Items

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  2021-12-10

  My Time During Covid-19

  During the Covid-19, I experienced a stressful time period just like most people. When the lockdown first happened I was scared and uncertain of what would happen. It was the first time in my life that I have ever had the feeling of being unable to hang out with friends and see family members. Many people I knew were still hanging out with people and doing social activities just like there was not a pandemic going on. I wanted to still do social activities with them and visit people but I was unsure if that was safe to do, so I decided to just stay in the house and be safe. My grandma is going through chemotherapy and I did not want her to catch covid if I did happen to get it, so my whole family was being extra careful to not catch the virus. During this time period I kept in touch with friends by playing online video games and facetiming my family members. The strangest part of this time period for me was the social aspect of the pandemic. Whenever you would go to the store in my area the shelves would be empty, and people would just walk past you and were not willing to talk to anyone. I usually take in person classes for school, and I had to make the transition to doing classes online for the first time. All sports had to cancel all of their events so I was not able to compete in any of the events for the entire year. This was definitely a year of fear and uncertainty for many people, but when I look back there were a lot of positives that happened. The most positive thing was that I got to spend a lot of time with my family. Mostly everyone in my household is busy all the time and we all never get too much time to just sit and talk even though we all live in the same house. During the lockdown we all got the chance to spend a lot of time together since there was not a whole lot going on. I was also able to spend a lot of time talking with friends that I have not talked to in a long time over online video games, and I got back into skateboarding which is a hobby that I have not done in seven years. Even though I was fearful of the virus, I experienced a time period where I could focus a lot on being as productive as possible, and it gave me a lot of gratitude for how things are today where things are mostly back to normal. Just like it was for a lot of people, there were definitely a lot of bad experiences that happened during the Covid -19 period for me, but there are also good things that I am thankful for. Hopefully people can focus on the positives that happened during that time period as we push forward past it.
• 2021-01-25

  COVID-19

  I haven’t personally been affected that much by COVID-19. My brother had it in January, before everyone knew what it was, but other than that no one in my family has had it. The way it has affected me the most is with school and sports being canceled. I wasn’t able to see my friends very often and I couldn’t get as much activity. Even with all the bad things that happened because of COVID, there was still some good things. Many people learned new things or got a new hobby. For me it was skateboarding. The COVID quarantine is definitely not fun but there is some good that has come out of it.
• 2020-09-25

  Cholo skateboarding to Fleetwood Mac

  Isolation has been so difficult for some of us. I chose this video because it represents the opposite of depression, hopelessness, and despair. @Doggface208 was skateboarding and drinking juice through a hill towards his job while listening to Fleetwood Mac. This TikTok video went viral, in the first 20 hours had more than 4 million views, but it also provided some hope, calm, and happiness to the complicated reality of the pandemic. Social media users even commented about this video as "This part of 2020 doesn’t suck", "This guy didn’t know he saved 2020".
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  2020-04-30

  Pandemic Pool Skating

  If you believe Stacy Peralta‘s documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, and of course you should — he’s one of the Lords of Dogtown for heaven’s sake, then you’ll know that pool skating originated here in Los Angeles during California’s drought in the late 70s. Some forty-odd years later and we’re in a drought of our own, a drought of socializing, of congregating, as humans across the southland and the world shelter at home to protect ourselves and the weakest among us from the novel coronavirus. But the empty pools and skateparks across Los Angeles, built for beginners, Olympic hopefuls and every skater in between, are being filled with sand and mulch so they don’t become deep, glossy-tiled petri dishes birthing a new surge of Covid-19 cases. There’s one problem. Just as no one could keep skateboarders out of backyard pools in the 70s long enough to keep a new sport from blossoming in a literal desert, a few tons of mulch or sand won’t help to board up skaters. That’s because essential services are still available. Big-box home improvement stores are open for business, stocked with antidotes to debris: shovels and shop vacs, push brooms and blowers. But of course we pool-riders are already equipped with such technology. So go ahead and fill that pool with mulch, dump and spread sand across the street courses. Skaters will eventually show up at odd hours to push and blow it out of the way. We’ll don our personal protective equipment, helmets, wrist guards, knee and elbow pads, and get in a quick session before you ever notice. We don’t even need to clear out the whole pool. A half, or even a quarter pool will do — like the quarter pipes we would hammer and scrap together at the bottom of our driveways in the 70s and 80s. We’d risk life and limb skating to the top of those rickety booby-traps pushing our wheels over the edge like we’d see Stacy and Tony Alva do in magazines (those things we’d use if we ran out of toilet paper). Skateboarders are creative, resilient, unrelenting. Ian McKaye of Minor Threat calls skateboarding “a way of learning how to redefine the world around you.” We see the world differently. Where you see an empty swimming pool, skateboarders see the form and shape and flow of concrete waves to ride. Where you see a curb and sidewalk, skateboarders see an edge to grind, a platform to manual, or wheelie, across. Where you see an empty corporate plaza, skateboarders see a playground of infinite lines to skate, slide and grind across. Where you see pools safely filled with sand, we see an opportunity to perform a ritual baked into our DNA, a ritual of clearing and cleansing. And in the emptiness we’ll skate new lines, try new tricks, push to new heights. As Craig Stecyk understood, according to Skip Englbom in Dogtown and Z-Boys, children took the ruins of the 20th century and made art out of it. And in the ruins of this pandemic there will only be more art. A lot of pool skaters aren’t children anymore. We’re the old guard, Generation X skaters with kids to care for at home, and parents to shop for so they don’t have to risk a Costco run. So we will keep a couple arms’-length apart as we sweep and skate, clear and carve. Because we can’t help ourselves. Our godfathers showed us how. Lance Mountain explains, “skateboarding doesn’t make you a skateboarder. Not being able to stop skateboarding makes you a skateboarder.” A crisis created skateboarding as we know it. No pandemic or sand-filled dump truck is about to stop its progress.
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  03/24/2020

  Alexander Oral History, 2020/03/24

  Alexander describes how his life has changed in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown. Some of his challenges include teleworking for a new job, watching over his kids now that they can’t go to school, and coping with shortages of necessities and lack of normal entertainment such as sports. He talks about how he thinks it is a good thing that his kids are not at school, as primary schools are known to be germ spreaders. Alexander conveys his hopes that the lockdown will end soon and normal life will be able to continue.