Gym selfies have been replaced by Zoom workout selfies. Cafe cupcakes have been replaced by home-baked banana bread. Pictures of you and your friends dining out have been replaced by pictures of you and your family dining in. All that is solid melts into air as the circuit-breaker turns the world upside down and inside out, transforming homes into offices, and perfectly good coffee into undrinkable shite.
Here’s a list of things which deserve to die once the Pandemic abates:
However, my favourite fitness influencer is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said: “Whereof one cannot gym, thereof one must be silent”. Interpretation has been contentious, but most modern philosophers agree that he meant: NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR GODDAMNED ZOOM WORKOUT.
Gyms have closed, but gym selfies are apparently immortal. Even when the last dumbbell has rusted into nothing and the squat rack returned to nature as a home for rhesus monkeys, we will somehow find a way to smugly inform our friends: “Hey, *psst* I worked out.”
XXL Fried Chicken Cutlet. Brown Sugar Milk Tea. Peanut Ice Cream Crepes.
Asking Taiwan to join the WHO is like asking British American Tobacco to host a Lung Cancer Survivor Support Group.
When their memory recovers, their laptop mic gives way. However, because nobody is sure if it’s the mic or their own speaker who is at fault, so we sit around for a full minute politely listening to the static as if we were attending a live performance by the Berlin Philharmonic. A charade which only ends when someone finally snaps and goes: “Oi, we can’t hear you. You are breaking up.”
After which, there is no real solution except to stop talking and revert to typing.
WFH forever also means videoconference forever and I’d sooner subject myself to a daily prostate exam.
Which, of course, leads to the inevitable conclusion that our answer to Covid-19 must be banana bread. Not just one loaf, but an Everest’s worth of flour, water, and sugar. People who were previously incapable of boiling eggs have suddenly donned aprons and conjured rolling pins out of thin air.
Why is it always baking, may I ask? For once, I would like to witness a catastrophe where the response is to make soup or noodles or perhaps even an omelette. Yet, for reasons unknown, tragedy is always followed by gluten as if it were the natural law of the universe.
Most millennials are in the same boat, but they refuse to admit it because it would be easier to pass a cairn of kidney stones than to admit irrelevance.
Hence, the large number of millennials suddenly jumping on the TikTok bandwagon during the circuit-breaker. I think it’s partly boredom, but also a desperate desire to cling onto the last shreds of youth via whatever means necessary—even if it entails self-humiliation; writhing like an eel while nubile youngsters look on in pity.
This is, however, sadly all too common as millennials fight for social media relevance as if it were the last lifeboat on the Titanic. This publication, sadly, no different, even if we pretend to be. Hence its inclusion on this list at gunpoint.
That’s why this editorial is dumber than a brick. That’s why it’s more heavily padded than even my O-level English model composition when I had nothing to say about ‘freedom of speech’, but was forced to say it anyway.
Sadly, we’re not the only ones. That’s why I actually pity the Lianhe Zaobao reporter who fabricated a story without the user’s permission. Perhaps he didn’t want to do it, but was forced to by his editors to fill a space. He was, after all, just an employee and probably afraid to lose his job at this juncture.
So please, let this madness end. We do not need any more dumb ‘relatable Covid-19 content’. Everyone knows that the circuit breaker sucks and even introverts are feeling the burn and have no idea how to self-care under lockdown. The world has come to a standstill, but our inner life need not go into lockdown just yet.
