The Brave News

by Joshua Whitfield

Staying at home gives me and many others what we’ve always wanted, to become one with our inner introverted selves and do nothing. Now after a month at least I am fed up with it, I now have cabin fever and it will very soon become insatiable until I can see someone other than the same 4 people I see every waking moment of every day.

I have done what no man, woman, or child has ever attempted since the years of streaming tv shows and movies online became popular. I have finished my queue, My List, whatever you want to call it, my infinite pit of entertainment has run dry. I started off small by adding maybe one or two shows and think “Oh I can binge this next weekend”, but never realized I have made a fatal mistake. I created a queue that I was continuously adding to week in and week out of things to eventually watch, but before quarantine, I knew I was never going to catch up on all of this seeing as how I didn’t have the free time as I do now. But, once quarantine started I started trying to catch up, this was my opportunity to indulge in this impossible challenge I have made for myself. The challenge was to catch up on all my shows and movies, which added up to about 50 TV shows and movies altogether. Yet soon enough the one all-nighter of binging I did turned into multiple nights on a somewhat consistent basis, sometimes even consecutive all-nighters were thrown into the mix as if I couldn’t mess up my sleep schedule enough. But now one month into quarantine I finished over 30 movies and around 15-20 TV series. Once I completed the mission I set out for, I realized that quarantine now sucks even more than before.

I then went through a crisis of doing random activities and hobbies I wanted to get into such as cooking, reading, working out, or even spending time reflecting on decisions and my mental sanity while in quarantine.  Just yesterday my classes were done around noon and I walked outside went to the top of the hill in my backyard and sat there with no music or social media and fell asleep for an hour and a half while just looking at the sky on our turf thinking about life and what I should start doing better at.

With my TV and movies now being a barren wasteland of bland unappealing no named titles in my eyes because I have seen everything I wanted to, I moved to more video games with my friends. I was hopefully going to scratch that itch for new fun things to do, but it made my quarantine mood even worse because all the time I spent watching movies and stuff I became rusty at the video games I was good at. Now when I hop on to play Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, I get hit with a 360 drop shot even though I’m sitting in a corner. I came to the realization that I now suck at all my games that I was good at and gave up. Eventually, I ended up trying something most teenage boys have never attempted or thought of before, I went to talk to my family about their lives and what they’ve been up to. I ended up calling every contact I had on my phone whether it was with people I haven’t talked to in a while or cousins and relatives I haven’t even met that whose numbers I got from my parents. I just spent multiple hours rekindling relationships with friends and family.

With all this primal communication I even dug deep down and tried to talk with my older brother, but unlike all the other people I talked to, he’s not pleasant to be around because he still lives with me. Anyone who has an older sibling knows how easy it is to get under each other’s skin, which is what we do to each other. We get on each other’s nerves so much we question why we’re related to one another sometimes. With so much close physical contact he and I started calling each other out on small things we overlooked in the past, I talk about the way he walks inside the house and how small he is. He walks in singing but like most people who think they can sing, he is terrible at it but does it anyway. He plays the same music he sings through his speaker in his room sometimes very loudly and even though he’s had a month of free time like myself, he can’t bring himself out of the eight songs he sings almost every day.

My mom’s gossiping hobby that she enjoys is at an all-time high going so far as to talk about things I’ve said in voice chat with my friends every few days with everyone she talks to. My dad has not changed in the slightest since the quarantine, as he still goes to work. My dad and online classes are about the two things I feel indifferent about during this quarantine because sometimes I can get more hands-on help from certain teachers even easier than during the school year. Yet still for the two things that don’t feel are detrimental to my mind, body, and spirit, quarantine has ruined all of my enjoyable different media forms and forced me to adapt and to become a “normal human being” as my mom likes to address me as.

by Alex Rotter

I’m writing from where I’ve been for the last three weeks: my boring house in La Palma. First of all, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my senior year at home playing Fortnite. I’ve gotten a couple of DUBS in the past few weeks, but the teammates I play with make me rage a lot. Plus, I’m always talking trash about their skills, or lack thereof. 

I haven’t just been sedentary this entire time, though. I’ve also been doing a lot of “at-home workouts,” and frankly, it can get pretty extreme, especially when I start yelling for no apparent reason. I’ve been trying to push myself to get a better body, so I can impress more girls over the Summer, if that even happens. To be clear, the screaming is a total non sequitur to courting girls. That’s just something I’ve been doing, and I hope it doesn’t carry back over into public life once my quarantine is over.

Sometimes living with my family can get a little weird, especially my mom. She’s been understandably paranoid about the COVID-19 outbreak, but she’s gotten stricter than ever. When I go outside to do something and forget to leave my shoes outside, she will flip. Also, when I get food delivered, she’s constantly telling me to take it out of the box because the “COVID-19 is in there.” I tell her that doesn’t make sense because if the virus was attached to the box, it would be on my food too. I’m thinking she’s just going insane like everybody else in the world. But who knows? I’ve had trouble keeping track of every last CDC recommendation.

Further in her defense, I’m also going a little crazy and don’t know what I want do with my life anymore. The first couple weeks were pretty chill, relaxing for most part. Although this past week has been tough. I’m very lonely now and in need of help. I swear sometimes I think I’m not going to make it through this quarantine. At least once per day now, I will start talking to myself in the mirror, like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver or something, because I haven’t seen my friends in so long. They also have been doing virtual concerts online, which inevitably ends up with me dancing wildly in my living room.

I’ve been watching a new “Netflix Original” that you’ve maybe seen: Tiger King, which is about “Joe Exotic,” a guy who owns a ridiculous amount of tigers, and this other woman who “saves” the tigers, who apparently had her husband killed. The show has me laughing really hard. I now want to have a tiger as a pet.

When it comes to online classes, all that I can say is that it’s become abundantly clear that random YouTube videos and video games are more entertaining than my teachers’ video lectures.

I end up just sleeping for most of the day once I get my schoolwork done because I’m obviously limited to what I can do in my house. Every time they extend the date for quarantine and remote learning, I just want to cry and eat ice cream. I swear, at my house, there is only unhealthy food to eat and feel at the end of this quarantine I will be 30 pounds heavier regardless of my at-home workout efforts and deafening screams.