One thing I know about myself is that if I don’t have work to do, I’m not terribly productive in any other facet of my life, either. The pandemic is making things slightly worse in that not only am I not productive in the things I could or should be doing (cleaning the apartment, writing fiction, learning the piano), I’ve got nowhere to go if I wanted to be nonproductive, either. Apparently there’s a lot of this going around.

I’ll have work to do soon enough: Customer A has a whole raft of tasks for me in June, and Customer B will be handing something off to me on tomorrow, which will consume most of next week. In the meantime? If I had crickets in the neighborhood, they would make more noise than the neighborhood.

Not sure if any of this is good or bad, it just is.

Fortunately, this slothful state of mind disappears pretty quickly once the work does come in. All I know is that I’m happier when I’ve got things to do and people to see and places to go. Right now, I can depend on only the first of those three, and then only sporadically. The rest of the time? Sloth.

You might be in the same boat. I won’t yell at you for not writing the Great American Novel/Screenplay. A lot of us are just in this state of living that’s not quite living. What are you supposed to do with yourself in a period of enforced tranquility? I don’t know, either, but I can’t say I’ve been doing as much as I could. Is that bad?

No, brothers and sisters, it’s just what is. For now. Don’t scold yourself, there are plenty of  people on the internet screaming about this or that behavior anyhow. Just try to be your best self, for you and others around you. There are worse things you could do.