Sexy Unique Quarantine
I bleached my hair. It was a fun idea. Something I had wanted to do for about half a decade and was now finally met with the perfect opportunity in quarantine. I bleached my hair, shared some photos with friends, and enjoyed the extra attention the look brought me. Over the next few days my feed was flooded with pictures of other people dying their hair at home, and news articles about hair dye shortages. My fun and unique idea while quarantined was undermined by being part of a quarantine trend.
In April I had some browning bananas sitting on my kitchen counter. I love banana bread. Let's do what any normal person would do. Somehow every white woman in America also had the same idea as me and also made banana bread. At the start of quarantine I was flipping through some New York Times recipes for cooking inspiration and found a bread recipe that looked like something to do while adjusting to a new homebound life. We all know how this story ends.
Is it possible to have a unique experience when all of our experiences are so much the same under quarantine? Every seemingly independent thought to bake or exercise is met by a New York Times trend piece of the over-saturation of the very idea you thought for sure was your own idea. Is our collective experience more than just the shared grief, boredom and loneliness of quarantine? Are we all also doing the same things?
Maybe it is no surprise that this is happening while our lives go almost completely online. All of our physical social spaces exist entirely on Zoom. Our movies are chosen from the same three sites. Our online echo bubbles are much louder when the screen time gets up to 10 hours a day. This begs the question of how independent are our choices if we are all probably under the influence of the same 1000 influencers controlled by the same three marketing departments.
The most transgressive act in quarantine seems to be protesting a stay at home order in front of a Baskin Robbins. In most of my circles these people are laughed at. These are the people that I find myself most often culturally opposed to. Their cause of opening up during the virus is dumb. Yet there is something beneath the dark side of the protests that I can’t stop thinking about. The guy who just wants to be able to go into McDonalds wants what we all want: to be able to be ourselves.
There are people who do not want to be seen as the type to protest the quarantine. Staying inside to save lives is also an attractive decision. However these people also seem to be reaching the end of a screened world. Cheeky driveway drinks, meet ups at the park, or coordinated supermarket trips have begun to replace the Zoom happy hour as the social event de jour. Even those that support the stay at home are beginning to reject the monotony of digital society.
There is a strange dissatisfaction to seeing your life mirrored back to you every time you do something. If everyone has access to everything then anything interesting is probably done by everyone. Is there anything original under quarantine?