The Idleness is Getting to Me; Shopping Trip; A Movie a Day; Tony and WWE; Canadian Consulate Email; Trump & Rush

• My wife Jenny complains that I have not been doing anything during this forced confinement in our apartment. This is not exactly true, for I have been doing a few things that could count as useful like some household chores and cleaning some hithereto neglected parts of the apartment. Truer for her to say that I haven't been doing much. The idleness is getting to me. As I compose this blog entry, I am experiencing an overwhelming feeling of shame. Something is telling me I am a big zero.

• It may well be that the depression I am experiencing now is a converse result of the strange exhiliration I felt yesterday when I walked to a nearby grocery store and did some grocery shopping. It was good to get out of the house, to move about, and to see things for which I could make a report in this blog: The entrance gate to our apartment complex was manned with security guards performing duties related to the virus outbreak. Traffic, whether pedestrian or vehicular, was certainly less than normal but not enough for me to take a photo which I could post in my photo blog showing desertion. The entrance to the Wanda Shopping Mall was manned by security guards with body temperature guns that one could stick in someone's ear. A green light on the gun showed my temperature was fine. In the mall, I went to the basement grocery store. Again, my temperature was checked at the entrance. The shelves were stocked better than I was expecting. There was lots of vegtables and fruits and snacks and drinks, and the stock people were busy re-stocking. I used my smart phone to communicate with Jenny (who was at home tutoring our son Tony) to determine which foodstuffs to buy. I did hear another shopper exclaim "laowai" at my presence. Everyone wore masks. I bought so much that I had a very heavy load to take home. Besides buying vegtables, Jenny had also tasked me with picking up a delivery that had been placed in a courier locker in the basement of the building where she has an office. I decided to walk through the basement parking garage of the mall to get to the lobby where the locker was. It turned out to be a mistake. An entrance that I normally would have taken to get to the lobby was locked which meant I had to backtrack, which wouldn't have been so bad had I not been lugging so much. I took an elevator to get to the main floor of the Mall. I saw that most stores were closed except for Uniqlo and Starbucks. I also found out the hard way that other entrances to the Mall were locked, and that there was then only one open entrance to the Mall which I would have to further backtrack to get through! I was starting to sweat at this point. Eventually, I was able to get to the lobby to pick up the delivery and then go to Jenny's office to pick up a few other things. It was then a long toturous walk back to the apartment complex. A complex security guard, seeing me with a big bag of stuff, thought I was a delivery driver and wanted me to fill out some forms and get a card, before entering. I had to bring out my phone and get Jenny to tell them what I was doing, after which it was "mei shi" from them, and I could go on my way. The trip had me feeling good despite the sweat because I had been able to escape that feeling of being idle and usless.

• I have been watching a movie a day. I have decided to choose my movies based on years. As I compose this entry, I am watching a movie from 1945: The Lost Weekend. The next movie will be from 1946, the next from '47 and so on....

• I downloaded a WWE Royal Rumble for Tony to watch. He is quite taken with it. Even, the women's wrestling (which I find off-putting). I tell him that it is all fake; he seems to find it very funny.

• Got an email from the Canadian Consulate advising Canadians, who are not essential, to leave China by commericial means. The same email then said that most flights to and from China have been cancelled. So, I am stuck here.

• To while away the time, I have been following the saga that is the Trump presidency. I would say that recently, he has had a good few weeks. His brushup with Iran was a win for him. Impeachment seemed to make him more popular and to make the impeachers look ridiculous and petty. His SOTU speech showed him to be defiantly optimistic while it showed his opponents to be juvenille. His awarding of the Medal of Freedom, during the speech, to Rush Limbaugh brought tears to my eyes. Rush changed the way I looked at the world. If it wasn't for him I would probably still be of the progressive mindset. From Rush, I was able to encounter so much in the intellecutal sphere like Hayek, Thomas Sowell, CS Lewis, TS Eliot, David Warren, the Z-man, Roger Scruton, to name but a few. Trump did a good thing, a very good thing, in awarding him that medal.

  
  

  AKIC email:  andiskaulins@hotmail.com