It turns out that my lifelong dream of just staying home, watching TV, and playing video games all day came with kind of a “monkey’s paw” vibe to it.

Life moves in slow motion now, and a mental schism is occurring in Kat and I. Here, at our home, things are fine. More boring than we’d like, sure, but we’re healthy. I’m working from home. Kat is still on paid leave. We have food, a roof over our heads, power, water, a barky-ass dog, all the trappings of our regular lives. We even have our health, for the moment.

But looking at any news source reveals that everything outside our little house seems fucked. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world have died, and millions more are fighting for their lives. Economies are collapsing. Supply chains are disrupted. People are eulogizing their loved ones on Twitter because they can’t gather in a group to mourn.

But outside the birds are still chirping and the sun is shining.

It’s surreal.

So after spending most of my adult life coming up with excuses to avoid hanging out, I’m starved for human contact. It also turns out that I’m heavily dependent on the outside world for excuses to procrastinate.

“If I only had the time!” I used to say, before I had nothing but time. But now here I am, time on my hands, and it took me like four hours just to write this.

I miss pretending to be too busy to do the stuff I’d rather be doing.