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  2021-04-23

  My Chaotic Covid

  For me, the pandemic has been the exhaustingly consistent cherry on top of everything that’s gone sideways in my life over the past year. Now, this isn’t meant to be a pessimistic rant about the past 12 months, but just a sequence of events that kept things spiraling out of control while I tried my best to stay on top of the chaos and maintain an energetic passion for life and hope for the future. These traits used to come super naturally, as I had been following my ten year plan pretty successfully as of last March, until the rest of the year, which I thought to be set in stone, was pulled out from under my feet. I was having the time of my life in Rocky Point over spring break when Covid started hitting the fan. ASU announced a ‘temporary’ switch to online classes while I was on the road coming back home, and I drove straight into midst of a sudden global pandemic. Luckily, I had gotten out of Mexico in time before the borders were closed down. I was working at Harkins Theaters at the time, and my last shift was one with a whole bunch of disposable gloves and excessive new sanitization rules in concessions. I left that night not realizing that that would be my last shift there. I was at least planning on being there for another few months, before I would start a summer job I was recently contracted for. I was going to go on tour as a videographer with the Cavaliers drum and bugle corps, filming professional marching band videos and cutting together rad highlight reels all while traveling the country and getting paid for it. That was canceled soon after I was furloughed from Harkins. I went back home to visit my dad and brother in the midst of it all, but I don’t think my brother was ready for that kind of personal contact. He wound up giving me a black eye after I ended up getting too close to him and intentions were misconstrued. Shortly after, while already recovering from a destroyed face, I came down with a long, rough sickness that was aligned with the known symptoms and assumed by everyone to be Coronavirus. Unfortunately Covid tests were far from accessible at that point, and I was never able to confirm if that was the case. Trying to get away from the bleak outlook of everything, I took a few of my friends up to my grandparent’s empty house in Sedona. My roommate proceeded to secretly bring alcohol, drank too much and fall off a ladder, leaving a large-man-sized hole in the wall of my grandparents’ expensive house. While staying in Sedona the following week on one of my trips to head up and fix the wall, I got a call from my dad that my mom had passed away. She had been suffering for the past twelve years from a stroke and aneurism she had when I was eight, and on April 6th she finally let go. So that was a lot of emotion to throw on top of everything. After spreading my mom’s ashes with my dad and brother, I came back to find a baby monitor camera had been hidden on a shelf in my bedroom. I didn’t know who put this camera there, hidden in a sock, but it had been filming my girlfriend and I for the past three days and had gotten some pretty personal stuff on camera. It wasn’t hard to put together that that was the whole point of the monitor. My roommate felt violated as well, as he said he thought it was one of his friends who had put it there, and was on board with the whole police investigation we launched after the fact. I trusted my roommate, and while he had gone through a bit of an alcoholic phase the month before, I thought he was doing better. He had been one of my best friends for over five years at this point, and I didn’t want the worst case to be possible. But a few weeks later, my girlfriend’s phone mysteriously went missing in my apartment for a night. The next day she found a monitoring app downloaded onto it. My roommate had taken her phone, copied off all of all her private, ‘personal’ images of herself, and installed a program to track her and check in on her camera and microphone without her knowledge. Luckily we found this evidence soon enough, but it wasn’t an enjoyable experience kicking my best friend out of our apartment. The police found evidence that he put up the camera soon after and he was arrested. Two counts of voyeurism, one count of lying to the police, and everything he had taken off my girlfriend’s phone. I haven’t talked to him since last May, I can’t legally, it’s currently April of ’21 and his trial has yet to reach sentencing. After all that had happened, Summer was not what I had initially thought it would be. But it wasn’t all that bad. People started wearing masks, I got a temporary job making dough at Little Caesars, I was able to hang with my actual friends and the worst of it looked to be over. And while that much was true, the pandemic itself was far from over and slowly the months of lost experiences and thoughts of unfulfillment and wasted potential began to sit in. I got a different apartment in August, but it was an older and more run-down first floor unit with unexplainably loud upstairs neighbors. I’ve spent the entire lease of that unit trapped inside and longing for a normal college experience. These were supposed to be the craziest years of my life, and I felt like I had missed out on countless memories. I was working as a video editor from home on top of online school, and the days blended together into hopeless rituals of helpless procrastination. The motivation to thrive while held up in the new apartment was hard to find. But I still made it. I didn’t give up on pushing forwards. I’d put things off and the passing of time ultimately became an illusion, but I kept making sure I stayed productive. I edited together a vlog series through the beginnings of the pandemic, worked on other personal projects, and was able to get a pretty sweet internship doing remote editing work for a television studio in LA that I ordinarily wouldn’t have been eligible for as in person work. I made it through the 2020-2021 school year, my junior year, with good grades and came out on the other side more hopeful than ever. I got fully vaccinated a few weeks ago, I’m beginning to live again, and the bright outlook of a fresh start in a soon to be newly reintegrated world gives me an unparalleled excitement. I am looking insanely forward to all the new people I’ll meet, memories I’ll make, and experience I’ll gain through my senior year being back in person. Everything’s coming back together, and as long as everyone can make an effort to get vaccinated and keep each other safe, calm, and hopeful, I’m more than prepared to cram 13 months of missed experiences into the best, jam-packed, fulfilling, productive and exciting year of my life. …Yet.