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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

These past couple of weeks, I feel like I've been having crazy mood swings between super happy and excited (usually when I'm socializing with friends) and super depressed and pessimistic. Last week, there was a period of time when I felt generally miserable and isolated on campus, which was only exacerbated by the fact that almost all the students in my hall are in a registered household together and being loud and partying all the time. I really don't like the way that my university has designed its COVID household policies. The way it works now, groups of up to 8 students can register as a "household" that allows them to mingle indoors without masks or distancing, and also grants them special privileges like reserving campus amenities as a group or (as of April 14) reserving outdoors campus spaces in tandem with other households. While I understand the need for households, I feel that the way the policies are currently designed effectively ranks the well-being of students with households (aka with preexisting close-knit friend groups) above students who don't. Currently, RAs in the dorm are not allowed to organize outdoors, socially distanced events for their halls (which are typically less than 20 people and already share bathrooms and showers). And yet the university allows groups of 24 students from up to 3 households to register outdoors, socially distanced gatherings. This is frankly absurd from the point of view of fostering the well-being of all students — I would venture that a lot of students on campus depend on sources of social support that are not within their household, but the university is effectively saying that that's not a legitimate way to be social and the only legitimate way is to be part of a group of friends that is close enough to be registered. Also, I feel like our dorm is really struggling to set ground rules for living together in COVID times (like quiet hours at night, reasonably quiet spaces during the day when we have remote classes), and resistance to these norms usually comes from households, not individual students. Seldom if ever do I hear about a single student being disruptive — usually, it's a household that is partying that keeps up people in a hall at night, or a household that is having an impromptu eight-way fireside chat that interrupts my lecture. I feel like any solution necessitates significant reform to the current rules around households. One prong of reform would be making an explicit set of guidelines around meeting with students outside the confines of households. Right now, the university doesn't have any guidelines either allowing or forbidding students from meeting with each other across campus, and as a result I see students meeting up all the time from different dorms (full disclosure: I have done this too). I feel like rather than pretending that this doesn't happen or blindly insisting that students give up the convenience of meeting up at the dining hall for yet another hour of Zoom, the university should acknowledge that students want to see each other and give advice for how to do so safely and when it isn't allowed. So for example, an explicit rule that no more than X students can meet up at one time, indoors or outdoors, but small gatherings (e.g. up to 5 people) are permitted as long as they are outdoors and distanced. Another prong of reforms would govern granting access to spaces for students who are not in households or want to interact with students outside the confines of their households. This I have less of a vision for, but I feel like this could start paving a path to normalcy for students in clubs, homework groups, etc. I've been really acutely feeling a sense of anticlimacticness to the end of my college career. Usually, this time of year is full of special events for seniors, but we have basically nothing. Our graduation is online, and other events that I didn't even know existed (e.g. senior formal) are cancelled. Our university won't even let us get grad photos, even though my friend at Princeton is getting formal graduation photos with the cap and gown. I find that this is causing a lot of anguish for me because I feel like no one is really acknowledging that we missed out on a year of milestones and we're ending our college experience on an incredibly dismal note. Yes, "silver linings" and resilience and all that (silver lining: I'm not dead, I guess???) but I feel like there's a difference between staying positive and acknowledging that we've lost a lot and we need to make up for it somehow. You don't make up for losses by just pretending they didn't happen. I'm taking a weird solace by making hugely expensive and unrealistic plans for how I plan to commemorate graduation regardless of what the university does. Item number one is getting an uber-expensive photoshoot. Like, engagement photo quality. A high school classmate did a photoshoot with a photographer in SF who I found out does really nice photos, and my pipe dream is to do a photoshoot with that same photographer and post the photos on Facebook and on my dating profiles. Item number two, which is related, is to go on a huge shopping spree and buy lots of fancy dresses and get a perm and get a makeover and a mani-pedi. Like, just totally reinvent myself physically. Item number three is to have a nice fancy restaurant dinner with my parents (we will all be fully vaccinated at the end of this month, so we should have peak immunity by May). My mom also ordered a cake for me through a lady who bakes really good cakes, so part and parcel of this fancy meal is having the good cake. That's all I have on my list right now (sometimes I think I'm going CRAZY, and then I realize that my "crazy" is actually a fair number of people's "fun weekend"). Last week, I met up with a lot of people on and off campus and through Zoom, and it was really nice and it helped me realize just how important having a social life is. it was also one of the impetuses for me to understand that the household policy is not well designed. Lots of folks in college meet their social needs not through a tight-knit friend group, but rather through a looser web of interactions, but instead of figuring out how to allow students to maintain that looser web more safely, the university just moved it all onto Zoom and prioritized the students with tight-knit friend groups. I kind of want to write an op-ed about this, although now that I'm entering the professional world I feel like I should be much more mindful of what I say in a public forum. Santa Clara County opened vaccine eligibility to all on April 13, which was a nice surprise since it was two days early. SCC has also "cancelled" the J&J vaccine, but anecdotally, I think a lot of people have already gotten Pfizer and Moderna here, so it's not as big of a deal. I personally got Moderna and my parents and a lot of my friends got Pfizer. Most of my parents' friends are getting vaccinated, which gives us hope that we can get together for a July 4 meetup. Usually we get together on the major holidays, but last year we didn't meet up at all after New Year, and holiday season was noticeably empty because of it. So I am excited. My work announced that we'll be starting remotely, which was incredibly disappointing to me. I have hated this last year of remote school and if it were up to me, I would never take another Zoom call in my life. Zoom is exhausting, it strains my eyes a lot, and I feel like it's impossible to truly get to know people or have meaningful conversations over Zoom. Plus I hate the prospect of having to spend my formative first years in the workforce working remotely, not really being noticed by my managers and unable to learn how to handle office interactions. My office is in San Diego and I had been looking forward to starting my dating life for real once I moved, but now, I'll have to spend at least another few months at home and will probably need to have an awkward conversation with my parents if remote work drags on. My parents are nice people, but they don't tend to react well when I try to make moves that signal independence from them (e.g. finding a partner as opposed to just relying on them), so I'm not looking forward to having to have this conversation while also trapped at home with them 24/7. I feel like my entire independent life has been on hold and my greatest fear is that by the time things finally get better and I can finally move on, I'll have become so emotionally stunted and fearful and weak that I just keep clinging to my parents for support. And so if they tell me they don't want me to date until I finalize my career, or something else to push me not to leave the nest, then I'll just accept it because I've become afraid that if I make them mad, then I'll lose them and then I have no one left. I hope that I haven't become that desperate, but I guess that's one of those things that you don't know until you're there. I feel like in a weird sense, I've both gotten used to having my entire life being ruled by this one virus and also am no longer okay with it. I personally don't believe it will be possible to eliminate COVID, nor should that be our goal (there are lots of other diseases in the world, and if we froze society until all of them were gone, we'd have no more society left). I do think that we need to make it so that it's no worse than a cold for everyone who gets it, and that we can get there through a number of policy means: worldwide vaccination, some regulation of spaces, etc. But I feel like at this point, I'm really damn tired of having to stick to poorly designed and haphazardly enforced university policies that unnecessarily destroy my mental health and put my social life and dating life on hold when so many other people aren't even trying. I feel like my only options right now are either being a chump who follows all the rules and then is forgotten about and is depressed and isolated for the rest of their lives, or being a "covidiot" who acts like the virus doesn't exist and then gets everyone sick. No one is offering a third way right now, and it's so frustrating.