As we all know, COVID is the new black around here and everyone is stuck at home. No one goes out, everyone’s locked in, washing hands every five minutes, buying toilet paper, you know the drill. So, for the sake of doing so (and because I have no other idea for an article) I’ll describe a day in my life during the lockdown.
My day starts at exactly 3:40 in the morning. No, I don’t get up to study, I get up because I can’t sleep. My body is officially done with sleeping and has now decided to torture me with boredom until 5. So, to tire myself, I run around the house for half an hour, twist my ankle in the process, try not to scream and then proceed to continue running for another hour. For the record, my house is small and cramped so there is a lot of stuff to bang my little toe into. Eventually, I lie back into bed and fall asleep only to be woken by my mother tickling my feet five minutes later. Since my school insists on having online zoom classes, a zombie drags itself out of bed and into the washroom. within fifteen minutes the zombie mystically transforms into a human and comes out. Since I am still not awake, I proceed to chug 3 glasses of coffee and hurriedly have my breakfast all while setting up the laptop which is low on battery (did I forget to charge it last night?) for class.
At 8 o clock, my first class starts. Being sleep-deprived, I’m not paying attention to class. Instead, I’m thinking out how lucky my sister is to be allowed to sleep for another 2 hours and how I ought to be paying attention but not doing so in the process. In the middle of the first session, I realize my pen, pencil and every other possible stationary I need is in the other room. The teacher requires us to keep our videos on so that they can make sure that we aren’t sleeping…which we are. So, after sending a prayer hoping my teacher doesn’t notice, I dash into the next room and grab everything I need and run back into the living room, just in time to answer a question the teacher has posed to me. After about 2 hours, it’s break time and my mom has just arrived with…boiled eggs (internal screaming) and to top it off a Thermo flask with boiling turmeric, lemon, amla and honey-infused water which is supposed to ‘boost my immunity’.
After painfully intaking the substances, the next classes begin. In one of the classes, the teacher doesn’t realise that we aren’t supercomputers and proceeds to run the ppt slides as fast as possible and expects to have completed, neat notes by the end of the period. At 1 in the afternoon, classes are finally over (I have no words to explain how relieved I am). but we only have 15 minutes to eat, as my sister’s class begins at 1:15. So my sister, my mom and I drink our food and then set up for the next class. My dad has gone to work and will be back in about an hour after which he will eat lunch in bed. After feeling relieved that school’s over I jump into the bed and then fall asleep until 6 in the evening.
The school, you see, automatically believes that since we are all sitting at home now, it is perfectly alright to send us approximately 40 or so assignments whose deadlines are only days apart from each other. At roughly 7, I creep into the kitchen with one thought. I’m not hungry, but I AM bored. Therefore, I shall eat. So where on earth is the Nutella! Then out of self-inflicted depression and multiple scoldings from, you guessed it, mom, I go to my study table and begin to restudy (is that a word?) the equations of motion for the 15th time that week.
By 9, the whole family greeted by tall glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice infused with turmeric for dinner. After which we proceed to consume cod liver oil capsules, vitamin d, vitamin c and every other preventive cure on the market while listening to a running commentary from Facebook on how the coronavirus was created in a lab to shatter the world’s economy.
After reading all this you might be thinking along the lines of ‘this kid has to be the laziest on the planet’ but honestly, I’m not. ln the midst of all this unproductivity, I am productive. I study for school. I learned to edit videos. I learned to animate. I participate in writing competitions. I write stories (not for the outside world). I draw…. I do everything. I may not be the most focused or productive person in the world, but I am not wasting my time right now.
This pandemic may not have brought the best for everyone, but the least we can do right now is be positive. After all, as one wise bearded old man once said, “happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if only one remembers to turn on the light."