I think I used the pandemic well.

Overall, I think I used the pandemic well.

I didn't have the stress of job uncertainty or isolation -- I had my eldercare job, then, with only the stress of getting adequate equipment, at first, and the increasing weirdness of public transportation -- and, overall, I was just able to re-adjust and find something to bide my time, that made sense for me.

Like, I read a ton of long works that I'd always wanted to read -- the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales, the Divine Comedy, the Arabian Nights, some of Gargantua and Pantagruel -- and I also moved into reading collections of religious texts that I'd always wanted to read -- the entire Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the "gnostic gospels" of the Nag Hammadi codices, some collections of Jewish and Christian apocrypha.

And, Gargantua and Pantagruel is stalled out in the pile of books by my bedside nightstand, but I'm still going strong with the apocrypha collections, having even realized that there's been like 5-6 fat volumes of further apocrypha in translation released over the past decade, that I wouldn't mind plowing through (five to six fat volumes -- that's a lot!!!).

I also used the time of library shutdowns to start studying intensively the one ancient language that I've now been studying for quite a few years and have now made myself into quite the expert in, since for that, you didn't need a full library, you just needed a textbook, which I had, and with that kind of thing, it's just a matter of time and discipline, to study vocab etc. and to push yourself through language-textbook lessons at a brisk but manageable pace. 

And, I had always suspected that I would find out major things about that language if I just sunk time into skills-building, and I did sink that time in, and since then I've just been uncovering major findings beyond anything that I could have ever anticipated.

Now, that's a bet that paid off, and it all began with how I decided to spend time, during the pandemic.

In general, considering how much chaos there was then and how much chaos has still been spilling out since then, I nevertheless used the pandemic pretty well, all things considered.

Like, even apart from the one ancient language that I learned, I've now read the Divine Comedy, and that's pretty cool.