This week we had Cinco de Mayoweenmas, and the season is winsprinsummerall. Welcome to the brave new world of quarantine. You have forgotten how to drive your car, and squirrels are living in the engine. You have worn the same pair of sweatpants for 49 days. You’ve only seen your friends and coworkers on Zoom, so in your memory, they’re all three inches tall and have squares around their heads. It sounds like you need to do something fun! Here are some more cool quarantine activities for you to do with your significant other!
Backyard Camping – You stomp down your creaky basement stairs and dig around in your mammoth collection of boxes and filing cabinets. You move aside a heavy plastic tub full of mismatched old pillowcases and then you find it at last: it’s the tent you bought that one time!
Make sure to air that thing out, because it WILL smell like the world beyond the grave. Now you two are ready for a backyard camping adventure! Make some s’mores on the grill, pack a cooler, and hike 20 feet into the wilderness of your property.
*cracks Monster energy drink while wearing sunglasses in a lawn chair at night*
Ahhhh. Isn’t it nice to get away from the hustle and bustle? Observe the local fauna: the deer that has made a nest behind your shed, the bat that lives under the roof by the kitchen window, the raccoons that scatter your garbage and ruin your life daily. How many of the local plants can you identify? All of them, because you planted them. That is your garden.
For extra romance, make sure to lay out a quilt on the lawn, so you two can look up at the constellations and celestial bodies. Did you see that? A shooting star! Make a wish. I wish for a new section of this blog to start!
Picnic! – Humans have been eating outside for a hundred years. You two can carry on this proud tradition! Shake the squirrels out of your car engine with a broom, hop in, and go get take-out, following proper health and safety measures. Then, take a long drive. Marvel at how even during a national emergency, people still find the strength to cut you off while merging. Humans are so resilient!
At last, find a suitable spot for your open-air feast. Perhaps a picnic in the secluded lot of an attractively empty water park. You know, if you squint, the slides and ladders look like a deserted city. Contemplate time and eternity with your partner over your styrofoam thing of noodles.
Or maybe you’d prefer a spot near the airport runways. Watch those planes come down from the sky, like screaming aluminum seagulls diving after a concrete fish. Who’s on the planes? Did they have a good flight? Who can say. Contemplate unknowability with your partner while drinking a can of Dr. Pepper from the Chinese restaurant’s mini-cooler.
There are tons of great picnic spots around. 1,845 to be exact. Can you find them all?
Fake Restaurant – Maybe a take-out picnic isn’t your thing. You’re afraid a gnat will land in your drink, or some grass will get on your sandwich. No worries. You can create a restaurant at home! Let’s say your favorite place is called Cheeseburger Restaurant. You look up a copycat recipe for their signature dish: The Cheeseburger. Seat your partner at a be-tablecloth-ed table, underneath a Cheeseburger Restaurant logo printed on copy paper. Hand them a cardboard replica menu. Whaddya know? They order the Cheeseburger. Make that two, please. Maybe they even order The Fries.
Then, customer and employee become one: your partner gets up and helps you prepare this delicious off-brand meal. (Or maybe you really go for the full experience, and you just cook for them. Whenever you walk by, they hassle you to refill their drink. You complain about them to an imaginary coworker. Your partner wanders into the kitchen, asking where the bathroom is.)
Et voila, dinner is served. You clock out in the imaginary break room, and eat together. Congratulations on your first day in business as a restauranteur! The health inspector is coming tomorrow. Better sweep!
Fake Movie Theater – The American multiplex is one of the loudest places known to man. To truly recreate a theater in your house, you’d need a speaker system playing a tape of children shouting and dancing around a cardboard Minions cut-out, or boisterous teens in JNCO shorts waiting for their mom to pick them up. But that might be hard to pull off.
You can still approximate the feel of a real movie theater! Spread out some candy on the table with outrageous price tags. $26 for Reese’s Pieces, $17 for a cup of water, $44 for a bucket of Sprite (and that’s the smallest option), $1,065 for a garbage bag of popcorn.
If you’re quarantined with a teen family member as well, have them be the ticket taker. Give them a little name tag. “My name is CHET and my favorite movie is National Treasure: Book of Secrets.”
But then you two have to decide what to watch! There are so many options: DVDs, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube rental, Hoopla, Kanopy, Mubi, Criterion Channel, iTunes, and a hundred other things that sound made up.
“I want to watch a movie where The Rock punches a giant gorilla on a pirate ship,” you say. “I just want to have an easy good time.”
“Nonsense,” says your partner. “I want to be intellectually stimulated by Jacques Rivette’s 3 hour 12 minute 1974 masterpiece Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris.” Your partner is a hoity-toity little dandy and is always saying horrible things like this. They’re doing the accent and everything.
In that case, as always, compromise in relationships is everything. It’s time for a double feature. There is room in cinema for both a long French movie about a haunted mansion that blurs the line between fiction and reality, performance and living; and a movie where The Rock says “No more monkeying around” and blasts Donkey Kong with a cannon.
As you can see from this blog, it’s quite easy to do the Four Pillars of Civilization at home: Sleeping Outside, Eating Outside, Eating Inside, and Watching a Movie. These are the values and traditions that built the modern world. No matter the hardship, or the global calamity, humans have endured by following one simple maxim: Party On.
