“[Quarantine] wasn’t too bad, as my parents and I are used to spending a lot of time together and we have the same hobbies. It felt like my childhood again, simply spending all day with my parents. However, these happy times were abruptly cut short when George Floyd was brutally murdered by police. This sparked many discussions about racial justice between my parents and I…”
“I think that the hardest thing about quarantine and COVID-19 has been going to school online…This semester, I feel like some of my teachers seem to be expecting more than if we were actually in person. I am finding it more difficult to balance my life between social, personal, and school.”
“She moved back to San Francisco because she missed the fog and the cable cars and the other poets. In the 1970s she found it easier (and less expensive) to write rather than paint.”
“Summer didn’t feel like summer because nothing really changed except for the fact that I wasn’t doing schoolwork all day, but it wasn’t the break I needed. It was not the stress-free summer I usually have – how could it be, I was starting to apply to college and things quickly turned downhill for my family.”
” I have been through pain, happiness, stress, excitement, and sadness through this taxing quarantine. In the end, I have learned the valuable life lesson that everything happens for a reason. I will not always get what I want, but I can learn from the journey and emotions that I am currently experiencing and use it to form my future self.”
“Personally, I was deeply affected during the pandemic because my grandmother (who lives in America) came down with the virus. This was a big scare to me and my family and I got really worried. The thing was that we could not even travel to her to help her and even if we could, we would have a massive chance of getting the virus ourselves.”
“During this period, I have realized how privileged I am because I see a lot of people struggling with financial problems. I hope their problems end soon. However, I read a lot of positive articles about how the earth is healing. That makes me very happy. However, certain things like fake WhatsApp forwards and the fact that my grandparents believe in them as if they are the words of the oracle is very irritating.”
“Personally, keeping a schedule, e.g getting to bed at a certain time, has really helped keep my life fairly structured during these chaotic times. So I’d probably encourage others to be slightly productive, even if it isn’t studying/work, something like baking is super fun and you get some great treats out of it.”
“There were no particular difficulties, but my institute, like many others, was not ready for distance learning, and some difficulties arose: for example, problems with the Internet, a poor-quality platform for conducting seminars and lectures. The hardest thing in my situation is the MacBook.”
“My mother works in the hospital and my father worked within the grocery store so we were always cautious about the way we did things. We talked at dinner about covid and all the crazy things it had people doing. We laughed about people wearing plastic bags or Stormtrooper masks (Starwars) when they went grocery shopping…The thought of covid was constantly on my mind, a stressor that was inescapable.”
Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA),
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