Saturday, August 8, 2020

I wake up without an alarm clock, right on time to go to work. This isn’t a workday. Usually, on Saturdays, I sleep until the crack of noon. Now, I’m up. I decide not to fight wakefulness. I immediately shower. I didn’t yesterday. In this humidity, that was a bad idea. When I emerge, I stare at my closet and try to figure out what to put on. I choose a plain white t-shirt. I rarely wear it, since it has a few stains that I can’t get out. No one will see me today, though, so it’s OK. I make my usual breakfast and sit down at the computer. I have things to do, but I wander around social media. At about 11 AM, I doze off in my chair. When I wake up, I drag myself to my bed, where I sleep for another few hours. In the early afternoon, I make lunch. I have had some eggs in the refrigerator for so long that I don’t recall getting them. I crack them open. They’re still good. I started a new loaf of bread yesterday, but I still have the heel of the previous one. Loaves with odd numbers of slices annoy me. I eat a lot of sandwiches, so I use the slices in pairs. After lunch, I finally get back to writing a program for a personal project. I’m not all that good at programming. I have trouble remembering commands and the order of arguments, even though I’ve been using the same language for some 25 years. I look everything up. I move slowly, debugging small things before I fit them into larger ones. I made my living as a programmer in the 90s. It helped that I had found a useful niche. I was glad to stop programming for a living and to work in a bookstore. Now I work at a desk again. It pays. In the evening, I have my usual Saturday video chat. I hold my phone so that it doesn’t show the stains on my t-shirt. Afterwards, I try to wrap things up and get to sleep. Even though I’ll spend tomorrow in the same room at the same desk where I’m sitting today, it’s a work day. If I have any video chats for work, I’ll have to look awake and wear a clean shirt.