. Nothing is drawing my attention and keeping it lately, and it’s hard to enjoy old shows, games, and books I usually do. I read some messages from my friends complaining about the state of the school as I eat and watch a YouTube video about a different type of sandwich.
Around 7, I log onto Discord and join my friend A in a voice chat before we game together. She tells me about a hawk that shattered her parents’ neighbor’s window by dive bombing it. We talk about what’s going on in our department on top of the world being on fire and try to hash out what we think is happening while also participating in a group chat that has our other peers in it. J joins our voice chat after logging on and it quickly turns into what we refer to as The Daily Bitch. I stay mostly quiet while J and A talk, playing games with occasional “mm-hmm”s and “oh”s and “right”s. We decide together that we are often left unprepared by our department. I’ve never been so glad that I’m not writing a thesis. P ends up joining the chat, drunk out of his gourd, and makes things pretty enjoyable. I continue to be trapped in the chat but A invites me to play Town of Salem which I’m not excited for but I play, since I’m dying to do anything at the moment. I spend the game trying to figure out how to disentangle myself from this conversation so that I can do literally anything else. An joins, talking about how high she got earlier, and I stream the game for her so that she can watch while she makes earrings. We end up switching to Among Us where I successfully win both rounds as an imposter. Apparently I’m great at lying over voice chat when it comes to murdering people and framing others— I might have a future as a politician.
Mid-game I get a snack of hard boiled eggs from the fridge that I don’t eat (I undercooked them somehow?) and I swap the cats out since the little guy’s been out since 6:30 a.m.
The group says our good-byes around 10 p.m. and I get up and stretch. The computer chair that I have is a hand-me-down from my deceased grandfather and is probably almost ten years old. Even with the use of an additional pillow for cushioning, it’s still uncomfortable after more than half an hour. An sends pictures in the group chat of the earrings. A sends pictures of her parents’ dogs. I think about everything that I haven’t done today and then try to embrace my current philosophy on life. “Today sucked, but tomorrow might not.” No way to know until it comes. I feel guilty not having read for classes or done any more job searching, but I’m trying not to be so hard on myself. It’s only one day, and tomorrow I’ll wake up early and drink coffee and be super productive. Of course, that’s what I’ve been saying all summer.
I go soak my old bones in the tub and take my Switch with me to play something else. I keep forgetting that the drain plug is busted and won’t hold water (a non-essential fix according to maintenance) so I’m only able to stay for ten minutes while forcibly holding it closed with the heel of my foot. I go back downstairs. I cycle through activities like you do through food options when you’re hungry but you don’t know what you want— going back and forth between the fridge and the cabinet, lowering your standards each time. I also make a tuna fish sandwich to really lean into my bread-based diet and load up another game (I think that’s the eighth one today, hoping desperately for some serotonin).
It’s 11 by now. I eat my sandwich, I read the game’s dialogue, I pray for a job to fall into my lap that pays enough for me to keep my apartment. I read an article about adult ADHD and how to recognize the signs, and then I read a blog post about adult ADHD and how to cope when no one believes you and thinks you’re just making excuses. I think about my bank balance and my emergency fund that I have squirreled away and I pray that it’s enough until the tide turns in my favor. But it’s not really in anyone’s favor right now, except for billionaires that are profiting off of us. I wonder if they’ve ever struggled, and if they have, how have they forgotten? Maybe it’s being born poor but it’s encoded in my DNA to worry about money, and maybe it’s being raised by an empathetic single mother but my existence means nothing if I can’t care for others. Jeff Bezos could solve world hunger and it would be a drop in the bucket for him. What do you gain from a currency that you refuse to spend? Trickle down economics my ass. They buy another yacht and I drink from the tap because my apartment doesn’t make me pay a water bill. Every time I’m at the store, I have to justify the cost of groceries to myself. Do I need eggs? They’re a whole dollar. I could get a burger for a dollar. Which is the better use of my money?
My friend B and I play this game every once in a while. “If you won the lottery, what would you do with the money?” We’re very similar in many ways— single mother, deadbeat dad, economic struggles, same hometown, same highschool, same answer. First: pay off our student loans. Second: help our families. Third: buy a house. Fourth: donate the rest. She and I joke about pooling our meagre resources and buying a house to split in half so that her dog doesn’t eat my cats and so that my cats don’t set off her allergies. I think that I want nothing more than a space to just exist without it being jeopardized. For the past six years I’ve been in school and I’ve moved every year. I want roots. I want to stay in Muncie. If I can’t find a job then I’ll have to slink back to my hometown with my tail between my legs, living in my parents’ unfinished basement. Sounds about right for 2020.
My watch ticks away on my bookshelf and it seems very loud in the silence of the apartment. I think sometimes that I’m happiest when I feel like I’m the only person who’s awake in the world. This past winter, I would make coffee at 3 a.m. and climb into my old car. I’d pull the back seats down and sit in the trunk area, staring up at the stars through the back windshield while the heater rumbled on. Sometimes my neighbors would go to leave, or they’d get home, and they’d give me weird looks. But they always looked up at the sky after a second, too. It’s something I’m trying to remember lately with everything that’s going on. Same sky. Same genetic makeup. Different everything else.
My mom says that I worry too much, that I make mountains out of molehills. This year just feels like a mountain. I finish soliloquizing (I know that’s supposed to mean speaking out loud but I feel like a character in a play complaining right now, cut me some slack) to anyone who might one day read this and correct a few typos. My day ends the same hour it began and it doesn’t feel like much has changed.