Personally, quarantine life has progressively become more normal as I feel myself settling into a routine (albeit one that encourages me to stay up much later than I should probably indulge in on work nights). Living alone in an apartment does get a bit lonely during these times, but there definitely have been more than one silver lining to this situation.
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Everyone is the same distance away from one another now. Now that we’re confined to our homes, everyone else has become the same distance away from one another. Doesn’t matter if you’re in the same city or across the country. The social friction for every single interaction has now been equalized. It takes the same amount of effort to video chat your friend living down the street as it is someone time zones away. As someone who self prescribes as “socially-lazy”, and tends to over-value convenience to prioritize my social interactions; this has been a real eye-opener for me. It started out with group calling my immediate community up here in Seattle when the quarantine first started. This made me realize that I could easily set this up for my college friends, whom all live in different cities. And the same goes for my high school friends. These are all people I stay in touch with, but usually on an asynchronous basis through messaging. These group calls the past few weeks with my high school and college friends made me realize: why weren’t we doing this before? Catching up with someone over video feels so much more present than asynchronous updates on a weekly or monthly basis. Even after this is all over, I’m excited to continue having these group calls with friends that aren’t with me in Seattle. Also, here is a list of fun games you can play while video calling, I hope you enjoy them just as much as I do.
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- Think Pictionary
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- Classic word game where you have a finite amount of time to come up with words within different categories that start with a randomly chosen letter
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- Online version of Splendor, a light-weight “engine-building” game
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- There is time to experiment and enjoy cooking. My relationship with cooking has always been…interesting. First, I’ve always enjoyed baking more because it is more methodical and precise (as they say baking is a science and cooking is art). Second, it always seemed like an annoyance or chore to me. In college, I was busy all the time, so cooking (if I did at all), was simply a means to an end of getting something edible into my body. I was barely even eating three meals a day then, let alone cooking them. Third, even in my post-grad life I never had to cook much because my office provides all three meals during the work week. Even though that was true, it was during this time that I started to perceive cooking under a different light. In Seattle, cooking became something social and fun. Friends would gather and we would tackle new recipes on the weekends: homemade ramen, pizza from scratch, fried chicken, fresh calamari (from squid that we caught the very same day!), and the list goes on. With each new culinary experience, cooking became something I enjoyed more and more. This new mindset allowed me to enter quarantine looking forward to experiment and try new recipes for cooking: pad thai, popcorn chicken, loaded quesadillas, etc. Now I look forward to preparing each meal as a reprieve from the usual monotony of my work day. So please send any favorite recipes that you guys have been enjoying during quarantine my way!
- Chain mail is back (in a fun, harmless way). This is an entertaining one, if not simply for the nostalgia factor. When Jenny sent me the “Recipe Exchange” (of which I’ve received a few I want to try out real soon) and “Poetry Exchange” email chains it definitely brought me back to my childhood, except now there is actually some sort of value to forwarding the email. Either way, it brought a smile to my face.