Day 21: no control

[freckles_and_doubt]

Gods, but this epidemic thing is weirding to the mental health. I have spent two weeks quite happily noodling around at home, surviving interminable Zoom and Teams meetings (Tracy, I completely agree that Teams is horrible, it's severely clunky and the sound quality is awful), and tempering the faculty's disfunctional flailing by cuddling kitties and prodding my garden and reading fanfic and rediscovering my piano. Then this morning the milk in my tea tasted funny, which is fair given it's five days after its sell-by, so I sallied forth to do a grocery shop.

And that was fine, keeping distance and disinfecting hands a lot, and filling up my trolley with the wherewithal for another two weeks, and then I came to the till, and the nice lady behind her plastic screen apologetically informed me that I couldn't buy the three kinds of plant food in my basket, it was considered non-essential. And I lost it. I managed to tamp down the response to the poor woman, it clearly wasn't her fault, but I loaded the car and drove home in completely irrational tears, shaking and furious.

And that's a weirdly complicated response to a very minor thing in all this. It's clearly demonstrating how close we all are to the edge, how stressful this is, how thin is the veneer of functionality, but I also think it's pushing two very specific buttons for me in particular. One: I have a pathological need to trust the systems I am a part of, and I've generally been OK with how this country is handling things, and feeling to some extent held and protected by the precautions, but this is a completely irrational exclusion, why the hell will they let you buy seeds and bulbs but not the food to feed them? so my faith in the logic and integrity of the system took a knock. And, two: the only thing I can bloody well control in all this is my homespace. I can feed my kitties and sweep my floors and wash my linen and water my considerable container garden and feed it every two weeks, which is starting to really make a difference to its levels of green. And now I can't. I can't control my space, and I can't properly nurture the things which depend on me, and aargh apocalypse it's all falling apart.

So it was a brief storm of disproportionate woe, and was materially assuaged by (a) driving home the very long way round to charge up the car battery a bit, and playing loud Manic Street Preachers at speed on the freeway, and (b) the fortuitous memory that the above grocery expedition had enabled me to take shameless advantage of the supermarket's post-Easter array of discounted Lindt chocolate bunnies. So I'm fine now. But will have to feed leftover orchid food to my non-orchid potplants until lockdown lifts or I can find an evil quisling supermarket which isn't keeping such strict tabs on its product categories. And am making mental notes to be kind to myself, because thin veneer of calm. The chocolate is helping.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Good grief. How bizarre. I know the Spar in Vredehoek used to have a relaxed approach to selling wine on Sundays. Perhaps they might be chilled about plant food. (Plant food?! How very strange.)

I am mostly okay (and our lockdown isn't as severe as yours e.g. am expecting nice delivery man to bring me wine and gin later today) but I have days when I am very quick to anger. Opera helps. K is really struggling; for her gaming helps.

[(Anonymous)]

er, that was me. Tracy.

[freckles_and_doubt]

My therapist used to categorise my gaming habit as "self-soothing", and it really is, particularly now. (Even halfway through the third Witcher game, whose tactical demands are kicking my butt even on easy). So I have much sympathy with K, please give her a fellow gamer's love!

The Rosmead Spar is a particularly good one, although I haven't been there for years, so I shall try that next, hopefully they will indeed be more relaxed. It's a very weird exclusion, I cannot think that it's well thought out.

Good luck with lockdown! may we all emerge healthy and sane.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the fact that she is my pillar of strength, gently leading me through Discord 101, and being the sysadmin to my connection with my students is also helping a lot.

I 100% truly would not be coping with remote teaching nearly as well as I am without her help. And she knows that. So, affirmation ftw :)

[caprices]

Michigan in the US pulled the same idiocy; their governor decided that banning garden centers as non-essential was a good idea. It (theoretically) just applies to big box stores that have a huge footprint, but there's a LOT of confusion about who (and what) is actually affected.

This is a very psychologically interesting time, is it not? Slow moving invisible disasters are not what our stories are really geared toward.

[freckles_and_doubt]

I keep thinking exactly this: we have no narrative for this situation, all our apocalypse stories are sudden and total and very clearly defined. This creeping, indeterminate thing leaves us floundering for categories and responses.

The garden centre thing is indeed idiotic, I also need potting soil as a bunch of my plants are too big for their boots. And it's one of the really warming, hopeful aspects of this whole bloody disaster, the way that people under lockdown are retreating into things that are about reality and self-sufficiency: growing herbs and vegetables and baking bread and making masks and remembering how to knit. Sometimes I don't actually despair of the human race.

[vesta_aurelia]

I think it's an urban, upper class response to close garden centers.
Because to that economic group, gardening is a "hobby" -- not a psychological aid, not a charity preventative, not a starvation preventative, etc. It's just a "hobby"....
People growing their own food to survive is so outside their paradigm, they can't comprehend it.