What a time to be alive. Have you guys seen the flatten the curve graph? Only twenty-nine times? Well, hopefully you got the message, then! If you are a good person not a psychopath and your employer is good not a psychopath either, you are probably at home right now, grateful that you are still getting paid to work on your Spongebob pajamas, but understandably a little bored.

So here’s a post with some suggestions of what you could be doing during this period of social-distancing so that you don’t completely lose your mind. Enjoy!

1. Get a copy of the Bible. If this is actually the apocalypse, you want to make sure your soul gets saved, right? For most of us, it’s too late, but you never know.
2. Buy a ton of stuff on Amazon. I mean, why not? That horse-shaped thermometer and limited edition pink Hello Kitty Nintendo Switch are just dying to get on your shelves. And just imagine how much happier you’ll be with them for the five minutes that will follow the arrival of the boxes! (Which you will wipe with Lysol beforehand, of course.)
3. Question all of your life decisions whilst staring at your moldy ceiling. Remember that day you decided to major in psychology in college? Or that year-long crush that completely set you back in your dating life? Now is the time to relive every excruciating detail and tell yourself things will be different from now on. And what better way to start if not by getting some diluted bleach solution on that mold? Like, now.
4. Memorize the menus of every restaurant on Uber Eats. Eating exclusively canned tuna with bottom-shelf rigatoni (and trying to ration the pasta sauce, which you don’t have enough of) can only last for so long. At some point, the desire for gastronomical variety will marginally exceed your fear that the restaurant staff and/or delivery person has coronavirus. That’s what Uber Eats is for.
5. Contemplate whether getting drive-thru Panda Express is worth the small risk that a COVID-positive restaurant employee has sneezed on the food. We at Lehrmda sympathize with the plight of the fast-food proletariat #socialism #berniecanstillwin. However, as sufferers of intermittent hypochondriasis, ain’t nobody want to risk infection from a scoopful of contaminated Beijing beef.
6. Look up “fever temperature” on Google every time a breeze comes in and you feel a little chilly. I mean, you never know, could be a fever, which is a symptom of the coronavirus. If you get the horse-shaped thermometer on Amazon, you can actually figure out if you have a fever because it will beep differently.
7. Learn Icelandic on Duolingo. Realistically, learn how to say “the cat and the boat are not blue” in Icelandic on Duolingo. But still… nothing stopping you from doing that now. Kötturinn og báturinn eru ekki bláir!
8. Try out a new exotic recipe with all the slightly expired leftover ingredients inside your at-capacity fridge. Subsequently, butcher the recipe entirely, throw away the atrocity you cooked, and call Dominos for a large hand-tossed pizza. (Again, Lysol the box first.)
9. Create an Excel spreadsheet to track the color and consistency of your feces every day. This will help you ensure you are keeping an appropriate diet during these difficult times. You can go further by creating some fun time-series charts in the charts section, or, if you’re feeling particularly frisky, you can export your results as a CSV file and create a beautiful dashboard on Tableau.
10. Once again deliberate whether yoga can substitute for actual physical activity performed outdoors. The dramatic decline in your Fitbit step count has brought up suppressed memories of being overweight as a teenager. Yet who really wants to do push-ups in their living room? Yoga is nice. Is it exercise? No. But for the time being, you can pretend it is and pat yourself on the back — you moved!
11. Determine how much weight you can gain before people begin to notice that you’re chubbier when we can all go back to work (2022 edit: lol we never went back!). Related to point #10. Look, at this point, you have to accept that your plan to go #keto is going to hell because all you’re eating in lockdown are carbs. The key is to find the balance between non-obvious weight gain, feelings of self-hatred, and a well-justified fear of going to the grocery store to get vegetables.
12. Open yourself up to the wonderful YouTube algorithm suggestions of time-lapse videos of food items rotting over the course of a month. The ones with raw meat, the egg, and the coffee ones are pretty cool. Fantastic way to waste fifteen minutes and remind ourselves of the incredible existential dread that existence itself really is #circleoflife.
13. Re-watch “The Office” for the nth time. Want to escape the confining reality of your four walls? Immerse yourself in the expansive world of Scranton, PA, and get intimate with Dunder Mifflin, the parking lot, the warehouse, and the Steamtown Mall. Occasionally, stock footage of NYC.
14. Craft your own handmade mask when the time comes to get groceries. Wrap together some plastic foil, toilet paper, and a cut-out sock, with a generous elastic band on the side, and you’ll totally not look stupid, and you’ll be totally safe when venturing out to Costco. Trust me, no one will give you a weird look.
15. Read the five books of George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire.” Since you are already on the “waiting indefinitely” mood, might as well do it, and wait indefinitely for the sixth installment.
16. Contemplate breaking your Lenten promise not to drink. Does it still count as breaking a Lenten promise if Easter is canceled?
17. Get yourself a blackboard and start writing equations. At worst, you’ll get a great Instagram photo that will fool people into thinking you’re smart and studious. At best, you may accidentally prove the Riemann conjecture.
18. Write a script for a Netflix series. Everyone wants to watch a psychological romance thriller based on what you wish your life had been. Seriously. Who wouldn’t want ten episodes of that? Plot twist: the characters all end up quarantined.

Well, then. Now you no longer have the excuse that “there is nothing to do”. So quit complaining, and get to work. From home. Stay home, and stay safe, everyone.

-RGG with contributions from PC