It’s the second week of March. I’ve just gotten out of school for spring break, and I think to myself, “Rory, you have two weeks off, no homework, you’re set to go to your first-choice college, all you have to do is finish that skit.” But then, everything goes to hell. That disease I’ve been slightly paranoid about for the past two months suddenly hits my country like a ton of bricks, everything spirals out of control, people start dying, school ends up closing for the rest of the year, and I’m “lucky” that I live in a state where I won’t get penalized if I leave my house. I’m pretty certain that everyone went through the same emotions and madness that I did while in quarantine. But specifically in the context of my project, this pandemic basically destroyed my will to continue working on it.

 

              I never got around to finishing the skit in the two week period during which I intended to do so. And I wouldn’t for over a month afterwards. Theoretically, I was at less of a disadvantage than some of my friends. All of my work was online, most of it was completed to a point that satisfied me, and I only had two major unfinished components left. But there was one problem. During stressful times in the world, whether in my life or in the grand scope of things, I have a habit of creatively shutting down, and focusing all of my attention on that particular thing. This has happened to me frequently, like in the aftermath of Trump’s election, or earlier this year, after we barely escaped from the edge of a catastrophic war with Iran. But this was new, a global crisis that tangibly and severely affected my life. So I decided to not focus on the project, instead trying to get used to the new online school, take my mind off things by playing video games, or else obsessively following the news.

 

          Now, just to be clear, what I’m trying to say isn’t that if this comes out bad, it’s all the fault of COVID-19. The majority of this work was done while school was still in session. For example, the basic grammar was all planned out and written down long before this disease was even identified. The one tangible effect is that the coronavirus-induced deprioritization of this project lasted for over a month, a month that I could have spent working on and perfecting this.

 

             It wasn’t until mid-April, as due dates started to creep up, that I realized that I needed to get this done. I began to edit my skit, at first intermittently, and then, after scheduling a date for when I would present this project to the school, I devoted hours out of my day to getting the footage out of my phone, dubbing the Kithnen lines over the English footage, and editing it into something rough, yet still cohesive. And once I had climbed over that hurdle, I realized just how close my presentation was. The day after finishing the skit was exactly ten days before the date I had scheduled with my advisor and the heads of school, and I still had a giant component of the project to do: the final essay. So I chose to spend the next week hyper-focused on that, and hopefully you’ve enjoyed the result.