Tags
anxiety, blogging, cleaning, Coronavirus, COVID-19, family, fear, frustration, games, stress
This isn’t really about shaving my legs at all. Mostly, it’s about playing games. The literal kind, that is.
Let’s say you have four people trapped in a house for 22 days. Two of them are adults, one is 16, and one is 8. What games can you play that will entertain everyone? This is a legitimate question, and if you have an answer, please feel free to respond. This shit is hard.
We bought cards on Amazon, because of course we’re having trouble finding ours. I bought three decks, but one of them turned out to be miniature (objects on Amazon may be smaller than they appear). Anyway. My husband watched a video on how to play Hearts, thinking it was a simple game everyone would like. It turned out two of us were having trouble grasping it, and one of them was me. Sometimes I can quickly grasp the most difficult concepts, I swear. I’m generally quick on the uptake. Unfortunately, occasionally my mind looks at something and just thinks, “Nope.” At that point, you can try 50 different ways to teach me the simplest concept, and it’s not going to happen, because my mind has already concluded it’s too hard.
This happened with basic math in second grade. In my defense, I’d been skipped from kindergarten to 2nd because I was already reading at a very advanced level. The great minds who decided to move me ahead neglected to consider that most people learn to add and subtract in first grade (back then, anyway). So when I was placed in 2nd and they were trying to teach me to add and subtract larger numbers and even how to multiply and divide, my mind shut down. It decided I couldn’t deal with math. And I never adopted a different perspective until 11th grade when I was introduced to Geometry, which somehow wasn’t math. It just made sense. These days, I’m mostly okay with math. I do a lot of it for work, and I cope with it just fine. But it took a really long time to come around.
I can’t tell you what triggered me today with Hearts, but it pissed me off. We were going through the game, step by step, but I wasn’t following what was happening and it made me cranky. This in turn frustrated my husband who had only been trying to find a game that worked for all of us. I was getting madder and madder as the game went on, until no one was having fun. The game reached an abrupt conclusion, and I decided I needed a shower. Also, I hadn’t shaved my legs since before quarantine, because why?
Today I shaved them because I was feeling irritable and icky and in the end my hairy legs were contributing to the ickiness. So I shaved and showered, and I feel a tiny bit better. Not completely, but a bit. I still put on leggings because it wasn’t really about what my legs looked like at all, you know? The tiny bit of self-care made me feel somewhat better, and better is good. I’m not shooting for perfection. Getting through right now is sometimes a one minute at a time thing. I’m feeling strung out and emotional and scared, really scared. Every day it feels like there’s another news story about someone approximately my age with no underlying conditions who was still taken out by COVID-19. And it freaks me out. I try not to focus on it, but it’s really hard to ignore, what with the being stuck in the house, spraying down our groceries with bleach mixture, and leaving our mail sit for three days because what if someone infected sneezed on it? The fear is everywhere, and we are all living in it, pretty much every second. So if my brain suddenly decided a card game is incomprehensible, how can I blame it? Maybe it just has nothing left to give right now. Maybe not succumbing to panic is a full-time occupation.
On that note, I’m supposed to watch a video on how to play Rummy with four people. Help.