MS Journalism: Fighting Boredom: The Other "Virus"
Posted: 30/06/2020
By: Leo Jiang and Laurence Yang
E8 Lucy Zhang sits in her room and stares at her closet. E6 Irene Jia watches many more movies than usual. Even Teacher Shaylin Chavez has started listening to podcasts. They have all succumbed to boredom in the pandemic.
This semester at SMIC ET Middle School, school was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students and teachers had to stay at home and do online learning between mid-February and May, and then again in mid-June. But since people could not go outside that often, many have succumbed to boredom and started to try out activities they had never done before or create new activities to stay occupied. Some of them have been very strange or silly.
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But before we get to strange or silly activities, what does “strange or silly activities” really mean? Different people have different interpretations of this term. Teacher Lashanda Wildgoose thinks that it means to do anything “outside your normal personality, such as watching movies you wouldn’t have watched before,” while Teacher Shaylin Chavez believes “unusual things are things that not many people do.” Irene Jia thinks that weird and silly activities are ones that are done in different ways than they would usually be done. Moving on from what strange activities mean, let’s talk about what strange and silly activities SMIC students and teachers have started during this pandemic.
SMIC ET Middle School students and teachers have many exciting ways to pass their spare time now, while the pandemic is ravaging the world. Irene Jia likes to tell silly jokes and guess movie characters from a short description with her younger sisters. Teacher Lashanda watches TikTok and Netflix videos and plays video games with her nephews. Lucy Zhang bought “a pile of books” to read and tried to make ice cream by herself. However, it seems that the ratio of people who like to spend time with others compared to people who like to spend time alone is almost the same. Ever since the pandemic started, E7 Christy Appleton hasn’t been talking to people that much, but Teacher Shaylin still loves spending time with Teacher Christian, her husband.
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Of course, SMIC students and teachers aren’t the only people who are bored and have started silly or unusual habits. Many other people around the world are too. Christy Appleton read on Newsela that some people have recreated famous monuments out of food. Irene Jia heard that some people take photos of other people’s body parts and ask people to guess who it is. Lucy Zhang even saw someone try to teach his cat Algebra on TikTok!
The internet is full of crazy things people have done. One person stuffed himself in a cardboard box with only his hands and legs sticking out and pretended to be a “creature.” Some people been eating way too many snacks and to stop themselves have put signs on their fridges saying, “You’re not hungry, just bored!” In Wuhan, a fishing lover even started fishing in his fishbowl since the quarantine time was so long! Some people even started selling fast food on eBay since no one is eating outside. What’s more, a woman cut her hair with a knife! Let’s hope her head is alright!
Despite these fun and silly ways to occupy time, there seems to be almost a complete agreement that everyone is excited to return to normal life.
