100 Words, education, Gatherings, Health, home, Media, Uncategorized

Staying Home

31 Comments

Perhaps I’m odd. Perhaps my early years as an only child enhanced my ability to entertain myself. Perhaps I have forgotten what it was like to be young.  I just can’t understand why people are having such a hard time staying at home.

I see in my Facebook feed challenges to live for  a couple of months off the grid in a remote cabin, and winning a bunch of money. Heck, we have all sorts of entertainment in our living spaces, yet people continue to crowd into bars and large parties.

My  question for the Baboons today is:

Why is it so hard to stay home?  What would you include in a tutorial that would help people stay put?  How would you manage in a remote cabin off the grid for a couple of months?

31 thoughts on “Staying Home”

  1. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    Renee, this is a question that I also have been pondering, along with its companion question, “why can’t people wear a mask?” My conclusion is that many more people than we ever realized, have mask phobias or staying home phobias. And then there must be some alcoholism playing a role in the need for bars. (Cognitive Behavior Therapy statement follows). You pair the reinforcement of alcohol with someone’s need for socializing and the reinforcement of finding other people in a bar, and you get a powerfully established behavior that is difficult to extinguish.

    There. That is my psychology-speak for the day.

    If I had a remote cabin in the woods for several months (assume electricity and internet access) , I would probably be doing the same thing I am doing here at home—scanning family history documents into a digital library. Baking and canning jam and tomato soup would also play a role, but I do that at home, too. So I will save the rent money for the cabin and stay here. And I am planning several posts about the stuff I have found in all this.

    My biggest challenge has been groceries. I have said before that I like to pick out my own fresh produce, and I am not satisfied with what arrives with services that deliver or where I pick up what others have chosen. I have also watched Target and Byerly’s staff putting together these orders—usually teenagers with questionable hygiene habits and a mask that droops and appears ineffective. I really think I am better off in my mask and face shield getting in and out quickly. 🍌(Mark o’ the Baboon)

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  2. That need to socialize thing is much more real than I had imagined. I am taking advantage of the summer weather where we are able to more safely gather with friends, and right now I am going out several times a week – but the only place I’ll go indoors is for groceries.

    A cabin in the woods or (the country) used to sound so lovely, but when I come down to it, I realized I’m too socially dependent. If I was isolated there, though, I’d have to get to know the critters – I find much healing comes from paying attention to other animals, getting to know their movements and habits… it’s refreshing to interact with something besides humans, esp. after listening to a newscast.

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  3. i get concerned about people’s ability to occupy their minds today.
    do much input it shuts out the stuff you create in self time.
    i find driving if i leave the radio off i get more done in my brain. it’s easy to knock out another 30 minutes of the current audiobook and pleasurable to listen to pandora play my favorite music or listen to a podcast about all the items i have in my stash but i find if i need to get something off my to do list i’d better just get to it
    walks through the woods without the phone doing a playback in my ear are a different experience than ones that have my chosen stream of input.
    painting drawing writing guitar piano a new accordion books tapes mechanical tinkering woodworking learning a new thing like coding or albanian would be good. i need to find time to do all the things i would like to do and decide which get plugged in
    a month or two off grid would be an interesting study wouldn’t it
    i’m wondering what’s going to take priority in a month when i no longer have to run out to my warehouse anymore.
    my business is going to be part of it mostly online with emails in the morning and at night with the details plugged in during the day but i’m guessing i will be able to do more me stuff
    looking forward to it
    my old band reformed after a 50 year hiatus and i’m looking forward to learning how to play with a guy in seattle a guy in houston and one in minneapolis all without meeting in person
    saxophone trumpet and trombone along with guitar piano and accordion will be easier via online input than live until i get the hang of it

    wearing a mask is a must but i can only do it in small doses or i get a headache recycling my own air
    i have never been able to wear gloves. i get claustrophobia. same with tight clothes and stocking caps,
    me and howard hughes like drawstring panama pants and i think my ability to survive in a cabin off the grid would be a great experience
    give me some solar and wind and an axe for splitting firewood a set of speakers a stack of books and some art supplies and check back in january or february

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  5. I’d LOVE to get off the grid and live away from civilization. So much simpler and less stressful . . . in a way. Stress in the wild would come from making sure your basic needs are assured, worrying about getting emergency health care if needed, and watching out for varmints, etc.

    But the self imposed stress of dealing with people, politics, real/fake news, all the world’s bad news that media loves to dump on us to make us feel guilty about not doing enough or anything to help, and other modern life issues would vaporize. All that is negative stress.

    Living alone and isolated would be positive stress to me. I may not be able to handle it for the rest of my life, but I could give it a good run for the next ten years or so. Now, I only need to convince my wife to join me. 🙂

    Chris in Owatonna

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    1. off the grid is simply no electric gas hook up
      news and telephone can be done off the grid

      if you want to stop the news you don’t need to go off the grid just shut off the damn news

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      1. I guess I meant move to a remote location for the social isolation as well. I rarely watch TV news. Only look at headlines on the internet and listen to MPR a little bit every day. I find my smalltown, 4-days-per-week local paper much more interesting than national/international news. Most of that’s too depressing and beyond my control or influence..

        Chris

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  6. I think I’d be pretty cool about it, but likely there would be things I’d miss being away from home. It would be nice to do some creative activities, maybe collage or mosaicing or making jewelry, or building birdhouses and stuff, but I imagine I wouldn’t have the right tools and materials consistently. As opposed to being at home, where I have the right tools and materials, but can’t find them consistently.

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  7. Although there are technological work-arounds, I assume a cabin off the grid means one without a connection to the internet and perhaps even one without electricity. Add in electricity and an internet connection and the cabin wouldn’t be substantially different from sequestering at home. A lot would depend on what you could bring with you for a two months isolation. With enough food and art supplies and books I could do it even without an internet connection.

    The difference between being isolated in a cabin for two months and the current pandemic sequester is that the cabin stay has a definite end point (and in this scenario a reward at the end). With the pandemic, all is uncertainty and some people are less able to deal with uncertainty than others. That’s why, in the face of the great mystery of existence, they have invented religions.

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  8. Living in two rooms is easier for me than living in the world. But that only works if I have electricity, books, a cable TV connection, a telephone and the internet. With those things I can be perfectly happy. I call myself “the happiest guy in this building,” which sounds better than it is. There aren’t many men here, and they aren’t very perky!

    Being free to move around is not an issue. Age and health issues forced confinement on me before the virus came along to constrict my life further. There was a time when I would have loved that cabin in the woods, but that time is just a memory now.

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  9. Morning all. For me the issue isn’t so much the shelter in place or stay at home, it’s the furlough. After 40+ years of working full-time, figuring out what to do with all of my time now is occasionally problematic. I had anticipated a lot more volunteer work outside of the house then it is currently appropriate And that coupled with no social engagements to speak of, has been hard for me.

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    1. You would suffer less now, I think, if you had been a kid when I was. My parents liked me and my sister, but there was no cultural expectation that there lives and ours would overlap much. I was shockingly free (by today’s standards) to amuse myself, so doing so now is easier than being in the company of others. It is good that YA is with you. And your animals.

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    2. i am surprised when someone like you vs has a furlough that allows you to fo anything else and you’re stumped
      i remember the time my daughter got dropped by basketball in 4th or 5th grade and she was so lost looking like what’s going to become of me and i told her that without basketball taking her to practices and tournaments she was free to do anything else…. you mean like theater and music and acting? she asked and she lit up
      find something to light you up and go for it

      my new mantra.

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      1. I think some of it may have been the shock of it. I was expecting to have a couple of more years before retirement and I think maybe the fact that it hit me so quickly is part of it. The other thing really is the volunteering. Any time I’ve thought about retirement for the last 10 years I thought about volunteering. All of which places don’t want volunteers right now.

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        1. Husband is driving me nuts at home all the time now that he doesn’t go to the rez any more. He has been cooking and baking a lot. For a while he was going to apply for a job at the local butcher shop. Then he started volunteering at the food pantry, and then he took responsibility for the church veggie garden. Now he is talking about expanding his private practice. It is nice to have him home, but I wish he would slow down. He gets disorganized and agitated the more he takes on, and then it is hard for him to get things done.

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        2. You had quite a long stretch of working for the same business. That’s so rare these days, but it must have felt like what was normal for you. My uncle went to work for Pitney Bowes when he finished high school. He retired from Pitney Bowes 45 years later. That just isn’t how careers unfold now.

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