It’s Sunday evening, and I’m trying to be cognizant of changes.

I’ve always been a bit of a hermit and a workaholic. The current lockdown is unique in that my social life is effectively zero, not counting sporadic short conversations with my landlords or hanging out with xgf on Saturdays. At the same time, work has blended with my home life: working from home, from my laptop, means I don’t commute to the office – it’s already here. Without going out, the main ways to pass time are video games and binge-watching TV shows.

This is certainly a defense mechanism: deliberate depersonalization to pass the time faster. Even so, this is a bizarre combination, with my life limited almost solely to work and solitary activities. Xgf says that after we parted ways, I immediately snapped into the “fingerguns Grigory” – a corporate caricature filled with artificial cheer, buzzwords and, well, fingerguns. That too is a defense mechanism.

Today, my Apocalypse Beard turned three weeks old. It’s rather sad-looking (my facial hair has always been very patchy) but I plan to make up for that in volume. My landlords as well as xgf both say that I’m skinnier than ever before. (Note to self: buy new batteries for the bathroom scale – the old ones died.) I know for a fact I’m low on protein: I try to keep my trips to the grocery store as far apart as possible, and that means having meat for just a few days and then going without much longer. (It doesn’t stay fresh all that long.) That’s certainly something to look into, but meh – as long as I stay covid-free, I’ll take the mildly unhealthy weight loss. (Before the pandemic, I was 6’2″ and 165 lbs.)

Lately, I’ve been reading about the difference between waiting and living, and I realized I’d spent many years simply waiting for one thing or another instead of enjoying life. How ironic that I realize this now, the one time during my lifetime when going out is a spectacularly bad idea. Oh well, at least I’m making some slow progress learning French. C’est la vie, eh?

…I wonder just how different I’ll be once the pandemic ends. I aim to keep this blog running and updated daily until they find a viable vaccine and I get my shot(s). Or maybe a little longer than that. Something tells me that’s not going to happen anytime soon, though.