Things I'm trying [really hard] avoid, #Pandemic edition: a List

- Overwatering my plants (I’m a Cancer, I heart water, and also? Yeah yeah: I've been known to "smother")

- Underestimating the power of a twenty-minute walk*

- *[After stricter stay indoors orders] Underestimating the power of a twenty-minute meditation/nap/session of just deliberately *breathing...*

refrigerated tents as emergency morgues, Central Park, New York City

- Retail-Therapy [particularly the buying of even more plants…]

- Comparing the quality/productivity/optimism of my pandemic experience to other people’s projected pandemic experience on the internet

- Despair

- Watching Tiger King on Netflix

- [UPDATE: 24 hours later] …talking about anything other than Tiger King on Netflix

- Giving up or giving in.

truck-refrigerators: emergency morgues for the surplus dead of New York City 

- “Letting myself go” and getting used to being THIS level of consistently “un-groomed” [AKA: cave person]

- Watching the bombastic, biased, calamity-click-baiting news. Like at all.

- The feeling that I have to “do” anything.

Brooklyn hospital, April 4, 2020

- The feeling that I have to “use this time” to write the next great novel / get in the best shape of my life / finally learn Mandarin, and if I don’t, I am a huge pandemic loser

- Negative self-talk

- Crazy-lady-screaming at people on the street who are not properly observing mask-guidelines and adequate social distancing

- A creeping sense of impending doom

- Listening to the voice that says, go ahead, al, fall into that dark, downward spiral…

- Panicking

the newly renovated Javitts Center converted to 2500-bed emergency hospital