brace yourselves for some relatable quarantine content
Hello, friends! Rob here.
I'm back! Did you miss me? I sure missed you. I understand that my colleague, H. Pruitt Landsman- who is absolutely a real human sacrifice advocate/YouTube celebrity and not at all a fictitious persona created to illustrate a point about reopening too soon, here is a link to his website if you don't believe me- may have irked a few longtime readers with his guest column last week (month? Who cares). That's understandable. His style is a bit more in-your-face than mine and he can have a tendency to rub people the wrong way. Still, I hope readers found it illuminating. As a gesture of contrition, please enjoy some Highly Relatable Quarantine Content:
I've lost the ability to get out of bed with any sense of urgency. Strictly speaking, I can't confirm whether or not this is true, because I haven't had any reason to test it in well over a month. But I have to believe my ability to take initiative has atrophied by now. I'll wake up around seven with my wife's alarm (she's working full-time from home), or naturally sometime between eight and nine, and then just linger in bed for like two hours, reading, wasting time online, doing Duolingo, or preemptively dismissing calendar notifications for gigs I was supposed to have. This CANNOT be healthy. And not just in the vague, “phones are bad for mental health” sense- I think I've reached the point where it's giving me back pain. If you told me right now that I needed to be on a plane at 11:00 AM tomorrow, I am genuinely unsure if I would be able to get to the airport in time.
Normally, my wife and I will pay the NFL draft a modicum of attention, as people who are generally interested in American football do. Who did the Saints pick? Where did the handful of college players we can actually name end up? Wow hard did everyone boo Goodell? Were there any cool outfits? This year, we made plans- actual, concrete, premeditated plans- to tune into the NFL draft. We made an event out of it. We watched every minute, including the commercials, which marked the first wave in an invasion of pandemic-centric advertising and inspired a new drinking game that I will continue to play for as long as the occupation persists: take a sip of whatever you have handy (doesn't have to be a grown-up drink- not trying to peer pressure anyone) whenever you encounter any permutation or derivation of “in these times...” We prepared all the classic gameday snacks that we make when we host for the Super Bowl. It was sweet and pitiful and fun and the wings turned out great. I'm so glad to have an air fryer in these strange, unprecedented times (drink).
Grocery stores. Am I right?
Speaking of drinking games, some friends and I recently did a power hour over video chat. It's a solid remote drinking game, because there isn't really much physical interaction between people, no cards or cups or balls or anything. It's a horrible drinking game because you end up downing about six beers in the span of an hour, which- funny you should ask- is harder than I remember it being in college. In between emitting house-shaking belches and wondering aloud why we subjected ourselves to this, my wife actually floated the idea of trying Edward Fortyhands. I'm game. They sure are some times, these times (drink). Also, the Wikipedia page for Edward Fortyhands has a picture of a guy playing. Imagine that being your claim to fame. Imagine sitting next to someone on an airplane and them casually dropping that they're the guy in the Wikipedia page for a game that involves malt liquor and duct tape. That guy probably finished med school three years ago.
My wife and I put our relationship to perhaps its toughest test to date one bright Sunday afternoon: she cut my hair. More accurately, we cut my hair. I started on the sides to give her an idea of what I was looking for, and she hit all the unreachable spots in the back for me. All in all, it turned out pretty well.
There isn't really any specific reason I was thinking about this the other day, but I like when a brand perpetrates some sort of highly visible screw-up and their damage control strategy inevitably includes a statement like, “we listened. We hear you. We can do better. We're committed to growth. And that's why we will be taking the following steps to ensure that we never again tweet the 'crying laughing' emoji next to a retweet of a meme from a prominent white supremacist...”
Hey, did you hear about that crazy cult out in Waco that thinks you can cure the Coronavirus by chugging salad dressing?
They're calling themselves Ranch Covidians.
...Sorry.
I know the whole “kids these days (often mistakenly identified as 'millennials') have never heard of technology that we took for granted a few decades ago” thing is beyond played out, but still: can you imagine telling your kids that there used to be an entire channel on television that you went to just to find out what was playing on other channels? You had to wait for this whole thing to scroll through like seventy cable channels just to find out what was on! And it was the best way to find that information! That is nuts.
Although, now that I'm thinking about it- was it that crazy? Every time my wife and I are trying to have a movie night at home, we inevitably get sucked into a vortex of choice overload until we finally just shrug and settle for something like a marathon of the original American Pie trilogy (which- SHOCKER- has not aged well). Maybe- particularly in these times of couch-bingeing (drink)- we could benefit from some sort of “what's on Netflix” highlight reel. Netflix Guide Channel. Get Mario Lopez on it.
I think I am addicted to frozen meatballs. They're an excellent protein source during soft quarantine. They're inexpensive, they're easy to prepare, they have a near-indefinite shelf life, and flavor-wise they do that same thing McDonald's does where it hijacks your caveman brain by mimicking the sort of dense, salty foods that were perfect for humans back when we had to chase all of our meals down and poke them with sharpened sticks. These perfect little spheres of fat, salt, and carcinogenic protein have the power to override decades of conditioning and all advances in nutritional science. They demand to be consumed. I am powerless to resist.
It's okay to lower your standards in these challenging times (drink). It's okay to let go a little. It's also okay to swerve in the opposite direction, and get really into your hobbies, or your workout routine, or your claymation opus, or anything else that you can control during these times of uncertainty (drink). There's no road map for how to deal with this stuff, and if you've found a way to cope that doesn't hurt anyone or produce new opportunities for Coronavirus to spread, then go for it.
Maybe leave the assault rifle at home, though? Like, seriously, I get that social distancing can be profoundly frustrating and the economic squeeze is a real problem, but what does carrying a large gun have to do with it? These times are scary enough as it is (drink).
