Back to Coding

I've been working on tutorials and other projects to keep myself in the practice of coding, but lately it's been harder to do it consistently. I think it's because of the pandemic. The news has been getting more dire since Monday, when the number of deaths due to the coronavirus in the U.S. went above 3,000. Today it went up to 6,000. I'm finding it hard to concentrate. I can't help watching the news because I've been a news junkie probably since I first started watching the evening news with my dad when I was a kid, but I think it's taking a toll on me. I've tried to make myself feel better with social time. I tried using the Netflix Party extension in the Chrome browser yesterday so I could watch a show called Locke and Key with my sister Monika, who lives in Seattle. The show itself is all right as a teen-oriented magical reality thriller, but a lot of the fun came from the chat feature on Netflix Party, which let's you chat with other viewers while you watch the show. We made jokes about the scary imagery and characters. That was last night. Today, I only connected with people on Facebook, which is starting to feel insufficient.

I worked out with an hour-long cardio video in the morning. That helped, I think. Strangely, watching an episode of The Handmaid's Tale made me feel better. Watching Elizabeth Moss navigate a dystopian future world controlled by religious fanatics for some reason felt better than the reality that I'm actually living in. I'm by myself in a studio apartment and I'm not supposed to have social contact with people because of a highly contagious plague for which there is no cure. It's like house arrest. It may be that just allowing myself to be in another world for a while was helpful, even a world as awful as Gilead.

After watching the show, I saw on LinkedIn that I got a message from my boot camp instructor, Zane. He was checking in to see how I'm doing. I think that helped. I was eventually able to get back to working on a WordPress tutorial that I had dropped earlier this week. I don't know how much WordPress will help me as a web developer, but progress of any kind feels helpful. I'll work on it more tomorrow. It's not like when Shakepeare was writing King Lear during the plague.

"Day 6: Ben Jonson must have written, like, six plays by now."

What Shakespeare Actually Did During the Plague