Keeping My Head Above Water

Since Covid-19 started the main issue I found myself struggling with on a daily basis was the idea of keeping motivated during a time where my motivation was nonexistent. At the beginning of lock-down, the world around me felt dull. Days mixed with others days creating one big clusterfuck of a year, making it hard to even distinguish one month from another. For all I knew summer had never happened, and it had just been a continuous cycle of the winter season from February until now. I was indoors wondering what the hell to do with my time. The future was so unclear and it was hard to even think of the years before the pandemic. All these goals and plans I had thought of before the new year all began to fade away as soon as 2020 began, before they could even be explored.

Things I took for granted are now so apparent. It’s odd to watch videos from the past years and see groups of people together at concerts or award shows. I definitely miss the small things, like walking around our Okanagan campus with my friends, heading to Tim Horton’s before our classes started, and chatting about our upcoming assignments or our recent horrendous customers we had encountered at work. Life changed so rapidly it was almost hard to keep up, as one day I was with my best friend planning a trip to Las Vegas for my 21^st birthday, and the next thing I knew everything was locked down and she had to rush back home to Australia before all airports closed.

It’s hard to do anything productive or fun these days without feeling like everything is pointless, but after months of staring at my ceiling wondering where my future was headed, I slowly began to get restless and looked for an escape of reality.

Painting

If I was a person who did drugs, I’d be super high all day every day, but I’m not, so I turned to other things like art to keep me company.

I sucked at art in high school, I’m not particularly good at drawing and I feel like I can never get any proper proportions right when drawing people. I had ideas in my mind of what I’d want the piece to look like but could never replicate that same exact image onto paper, thus discouraging me from even trying to create any form of art. Though after watching many YouTube videos on people doing painting at home, and now being a grown adult stuck indoors for days on end, I decided to give it a try again.

Painting to me feels more forgiving than drawing, and if I don’t like something I can either wash it away with water or paint over it. Though it is time consuming and you need to wait between each layer for the piece to dry, it gives me something to look forward to throughout the day.

 

My paintings are definitely mediocre at best, but I do enjoy making them and am happy to display them in my room. It helps me express myself and I like creating abstract pieces as well as pieces inspired by other artists. I never knew that I’d be able to find my own style when it came to painting, but it developed pretty soon after I started. It will be interesting to track my progress and see how much my art style changes as time changes too.

I hope you as a reader are also inspired to start something you’ve been really wanting to try this quarantine, whether it is painting, sewing or learning an instrument! I encourage you to set some time away to do something new, something that makes you feel accomplished and genuinely happy!

Music

With the creations of art and a desperate need for inspiration came discoveries of new music genres. I began listening to hour long lo-fi playlists on YouTube as they helped calm my mind while simultaneously creating an atmosphere that helped my creative juices flow. Usually these videos contain different compilations of lo-fi music, which are mixed with chillwave and hypnagogic pop music. Depending on my mood I usually switch between mostly two kinds of aesthetic lo-fi styles.

The first style is a more soft and dreamier aesthetic melody, which reminds me of a stary night sky, where you the listener are bundled in a blanket drinking a hot cup of lemon tea and pondering about life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qku9aoUlTXA

 

Cotton Candy Bunnies

My eyes twinkle at dawn,

The pounding in my skull ceases.

Soil itself lays in a flower bed beyond,

 

As thoughts fall to puzzle pieces,

The clouds that reflect animals in a pond.

A starlight beams footprint increases,

 

Ideas dribble down till all facet water is gone,

Oozing from my mind like a glue adhesive.

The citron taste begins to tickle my bitter mouth,

And the traffic comes to a halt.

 

The other style is more instrumental and jazz-like, with beats that give me café vibes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbuZfY2S2UQ

Its almost nostalgic to me in a way, and reminds me of the time when I went to South Korea with my cousin for a month-long vacation before the world was shutdown. We went to a popular coffeehouse chain called “A Twosome Place”, just because the name had seemed rather funny to us at the time, and we sat in that dimly lit cafe eating cheesecake and drinking overpriced lattes. We laughing about everything and nothing, and at the time the thought of a pandemic plaguing the world seemed like an unlikely event. Now I miss her more than anything, but am patiently looking forward to those days when I can see her again, once the pandemic comes to an end.

Video Games

Video games are a hobby which I had before, but the hours I spent playing them definitely increased quickly once the pandemic started. More particularly, I became addicted to a now very popular game called Animal Crossing New Horizons. This game, which is played on the Nintendo switch, seemed to consume the gaming community right away, and was one of Nintendo’s top selling games in March, right when lock-down started. I have currently logged in more than 600 hours in the game which is about 25 days of straight game-play. I’m not proud of my obsession, but at the same time I am not not proud either.

Basically, here is a short summary of the game for those who don’t know what Animal Crossing is. You create a character and inhabit an island with a bunch of animals on it. The island follows whichever time zone you are in, so when its 1pm in the afternoon in real life, it is 1pm in the game too. These animals can become your friends if you talk to them daily, and they will give you gifts or items to craft. You can also decorate and transformer your island into whatever you’d like as well as collect fossils and paintings, and catch seasonal fish and bugs. You can also visit your friend’s islands and send them menacing letters in the mail, which is pretty hilarious! The game play itself is very wholesome, and as someone who has played the earlier versions of the game when it came out on the Nintendo GameCube in the year 2000, the whole series is very nostalgic to me and brings back warm and fuzzy feelings.

The images above show pictures of my island, Mochi! In 2020 I would count creating an island a form of artistic expression now as every tiny detail is planned out and every island is unique to their players aesthetics! When you start the game all that you are surrounded by are trees, rocks and a whole lot of land. This game gave me a platform to be creative in, and was a nice escape from the reality of what was going on in the real world. It will continue to be my beckon of light in stressful times.

Keeping My Head High

People around me continue to loose their jobs and businesses all across the country are being shut down. People are protesting, screaming at others for wearing a mask, calling them ‘sheep’ for following government mandated rules. Others fear for their lives as they live with compromised immune systems, praying for people to listen and put others before themselves. People are calling everything ‘fake’ or a ‘hox’, and pointing fingers at anyone who disagrees with them.

Its exhausting and tiring keeping up with all the bad news, not to mention stressful and not good for anyone’s mental health. The world honestly feels like its been flipped upside-down and as the year comes to a close, all we can really hope for is a vaccine for Covid-19 in the new year.

To make sure things get resolved quickly, please just follow the rules of our government and be kind to yourself and others, especially essential service workers who are constantly being heckled by others for just doing their jobs. Take up some old or new hobbies, discover some rad music and know that nothing is ever permanent. Motivation is hard to find at a time like this, but taking things one step at a time is the key. I wish you all a Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year.