One of the extreme new realities of life under quarantine is the idea of (semi-)permanently working from home. For some of us, that transition’s been an easy one: Wake up, get dressed (maybe), work in the peace and comfort of a makeshift (or if you’re lucky, a...
Needless to say, life in quarantine can be a bit redundant. If your schedule is anything like mine, you wake up, maybe mosey over to your couch, where you work, eat, nod off a bunch of times and scroll through the internet until your thumbs go numb...
Thank God for next-day shipping. I get paid on Thursdays and my wife’s birthday was this past Friday — I’d planned to head out to the mall on Thursday and get some new sneakers that she was excited about. I’d had this figured out for weeks, but I...
Becoming a cyborg could have been liberating. In 1985, scholar Donna Haraway posited that as the categories of human, animal and machine became blurred, the rigid boundaries of gender, labor and other symbolic oppressors could collapse. In some ways, the smartphone has made progress toward this end: In cyborg fashion,...
It’s weeks into most states’ COVID-induced quarantine, and the change of routine is, for many of us, the new normal. Outside the house is now bad, and inside is our cocoon of safety. In an amazing display of ingenuity, that’s led to a number of innovations in...
Under most normal circumstances, wearing pants is an advisable, if not imperative facet of daily life. But any semblance of normalcy was abandoned when the coronavirus struck and stay-at-home orders were implemented, and whether we need to wear pants while enduring the confines of our homes was...
As I’m writing this, I’ve been in self-quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic for a few weeks. I am, of course, worried about getting the virus. Or maybe more so about it being dormant inside of me and passing it to someone else. But as I spend more...
Like a new cohort of workers affected by the coronavirus, I work remotely from my apartment. On a daily basis, my colleagues cooperate with my bulging head, projected like the Wizard of Oz on an enormous flat screen in our faraway headquarters. The same corkboard where I keep...
Unloading your dishwasher, you’re faced with two threats: pipin’ hot ceramic dinner plates and Tupperware containers containing a splash-in-the-face quantity of dishwater. The dinner plate thing is fine and normal — hateful, but fine and normal — but what’s the freaking deal with all these wet plastics?...
Obviously, you can just straighten out the bag and pour those remaining chip fragments into your mouth. Wasting food is terrible anyway, and that’s only become more true now that we’re trying to minimize our trips to the grocery store by making the most of our stashes...
Welp, you put it off as long as possible — and went through quite a few matchbooks in the process — but the very apparent stench creeping out of the bathroom yet again this morning means it’s highly unlikely you can hide one unassailable truth from your...
Spending a good chunk of money on a mattress is obviously a wise investment. You spend a third of your life asleep, or if you’re like me, more than half of your life at least reclined on a mattress. As with cars, toilet paper and cuts of meat,...
