Five on Friday: Getting Better

While the world outside is struggling to get better, we are hunkering down at home trying to stay healthy . . . and, I realized, it's a great time to perhaps try to "get better" at certain things. 

Of course I'm not the first one to think of this and the attitude has been met with some well-founded criticism: no one should be made to feel  guilty about not, for example, getting in better physical shape right now if that is just too hard to do while coping with the anxiety of COVID-19.

There are a few things I thought I'd be doing during this time that I'm not. Some of it I have no interest in, some of it I just cannot get involved with because I didn't anticipate how much time and energy I would need to use on getting my kids (fine, mainly one kid in particular) through their school days.

However, I am a person that really likes feeling useful and staying busy so I am trying to balance that with not asking too much of myself right now. So here is my completely honest list of things I'm getting better at during the quarantine:

1. SLEEPING IN I am a notoriously early riser. Back in the days of going to parties that started at 10pm and ended when decent people were getting up for work, I'd crash at the same time as my roommates but then wake up HOURS before them.

Over the past three weeks, I have been really trying to just close my eyes and stay in bed longer. Historically that hasn't worked but I guess since there's nothing that needs to get done, no schedule . . . it's making it easier to stay in bed and sometimes even fall back to sleep. I even slept in--get this--to 7:40 one day!!

2. MAKING PASTA FROM SCRATCH  I guess I've been finding some real solace in cooking lately because I am doing it non-stop. I've come to enjoy an almost meditative quality to pasta making:

 3.  WATCHING SOMETHING ON NETFLIX THAT EVERYONE ELSE HAS BEEN TALKING ABOUT I'm not a big watcher of shows. I never have been and as a result I have always missed a lot of pop culture references. But I watched Tiger King! And now I understand those memes.

4. FINDING CREATIVE WAYS TO STAY CONNECTED I have participated in some Zoom happy hours and one 21st Birthday celebration. I also went to the grocery store at the same time as my BFF and we loudly conversed with each other from the opposite sides of the at least six-feet-wide produce tables.

5. WRITING A PERSUASIVE PARAGRAPH In an attempt to get my child to write a decent persuasive paragraph, I had to write both a bad one (similar to what she wrote) and a great one. 

When presented with the two, she insisted that the bad one was actually the one she liked better. Of course. She then refused to rewrite her own paragraph that was supposed to convince me to let her get a Fennec fox as a pet unless I wrote one explaining why we could not.

I'm not trying to brag or anything, but my paragraph was so good that she decided she didn't want a Fennec fox after all!!

She says she works better in the plastic bunny glasses.

EPILOGUE: She then stopped complaining, sat down and wrote a letter outlining why we should get a lizard as a pet . . . and it was an excellent paragraph, but the answer is still no.