A bright red line. So immediate, so definitive that I thought it was the control line. It wasn’t. That line soon appeared too. I took another test, an expired one I had lying around. Same thing, two lines. The next day, I took another one at 8 a.m. before “Primates.” Two lines again. Three tests (all of which may or may not have expired) said I had COVID-19.
“What was it like for you this time?” My friend Vaughn asked me after I got out of isolation.
“Oh, this was my first time getting COVID.” Vaughn was shocked. Perhaps I got COVID at some point in the past four years and didn’t know it, but this was at least the first time I’ve consciously had COVID. It being nearly four years into life with COVID, I missed out on all the bells and whistles of getting campus COVID in semesters past. I didn’t get the COVID hotel, or PB’s cookies for the ill (perhaps she’s a bit more preoccupied these days). I didn’t even get to be a statistic on the COVID dashboard. It was just me and my humble Main single.
After living through all of that time without COVID, a part of me thought I was in the club of people immune to the virus. It gave me a weird sense of pride, the same pride I feel about being left-footed. Alas, I am but the average bear when it comes to COVID. I was a junior in high school when the pandemic started, and now I’m a junior in college—COVID finally caught me.
Despite the scary bright line, my symptoms were pretty minimal. I mean, I had a real faucet of a nose for like a day and a half and then I lost my sense of smell, but that was about it. Also, walking from Main to Central Receiving took EFFORT last week. I missed smelling quite a bit, but I was also aware that most of Main smells like cat food all the time, so maybe I lucked out.
I really didn’t mind missing classes. I didn’t even really mind missing club meetings. I did mind that I wasn’t able to perform comedy for a stand-up show, an event that I booked for three days before I got COVID—that was tragic. I booked for Friday, my last day in isolation. With all that pleasant free time in isolation, though, I was able to accomplish some stuff, like making an attempt to grow a beard and spilling a cup of water on my laptop (never said they were good accomplishments).
The computer thing happened on the third day of isolation. I have a bad habit with tech where I’ll do the most boneheaded, worst possible thing you could do to it. What should you not do with a phone? Fumble it down a four-floor stairwell. What you should not do with a 2TB hard drive? Lose it. You get the idea with the laptop.
“Well this isn’t good,” I thought as I sopped up water from the keyboard and the screen. After that, everything still looked fine, until it didn’t. It was like that scene in “Indiana Jones” where he replaces the idol and he thinks he did it right until a huge boulder comes at him.
No boulders for me, just a thick, dark vertical line that appeared minutes later down the right side of the screen. Two days later, there were vertical lines racing up and down the screen. In fact, this article was written on said line-ridden computer. I’m getting a lot of hate from lines right now, horizontal and vertical. Diagonal lines are the only ones still on my side.
I did have one real accomplishment this week. I had a bunch of camera equipment rented from the Film Department for the week, so I spent much of my time in isolation editing, recording and eventually filming a video for the comedy show I couldn’t go to, which meant editing on my janky ass computer. If you were watching my film during the show and thought, “Huh, the color grading on the last clip looks kinda fucked,” it’s because I edited it on a screen that was absolutely fucked.
The video-making kept me occupied for quite a while, scavenging bizarre clips off of YouTube and recording voice-over with a blanket over my head. I even filmed a segment outside where I expressed my disappointment of not being there. Everything came together for the show day.
Despite not being able to be physically present at the show, I was still really excited about it, so I spent Friday night lurking out in front of Sanders Auditorium to watch the latecomers arrive between 9 and 9:20 p.m. while trying to hide the fact that I was literally just there to watch attendance numbers and to vicariously experience the show. I wonder if any attendees had the experience of watching my video where I say I couldn’t make it to the show, and then remembering seeing me right outside the venue minutes ago. That’s some serious gaslighting on my part. I can imagine the conversations after the show.
“I swear I saw the guy in the video outside before we came in. He was standing outside in front of the building. It was really weird.”
“Was he doing anything?”
“Nothing. He was just lurking. Watching. Waiting. Like Mothman. Wait, there he is again! I just saw him leaning out behind that tree!” (I also came back outside at the end of the show to watch people leave). It just goes to show ya: you can take the man out of comedy, but you can’t take the lurking outside of comedy shows out of the man.
Well that was COVID. Kinda sucked, kinda didn’t. Wouldn’t recommend it to a friend.