Way too much time on my hands

As of yesterday, I have been working at home for a month. The Shelter-In-Place order for our state has been in place for a month.

I am a homebody at heart. Some people live off of the energy of others, but then there are people like me who get drained by too many people. The best way to describe it would be like all the people around you have straws and they are drinking in your energy. 

Okay that got weird, forget that. 

Anyway, while I am a homebody, at this point I have to say there is WAY too much home in my homebody life right now. It is a little maddening. Before my life was a calm ballad with some changes to the melody of going back and forth from home to work, maybe go out with friends or invite people over, or finding a small adventure to enjoy. 

Now it is the same note over and over and over and over and over and over and over....well you get the idea. There is no change. There is little to look forward to. Wednesday is the same as Thursday, Friday and Saturday now feel like twinsies, and Monday and Sunday are only differentiated by getting up to either go on the computer for work or to kill time. And a day off...well that just means you now have to try and fill your day with something that will feel a lot like the day before.

Things get really confusing when I have to take my medicine. When you get up everyday and do the same thing everyday, you have no idea if you have taken your medications or not. I mean it FEELS like you took your medication on time, or did you do it yesterday? Or was it today? Or did you think about taking it and therefore you thought you took it, but actually, you didn't take a thing and you are just staring at your pill bottle with your head tilted for so long your dog paws your arm to make sure you aren't frozen. (If that sounds way too specific to have not happened...yea, it happened.)

It is in this way I realize that I have been completely unfair to the older population who retired and would say, "Oh is today Friday? Huh...I didn't pay attention." Turns out they were not trying to be jerks, they really had no idea. Before I would write it off as them getting old and their memory going. That's what my mind told me because how in the world can you not keep track of time? It seems like a basic function the mind should be able to do. Turns out, time is a lot trickier than I realized when time has almost no meaning. 

When I was a kid, I kept track of time like a miser keeps track of gold and I think a lot of us did. We knew how many classes before lunch or end of day, we knew how long before the bell rang to end class, we knew exactly how long it would take us to scribble out an assignment during lunch. If we took the bus, our timing was impeccable when it came to catching it. We knew how long to wait before our parents came home to finish whatever task was assigned to us. We counted the days until summer, how many days until our next vacation, the weekend, or even how long before our friends would call so we could meet up. 

We made up things to look forward to and we held onto that feeling. As an adult, it fades a little because the magic of time goes away, but we still have it at some level during the work week. I even have a timer I put in Excel to countdown until the end of the week. I even have a countdown for days until retirement, which was over 4000 the last I looked. 

Turns out when you have nothing to look forward to...time has almost no meaning.

As of today, I know I took my pills and I am going to fill my pillboxes so I make sure I stay on time with them. That is...if I remember what day of the week it is.