It’s me again. I’m still at home in New York, but it’s worse now. NYU New York has become 上网纽约大学 and many of my friends who came to study at the New York campus have gone home for Spring Break, and to be closer to family. The virus situation in New York is getting worse and my parents have instituted a self-imposed quarantine, meaning I can’t interact with people. Almost all of the reasons I had to be happy about staying in New York have disappeared. All I have left is home-cooked meals and my own bed. But my house feels more restrictive now. When we moved to the apartment, the walls were painted very white, and my parents said it looked like a mental hospital. The walls are a new color, but it now feels like a mental hospital.

I haven’t been in a classroom in three months. Online university doesn’t feel like school and the sheer monotony of my life these past three months is starting to weigh on me. Every day of my life feels the same. Time is an illusion. The highs and lows of normal life have been slowly and consistently dulled by the weight of the nothingness that daily life has become. The hedonic treadmill is an idea in psychology, that happiness and sadness are temporary and our mood will return to a baseline. The point is that we have to work consistently for happiness, rather than stay on one high. My hedonic treadmill feels broken. The activities I used to do to relax from schoolwork have become desperate attempts to stave off boredom for as long as possible.

I am, of course, being overdramatic. That is my brand. I have a loving family and a safe environment to wait out the virus. But sometimes I wish my virus experience was more exciting. Not disaster level exciting, but human emotion level exciting. I literally cannot wait to go back to school.