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.