Stir crazy

I keep thinking this must be the most luxurious quarantine ever -- a comfortable house, heating and plumbing all working fine, an enormous amount of food, fast internet, phones, lots of books and movies and games, the two cats to play with (and clean up after), the twins to play with (and clean up after), a nice neighborhood to walk in (as long as you don't go near your neighbors), a functioning car to drive to the functioning grocery store (but not too often), nothing I need to be doing and nowhere I need to be going.

So what's the problem? Why am I losing my mind? I'm not that social of a person. I don't think it's that I desperately want to be in a large group or go up to people and hug them.

I think it's the feeling of being stuck in time. The feeling that I can't do anything except wait for it to be over. I mean, there are things I could do. I could work in the garden (on non-snowy days). I could write a novel, or a poem, or my memoirs. I could clean the house from top to bottom (ha ha). I could sew something (the hospitals are saying they don't want hand-sewn masks after all, but I could make a tablecloth or a pillow). I could teach the twins to cook. There are all kinds of things I could be doing, but what I WANT is for time to come unstuck and move forward again.

Actually, time IS moving forward and that's part of the problem. Think of all the high school & college seniors who don't get to go through commencement, or prom (my high school didn't have a prom, but I understand it's important to many people). All the spring festivals and events have been cancelled or postponed. The friggin' Olympics have been postponed by a year. In other words, the year is happening, but we don't get to be part of it. We're just watching it go by.

This past week, the official Spring Break, I tried to get the twins to do things. Each day (Monday through Friday) I announced that we were going to travel somewhere different, and we did so, virtually. Monday we went to two museums online (the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and the Houston Space Center), Tuesday we used Google Earth to visit beaches around the world, Wednesday we went to Nebraska and learned about sandhill cranes, Thursday we went to San Francisco and learned about cable cars and the Japanese Tea Garden, and Friday we went to Steamboat Springs and Aspen to go skiing. The experience got worse and worse as the week went on, and by Friday I could hardly get them to do anything. Probably the best parts were a Facetime call with Aunt Baba on Thursday and our Corn Crib sundae treat on Wednesday.

We were doing this little exercise partly to have SOMETHING to do other than play video games all day long every day, and partly to have something to enter into a spreadsheet Rocket Boy created to force the twins to do something other than play video games all day long every day. He wants them to be interested in other things besides video games, and I do too, I do too, but I don't have a lot of hope. He still has hope, but his hope requires ME to do things, like force the twins to look at websites and then write down what they learned from them.

It was just not fun.

I'm expecting that things will be different (perhaps worse) starting Monday, because that's when the twins go "back to school," all online of course. Oh, the horror, the horror. I printed out their schedules -- this one is for Monday, when they "attend" all their classes. The other days are "block days," with periods 1, 3, 5, and 7 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and periods 2, 4, and 6 on Wednesdays and Fridays (for 60 minutes each, rather than 30). You know what this is going to mean, right? At least at first? It means I'm going to have to sit with them from 9 am to 2 pm, "encouraging" them to read their daily assignments and then complete them, "encouraging" them not to scream at each other, "encouraging" them not to play video games during Language Arts.

Rocket Boy was saying the other day that it was too bad I didn't apply for a Census job a few months ago, because then I'd have something to do now. "I have something to do," I told him, wondering how husbands can be so clueless. "I have to make the twins go to virtual school! Do you think they'd actually do that if I weren't here???"

I am hoping that they will get used to the routine and I won't have to be so intimately involved the whole time. But I suspect that I will have to be very intimately involved the entire time. My children are not like me -- or their father. Both of us were "that kid," the one who did extra work, the one who couldn't wait for homework to be assigned. I was always reading, and I did math problems for fun. Rocket Boy did science experiments and almost blew (this) house up. Even if there had been TikTok back then, I don't think I would have been on it all the time. But I don't know. It's really hard to compare then with now.

The brightest spot in our quarantined days is our daily, socially-distanced walks to the park/school, the playground of which is now wreathed in caution tape. But they haven't cordoned off the gaga ball pit, nor the basketball hoops, so we always have plenty to do. We found a frisbee on the school grounds one day and brought it home with us because it was such an excellent frisbee that we didn't want to risk losing it. So every day (if the weather's good, unlike yesterday) we walk to the school/park and play frisbee, basketball, and/or gaga ball, usually all three. For the latter two games we use a white soccer ball that just always seems to be somewhere on the grounds. I know it could have germs, but I think most people just kick it around (unlike us). One of these days it will be gone, but so far we've always been able to find it. A small pleasure in these very strange days.