Category: Coronavirus

Five Outlets for Your Quarantine Loneliness

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So you’re rolling into week nine of quarantine, and let’s just say things are getting a little desperate. Your roommate abandoned you for their family home in Connecticut (with a fucking pool) WEEKS ago, and the closest thing you’ve experienced to human contact is when you accidentally got within a foot of your neighbor during the social distancing hallway dance then both of you sprinted away. Tinder has gotten intensely introspective and the dark corners of the internet have lost their shine. That boule though…It’s looking pretty…tasty. And it’s not the only one.

Here are five sourdough breads that look good enough to fuck.

5. Scored for your pleasure

4. It even comes with lube

3. I mean, wouldn’t you?

2. Look at those curves

  1. Sploosh

How is it already week two of quarantine?!

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Um, is it just me or is time flying in quarantine? Seriously, it’s already week two and guys, I’m worried I’m gonna start losing my mind. But as I get ready for day nine of staying at home (and day seven of wearing the same sweatpants, who feels me??) I’ve come up with a few unique tips to help pass the time:

  • Read a book
  • Do a puzzle
  • Learn to bake
  • Go for a walk
  • Yoga
  • Move to your parents $4 million, seven-bed in New Hampshire (no boating though!)
  • Journal
  • Learn a language

Hope this helps!!

Five Great Ways to Stay Connected With Your Friends During Quarantine

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Start a Tontine! Feeling inspired by our word search? A tontine isn’t just a great investment vehicle, it’s also a surefire way to make sure you stay connected and deeply attuned to who among your friends is still alive and drawing from the fund. 

Find Something to Wager On! Just because there aren’t any sports on doesn’t mean you still can’t gamble. Have your friends set up a regular zoom chat so you can try something new, like Virtual Russian Roulette! 

Start a Virtual Fight Club! Go on, put those home workouts to use. See which one of your friends can land the best round-house kick on the inflatable doll your friends inexplicably bought for you from Amazon. 

Develop a Hobby! Now’s an excellent time to treat yourself to some “me” time. Maybe that means finally getting into wine by polishing off a bottle or two per night! 

Invest! The best way to survive and prosper during a bear market? Be aggressive! There’s never been a better time to treat yourself to that barrel of oil you’ve had your eyes on. 

The Worst Things We’re Going to Do When Quarantine Ends

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  • Keep talking to people about my sourdough starter
  • Go back to letting the faucet run without actually washing my hands, just so people outside the bathroom don’t judge me 
  • Touch
  • Produce Season 2 of Netflix’s Tiger King
  • Hold the subway poles with my mouth
  • Watch NFL football
  • Feel
  • Proclaim to be pro-science on things like climate change, but quietly hold an internal skepticism of vaccines
  • Get seriously injured and waltz into the hospital
  • Hold
  • Greet all strangers with an open mouth kiss
  • Scream, “I missed you, man!” at every passing stranger
  • Continue going on walks wearing a bandana around your mouth like an 8-year-old dressed up as a cowboy 
  • Stop tipping delivery drivers for a few months, to balance things back out

What Is This Hyper-Capitalist Shaming Bullshit?

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If you do #business like we do #business, you have probably seen some Ayn Rand garbage like this making the rounds: 

“If you don’t come out of this quarantine with:

  • A new skill
  • More knowledge
  • Your side hustle started

You never lacked time, you lacked discipline.”

While we here at Left on Read love shaming people for almost anything (we’re looking at you, people who cover their mouths when they laugh. Why are you covering your mouth? Do you hate joy, weirdo?), this has the empathy and spirit of Ronald Reagan throwing bags of pennies at homeless people—a true thing that did happen. 

Here’s a fun bit of information: We are in a motherfucking pandemic. You know, a worldwide event during which thousands of people are dying and every single person is being forced to stay inside. In other words, it bad. This bad. During times that are, you know, this catastrophically shitty, we can just maybe have the slightest bit of empathy for people not feeling like learning how to do a VLOOKUP. I’m looking at you, “Thought Leaders.”

As we enter week five of quarantine purgatory, our bar for what constitutes success needs to be brought way the fuck down. So, if you don’t come out of this quarantine with…

Congratulations! You are an amazing human genius and we are very proud of you. You did it, and we are proud of you.

Excuses for why you haven’t done that thing, now that you can’t say you don’t have enough time

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  • All of your good novel ideas involve an intrepid lawyer who, while working from home, constantly searches for “coronavirus symptoms,” “coronavirus testing,” and “please dear god where are the tests”
  • Shakespeare wouldn’t have written King Lear while under quarantine if he had access to Netflix and medical-grade kush 
  • Forgot how long Civilization LAN games take
  • Just been putting a lot of time into this email newsletter thing, you know? 
  • Nowhere near as productive without being in a crowded coffee shop surrounded by awkward hinge dates and undergrads furiously typing on their powerpoint (??) presentation for Socioeconomics 210
  • You recently discovered that Road to Perdition fits into the lyrics to “Ignition – Remix” and you’re not sure what to do with this information
  • Unexpected breaking down into tears suddenly up 200%
  • If I clean my apartment, that’s just going to generate more trash, and isn’t increasing the workload for the garbageman a moral issue at this point?
  • My therapist* said I should really be more patient with myself, and that I shouldn’t expect to accomplish everything at once**. (*own blog, **ever)
  • Oh, I’m sorry, are you unfamiliar with The Dread?
  • You also recently discovered that “Pete Davidson” fits into “White Iverson” by Post Malone, and again, it’s just been a lot to take in
  • You have been at your computer for six days now, not sleeping, ordering new casserole dishes on Target.com
  • There are CHILDREN in CAGES!!!!
  • Good Screen and Bad Screen are the Same Screen now 😦

My Culture Is Not Your Playground: It’s time to stop co-opting introvert culture

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As someone who is a hard “I” on the Myers–Briggs, this quarantine season has been very difficult for me. It seems like I can’t go a day without logging on to Instagram and seeing photos of my friends who have traded in their Coachella tickets and networking happy hours for a night in, cuddled up in a cozy blanket to re-read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Hashtags like #introvertlife and #quarantintrovert abound. If I have to hear one more time about how “it’s so nice to finally stay home and have some me time,” I might just pen a thousand-word missive on tumblr. 

I’m sure many of you think it’s funny to joke about how nice it is to finally have an excuse not to hang out with your friends. But maybe next time you should stop and think about how hurtful that can sound to people who have been turning off their camera on video conferences for years. 

We get it. It’s now ~so~ empowering that we can all admit that we find small talk on Zoom to be incredibly cumbersome. Us introverts should take it as a compliment that so many people now claim to “actually wait until the delivery person drops the food off before I come to the door.” But how about you put yourself in our slipper-shod shoes? Next time you brag about how you learned a lot about yourself by quietly self-reflecting during your now-solo coffee break, think about how painful that must be to your introvert friend who—before this quarantine—only found himself represented in cardigan models and Buzzfeed listicles. 

So, while we invite you to celebrate our culture, there are a lot of other ways to appreciate us introverts than to make light of your sudden aversion to hugging friends or seeing your neighbors in the elevator. And we challenge you to think about what it means when this is over and some of you extroverts can put that jigsaw puzzle back on the shelf.

This quarantine can be a fun time if we all take proper social distancing measures and be careful with our personality-shaming. Tell your friends. And can you tell ours too? 

What have we learned during self-quarantine so far?

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20. You can have 50 titles in your Amazon watchlist and still have no idea what to watch.

19. Maybe not having enough time wasn’t the reason you never wrote that book.

18. This was a bad time to read The Road.

17. Time, in hindsight, was a bad idea.

16. I liked the sexual tension that came with full-contact deliveries.

15. There are no truly fool-proof YouTube tutorials on cutting your own hair.

14. More things go with cauliflower than you’d think, but not as many as you’ve tried.

13. There is literally nothing stopping me from watching Christmas movies whenever the fuck I want.

12. People really like playing Codenames? Like, they’ll seek it out? And play it over wifi? 

11. No amount of plants can compensate for the small joy of subtly rubbing against strangers on public transit.

10. Maybe you underrated Silver Linings Playbook the first time around.

9. John Oliver is, in fact, my daddy.

8. “Sweet Caroline” is the wrong song to sing in public during a pandemic (“REACHING OUT. TOUCHING ME. TOUCHING YOUUUUUUU”).

7. All it takes to create a national cultural conversation is a little quarantine, a weird sex cult, a hit man, and some tigers.

6. Maybe leave the bread making to the professionals.

5. It’s ten times harder to avoid hanging out with your friend group when everybody knows you have nothing better going on.

4. Allowing unfettered capitalism to create a permanent under-class controlled by the whims of billionaires weirdly isn’t good for public safety and well-being (CC: Uncle Bezos).

3. You shouldn’t eat where you shit, but you can conference call while you shit.

2. If two people make the same amount of money but one has a backyard and the other does not, then they are not equals.

1. It’s easy to become a functional alcoholic if you lower the bar for “functional.”

Hey buddy, how are you?

~ leftonreadletter ~ Leave a comment

Hey man, how’s it going? You hanging in there? Things are pretty nuts right now, huh? Unprecedented times, that’s for sure!

Just wanted to check in and see how you were. I know we’re all pretty isolated right now and it’s tough to stay connected, so I thought I’d drop you a line. Let me know if you ever want to video chat, I’ve got a pretty sweet Zoom hook up!

Anyway, just wanted to let you know I was thinking of you during these trying times! While I’ve got you, I did also want to check in on that $14,000 you owe me. I was just looking at my Gcal (who can even remember what day it is, lol!!) and noticed it had been six months since you were supposed to pay me back.

It’s no big deal, I know how crazy things are right now! I wasn’t even sure banks were open anymore, what with the unprecedented times and everything. But I had a sec so I looked it up and it turns out they were deemed “essential businesses” within the State of New York so we should be all good on that front.

Maybe we can chat about you getting me that money when we have a Zoom hang! I was thinking a little virtual happy hour? If you’re up for it, we could both make our favorite cocktails (Old Fashioned for me, haha!) and just kick it. It would honestly just be great to see another person’s face!

Speaking of which, I noticed that after I sent Big Joey to try to collect in February you kind of bashed his nose in with your driver (you’ve still got that old Callaway, huh?). Good thing he’s quarantining at home now, so no one can see how jacked up his face his!! Gotta focus on those silver linings these days, that’s for sure! Anyway, just wanted to make sure you weren’t planning to do that again if I send Timmy “The Clown” O’Callaghan your way—I don’t want anyone within 6 feet of my guys!! 

But seriously, quarantining with my ball and chain has me missing the good old days, when you and I used to knock back a few (dozen, lol!!) brews at the bar and set terms of a payment for a loan between pals. Remember those days, when people could go to a bar? Hah! But really what is this world coming to?

Anyway, just wanted to say hi and that your whole family is in my thoughts! Especially your parents—are they still out on Long Island? At that place in Islip? 2634 Union Boulevard? Just down the block from the high school? 

Well tell ‘em I say hello, and that they better be staying inside! If I hear they’re going out, I’ll tell Father Johnny over at St. Pat’s on ‘em! Hah!

Good catching up, drop me a line some time. Account number and routing information to follow.

All my best!