Twenty something year old doing twenty something year old things

 Kids sense of time is unique. Minding child A and child B yesterday I was surrounded by their rogue estimations of how long it would take to reach various desirable locations (namely 'the green', 'the park' and--most importantly--'the shop') each they assured me were, at most,  "two minutes away" (Fifteen minutes and counting). I was satiated however by a brownie which Child A easily convinced me into buying once we reached one of these locations. It was to be a secret, I warned her, and best if she did not tell her mother or her brother about the pre-dinner death by chocolate. I am in cahoots with a 9 year old: the adult who can resist everything except temptation.  Temptation seems the operative word of this lockdown 3. One worrying temptation is that of looking at my own face during zoom meetings. Despite the colourful checkerboard of interesting faces to lock eyes on, I am consistently drawn to my own. Never before has my own face been so familiar...

Nostalgic memory of youth: My mother telling me not to watch too much TV in case I got "square eyes".  I spent a long time trying to find someone suffering from this affliction but strangely never did.  But ah,  the days when 'screen time' was seen as an unnecessary pleasure and square eyes the risk associated with it, akin to the 'monster under the bed'. Now it is a necessary evil. We buy special 'anti-blue light' glasses to allow us to continue to stare, squarely, into the screen in an intense 'who blinks first' match. I'm currently in one and will continue until four pm when I log off my duties of monitoring  psychology classes.                                                                        ***** The above section was written, as you can guess, well before the present --when I ir...