Of Swans, Lights and a Plastic Bottle

It is not even 10 am and I have already made a bean soup and managed to yell at my kids when they argued for a piece of cheese (like it is the last cheese on earth) and in the aftermath of my yelling they broke a saucer which made me break all accords of good-dad-behavior. Not the best start of the day – kind of out of my equilibrium right now. Very similarly to two days ago when I was watching the beautiful group of swans that are hanging out across our building

 in the Ljubljanica river and noticed a guy stop a car in the parking lot, get out, empty a plastic bottle of some liquid and then throwing the bottle nonchalantly on a patch of grass while a garbage bin was about 5 meters away from him. This guy is the prime example that the Mathew McConaughey monologue on the “human ability of consciousness is the great mistake of nature” in the True Detective might as well be true. Seems I get a lot of out-of-equilibrium moments these days and I am not sure if it is the 4 week confinement due to Covid-19 measures or maybe it is the kids that are affected by their home-school situation and I am just the collateral damage or we all suffer from “the-same-day-in-day-out” syndrome and we are trying to make things interesting by arguing and breaking dishes and wanting to push the empty plastic bottle where it does not shine for that obnoxious character of a man.

In truth I am enjoying these moments where we get to spend a lot of time together, but maybe we have finally come to an impasse where too much good is maybe not very good any more and we need some break. Therefore, maybe it is a good thing that tomorrow I start working (from home) again. Hoping this will give us a break from each other that we need. I know that I will be missing them as soon as I start working.

Weeks are going by, black Friday and digital Monday have come and gone – and they have been extended until next Saturday, thus turning them into Black week and Cyber Monday-to-Saturday, my Steam library is too full of new games (no such thing as a “too full” Steam, I am writing this just to prove to my wife I have not lost my mind completely) that I will not have time to play (oh, no, wait, I will have time to play, it is Covid after all…silly me), while Trump is still clinging to his “victory” and “fraud” speeches, our “local girl” Melania decorated the White House with Christmas decorations despite stating a few months back that “who gives a fuck about the Christmas stuff and decorations”, our (Slovenian) government is trying to navigate between Covid outbreak measures and the prime minister´s continuing Tweet outburst (which is giving Slovenia a lot of international publicity, but in this case the proverb “any publicity is good publicity” does not apply no matter how much our prime minister decides to stick to his congratulations to Trump for his “election victory” which did not happen). And I have started to miss the company of my friends – which basically means that this has been going on too long. But IT IS necessary as the numbers are still mind-blowing – we have, in fact, gotten so used to the high numbers, that we are seeing improvement when the ration of daily infected comes close to the 20% margin. Before the second wave of outbreaks we were nervous when that number came close to 5% or 100 daily infections, when now it is standard to have more than 1 thousand. So, we will just have to hang on and keep on doing what we are doing – and I don´t mean internet shopping. I mean walks and to enjoy the freedoms that we do have now. Despite my ramblings and this morning yelling (and yelling yesterday) we are having a good time, doing fantastic walks inside our municipality and enjoying our home entertainment that we have loads of.

We even managed to get our asses of the couch on Saturday evening to check out the Christmas lights in the city center.

And I have pushed our kids to do one walk a day at least – the best motivation is the feeding of cats and swans along the way – or I tell them a story about the book I am reading The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and I hope that like a ta´veren (a person around whom the wheel of time weaves itself – basically a center of attention AKA a drama queen AKA BIG DADDY AKA me) I will be able to influence a change in the mood in them.