The sudden outbreak of the corona virus was of course scary and still is, but I’m glad that we now all have the opportunity to stay safe indoors without spreading the virus around. By staying indoors and canceling many crowded events, we can decrease the number of cases of COVID-19. Besides doing my e-learning assignments, in quarantine I have been making jewelry to cope with stress and cure my boredom! Making all sorts of jewelry was a way to keep my mind off of the negative and focus on the fewer positive things in life at the moment.

Talk of the virus, be it out of fear or dark humor, reached Lemont far before its arrival. The first day off was a nice change of pace; no school and no infections create an excellent pair. But under the governor’s ordinance to stay at home until early April, the drawl of monotony began to spread and my momentum began to stagnate. For a while, it was fine to act like it was just another weekend or an early Spring Break – that is, until it kept going. In the interim from the first week off to now, I have learned that the cure to this statewide stalemate is administered through any likeness of change: eat something new, mess around on your phone, aerobic exercise – something, anything, to break the mold of this lackadaisical reality.

Regarding this global pandemic, my thoughts on the situation reciprocate my parent’s opinions which, in short, include: That the media is exaggerating the Covid-19 issue more than they should be, as a result of this, the world’s population is distraught and major gathering facilities like schools, convention centers, shopping malls, restaurants, etc. are shutting down for precautionary measures — which only adds to the global turmoil. I think that if everyone were to calm down and accept the fact that the majority of the population (people between the ages of 35 and 65) have already lived through similar situations without extreme measures, like the ones today, being taken in response to terrifying news stories — we would all be okay. To put it shortly, we are not too freaked out. Regarding my own whereabouts, other than dedicating an immense amount of my time to school work, because I don’t have much else to do, I have also been spending a lot of time outside — more than usual.

Ironically, many people are on the same boat as me and there are a lot of people that go outside and spend their time at nature preserves and parks — going against the social distancing that the government is encouraging us to be practicing. But, even more ironically, the government is actually advising us to take advantage of nature during these “stressful” times, which in my opinion is quite hypocritical. I try to take walks everyday, and have been enjoying Waterfall Glen and other local nature preserves a lot. Most importantly of all though, I definitely think it is important to document this time. I hope we all recall the extent of not only media bias during unsettling times, but how much this bias affects people through the butterfly effect. People who pay close attention to the news, spread what they heard to the people around them and so on and so forth — distorting the information, and thus creating this never ending cycle of the telephone game.

Nevertheless, I could compare this to terrorist threats in the past — through events like 9/11 and the Cold War — and definitely say that the media lies at the heart of the issue for the people. This, like it was during these other two events, should definitely be documented and analyzed after the event is over so hopefully one day we can fix the issue with future stressful events, and learn to gear our focus to more reliable aspects of our news.