The Toilet Roll Archives (4) - A bit more on Anne and a bit of a gridlock
Been thinking about Anne Frank’s diary in relation to our current situation some more this week. I, myself, haven’t promised to keep any sort of Quarantine Diary because I know I’ll end up getting bored-in-the-house-im-in-the-house-bored and I didn’t want to give myself a reason to let myself down. I knew I was obviously going to write about Corona and stuff but I wanted to wait until my thoughts had ‘matured’ somewhat. I’ve gone from laughing at memes to making a sunbed on my windowsill because my balcony is too shaded; #stayhomesavelives and all that.
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| #sunbed(room) |
Anyways, I’ve hit a bit of a mental / creative gridlock this week. I’ve been waiting to stumble into bigger and bulkier and self-isolative-y (?) thoughts to get my teeth into and nothing has hit me just yet.
But I’m treating this as a sign. Because the problem is that time is all the same these and quarantining isn’t helping. Not leaving home and minimal social interaction (aside from my flatmates) is eliminating the spread of the virus, which is great. It’s the only solution in the short-to-medium-term. Nevertheless, it’s limiting any possibility of spontaneity and excitement – I sound pathetic and I swear I’m not complaining; ‘it is what it is’ at this point!
The same sequence of things happen today as they did yesterday and as they will tomorrow (I can safely assume). I get up, I go for a run, I work, I write, I listen to music but then don’t feel like it, I try and tune into a podcast and I don’t feel like that either – there’s too much to choose from; I don’t choose anything. It’s like there’s this cultural bulimia of excess supply. How many books do I have to read? How many episodes do I have to get through to feel like someone who has truly put this period of a-sociality to good and productive use?
I’m not sad about it. I’m not really feeling any apathy at this point. I have this new routine. My favourite part of the day is the morning. I’m naturally an early riser so I’m wide awake and off for a run at around 6.30 am. I shower and stuff and then have around forty minutes to fill with struggling to pick between podcasts and playlists and channels before I settle down for work.
Since every day is the same as the next, their names barely matter anymore. Only the weekend is different because you don’t have work – at least, on a structured and formal level – so you have 48 hours to fill. For the rest of the week, Tuesday had might as well be Thursday and the ‘Friday Feeling’ is something of the past. I can safely make the assumption that perception of time has changed and distorted drastically in the space of a few weeks. I mean, I literally forgot the clocks changed and went on for four days without realising! My phone and laptop change automatically and, since I haven’t been wearing my watch, it never occurred to me that time is ticking on (lol) outside of this Corona bubble.
Sometimes an abundance of time
translates into scarcity of time, just as abundance of options translates into rejection
of choice. If I have little time, I know how to use it. If I have a
seemingly infinite time I no longer know how to use it and yet, somehow, it
never seems enough. Kind of like when you’re still tired after getting too much
sleep. Seems illogical, but it’s perfectly reasonable.
The whole quarantine situation is so ‘surreal’ (I probably use that word at least 20 million times a day) that we can no longer measure change by comparing it to before, after or during. You can try and compare this to wartime Britain, but it’s obviously not the same. Even mapping out Corona-spread-graphs and comparing countries side-by-side on a bar chart isn’t quite the fairest of measures.
It’s not like being on holiday even if you’re forced not to go to work, so you can’t fool your brain into believing it. What used to be taken for granted – meeting friends, going for a Nandos (it’s not goodbye, it’s see you soon), even walking – is no longer like that, but the conditions on the margins are so unprecedented that it is difficult to see these as shortcomings. You can’t even really miss them properly yet, because everything is suspended and distorted and overwhelmed by events. It’s like we’re all waiting for that nine-year-old school-child-author of this Corona Creative Writing Homework to come and write their next paragraph.
How will we tell it in a few years? Well, that’s where the whole Anne Frank thing comes into play. People’s diaries, their accounts, their illustrations, will be what makes this whole thing interesting. I was reading something in The New Yorker about how important these accounts are to historians and it makes sense; how can you measure the gravity of an event without looking at the people who are directly affected by it?
The sense of isolation will be read in the diaries of lots of little girls who hide their locked journals beneath their beds, who tell their stories about online homework and skyped music lessons and no more trips to see friends. It’ll be conveyed by artists who paint from the window of their kitchen. But is there only so much words and pictures can convey, before people start projecting their own opinions and assigning their own meanings onto them? Like if I was to draw a picture from the windowsill in my bedroom and it was to be studied by students in years to come, they might argue my sketch of the overflowing recycling bins out the back is a metaphor for my own thoughts and ideas spilling out of my head. Or that the big tree that is beginning to blossom is symbolic of the dawn of a new Corona-underpinned normal.
But it is hardly that deep and romanticised. I’m trapped in a box. I can’t decide if I want to listen to Coldplay or Chris Stapleton. I don’t know if I want a stir fry or cereal for tea. Sure, projecting your own metaphors might add some exciting and ‘meaningful’ dimension to this experience, but really, the experience is arguably one to be felt, not one to be read.
That being said, the view from my bedroom window hasn’t changed. I doubt any artist’s landscape has changed either. And the little girl’s bedroom in which her diary hides probably looks the exact same too. Yet the world feels different. It’s like a parallel universe, this Corona bubble. The world around us is extremely familiar but, at the same time, it is completely different and we have no references to look to for guidance. Everything looks the same as before, minus our freedom and a good portion of the behaviours that are familiar to us: hugging, kissing, talking to each other in close proximity. The view from my balcony is the same but it isn’t, in the weirdest way. It’s all rather ‘Black Mirror.’
So yeah, Day 21 has given me a lot to mull over. A whole lot of nothing, more like. Hope you’re all keeping well; like I said, I'm ok though I've tested positive for missing me pal$ xoxox jk I hate you all and I pretend to like you by speaking to most of you at least once a day J >>>> "hey what you doing?" ::: "staying in wbu" <<<<
PS: the insta story 'would you rather...' polls are getting extremely popular and all is getting a wee bit rowdy and excited in the DMs. Shall I continue? After all I'm just a girl, standing in front of her laptop, trying to entertain the masses (if u don't get the film reference, look it up and watch it; it's not as though you don't have time!) xoxo
All the love xoxo
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