TRICK A Tale of Boredom
Trick - is, for those that don’t know, wonderful. She’s many other things but I think it’s important to get the most true thing up first. She’s the person you need at a party when you’re flagging and everything is getting away from you. She’s a human cuddle with the cuddle included. Thank you Trick for sending this over!
Peter, I think puts it much better -
As life in lockdown settled into its bizarre and familiar new routines, Trick has taken a look back at how she has experienced it. Trick is one my longstanding close friends from uni and has long been recognised for having a unique and jaunty view on the world. She has done all the right things with her twenties by amassing a series of jobs for charities and publishers and living abroad for a couple of years. I literally can't wait to be bemused by her creative slant on life over a drink when this is all over.
Trick, over to you...
TRICK
I feel fine. Friends and family ask me how I’m doing in isolation and my answer is always: ‘Yeah, fine thanks’. It’s the truth and, under the circumstances, I feel glad to be feeling so distinctly average; nothing more but, crucially, nothing less.
Before I get going, I just want to make clear that I fully appreciate I’ve brought this mood on myself. There is a distinct possibility that I could be feeling happier, more constructive and upbeat but, somewhere along the lockdown line, I must have made a conscious decision not to be. I’m assuming (/hoping) I’m not alone here and that people share the same mediocre existence. It isn’t laziness as such, just a lack of drive I suppose.
I wanted to write about something cool and exciting that I’ve taken up in lockdown – learning Arabic, planting the seeds for a new post-corona business idea, (I have, at least, planted the M&S radish and lettuce seeds so not a total failure), making clothes hangers etc. – but to tell the truth, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what I’ve been doing with my time. I suppose I’ve spent a fair bit worrying about the fact that I haven’t done anything worthwhile with it…unlike, it seems, so many others.
So, what is a typical day at home at the moment? Well, I get up early enough, then spend a solid couple of hours on my laptop ‘tidying up’ my music on Spotify; moving songs to different playlists which I will then decide to move back a few days later. Then maybe a walk through the cemetery, eat (granted healthily) to oblivion, inspect the progress of my M&S vegetables, and bike aimlessly to any supermarket – distance no obstacle – I ended up at Tesco by Wormwood Scrubs Prison last week and came back from the journey pleased to have discovered a new part of London. Recently, pointless internet browsing has taken on a new meaning - I’ve seriously looked into selling my old Huawei Y300 and iPhone 5C online (for the grand total sum of £8), signed up as a delivery driver (even though I can’t drive), and tried to outsmart Adobe by accessing my account without paying for it (ongoing, obviously). The weirdest thing of all – sometimes I genuinely look at the clock and wonder where the hell the day has gone.
In reality, I know I’ve achieved very little but sometimes I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve achieved quite a lot.
Weirder still, I haven’t taken to all the new things that lockdown has introduced. Houseparty – I just don’t get the point. Starting a blog – this will do. Upcycling furniture – does painting a mouldy wood rack I found in the basement count? Virtual pub quizzes – no thanks. And maybe the most obvious – being permitted to watch an unhealthy amount of TV without judgement. Instead, I’m perfectly ok killing time in my own company (although this is admittedly starting to wane) and keeping busy with totally useless things.
On the whole, I wouldn’t say I’m unmotivated, I’m just unmotivated to do anything genuinely productive. This results in, I believe, feeling fine. I guess it is also what you call procrastination.
There really are things I should be getting on with. Like, say, finding a new job. In the scale of priority, I’d say this was pretty high. Maybe a seven or eight out of ten. My current job finishes at the end of the month, and I have bills and rent to pay despite not even living in my flat at the moment (absurd). Also, a full-time job would mean having something valuable to do with my day. Yet there is a probing voice in my head saying: ‘You’re never going to find a new job in this corona climate so why bother?’. There are other voices too, but I choose to be guided by this one.
Sure, hanging out by the fridge, bored out of my mind at Mum and Dad’s, and unemployment looming over me (in eleven days and counting) is not the ideal situation but, pathetically, it’s nothing new. I’ve been here too many times before. Whereas some people’s lives may have changed profoundly and irrevocably mine, it seems, is on the slightly smaller scale. Learning to be patient when queuing for some Fruit Mentos and getting creative-ish with birthday cards as Scribbler’s shut isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
And in all seriousness, I am aware of people in a far worse situation than my own. The list, I’m sure, is endless but – since I do still have a job working for a charity that provides aid to Syrians – let’s take a displaced Syrian or refugee, from any country in fact. It has already had its first coronavirus cases but when an outbreak hits somewhere like Syria, (which surely it will), the result will be catastrophic. Grossly overpopulated with people living within camps and war-torn city rubble, and a healthcare system that is miles away from our own, it will be unimaginably worse there than anything we’ve seen in Europe over the past months. So yeah, looking at the bigger picture, I feel grateful to be feeling fine.
