One month ago, I moved out of my childhood home and back to my college town in San Diego. At the last minute, I took up an offer from my best friend’s good friend’s girlfriend to move in with her and her roommate. The two girls didn’t have a bedroom for me, so they said I could crash on her couch and pay dirt cheap rent for a couple months. It seemed like a pretty sweet deal.
I had met these girls only once before. At the San Diego Women’s March, I complimented their outfits and they complimented my sign. After the march, we went out to eat in Little Italy and I think I ended up following them on Instagram or something. Little did I know, five months later we would be living together.
One of the girls is a public health major and the other is biology major specializing in viruses (among such brain power, my writing major feels even more useless). Needless to say, we are pretty big sticklers for the rules. We stay away from others, disinfect everything, and the Taiwanese mother of one of my roommates even FaceTimed us as we poured salt and rice around the corners of our apartment to cleanse the space of any bad energy.
But, in the middle of social distancing and constant cleaning, we have still found ways to make memories together. Unable to go out, we spend our nights playing board games, watching John Mulaney, and building a Lego Death Star (we are almost done!).
While our situation is not the ideal college lifestyle, there is something inherently amusing about it all. We live right next to the freeway: the only thing louder than the rushing cars is the squawking seagulls that have chosen our balcony to nest on. The internet is not strong enough for all three of us to take our Zoom calls at the same time. The whole thing feels like the plot of some strange, coming-of-age sitcom.
It’s like we’re stuck in a That ’70s Show reboot where instead of sitting in our basement smoking marijuana we are trying to melt hand sanitizer to use as a
So many people have told me how sad it is to watch us quarantined 20-somethings “waste the best years of our lives”, but this time doesn’t feel wasted to me.
Yes, our apartment is shitty. Yes, I don’t really see anybody but my two roommates who I barely knew a month ago. But there is still something endearing about it all. Maybe 20 years from now someone will make a cheesy sitcom with an overinflated laugh track about being young in 2020 (if there are any big time
We are living through a crazy period in history. We will all share our stories about this time to generations to come. You have the power to take control and live out the narrative you want to tell your kids and grandkids about.
And I plan on regaling them with some pretty cool plot-lines.
