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Thursday, March 28, 2024
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How to deal with having COVID-19 at home

All articles featured in The Beet are creative, satirical and/or entirely fictional pieces. They are fully intended as such and should not be taken seriously as news.

If you’re like me right now, you’re spending your days in your twin-size childhood bed after a pair of unexpected positive COVID-19 tests. Yeah, you were safer than normal — read: stopped going to frat parties and bars — the last week you were in Madison, and you tested negative twice before coming back, but that goddamn baby that was bawling its eyes out from Chicago to Newark probably gave it to you. Stop crying and put a mask on you little shit.

But, asshole baby or not, this is your life for the next few weeks. Every time you see your parents, they’re in a mask. You feel guilty for bringing the Becky Virus — as some people are calling it, I understand — back home, but again, nothing you can do now. 

Never fear, dear reader, for I am here to walk you through your two weeks of quarantine and mild COVID-19 symptoms with the five most important things you’ll need to survive.

1. A Good Attitude

Listen, bud. It could be worse. You’re in your bed, not the ICU. Sometimes, when everything sucks, you just gotta take a step back and realize where you are. Yes, it’s twin-size, so you may as well be locked up in a Slovenian prison, but let’s move past that for a second.

Of course, the benefit to being at home is the food. Home-cooked meals beat UberEats McDonalds any day, price-wise and taste-wise. So just wait for your mom or dad to bring up the next meal … fuck yes, some nachos. Hmm…

These nachos taste weird. 

Actually, they … they don’t taste like anything… 

Wait. Wait wait wait. Hold on. Hooooold on. Did I … no. There’s no way. No way. Let me take another bite … oh fuck.

It’s about now where you’re gonna slowly walk over to the stick of deodorant sitting on your desk. Take the top off and put your nose about three centimeters away, take a whiff like you’re Diego Maradona (RIP) before a big game, and … shit. Shit shit shit SHIT SHIT SHIT I CAN’T SMELL OR TASTE WHAT THE FUCK OH GOD IM SPIRALING THIS IS GONNA BE A DIS —

2. Drugs

Okay, calm down. You’re gonna be fine. But maybe right now we just need to take the edge off.

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Hopefully on your way back you pulled a Baby Escobar and trafficked a few weed edibles through the TSA. Trust me dude, they don’t give a shit. Just do it, but don’t call me when you get arrested. Millions of people do it every year and if you get in trouble it’s because you’re lame and you deserve it.

Weed is the quarantine drug of choice. I’m not gonna preach to you like one of those stoners who wear drug rugs even though on many levels including spiritual I am one; however, I am 100 percent right about this. If you’re gonna be laying in bed all day, you should at least be high. Feel something dude. 

You might be thinking that without your sense of smell, it’s a great time to try cocaine. Um, no. Don’t do that. Doing cocaine alone is some sleazy shit. That’s why we voted out the Trumps. 

Alcohol may seem like a good idea, as it’s probably more readily available than weed, but you’re gonna feel like shit in the morning. Also, drinking alone isn’t fun and is only slightly less sleazy than coke alone. If coke alone is the Trumps, drinking alone is some George W. Bush shit — even though we know he was a party animal.

The opioid crisis has killed hundreds of thousands of people and ruined millions of lives. But … just hear me out. All things considered, maybe heroin isn’t the worst thing … I should probably stop here.

3. Buy a JRPG

Okay. Let’s not lie to ourselves. We’re down bad. And for me, at least, I am using this time to do absolutely no work. Fuck this late-stage capitalism shit, I’ve got a virus that’s killed millions of people and I’m not gonna spend this time doing schoolwork. Yuck. But then, what am I gonna do?

Well, my friend, let me introduce you to the weeaboo hell that is a Japanese Role Playing Game. I haven’t touched one of the things since my middle-school days because I didn’t want to seem weird in high school, and that might have been the lone choice that led to me actually having friends. 

But we are alone now. No friends allowed. Welcome to Weeb Land.

Now, I’m not so dead-set on these games because they’re fun. God, no. They’re kinda fun I guess. But you know what they really are? Time-consuming.

I sunk dozens of hours into various JRPGs over the course of my middle-school years, and I didn’t beat a single one. Not one. These fuckers are like 80 hours long. The average person should never be able to complete one. But guess what? The average person has things to do, unlike you and I. 

I personally recommend Persona 4 Golden, which is what I’m playing through right now. I’ve played 15 hours in the last three days, so I’m barely past the prologue. It’s pretty good if you take it for what it is and don’t take it too seriously. If you can get past the plot point of a major character having homosexual thoughts and brushing it off as a mental illness — I wish I was making that up — then it’s a pretty good game. It’s on sale on Steam, too, which in most people’s minds outweighs the homophobia.

4. Stay healthy. Or at least try to.

Every time I open the door to my room for my dad without a shirt, he asks if I worked out yet. Of course, the answer is no, but it’s making me self-conscious so I’m gonna pretend that I’m gonna do these healthy things.

Yoga is a really good way to stay healthy while you have COVID. Except for the fact that it is literally all about breath, and you have a respiratory virus. So, nevermind.

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is out of the question, too. I did HIIT for six weeks over the summer and I couldn’t breathe when I was actually healthy, so I’m not even gonna try that. 

If you have weights, that could work. Look at Mr. Moneybags over here with his personal set of weights. Fuck you. I’m jealous.

Of course, now is as good a time as ever to go on a diet. I’m considering going not just vegetarian, but kale-only. Kale sucks, but guess what? I can’t fucking taste. What does it matter to me? Gimme a plate of leaves like a well-loved rabbit three times a day and I’ll probably live. 

5. Write about your feelings

When all else fails, take a few hours to write a dumb little satire piece, because it’s not like you’ve got anything else to do. Stop scrolling through Snapchat and Twitter where all your friends are living it up in San Diego, and take some time for yourself. 

Write what you’re feeling. The pain, the dullness of losing your senses, the pinch in your back from being hunched over in bed all day, the tightness in your shoulders from all the stagnance. Bare it all. 

And then send that apparently-deeply personal piece to Almanac Editor Jordan Simon, who — based on his recent tweets — is probably ridiculously high, and give him work to do on a Saturday night because you have no sense of times or dates anymore and forgot that people actually go outside and do things on weekends. 

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