Because confinement is not easy

(Note : I am writing this in Mac OS text editor, so I am really avoiding the shit out of quotation marks and apostrophes because the ones it forces on me do not play well when posted into nano. I might have a lot of time, but I have zero time to be hunting down crappy punctuation.)

In France we have had a pretty long stretch at being confined, mainly because a bunch of self righteous assholes forget the whole fraternité part and don’t seem to take their social responsibilities too seriously.

Which leads to travel restrictions since February and a curfew that has been in place so long I can’t remember when it actually started.

So far I think I have managed to avoid most of the problematic parts of being at home for five to six days at a time. Granted I have had some serious mood swings, but I put that down to trying to reduce how much I am smoking, because at the hight of the initial set of lockdowns I was hoofing them down out of boredom.

Well, that’s of course what I thought until today. You see I got bored as usual, so went dragging up content from a collection of streaming sites to fill the time.

This was my first mistake, because dear readers, when you’ll watch anything, you’re going to expose yourself to the content you don’t really need in your space at that time.

If you have not watched an LGBT romance film, you will have no idea that they do not always end in a positive note, contrary to the cis het versions where it is all bubbly and happy to the end. Because that is more how life is, it ends badly, like enjoying your social life, and then being locked in your apartment for over a year on and off.

This is the key part here, as you see, it transpires other than having really vivid dreams all the time, one other side effect of all this social disconnection is that my emotions are quite frankly fucked and it does not take too much to really go the wrong direction.

Normally, I would be able to watch a sad film and at the end of it be like, well that was sad and move on. What is happening right now is that the end of the film lingers until you are making a pizza and start crying because one of the characters picked a terrible decision and the credits rolled.

I was not ready for that at all

Totally expected the weight gain from stuffing my face and rolling in and out of bed, but did not see this coming at me like a barreling train on fire AND ME NO LIKEY.

While I can not really change the conditions of our curfew, what other people do, and the fact that 10km from me in any direction doth not include a sea, I can mitigate the effects.

One thing I started pretty early was not to drink during confinement, I did a few video drinks, got a bit drunk, and when you close your laptop it is a touch too depressing being drunk and alone in the dark. So we said good bye to that rather sharpish.

Now I just need to make sure I keep my boredom viewing a bit light and spend a bit more time with Kaja, even though she fucking well cut my face up last night when she decided she was not happy with the position she got herself into while I was sleeping (and I am to blame for obviously).

Really, I think if she was not around I probably would have gone clinically insane. Having another living creature, albeit a small hate filled fluff ball, does cut out the loneliness part. It kind of also helps that she’s a very vocal cat (as in she miaows a lot, not that I hear voices come from her as this would be schizophrenia), so when I talk to her I do get a reaction back, we play, and she will come sliding into bed to watch a film.

Of course, what she is actually doing is profiting off that body heat, for she is a cat after all and that is what they do, but it is beneficial to us both.

I really hope that Macron can get his governments shit together and move on with the vaccination programme, because really that is the only thing that is going to make a difference. I can live without going outside the country, but it would be nice to at least be able to go to the other end of this one (and not write a huge blog post about my decent into losing my mind).

Watch list

If ye be interested, here are some films I did enjoy (VOST = Version originale sous-titrée / Original subtitled version)

• Confessions (VOST EN / FR)
• Confessions, le testament de l'amour (VOST EN / FR)
• Confessions, l'état de grâce (VOST EN / FR)
• Alors ça ! (VOST EN / FR)
• Holding Trevor (EN)
• Shelter (EN)
• Donald Strachey Mystery : Third Man Out (EN)
• Donald Strachey Mystery : Shock to the System (EN)
• Donald Strachey Mystery : On the Other Hand, Death (EN)
• Donald Strachey Mystery : Ice Blues (EN)

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