Despite the fact that the country is reopening at a startling rate, we still don’t know much about COVID-19. Cases remain relatively steady, and there’s no vaccine or cure in sight. As such, people are basically scrambling for some kind of magic wand that makes everything safe again. And some companies...
This week, at long last, I received a much expected email from my gym alerting me to the fact that it was reopening — with a long list of modifications, of course: Also expected was the small print at the bottom of the email, which stated that the...
It’s been an absolute delight to exclusively use my own bathroom for the last three months. People seem so eager to go to bars and restaurants, but aren’t they forgetting that consuming beverages in public usually results in needing to use a public restroom? Regardless of how...
We tend to enforce this cultural binary of city versus nature, dirty versus clean. We see nature as this pure, separate place, but really, the grass growing through the concrete on the sidewalk outside our apartment is nature, too. COVID-19 seems to have only strengthened this binary, with people fleeing the...
Life as we knew it paused when the pandemic appeared, and that may have included your attempts at mashing lips, falling in love and everything else that lands under the broad umbrella of dating. After a few months of quarantine, you might be feeling especially alone, antsy...
These past two-plus months of quarantine have been an exercise in “making the best of a difficult situation,” and how we work out is now different. The giant, potential coronavirus breeding grounds formerly known as “gyms” are currently closed. Home gyms, on the other hand, are all...
If there’s one thing the long history of nutrition fads teaches us it’s that, whether they’re prescribed for weight loss or healthy living, blueprint diets have their drawbacks. With the vinegar diet, for example, popularized in the 1820s by the English poet and legendary narcissist Lord Byron...
Sure, there’s a biological reason why most people prefer to breathe out their nose, but there’s a social one, too. That is, a lot of people don’t want to be a mouth-breather, a trait culturally associated with stupidity. But now that everyone is wearing a mask in public, you...
It may be the year 2020, but living in a home with a dishwasher is still a luxury to many. Hand washing dishes after each and every meal is a necessary evil across much of the world, and with much of that same world in some level...
I remember my first chip-filled sandwich like it was yesterday. My friend and I — both early adolescents — had just endured a routine, but strenuous water polo practice at our community pool. As we stepped out of the modest aquatic center, our hair still damp and...
Humans have been imagining words and phrases to categorize others by how they look since the advent of language itself. For men — and particularly fathers — two contemporary examples of this are ‘dad bod’ and the more recent interpretation of ‘father figure,’ both of which are...
Ever since I’ve started protesting, I’ve been coming in hot with my every interaction. Whether I’m going off about something someone said on the internet or fighting with my family about why people loot, I’ve been a bit much. Even with friends I agree with, since I started protesting,...