An Extrovert’s Guide to Surviving Social Distancing

I describe myself as painfully extroverted, so you can imagine that the concept of social distancing is pretty distressing to me. I think what’s keeping me most sane right now is meaningful connection with colleagues and friends via technology.

Pre COVID-19 I already had a rotation of friends I regularly skype with, so now I’m amping up the frequency of calls. One of my best friends Chris and I are planning a skype session tomorrow and a topical game of Pandemic over Tabletop Simulator. I have a core group of 5 friends that has watched the bulk of Steven Universe together despite being in 4 different cities and 2 time zones. We just queue up the same video on our laptops and have a cute countdown ritual to roughly synch our video start time. I suspect we’ll binge the recent epilogue series Steven Future in the next month. One of my lab’s slack channels is discussing how to stay sane instead of staring at twitter all day. Recent focus is on alternatives to toilet paper like getting a bidet or finally having a use for all those papers you printed out but definitely never read. My roommate and I continue to  dm each other memes across multiple platforms and texts while in the same apartment.

I hope my fellow extroverts are still finding ways to connect and recharge too.