DU student shares ‘Q-Tips’ for making the most of quarantine

April 1, 2020

Carissa Haslam | Junior Communication Studies major 

I have curated a list of some tips that will hopefully help you make the most of your quarantine experience — or at least survive it. 

Some important Q-tips:

1. Relive your childhood by building a giant blanket fort in your living room! Bonus points if you attend all your zoom classes from within the fort.
2. Call your grandma, or if you don’t have a grandma, call mine (I’m sure she would love to hear from you).
3. Train your hair to only be shampooed once a week — it’s a thing! And quarantine is the perfect time to start this process because there’s no one around to judge you over your disgustingly greasy hair as it begins to adjust to your new more environmentally friendly and lazy person friendly shampoo schedule.
4. Instead of changing from your night pajamas into your day pajamas (or not changing at all) try putting on some real pants once or twice a week — it may increase productivity and it will certainly make you less likely to fall asleep in the middle of class.
5. Do some yoga! Personally I recommend “Yoga with Adriene” on Youtube. o]Or just walk around your house a little, so your legs don’t forget how to be legs.
6. Watch a movie on Zoom with your pals via the screen sharing feature (pro tip: be sure to check the box that says “optimize screen sharing for video” or else you might think you’re viewing a poorly made flip book).
7. Sit outside, listen to the happy birdies and soak up the free vitamin D — if you live in Pittsburgh, this probably is not an option for you, and I’m sorry that the sun hates you. 
8. STOP READING THE NEWS (but keep reading the Duke)!
9. Listen to some jazz music. I promise you cannot be sad when you’re listening to jazz. Check out Rachael & Vilray on Spotify!
10. Write & send letters! Everyone knows pen pals are better than regular pals. 
11. Read a book, or write one. Paul wrote half the New Testament from prison and Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine so there’s a lot of potential here.
12. Send memes to your friends, also probably communicate outside of the memes. But memes are very powerful communicative agents, I’m honestly not sure how people survived global catastrophes without them.