Eccentricities I have considered adopting in These Trying Times™

Now, more than ever, I am losing my mind. The good news is that while I’m alone in an apartment, separated from my friends and family and with so much time on my hands, I have the freedom to experiment with whole other ways of being a person. How fun it would be, for me and no one else, if I were to emerge from this a weirder, less socially acceptable version of myself! A metamorphosis in reverse, a butterfly crawling back into the cocoon to become a creepy little caterpillar.

Here is a list of some of the pivots I have considered:

• Spending my savings on dozens of nightgowns and fancy silk pajama sets in bold patterns to become person who only wears glamorous loungewear and slippers with, like, a little fluff of feathers across the toes
• Downloading a bunch of programs that make different sounds and producing confusing music with wailing vocal tracks that I lay down myself
• Calligraphy
• Constructing detailed miniature dollhouse worlds, of course
• Wearing leotards and athleisure outfits every morning to film intense dance routines and posting them on Instagram with captions like “a lil freestyle this morning ☺️” and my followers will be like “is this a bit?” but it WON’T be a bit
• Applying to grad school
• Pretending 24/7 that I live in another era like those Victorian freaks but I’ll pick the 1980s and sit around with the biggest shoulder pads, makeup caked all over my face, saying things like “I sure hope they get that baby out of the well”
• Finally figuring out what’s up with the whole Lord of the Rings thing
• Coming up with a brilliant place to hide my treasure  — somehow in plain sight, and yet impossible to deduce without logic and attention to detail — and constructing an elaborate puzzle game with clues that lead a worthy player, noble of heart and intention, to find it after my well-publicized death under mysterious circumstances. (My treasure is my Beanie Babies collection.)
• Learning to code haha jk I would never
• Cooking every recipe in some old cookbook and then writing a memoir about it called like Betty Crocker and Me: What a Vintage Cookbook Taught Me About Domesticity, Self-Sufficiency, and Why You Can Never Have Too Much Butter
• Cyberbullying influencers
• Planning every detail of my future wedding down to the napkins at the rehearsal dinner and keeping all my ideas in an enormous scrapbook that I will pull out on first dates when dates are allowed again, just to see how my suitor reacts

I’m not sure which of these I’ll actually latch onto, but it’s sure to be at least one or two. I’ll catch ya on the other side of Deranged Recluse Summer and let you know!!

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