time enough at last

The websites all want to help so badly. You are inside, we're all inside, and there is all this time — how are you going to spend it all? They have so many ideas: things to watch, things to cook, things to read. Have you considered role-playing games? Perhaps comic books? Or anime? Eventually, the suggestions become so numerous that they feel as plentiful as the options were in the first place, defeating the purpose entirely.

It does not soothe me. Before, we were drowning in an ocean of things competing for too little time. Now, we are drowning in things competing for our excess of time. In all these helpful-seeming, cheery recommendations, I sense my fear of boredom, my personal anxieties, and longing for human contact amplified a thousand-fold. What I would really like is quiet.

The fundamental underpinning of a lot of media is simple: living is hard, so let us tell you how to do it. Trouble is, there's no guidebook for this. The helpful articles are only allowed to be helpful because the publications want to survive, and my fear keeps me reading.

I had a plan to get married this year. It's still my plan, but every day now I have to wake up and think about whether or not that plan will have to change, whether I will simply have to wait much longer than I thought I would or if I will have to drastically change what that day will look like and start from square one with my partner, losing six months of progress and money. This is not a complaint, it's just the reality, and I have to adjust. No one can tell me what to do, because no one knows anything.

A joke: Want to know the whitest thing you can say? What's your five-year plan?

One of my family's most unfortunate talents is the one shared by a lot of Americans living in poverty, the skill with which they manage to dance while inches ahead of calamity. My parents never told me about plans, probably because they never had one. I didn't know how to make plans, because I wasn't taught. I hate the calm I feel right now. I hate the skill with which I can dissociate. I worry it makes me less empathetic. Less compassionate.

But I am also stupid, like the protagonist of an action movie. I don't want to know the odds. I don't want to know the story. I just figure I can take 'em, because if I think that, it means I'm here, and when I stop thinking that, I'm beat.

So no, I really don't know what I'm going to watch or play or read tonight. I don't know how I'm going to use this time. Plans seem foolish, I made one (1) and look where it got me. Perhaps I will be bored. Perhaps I will be scared. Perhaps I will continue to put off finally seeing The Sopranos. But maybe I'll call someone who needs it. Maybe I'll figure out a way to find that quiet, to get out of my own head and figure out what the right thing to do today is. And maybe I'll recommend some shows, because I really do want to help, badly.