What time is it?

[DonJuane]

Here's some additional ideas for getting through this. First of all think of what powers you have to make a change. Back stateside you can only vote and write to your congressmen so if you feel you have a firm handle on things and an idea how to get through this pandemic, then write to your congressmen with your opinions and vote come election day. Otherwise turn off the news media. Their job is to maintain their echo chamber, keep you baited in so their advertisers will pay them. And since you are in Mexico and likely are accessing them through back handed methods, your number is not even counted in their ad revenue so the few pennies they normally make off US viewers is not even going into their pocket. So with your daily actions what is happening is you are becoming a pawn to the news media, hanging on every word and commercial while the agony you get from this fire hose of info turns you into a drug addict of sort, all that is happening is you are likely putting your own health at risk and making yourself more vulnerable by pacing the floor while letting the news media cook you up into a frenzy. And all the time they are not even getting paid for your effort.

So what you can then do after writing to Congress and voting is to cut the cord on your US news sources.

Now once you pull the plug on your daily barrage of doomsday reporting, then become a day trader. Actually I am joking and maybe some will get that joke ... or not. The next thing you can do is to involve yourself with something more productive. As options you could do something you thought you never had time for before because you thought you were too busy. Or maybe you had such a fruitful life, that while there were "secondary" things you wanted to do, you never did them because you were always picking from life's "top shelf". Back then you knew there were metaphorically nice products available on the second shelf and below it but you always skipped them because you'd rather grab metaphorically from life's top shelf. So make this time about the second and lower shelves. So read a book, watch a documentary, fix the vacuum cleaner or clean off the top of your refrigerator.

Or better - think of something you can do to help someone else. Maybe ask the wife or friend if you can borrow their sewing machine, learn to sew and make some masks for the local people who don't seem to want to wear them, and come to think of it, the Gringos who won't wear them either. Or make yourself a shirt, or read a book on gender misconceptions and then start posting on social media your new sewn creations as a field study to accompany your taking on a stereotypical alter-gender role and remapping it and then as a result, study the reactions of others as they discover your work and from that grow to the point of understanding you are now at least a better armchair psychologist than before and actually now you have even more worrying to do than during simply the current pandemic.

Then continue to expand on this theme to understand other aspects of your personality. And once you initially succeed in removing yourself from the trap of our disconnected media machine and once you gain the fortitude of breaking down stereotypes, and from sampling from the infinite possibilities of shelves 2-downward, once you have divorced your peer-assigned gender role and taken up sewing, and once you have denounced your fear of peer pressure and posted your works as a seamstress on social media, then you will be on your way to realizing that during this period, you grown to points you would have never imagined before all this started. You will have arrived to a new plateau knowing you have done all you can by communicating your ideas of a solution back to your government and that you reinvented yourself to the point of getting on track for a happier life.

Once after working through all this, a good philosophy is to make today such a happy and productive one that you don't really count on tomorrow. What then happens is the end of it all will not seem so in vain. When that final moment arrives, as it will ultimately for all of us, we'll know we did the best we could and right up to that very moment.