Sam's Sanity Diary

So I've been tracking my moods. The day after I wrote the last post, I felt a bit better. And then the two days after that, I felt kind of listless and drifted for 2 days, barely getting the daily chores done. Now I'm bored and really tempted to install Age of Empires 2, The Definitive Edition. I am so close to doing it. But I did say one of my goals this week is to increase my attention span, and I did say I would do that by enduring the boredom. So maybe the cause of the higher number of bad days this week isn't really depression but more like boredom because I am forcing myself to have less distractions. Maybe it is just a side-effect of this transition. Maybe laziness, depression and having a short-attention span are all just interrelated, if not the same thing.

I'm going to be honest with you. I don't think I am handling this lockdown very well. Remember when the first one hit, 14 months ago, and everyone was doing online yoga and making sourdough bread, and sharing pictures of their meals? I felt so alive then. I was actually telling myself that if I could just figure out something new to do, I could go back to feeling like that. But I'm just not feeling it. Not right now, anyway. Right now, it feels like the opposite of that.  Maybe this is the lowest point. But not really. Not in reality. In reality, my problems are miniscule. If having problems was a sport, I'd be a spectator. But the feelings must come from somewhere. I keep thinking, maybe if I was smarter or dumber, I can figure out how good things actually are, and I would feel better. And then I just tell myself, "Hang in there. Tomorrow will be better." But that's also what I say to people when I can't think of anything else to say. I said it yester...

I need to remember what I did this week, so I don't feel like I just wasted another week of my ever-shortening life. I hosted an online mic on Thursday. I streamed a comedian chat on Friday. I spent exactly 1 day watching Tony Hinchcliffe videos on Youtube to determine if I liked him as a person (I don't). I spent 2 days in bed recovering from food poisoning, and 2 days recovering from backache. I watched The Dig on Netflix. I cried at the part where the kid was upset about his mom dying. I started watching Dr.K on Youtube again. I'm not sure if I did it to try and figure out some of my problems or to just distract myself from them. Maybe a bit of both. I started reading Pride and Prejudice. It's really well written, but it's slow going for me. I'm hoping that as my attention span increases, my reading speed will too. Dr. K said the best way to increase your attention span is to force yourself to do nothing when you're bored. That sounds horrifying. I'll...

(image by Fahmi Reza. https://linktr.ee/kuasasiswa) I might be biting off more than I can chew here. We're under lockdown again and I think I want to make use of the clarity of mind that I get from writing to figure out what I want to achieve during this lockdown. And to figure that out, I might need to figure out what I want in life. Right now, one thing is for certain. I want to clear out my living room, so that we can watch television together. It's just a mess right now and I am overwhelmed by it and I know a lot of the stuff in there right now would have to go back into the workshop/streaming cave which means I have to clear out the clutter in there as well. But whenever I try to do it, I find it hard to throw anything out. I guess I'm just as much a hoarder as everyone else. But I've moved this to the top of my list. As mundane as it sounds, I want to watch television with my wife and son because that might be the only activity we all have in common right now. Yea...

The one thing that has been on every Malaysian's mind this weekend was the talk about an imminent lockdown. Because the Health Ministry went public and announced that they recommended lockdowns in areas with high numbers of new cases. So yesterday, the government finally announced that there will be a lockdown in 6 districts in Selangor. Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya, which are surrounded by the 6 districts are still not under lockdown, which seems kind of silly. We know that people travel freely between all these places, so it's not like Kuala Lumpur has fewer cases. I guess the government is either worried about impacting the economy or losing votes. Anyhow, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I think this is a very lenient lockdown that isn't going to do a whole lot to bring the number of cases back under control. But on the other hand, on a selfish side, I do feel a bit relieved because I live in Kuala Lumpur, and the two comedy clubs are in Kuala Lumpur and the c...