By Kaylee Chan | Junior Editor
The alarm beeps from my phone, the first step in an all too familiar routine. I roll out of bed, hit the stop button, and stretch. Today, there will not be a quick breakfast grab, the slinging of a backpack across my shoulder, or a crowded commute to the Gabrielino campus where I will start another day of sophomore year. Instead, my school lies within a screen.
It is a new normal, but I keep my old routines where I can. I splash water on my face, brush my teeth, and scrub my hands – the latter done with vigor as I remember what this all stemmed from. ‘Pandemic’ has become a tired out word, but it crops back up in my thoughts all the same.
Before I know it, I am right back in my room again, eyes fixed on the clock. At two minutes before 8:30 a.m., I click on the English zero period Zoom link and submerge, hopefully unnoticed, into the crowd of pixelated heads. My earbuds relay laggy audio, narration of a story about a man who turns into a cockroach; he too is trapped within his home, isolated from others and unable to go to work. It is wrong, how relatable that is now.
The next few periods go by in a flash. Ninety minutes feels like no time at all as I struggle to retain snippets of information from the cavalcade of presentations, lectures, and videos. Algebra becomes a blur of Desmos graphs and paper scribbles, AP History is a balancing act between multiple sprawling documents, and lunch is far shorter than it should be.
There is still a half-eaten bowl of noodles on my desk as I arrive at my last period. It is Intro to Art, and like every class, it feels diluted in the wake of the new format, up to the moment I sign off for the day.
As usual, during school no one addresses the elephant in the room. There are brief allusions to ‘our current situation’ and ‘the way things are’, but even that starts losing meaning as the abnormality of our current state starts fading into the background. Whether we are adapting or are becoming numb to it is unclear.
One thing is certain: it is tiring. It is tiring to be confronted with the same issues over and over like a broken record, tiring to deal with the personal consequences of global mishaps, tiring to have mental problems compounded with academic ones as grades start to slip.
I know I don’t have it the worst. This isn’t my first year at Gab, and it isn’t my last. Someday, I will get to enjoy the campus again and the experience of being at home all day will become a weekend rarity.
Until then, I browse the news and count my blessings. If this is a dark tunnel, then we will see the light at the end of it, even if we must be reminded of the pandemic every step of the way.
