A meme about the plague year
Mar. 24th, 2021 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Here's a quick little meme, originally from the New York Times (although I got it from aphrodite_mine).
Note: the questions talk about 'this year,' which I am taking to mean 'the time between the first lockdown in March 2020, and now'. I.e. the plague year, rather than the calendar year.
1. What art did you turn to?
So, so, so many books. I am someone who has always read, and reread, for comfort and consolation, and I'm fortunate in that this impulse and desire to read never really went away. I know many people completely lost the ability to find joy in books in 2020, but it was the opposite for me: I dived headfirst back into my trusty old favourites (Victor Kelleher's dystopian novels, Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series, Catherine Jinks' Pagan Chronicles books, The Lions of Al-Rassan) and never looked back. I wouldn't say that these books are exactly happy — most of them have a kind of bittersweet, melancholy tone — but they're all about people finding strength in each other, meaning in art and learning and incremental changes, and continuing to live even if they are surrounded by loss and destruction. Many of these books have been favourites of mine since I was a small child, so I guess I have always been drawn to that kind of story.
2. Did you have any particularly bad ideas?
I don't really think so? I'm a pretty cautious person.
3. Did you find a friendship that sustained you artistically?
Not 'artistically', but certainly lockdown life was a lot easier mentally given I was sharing it with Matthias. Given we've been living together for ten years, though, it's not exactly a friendship that I 'found' during the pandemic...
4. What's 1 thing you made this year?
This was a year of cooking and gardening. I'd always done those things, but the combination of working from home (much more efficient than working in an office) and having limited opportunities for social activities outside the house meant that I had so much more time to devote to these kinds of activities.
I also ended up writing around 50,000 words of fic. Some of this was for Yuletide, which I would have done anyway, but early on in the first lockdown an idea just gripped me and wouldn't let go, and I ended up writing a 30,000-word story. You won't find it on my main![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Dolorosa account — it was sufficiently different to the normal things I write that I felt it needed to be separated off, and I haven't linked to it or really discussed it in any way. Doing this felt really liberating, actually.
5. What's a moment from this year you will always remember?
A positive moment: when we finally completed the purchase of our house, although I was so stressed and exhausted that it was more like delirious relief rather than happiness.
There are also a lot of really sad and chilling moments that are etched in my memory, but I'd rather not dwell on them.
6. If you'd known you'd be so isolated for so long, what would you have done differently?
I don't think I'd really do anything differently. I remember when we first went into lockdown this time last year (which I naively thought would sort things out in about a month), Matthias and I sat down and came up with a plan for how we were going to make things work: going running at least three times a week, at least one walk a day to get us out of the house, order take-away every Saturday for something to look forward to, anticipating that technology/work would be frustrating at various times and never to take out those frustrations on each other, etc. I even bought a bunch of more comfortable clothes in the very first week, knowing I would definitely not be dressing as if I were in the office!
7. What do you want to achieve before things return to normal?
I'd very much like to have our vegetable garden, compost bin, and outdoor space fully set up so that there's very little work required to keep them carrying on.
Feel free to steal this if you'd like.
aphrodite_mine).Note: the questions talk about 'this year,' which I am taking to mean 'the time between the first lockdown in March 2020, and now'. I.e. the plague year, rather than the calendar year.
1. What art did you turn to?
So, so, so many books. I am someone who has always read, and reread, for comfort and consolation, and I'm fortunate in that this impulse and desire to read never really went away. I know many people completely lost the ability to find joy in books in 2020, but it was the opposite for me: I dived headfirst back into my trusty old favourites (Victor Kelleher's dystopian novels, Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series, Catherine Jinks' Pagan Chronicles books, The Lions of Al-Rassan) and never looked back. I wouldn't say that these books are exactly happy — most of them have a kind of bittersweet, melancholy tone — but they're all about people finding strength in each other, meaning in art and learning and incremental changes, and continuing to live even if they are surrounded by loss and destruction. Many of these books have been favourites of mine since I was a small child, so I guess I have always been drawn to that kind of story.
2. Did you have any particularly bad ideas?
I don't really think so? I'm a pretty cautious person.
3. Did you find a friendship that sustained you artistically?
Not 'artistically', but certainly lockdown life was a lot easier mentally given I was sharing it with Matthias. Given we've been living together for ten years, though, it's not exactly a friendship that I 'found' during the pandemic...
4. What's 1 thing you made this year?
This was a year of cooking and gardening. I'd always done those things, but the combination of working from home (much more efficient than working in an office) and having limited opportunities for social activities outside the house meant that I had so much more time to devote to these kinds of activities.
I also ended up writing around 50,000 words of fic. Some of this was for Yuletide, which I would have done anyway, but early on in the first lockdown an idea just gripped me and wouldn't let go, and I ended up writing a 30,000-word story. You won't find it on my main
5. What's a moment from this year you will always remember?
A positive moment: when we finally completed the purchase of our house, although I was so stressed and exhausted that it was more like delirious relief rather than happiness.
There are also a lot of really sad and chilling moments that are etched in my memory, but I'd rather not dwell on them.
6. If you'd known you'd be so isolated for so long, what would you have done differently?
I don't think I'd really do anything differently. I remember when we first went into lockdown this time last year (which I naively thought would sort things out in about a month), Matthias and I sat down and came up with a plan for how we were going to make things work: going running at least three times a week, at least one walk a day to get us out of the house, order take-away every Saturday for something to look forward to, anticipating that technology/work would be frustrating at various times and never to take out those frustrations on each other, etc. I even bought a bunch of more comfortable clothes in the very first week, knowing I would definitely not be dressing as if I were in the office!
7. What do you want to achieve before things return to normal?
I'd very much like to have our vegetable garden, compost bin, and outdoor space fully set up so that there's very little work required to keep them carrying on.
Feel free to steal this if you'd like.