Hello there! - The Antibland Chronicles

I am coming back to you after a long pause. I wish you all have been well? yes?

Some of my absence had to do with just taking a break and enjoying the last days of summer vacation with my kids.

But some has also stemmed from anxiety of living in this world which increasingly seems to be going to hell. The droughts, the fires, the virus, the killing. I don’t know how to handle so much bad news all the time.

A lot of it is happening far far away from where I am, but I still can’t stop thinking about it every time I walk out to water my garden, or wipe the stinging sunscreen from my sweaty brows, or when I feed my kids, of when I use the bathroom. All the things that are mindless and simple, but denied to so many people.

I have used cleaning, organizing, and home furnishing as a distraction. We finally have a dining table (but no chairs yet). There is a wallpaper coming my way. There are a couple of new rugs. Some new placement of furniture pieces. Some new ideas for art work.

At any given time, my home décor pendulum swings from maximalist (when I am looking through magazines, Pinterest, and blogs) to minimalist (when I actually go to stores and see how much things cost). Turns out I don’t like the idea of it taking $22,000 to furnish my living room as suggested by one of the design professionals. At the end of the day, I’d rather use my $$$ to travel turns out.

There are also two new cookbooks in my bookshelf. I haven’t cooked from either of them yet (ha!) but I see the “doing” in my near future. I have also been eating some radish and butter mini sandwiches with a sprinkle of salt. From what I can tell this is not a thing yet, but it needs to be!!

Another new thing I have been doing (to manage some of the said anxiety about the world going to hell) is being more mindful about things I use – like electricity. While this may not make any difference in the scheme of things, I have started air drying my laundry. When I do it outside, the NC sun takes about an hour at most to dry everything. When I do it inside, it is an overnight thing. Either way, I like it. Air dried clothes feel a little crunchy at first, but that seems to go away as soon as you put them on.

Oh, and did I tell you that I am starting a 2-month work project in mid-September? It’s in finance and banking – my old stomping grounds. I suppose I am getting my feet wet to see if going back to work full-time is something I can handle at this time. Ari will go to daycare for those 8 weeks. There is a lot involved in sending a child this age to daycare turns out. We had a nanny when Asha was under 1 and then Arjun and Ajay didn’t start daycare till after they were 15-months-old. So in a way I haven’t done this before! Piling on my anxiety, aren’t I? Having said that, I am still happy to focus on work-work and use a part of my brain that seems to have gone dormant since COVID-19.