Unfortunately, despite my 3.5 years of miraculously avoiding covid, last August my luck ran out. While stuck in my isolation, the endless free-time and limitless boredom started to get to my head, so I decided to start blogging my experience to cope:

Friday (Day 1)

I had gone to bed around 8 PM Thursday night feeling relatively terrible, optimistic that the 10 hours of sleep ahead of me would be adequate revival for my soccer game at 10:30 AM the next morning. Unfortunately, the sleep gods were not on my side, and I don’t think I slept for more than two consecutive hours the whole night. Around 6 AM, I decided to call quits on sleeping, letting my coach and lab members know that I was sick and would not make it to the game and lab respectively. There had been a covid outbreak earlier that week on the men’s soccer team (‘msoc’ as they’re colloquially known), so just to be safe, I decided to take a covid test. I was not coughing and assumed I had just gotten the same head cold as another member of the team, so I was pretty shocked (and quite disappointed) when I picked up my test to see a positive result. After the necessary texts, exposure notifications, and messages to Caltech health services, I curled under my blankets and tried to drown out my sadness with some trashy TV.

During the original quarantine, I had stumbled upon this incredibly cheesy CW show, One Tree Hill. Now, the entire premise of the show is that about 17 years prior to the first episode, a star high school basketball player manages to get two different girls pregnant in the span of a few months but is only was willing to step up to be a father for one of the children. Flash forward to episode one, both sons are in high school together and, understandably, hate each other’s guts. So, while my original addiction with the show may have been excusable – global pandemic going on and all – my recent re-attachment to the show was really just bad judgement. Nonetheless, I started my descent into a new round of quarantine misery at 6 AM in the morning, 3.5 years and 6 seasons later with, once again, One Tree Hill.

Now, as the day progressed, I did manage to get a few, productive tasks done:

1. Waffle-making. During one of the many episodes of One Tree Hill I watched, someone cooked pancakes, and, despite the fact that I was stuck in a dorm room, I started to really crave pancakes. So, I had the genius idea to simply make my own. When I moved in to college, my aunt gifted me a mini waffle maker. I had used the waffle maker a few times over the past few years – once to try out a box of funfetti pancake mix my teammates and I found in the kitchen – but it generally sat on my shelf relatively unused. However, on this day, it was going to get put to good use. I covered a section of my floor with tinfoil (o.p. mess minimization) and mixed together some waffle mix from a box I happened to have in my cupboard. For extra ambiance, I added some frozen blueberries I had in the freezer. By some miracle, I managed to have all of the necessary ingredients for the mix (water, eggs, oil), and my waffles were actually a resounding success. A few batches in, I realized that the waffle maker released a bit of smoke while it cooked, so I opened my window for some ventilation. Triggering the fire alarm at 8 AM with a mini waffle maker in a dorm room while I had covid seemed like a not-so-ideal way of starting the day.
2. Cheer-leading. Despite the fact that I could not physically attend our game, a little stint of covid was not about to stop be from supporting my team. So, half-awake, I lay in my bed watching our team’s live-stream of the game, feeling quite sad and isolated from everyone, but still excited to cheer everyone on. The camera audio can pick up on all of the conversations nearby, so hearing the coaches talk and some of my teammates on the bench made me feel a little closer to everyone (though I’m not sure if the people on the sidelines know how much they’re being overheard).
3. Blog work (You’re welcome Lucas). Because I am an avid supporter of the Caltech blog and a reliable employee, even in quarantine, I managed to also pull off some editing of posts. However, I was laying in bed, likely at least slightly feverish, so I apologize to anyone who may have received some odd comments on their posts ….
4. Reading. Once I started to feel a bit better later in the evening, I made considerable progress in the book I was reading (Raised A Warrior by Susie Petruccelli).
5. Cinema. Coincidentally, while I was having my own covid quarantine on the West Coast, one of my friends from high school was actually having the same experience on the East Coast. We decided to have an online movie night and watched Good Will Hunting, which is one of my all-time favorite movies.

However, while these tasks make it seem like I was feeling robust and highly functional, in reality, I spent most of the day sleeping or lying in bed. A few of my friends dropped off food and medication for me, to which I am eternally grateful, and my mom sent me some food. I went to bed feeling better than I had woken up feeling, but overall still quite sick and frustrated.

Saturday (Day 2)

I woke up Saturday morning to the sound of zero alarms! After alarms waking me up every day for practice, lab, or some other commitment, waking up naturally was glorious. I had also slept for 11.5 hours and was feeling like a whole new person. I decided to finish my book and then see where the day took me (figuratively, of course, considering I was still stuck in my room).

The singular perk of getting covid at Caltech is that dining services will bring you food. After a summer of cooking almost every meal for myself, it was nice to have someone else providing my meals. I had been informed that a new person would be leaving my food in the 1st floor Bechtel kitchen by 1 PM and 5 PM each day over the weekend, so around 12:30, I decided to give the kitchen a check. Unfortunately, there was nothing. I figured I was simply too early, so I went back to my room to wait until 1 PM. However, by 1:30, there was still nothing there, so I decided to check the other kitchens just to make sure that the new deliverer didn’t had a different drop-off spot in mind. As I scoped out each kitchen (still in my pajamas and wearing a black mask), I received a few odd looks from some maintenance people in the hallway. I wanted to be like, “guys, don’t worry, I’m not trying to steal from the kitchen: I’m just looking for my food,” but, figuring that would just give me further odd looks, I stayed quiet.

I gave up on my search for my lunch, relegating myself to eating some soup and ravioli I had in the fridge. However, around 5 PM I received an email saying that my food was in the Bechtel dining hall. After a quick email exchange with the Red Door employee, she moved my food to the kitchen, I was able to finally access my lunch and dinner! On a side note, the Red Door employees have been incredibly kind to me throughout this experience. Sometimes they give me extra pastries with my meals (even though I did not sign up for breakfast deliveries), and the woman who brings me my meals leaves me kind words and emojiis in her drop-off emails. A little bit of kindness does not go unnoticed.

I spent part of the afternoon trying to learn Cool About It by Boygenius on the guitar. The song is pretty fire (give it a listen), but once I figured out the picking pattern I got a little lazy and frustrated with the rhythm and gave up. The goal is to have it mastered by the end of quarantine.

Earlier this week (pre-covid disaster), my friends and I went to Vroman’s bookstore to grab some coffee and get some work done. This had been a slightly trying experience because, since I had not had caffeine in days, I had enthusiastically ordered a large iced coffee to reward myself for such restraint. However, when I received my small iced coffee, I asked the barista if there was anything he could do, as I had ordered a large (I just assumed he’d add some pre-made cold-brew-esque liquid). His solution (in full view of me and my friends) was to move my drink to a large cup and fill the empty space with milk. When he handed by drink back I was (1) peeved at the rip-off (less caffeine!); (2) grouchy because I don’t even really like milk; but (3) kinda impressed by the brazenness with which he dealt with my complaint. Anyway, that is kinda a long introduction to my main point. At some point during our time at the bookstore, I stumbled upon a display of books including one of my favorites, Donna Tarts’s A Secret History. Intrigued, I spent the next 10 minutes reading the back of every book on the display, making a little list in my notes app of the ones I thought seemed interesting.

Flash forward to my quarantine, I decided to use some of my spare time to read some of those books. I realized that one of the books, This is Where I Leave You, had been turned into a moving staring one of my sister’s favorite celebrities, Adam Driver.

I called up my sister to ask her if she had any interest in reading the book and watching the movie with me. After watching the trailer, she said hard pass on the book club, but if I could finish the book by Monday, she’d watch the movie with me. Otherwise, she was watching it without me. Thus, now on the clock, I started to read.

I spent the rest of my evening calling one of my friends and watching this movie Ted. Despite our preconceived belief (aka education-by-Instagram-reels) that the movie would be funny, we mostly found it very crass and not that entertaining, so we gave up halfway through. We did end up watching the last scene, which did not really make much sense. That could have been on account of the fact that we did not watch the rest of the movie or simply could have been because the movie itself did not make much sense. I guess I’ll never know.

I ended my night with an attempt at being a lawyer. Law school has always been something peripherally on my vision, and my mother – a lawyer herself – had excitedly sent me some LSAT practice links once when I had brought this up. For fun, I decided to give some of the practice questions a try. I did pretty abysmally on the first section, completely blanking on every standardized test skill drilled into me as a kid. However, when I got to the logical reasoning section I actually had a lot of fun. It felt more like a puzzle than taking a test (if Jenni can’t sit next to Paul, but Paul must be across from Avery, and Avery must be next to Cam …), and I enjoyed reasoning through the problems. I’m still not quite sure if law school is actually for me, but it was an interesting experiment nonetheless.

Sunday (Day 3)

By Sunday morning, my mother had decided I was feeling healthy enough to be put to work. I have always had a vehement hatred for the commercial greeting card industry (waste of money, detriment to the environment, etc.), so from a young age I insisted on making all of my family’s cards. This means that any birthday, thank you, condolence, Christmas, (insert-other-holiday-here) – card you received from the Hong-Polanskys was made by me (Sorry to all of my sister’s friends – she probably did not make that birthday card she gave you). However, it also meant that with me in college, 3000+ miles away, my mother did not have her resident card-maker on-hand. Thus, as I was now stuck in quarantine with nothing to do, what better use of my time than to make some cards (my mother’s words, not mine). Nonetheless, I do like art, and I did have nothing to do, so I blasted some music and got to work.

In terms of music, I once again roped in my quarantining friend for help. We made a joint quarantining playlist to share some music and vibes while we both went about our work.

After eating my tofu sandwich (no wild-goose chase needed to find this one), I decided to attempt some minor productivity. I opened Justin Bois’s coding boot camp and started one of his lessons. I got through an entire section of a 10-section lesson before I had decided that I had done enough work and quit (when in quarantine, lack of motivation is excusable).

I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing up my book and the evening losing every imaginable game pigeon game. I also ate a lot of dry cereal.

Monday (Day 4)

I awoke at a ripe 10 AM and spent the morning lounging around in bed reading a new book. My inevitable hunger and thirst started to get to me, so I drank some peach mango orange juice – my attempt at increased vitamin C intake – and microwaved some soup. My sister called me to watch the movie (This is Where I Leave You), during which we spent the next 80 minutes laughing hysterically to Adam Driver playing a clown (I think I now understand why my sister is so obsessed).

For dinner I ate a salad and then some oatmeal – an odd but not entirely bad combination – and finished my book. Starting to go a bit stir-crazy, I cleaned my room, watered my kombucha garden, and called a friend. Notorious for randomly opening my drawers to make sure I’ve been maintaining a sense of order, I sent her some pictures of my cleaned room for validation.

Tuesday (Day 5)

I guess my body has finally caught up on sleep, so, despite my best efforts, I could not sleep past 9 AM. After lying in bed reading for a bit, I finally decided to get up and get my life together.

My lab era:

Stuck in quarantine, I had started to lose track of the days. I spent the morning reading over a scientific article about “High-throughput functional analysis of autism genes in zebrafish.” The goal was to essentially understand what was going on in their Matlab script for visual-startle response behavior and apply that to my research on light-stimuli response (a possible indicator of ASD phenotype). However, I am (a) very bad at using Matlab and (b) there are like a million different files in the Github making it hard to figure out which to run. Thus, I was getting quite frustrated.

However, before my I was ready to take out my frustration on perhaps one of the more breakable objects in my room, one of my lab members kindly sent me the zoom link to our lab meeting, which had been going on for like 30 minutes. Chastised for forgetting the day and being late, I quickly joined the meeting and spent the rest of the morning listening to the presentation.

My coding era:

In an attempt at minor productivity, I decided to multitask, working on some coding challenge problems while watching Warrior Nun. To be honest, I do not think multitasking is analogous to comprehension; I’m not sure I got much out of either.

The finale:

I spent the evening eating dinner, organizing my songs into a new playlist, and reading. Out of laziness and respect for other occupants of the kitchen – I was still in quarantine after all – I attempted to microwave-boil my ravioli. I’d say a solid 8/10 success. I went to bed early, very, very ready for the next morning.

Wednesday (Day 6)

Freedom!