MCO 2.0 Day 2 - Day:1, Me:0

— 3 minute read

Thursday. Today is one of those days that you end it feeling, ok, day. You won this time but tomorrow I'll get you back.

I've been suffering from some sort of writing block in my work, which is not a good affliction in the best of times but worse when you've got (overdue) deadlines and should not lose one more day (apart from the day when they announced the lockdown, and the other day when they announced the emergency, and one more day in which you were recovering from both announcements). I stare at the intimidating wall of words that I have not written. The wall stares back. I back down and run away, tail between my legs.

Ok, day. You won this time but tomorrow I'll get you back.

It was not such a bad day, considering. I woke up after a not great night of sleep, determined to start the day well. The year starts with spring, and the day starts with the morning, say the Chinese forefathers. So I kept my phone off and didn't turn it on until I finished a round of yoga and meditation, until about 10am. Without my doomscrolling the world continued doing its thing. Trump's second impeachment is on, and Malaysia's Health DG promises that the lockdown will not last more than a month, in order for us to flatten the curve by May. I am sceptical on both fronts but ok. We'll see.

In terms of daily lockdown life, which mostly revolve around food as I recall from the first MCO (we went off our low carb diet and haven't looked back since), we're still living off pre-lockdown groceries in the pantry so we haven't begun on any ambitious lockdown recipe yet. This afternoon we were very close to having all the ingredients for a vegetable curry but lacked coconut milk, so for lunch we ended up having a noodle soup with old cabbage and assorted fishballs, fuchok and taufu pok. Dinner was similarly cobbled together, a stir fry with minced meat, brinjals and greens that were yellow at that point.

Unable to write and feeling a constant need to munch on something, I draped myself over the bed and chewed on dried cranberries. Stared at the plants on the balcony. Played some chords on the guitar. Still nothing. Practised barre chords until my fingers cramped up. Still nothing. Checked the phone and noted with satisfaction that people are migrating to Signal after Whatsapp's like-it-or-not-we're-doing-it notice that its data will be merged into Facebook. Still. Nothing.

Ok, day. Gonna have to trust that tomorrow will be a better writing day, because there's no other way around it. There's a ton of stuff in my brain that needs to go on paper, but the energy level is very low and I can't bring myself to focus for long enough to make that happen. (But apparently writing a rambling blog post is doable. Thank you brain.)

Hope is more helpful than despair so I'm hopping on hope's team. I'll either write five pages tomorrow or get mad guitar skills in the process. Onwards and upwards.