College campus has been shut down since Thursday, March 12 with essential businesses being the only spots where people can remotely congregate. Since then classes have switched to online, and students cannot even enter campus buildings without special permission from campus safety.
Most LPC students are doing the same thing: Sitting at home, watching Netflix and waiting for the days to go by. Friends are scarce, and some of us are tight on money because our places of work have been shut down.
So what has a community college student like myself been doing? Absolutely nothing. And it’s terrible.
The first couple days went by pretty fast as I started off by doing some of the essentials around my house. Cleaning, organizing, rearranging kept me sane for some time, but I could only do that for so long.
At the same time, school work has been keeping me busy throughout the week. Just this past week, I had a midterm and two tests which were exclusively done online. Depending on the amount of work I had for that day, I might have up to three hours of classwork to do.
One thing that I most definitely wanted to keep up was my hygiene. Showering and brushing my teeth twice a day were essential. In times like these, humans can get pretty unsanitary.
Eating three meals a day of course was practically a must since I had all this time on my hands. I’m pretty sure I have eaten every type of typical household meal that can be prepared. Digiorno’s pizza, top ramen, dino nuggets, homemade pasta, bacon and eggs, chicken noodle soup and many more were consumed in this 11 day period.
So with about 12 hours left in my day, I had to find things to fill my time with. Netflix and Spotify were used heavily along with YouTube and Twitter.
After about two and a half hours of rotating between those four apps, I turned to video games. Three games of NBA 2K, four games of Madden 20, a few UFC 3 matches tired me out after about four hours.
Five and half hours left. Now is where I had to get creative. I installed a Nerf hoop outside my door where I would pretend to be Steph or LeBron or Giannis. I would dunk on pillows, shoot threes from the corner of my room and hit game winners in front of a crowd that I projected on my TV.
I went out and got a few books that I could read for leisure. I’m currently reading “Double Cup Love” by Eddie Huang, and I must say it is pretty interesting.
I am finally using the punching bag that I had set up in my garage that I never used. I am in the process of looking up YouTube videos on actual punching bag workouts, so I don’t look like a mad man that’s hitting a bag aimlessly. Plus, a little exercise never hurts anybody.
My favorite thing to do thus far has been spending time with my family. We watch movies together, eat all our meals together and we even made a few TikToks.
I think a lot of people get caught up in the loneliness of it all and don’t really see the upsides of getting to stay indoors. It’s a time where we can slow down and be thankful for the little things we have in life.
I know by the end of quarantine, I will be happy to go back to living my normal life. I will be able to go back to school and work. I will be able to walk around at the mall or go hang out with friends. I won’t have to line up at 7 a.m. to go grab toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
But when we look back at this time in our world’s history, we will remember it for the times where we had to play Uno for two hours straight with our siblings. We will remember it for the times we stayed in our rooms all day and binge watched “The Office.” We will remember the times we ate spaghetti four times that week. But most of all we will remember these weeks when the world stopped and we had to figure out how to live life the simple way.
Nathan Canilao is the sports editor of The Express. Follow him @nathancanilao.
