5 Signs You May Be In Quarantine Too Long

But so what. It’s not over. This may just be the beginning.

We live life in stages, right?

At birth, we’re learning to use our mouths, so we burp and spit up, and everyone thinks we’re adorable.

By high school, we get drunk for the first time, overdo it and puke all over our mother’s new couch and get grounded until college.

Stages.

When the sheltering-in-place landed on my phone as an annoying, pinging, screeching, repeating alert from my local emergency services agency to stay home for the next two weeks, I said, no problem.

Two weeks inside my crib (see how down I was, using the last millennium’s jargon) with nothing to do but eat popcorn and binge-watch Netflix? I got this in my hip pocket, I said.

Then it was a month.

Well, okay. I was running out of coffee filters, but I had found an on-line delivery service for produce and some essentials. Also, my wonderful neighbors took turns picking up the slack for me, getting my perishables on their shopping trips because I’m like, the oldest person they’ve ever known. They want to keep me around as a relic.

I got all excited about exercising and growing biceps nobody thought old people were supposed to have and baking bread. Well, that wasn’t news. I’ve been baking my own bread since 1979. In January, I stocked up on two pounds of SAF, my go-to yeast. Who knew it would soon become as rare as toilet paper. Which, I had stocked up on in February. Also, in the “who knew” department. Yay me for foresight, usually in short supply in my universe, but go figure.

So, yeah. I could do a month inside. And, actually, it brought out my competitive side. You want a month? How about six weeks with a friggin’ smile on my face every day and none of this whinging about not being able to get my hair colored on schedule. So I have a raccoon stripe down my skull. Who’s looking at me anyway, as my father used to say?

But now it’s coming up on four bleeping months. Wait, let me count that up on my fingers and toes. It’s past four months for me. I’m heading into five months.

See, technically, I started quarantining on February 29th when I was diagnosed with a virus. Not the big CV, but a mild case of shingles. At the time, I thought it was the end of the world. Don’t come near me, I wailed. I’ve got shingles. OMFG!

How quaint that seems now. Was it Einstein who said everything’s relative? We should have believed him.

So I itched a bit and didn’t let my clothes touch the spots. That part was easy. I live alone, so I didn’t wear any clothes. Oh, for the good old days.

But now, as I head into my fifth month (almost sounds like pregnancy), I’m worrying it may be too long. Maybe you’re like me. You finally got the word from your governing body that everyone should wear a mask outside and in the common area of apartment buildings, so you figured it was safe to leave your abode. And! Bam!

You pick your first walkabout on the day the cases start to spike again.

So here you are, inside once more. Is it too much? Can you do this? Isolate by your lonesome until we land a man on a galaxy far, far away?

Here are five breadcrumbs that will lead you to the decision that maybe it’s time to…well, you have to go to the house next door for solutions. I’m only giving the signposts because solutions to this mess are as rare as yeast and toilet paper.

1. You count going to the bathroom as exercise.

You’ve signed up for every live streamed yoga class in the known universe. You’ve worn a hole in your carpeting doing 5ks every morning before you tackle a job search. You pulled out jugs of water and cans of beans from your prepper pack you had stored away in case of an alien invasion. You’ve repurposed them for a faux gym in your bedroom. Everybody thinks you’re queen of the universe because of your new abs, especially at your age. At least for the first two months.

But now? You just can’t anymore. Your Fitbit needed charging two weeks ago, and you think it fell into the bag of laundry you stopped washing in the bathroom sink because who cares if your jeans have spaghetti sauce on them?

So, you want a workout? How about you swing your feet onto the coffee table while you watch the next installment of Jack Ryan and call it done for your glutes? Reach for that packet of microwave popcorn you think is on the top shelf behind the dried beans, and that’s it for stretching. Two birds with one stone and all that.

You need a little cardio? Run for the phone the next time it rings. It might be that cute guy you met just before the lockdown who’s as bored as you are and going through his contacts.

Oh, and don’t forget your morning bathroom break. If you’re not eating enough fiber, that extra straining is equal to a good 100 steps.

Any one of these is a sign you’re letting your fitness level sink below average. But if you checked all the boxes, in my book, after four months and counting of putting up with your own company, you’re only human.

2. You zoomed a work meeting and didn’t care when your monitor slipped and everyone saw that you were only wearing a baggy top and mommy underpants.

So let’s talk standards. I don’t care how long it’s been since you’ve partied down with your besties, or run a meeting with the precision of a rocket launch without your toddler breaking into your home office bare naked with your vibrator in one hand and your brand new iPhone dripping milk from her cereal in the other.

You simply can NOT do a zoom call in your underwear. It’s time to take the pledge. Repeat after me: From this day forward, I will not appear in cyber public unless my top and bottom match, my books are lined up in some semblance of order behind me, and the plant on the bookcase has been watered recently enough so it doesn’t resemble the forgotten greenery in the undisclosed hostage negotiating bunker where nothing matters but getting the ambassador back.

But if you have to rally your team today and none of the above can get you to put on anything more Zoom-appropriate than sweatpants you bought during high school and a T-shirt so old it has shoulder pads, then you may be suffering from quarantine overload.

3. You play a new game: watching your neighbor’s TV through your binoculars because you’ve run out of the 7-day free trials on all the streaming services.

Even at a paltry $7.99 a month, I’d be out of popcorn money in a few short weeks if I signed up for all of the available streaming services. But ever inventive, one night I checked out the action on the street. Not much happening at 2 a.m. since the hookers and homeless are esconsced in the empty downtown luxury hotels. So, I raised my sights to the upper floors of the building across the street. Eureka! Open drapes of another insomnia sufferer and an action series on their HBOMax, which is too rich for a pensioner’s budget.

In a stroke of foresight, back when I was in the money and tooling up for my once-in-a-lifetime tour of the southern African countries, or at least two of them, I sprang for a decent set of binocs, as the safari field guide called them.

Not only were they perfect for discovering the gorgeous Velvet Breasted Roller and the vultures high in the trees waiting for the lions to have their fill of the warthog they’d just nailed for breakfast, I could also see plainly the 200in TV set so close to the window I could even read the credits for the shows.

No audio, you complain! Beggars can’t be choosers, and you’d be surprised at how many helpful YouTube videos you can find that will give you lip-reading tips. Better than reading an actual book, I’ll tell you that.

But it’s not the pirated TV subscriptions that will give away your quarantine fatigue, but the inability to read one more book from cover to cover, the real casualty of your quarantine sentence!

4. You’ve decided you look sexy with a raccoon stripe down your head.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this one: when the universe gives you lemons, pucker up and make a dry martini.

I’m not one of those lucky babes who can rock a box of home hair coloring in the privacy of my bathroom sink. I do highlights. I’d have to be a spy to maneuver all that aluminum foil on my head.

So I decided color blocking on my head wasn’t half bad. After all, since I only traveled from my bedroom to my kitchen with detours to the bathroom, living room, and the occasional closet for clean clothes, did it really matter what my hair looked like?

Sound familiar? Make a pact with me. As long as we don’t take scissors in hand and chop off our own locks waiting for the hair salons to open up, we still have a few weeks to go before we’re officially in the grip of lockdown lunacy.

5. You hire witches to put curses on people who don’t wear masks.

Staying inside may be wearing you down to your last nerve, but you can still read. You know that scientists say that if we all wore masks, social distanced, and washed our hands until we didn’t have any skin left on our bones, we’d lick this pandemic in a hot minute.

And you know what that means, bunky. If you all did that, I could finally go out!

So, when I sit longingly in front of my window and watch the world go by without me, I have a keen eye for those lunkheads who aren’t wearing masks.

And as you and I well know, those are the people who help this virus spread. Maybe you’re like me, and you’re not about to hoist your great-grandmother’s heirloom out the window to teach them a lesson. Instead of wasting a perfectly good knickknack on these idiots, you do the next best thing.

You call up your local black witch and hire her (or him, you being an equal opportunity witch employer), to cast a spell on them and their spawn for getting and spreading COVID-19.

Yes, there was a time when, compassionate citizens that we were, we’d be sobbing into our elbows that so many would come down with a plague of locusts in their bedrooms, or pictures flying off their walls in the middle of the night, or having to duck their own grandmother’s knickknacks hurtling off their bookshelves attacking their thick heads as they head out the door sans mask.

But today, as we hunker down for the 57,000th day inside because some selfish, privileged jerks are not socially distancing enough, do we give a flying frog because they suffer some paranormal consequences? We do not.

And that my friends, is a sure sign we’ve been inside too long. We’ve lost our heart of hearts. But can you blame us? Because until those naked nincompoops wise up and cover their faces, we have to dig in for a long wait before we can remove our seatbelts and move about the country again.

So you just might want to try 1–666-GOT-SPLZ.

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. Thank you for reading.