more isolation tales

It’s not all fun you know, lockdown. Not that you probably think it is either, but it’s necessary, for sure, But even at times like these we still only have a habit of putting the best of ourselves online and neglecting to share the rest.

Although you most probably don’t really want to know about such things as I just washed the dishes, or vacuumed the stairs, or replaced a bulb in the bedside lamp yes I am quite handy to have around sometimes. Nor how long I been staring at trees watching leaves unfurl or the times, a lot actually, when I flop on the bed utterly fatigued at the end, or sometimes middle, of a day drinking in the lack of scenic views my ceiling offers It’s not overly interesting either knowing what comfort food I’ve just made for lunch, though I have just baked the most brilliant pudding that will last me days.

You definitely don’t want to know the times I feel utterly useless, or when I almost scream, missing the university atmosphere, even the lectures, the library, coffee shops, my life-class modelling work, which pays when I do it and not when I don’t, so a loss of income there. That kind of ‘when will it end’-feeling just sometimes overwhelms. You won’t want to know about the angst I can go through choosing which socks to wear that day nor how slowly I can eat chocolate trying, trying, trying to make it last as long as I possibly can while fighting my instinct to gobble it all down within minutes. I’m right-handed, which isn’t very interest either, see more mundane stuff, and apparently I have a pretty good left-hook, I’m told. Not an actual hook, I’m not a Peter Pan pirate.

When I get low I really get low, like lower than a worm burrowing as fast as they can to escape a hungry birds beak. Though I full-well know everyone does to different degrees for sure. Sometimes it feels like we are all being consumed by social-distancing and self-isolation, our chatter, our behaviour, the headlines, the advice, social media, all reminding us to stay away from each other. Of course, it’s all for good reasons but it doesn’t stop it feeling draining. You definitely don’t want a blow-by-blow wordy account of me crying here online just with the effort of everything.

Keeping physically busy helps, as a Covid Volunteer, for instance, and active with exercise, yoga, running, all obvious mindful stuff to do to stay sane but in the end it can’t stop the brain mulling over it all, especially when waking up in the middle of the night wondering if you spent the last few hours asleep holding your breath, all so seriously disorienting.

I always remind myself however bad a day I’m having, someone is having it worse, far worse. Sometimes that doesn’t really help to know or even tell yourself that, but it’s true for certain.

Off to make dinner now, probably a spaghetti thing, which again is probably something of totally no interest to you. Hugs, stay safe and home and keep sane, or sort of.

~x

another isolation tale

I think I’ll self-isolate. . . . . . . . .
in SL!

Seems to me a much safer place to be at the moment, but would you believe it, there are even people here exploiting the virus for personal financial gain, selling products with the word coronavirus to make money. I mean, really, how cynical. I suppose we don’t need to buy them, but really for it to be in the true spirit of things then maybe all virus-related products should be free to encourage looking out for and looking after each other.

Or maybe, horribly, this is reflecting real life and all the greediness of it. Which is sad but out of my hands. Itis as bad as people stock-piling and hoarding toilets rolls, and who would’ve thought of all things that would be fought over come the apocalypse, it wouldn’t be oil or gold or water or even land, but toilet rolls! It’s totally mind-boggling. Again, luckily here in SL we don’t actually need toilet rolls either.

Anyway, I am sort of semi-self-isolating in RL though this has impacted on my studies which are all only now entirely online and my part-time work as an artist model for life-classes, which means no extra income. Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, I feel perfectly fine going anywhere I like in SL and doing anything I want. Even without a mask. Not that a mask really helps at all, but I suppose it makes some people feel better, like some kind of security blanket.

Anyway, I thought a lighthouse would be the best place to do it, on a rock off the coast with only birds and seals for company, and an endless supply of coffee (I made sure of that). Hopefully it won’t be toooooooooooo long as seagulls aren’t the best conversationalists.

 © Anan Eebus ~x

isolation tales

That’s one really good thing about SL: you can’t get ill, no matter what you do, it’s all bacteria and virus-free, not even the coronavirus can get you here. Of course another kind can, a computer one, but that’s not really a virus, that’s just some coding chicanery which even though can really frustrate you can’t actually make you sick.

You can even fall from a great height here and ta-daa! No cuts, bruises, no broken bones, not even death, and we all know how inconvenient death can be. Well, we don’t actually, we can guess though that it would be mighty annoying. You simply dust yourself off and walk away, or go back up and do it all over again. If only real life was like that. Nor do we have to deal with those really piss-me-off niggles as sneezing or runny noses or wracking coughs or even itches. Mind you, I think itches can be handy, as long as they can be scratched away with some judiciously and well-targeted fingertips.

So, whoever said virtual worlds were a waste of time should try it, it’s quite handy finding somewhere no one or nothing can actually hurt you. That is, as long as you don’t take it too seriously, after all, it is supposed to be escapism, a place to put distance between you and the outside world, being kind of a pixelised extension of your inner world.

What best of all though is in SL you never ever, ever have to use the toilet: ever! While at the same time not worrying about being constipated or having diarrhoea, or exploding! Surely that’s a good thing, especially the not exploding. And, finally, for us girls, no periods. Hurrah! Among other things of course. I know there’s a good side to them as well but really, some days I think nature pulled a fast one on us.

Nevertheless, I still it’s important to keep up ones vitamin C so, even in SL, you’ll sometimes find me filling my face with grapes.

© Anan Eebus

dancing queen

It’s about time I posted my first blog of 2020 here. I’ve been tardy of late and been pondering my place in SL for a while now, it having changed so much in the past few years and me having been there for so, so, so, so long, which is a long time, very long, so, so, so, so long.

Not that I still don’t enjoy it, I do, just its hold on me has loosened, lessened, not what it was. Thankfully in some ways in that once upon an SL time I was so enmeshed in it, it started spilling over in m RL which is not what it’s supposed to do as far as I’m concerned. What did leak through was mostly the worry, the angst, even some of the drama, some directed at me some just happening around me. Of course we all know and loudly proclaim in SL it should be drama-free, there’s even signs affirming that on some sims: “This is a Drama-free Zone”. A bit like “this is a Zombie-Free Zone” except without the zombies, although I’m sure some of the people I’ve met here can seem a bit brain-dead.

If you’re not careful though things can snowball, get away from you, gather unexpected momentum and before you know it: madness!

Well, fortunately for me I’ve learned through my mistakes in investing too much ‘me’, so to speak, as in my emotions and trying to spot and head-off any potential drama before it becomes drama, which can be a bit of an inworld skill in itself and not a perfect science.

I always keep myself busy though and never understand those who say, “I’m bored”. It’s strange because f you are bored then why are you even there, online, inworld, and if you are go do something else instead. Some people seem to need to be ‘entertained’ all the time, and if you look hard enough, even thuogh SL isn’t what it used to be (i.e. admittedly not as much fun or interactive) there are things to do, place to explore, amazing builds and sims to see that are just a feast for the eyes and dancing, I love dancing.

So I’ve been thinking lately about why I’m still here. One thing for sure I am loyal to my avatar, or me, which sounds strange to anyone who’s never done SL. It’s like after a while because it is like: are are you your avatar, or, is your avi you? Either way you can feel incredibly protective about her, and in my case I do, and the thought of losing her after all this time is almost unthinkable. It would be like losing a part of me, because she is in a way, my avi is me in so many ways: my beliefs, attitudes and, even though you can choose any be anyone or anything here, I have actually very closely physically modelled her on me. Not sure why although I feel most comfortable in my own skin, although my hair in RL isn’t blue, although sometimes it has been, as it has been other colours too.

I’ve never been a tree or a dragon or a zombie. I am though a vampire, and a photographer. Some things have stayed with me pretty much from the start or at least from my first year here, like the blue hair I actually had sorted by my third week. I’m still finding new things too, adventures, friends and such, though have never been into anything overly competitive.

I haven’t come to any conclusions yet except that I’m not going anywhere and staying here in SL happily as me, probably because you just never know what might happen next, and that for me, is still most exciting.

~Anan~~

A sense of grief

A sense of grief, the weird feeling I got recently as I was doing something so boring and benign as clearing some things out of my Second Life (SL) inventory. All of a sudden I felt a growing overwhelming sensation of grief, of loss, of a distance moving further away from me.

It wasn’t feeling of mortality or anything like that, just a realization of how long I’d been in SL and how much it felt like so much longer: a lifetime, or several.

I was sorting through my vampire stuff, which to anyone not in SL would sound utterly bizarre, and realised how many different vampire RP systems I’d been part of, some more than others, and how most of which are now gone, defunct. I was left with just the two active ones now, which is probably just as well, being they can take a huge amount of time and commitment.

As I was packing all the bits and pieces, HUDs, associated regalia and weapons of the now deleted systems into single boxes to rationalized them and reduce my ever-bulging inventory I felt this sense of grief. I couldn’t face getting rid of them completely yet, even though they no longer worked (crazy, I know). 

I found myself remembering the people I’d met through them, the adventures, inn-jokes, laughs and tears and suchlike, and how all that’s gone as are most of the people, having left not just the RP system but inworld SL entirely.

I recalled the process of learning each one, meeting sometimes new people, new vampires and other weird supernaturals, each system often so different from the other, each with their own quirks and sims and worlds and objectives. I have probably tried pretty much every single vampire RP system going in SL at one time or another and still play two. 

But it isn’t so much the vampire thing that made me feel this waves of sadness, it was that the act of sorting through signaled some kind of precipice, as I remembered people who had not just left SL entirely leaving behind their memories, but those who actually died, as in really died, in real life and how now for many of them their avatars still exist in SL. Although not in body but there in friends lists, clan lists, their profiles frozen forever in inworld time.

This is the grief I felt. Unlike most of the time in RL grief is shared and released and come to terms with, here in SL it can’t be in the same way and can’t be done with anyone outside of SL who’s never played, never been, or not even heard of. 

There are lots of us for whom being here is very personal and not shared with anyone within their immediate real life circle, and because of that there’s nowhere for this grief to go. Most people who’ve never experienced SL think we are a bit nuts anyway wondering why we waste our time here.

So it eats away inside and sometimes wells-up as it did with me recently. It’s very real, this grief, its deep, embedded and sometimes catches me unawares, all the deaths, losses, experiences, adventures which were just as real as anything in RL, but real in a different way: the relationships, friendships, the bonds, just as real because we did so not just as comic avatars but as real people. 

© Anan Eebus 2019