I’m super behind on pretty much everything, whether it’s my ever-growing list of TODOs at work, my (still) unprocessed Thailand photos (from February!), any attempt to make progress on any of my personal endeavors, keeping the house in some form resembling clean and tidy, or even just updating this blog/journal/whatever it is.

The world increasingly feels like it’s falling apart around me. Everywhere (including Pennsylvania) seems to have decided the pandemic is over by sheer force of will, and cases in the US are pretty much continuing to increase from their previous peak. Restaurants and bars and gyms are open again. Masks have bizarrely become a political issue. The police seem to be going on ever-increasing rampages with impunity. The federal government is increasingly incompetent (if that’s possible) at handling the crisis. State governments are unable or unwilling to fill that role anymore.

The easiest thing has been to hide away every night and do mindless things like watch YouTube videos (I recommend the Taskmaster series, which is hilarious, and was recommended to me by at least three separate friends) or participate in the (fortunately) large number of virtual game nights (including the work one, I have four recurring sessions a week now)… even Beat Saber feels like too much effort most days, now.

I can’t manage more than short bursts of actual brain-y time at work. It took me 2 hours to diagram out a basic OIDC flow (which I should know like the back of my hand) because I just couldn’t focus. Salesforce has been doing a great job at helping their employees through this mess, but my obligations to literally dozens of people still feels insurmountable at times. There’s an increased meeting load, which doesn’t help. Maybe that’s why I’m so behind on everything.

I cancelled my dentist appointment, because it felt too high risk to me. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe the next chance won’t be for a year or more. Maybe I should start using mouthwash or something else to try and handle things myself until then. Maybe losing teeth is the tradeoff for being safe.

I’m increasingly worried with each passing week that I’ll get sick, despite all the precautions I can take, because there are enough other people that just don’t care anymore. I’m increasingly worried that I’ll have serious complications, as someone who is in the at-risk category with respiratory illnesses. And I don’t know what else I can do about it, other than ask others to bear the risk of required activities like grocery store visits in my place, which feels like it’d be utterly barbaric of me.

I want to give up and say screw it and treat getting sick as an inevitability so I can stop worrying about it, but I think I’m too afraid of what that could mean.

But if Pennsylvania is bad, Arizona is totally exploding. I’m worried about my mom. I’m worried about her anyway, given she’s by herself now and isolating. There’s nothing I can do about that, and maybe that’s the worst part. Travelling isn’t safe. Driving isn’t practical. I have too many responsibilities otherwise, anyway. Or something like that.

I hope I come back to this entry early next year or something and read it and appreciate how much things have improved and started to maintain some semblance of normalcy again — maybe a vaccine will actually be close — but I’m increasingly worried about how long this will keep dragging on thanks to incompetence and others’ selfishness.

So life goes, I guess.