Over the past years since the start of the pandemic, life, for me, was mundane and a pleasant change of environment. What I worried and to this day worry about the most is how well I’m doing in school. Trying to find a perfect schedule to work around my job was hard but I managed. Though I’m now yet again behind on my assignments. I usually rush into things without knowing what I’m supposed to do, and in doing so, I just mess things up. I worry about my future a lot, I’m 20 years old and I still have no idea what it is I want to do. Just thinking about what I should do once I’m done with school is really stressing me out. I’m also extremely frustrated at the fact that I’m a lazy bum, it’s hard to change that habit. I tried to fix that habit of being lazy but it’s so difficult. 

     Honestly, a few lessons I learned from this time period is to use most of my free time to do what I enjoy doing, like hanging out with friends and playing games with them. Otherwise, I will just be back to being a mess of stress. I also learned how to adequately manage my time, but I still need to work on that. What I will do differently now would be to get better at time management. I struggle when it comes to managing my time, and that is extremely detrimental to my education. What I also learned from this period of time is that while managing my time, taking things slowly will relieve my stresses. 

Hi, my name is Pau Khai. I preferred to be called Khai (Kai), but you can also call me Pau (Paw/Pow either one.) My hobbies are similar to your average guys; I love video games. My love for video games has put me on a path to computer science because I want to make my games. Unfortunately, computer science is extremely tedious if you’re someone like me who gets bored quickly. So I combat this boredom through music called LoFi (Low Fy).

I don’t know if I need to explain what LoFi is, but I will explain it to the best of my ability. LoFi is a collection of music with all of them having the same goal, to mellow the audience. My current favorite collection of LoFi is from a YouTube channel called “Riot Games Music” titled “Sessions: Diana | A Creator-Safe Collection | Riot Games Music.” At the moment, I don’t have any favorite movies or shows, or sports to talk about. 

I know it’s incredibly late for me not to have made up my mind yet, but I don’t know what I should do for my future goal. I’m not skilled or have adequate knowledge of anything, so that’s also what’s weighing on what I should do. Once I finish college, I will trickle into society and get a job; from there on out, I guess I’ll see what happens.

     I really can’t recall much of what happened back then. I was one of the lucky ones as I didn’t have any relatives that had died from Covid. I was, however, worried for my families and friends though. This is not as hard as it is to talk about but I guess since I still remember it, deep inside I was traumatized. I saw my grandma’s lifeless body back in my country when I was about 6 years old. While recalling this memory doesn’t have such a deep impact now, I was probably traumatized and I had never realized it. What I’m getting at is that I would hate to experience a death of a loved one so soon.

     What comforted me through the pandemic in 2020, was my friends and family. Since none of my friends were affected nor were any of my family and their families, we could still hang out. We would hike Stone Mountain almost every week, it was refreshing. There was barely anyone most of the time and that was also nice. I can’t specifically say a show or movie I watched during those times. I watch a lot of movies and shows during the summer. There were no specific genres I like either but I guess I could say I binged watch a lot of cartoons and animated films. I also played a lot of games with one of my friends (he was the only one that had a computer). We would constantly play this game called “League of Legends,” and it was fun.

Dr. C, I thought I had already posted my Blog#1,3,4 but it seems it didn’t get posted in this specific site, my apologies.

The last vivid detail, that I can remember, about my social experiences before I had to start worrying about the pandemic was at school. I was home at the time when this new virus started making headlines. My mom usually leaves the TV open on a news channel when she would wake up my little brother and prepare him for school. I would watch it from time to time as well while getting ready for school. The next day, while preparing for school, the TV is on like usual, but this time it was unusual about the headlines that were being made. I changed the channel to another news channel and they would also talk about the same topic. A new virus was discovered in Wuhan, China. 

     The next day was normal and it would stay normal for the next 14 days. The news died down for a bit about the virus and there would be normal headlines again, like a car accident or something along the line of accidents. Life was the same as usual. I would hang out with friends after school and do what most video game-loving teenagers do, play video games. While everyone was having a normal time, the scientists and researchers were about to discover how truly devastating this new virus was.

     14 days was up. December 12, 2019, starting from the core of where the viral infection was first discovered, Wuhan, Hubei Providence, China. People started to become sick, some were experiencing shortness of breath, some were experiencing mild fevers, and worst of all (at the time) some were experiencing both symptoms. From this point on the world fell down a deep rabbit hole. Hospitals flooded with sick patients, and many more on the way.

     Days go by, cases rise and worst of all, people started to die. We weren’t prepared for this virus at all. March 13, 2020, the President announces a nationwide emergency. February 23, 2020, Italy was hit hard and they would soon close their borders. Many countries would later follow in Italy’s footsteps.  The number of symptoms began to increase. These symptoms not only came in pairs, and for most unlucky few they would get the whole package. These symptoms of Covid-19 include fever or chills, coughing, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion or runny nose, nausea or vomiting, and diarrhea.

      There were mask mandates and you now had to stay 6ft away from people. Eventually a nationwide panic. People were stocking up on supplies and some were extremely greedy. Some were scheming, like this man in Tennessee, Matt Colvin, who went around to every store that sold hand sanitizers and bought all of it. He was planning to make a profit but little did he know not only did he not make any profit, but he was also scorned by everyone. Somewhere in 2020, there was a shortage of toilet paper and everyone was literally going crazy over it. Memes were created about toilet paper being used as currency and people were even fighting over a single roll of toilet paper. Schools had to change to online classes. The first choice was an app called Zoom. Zoom was good but like anything that’s related to the internet, it was easily ruined. People were sharing their class codes to the internet and some random people would join in and be disruptive. This was a serious security breach because if a weird person ever got their hands on those codes, they could ruin a kid’s life. People that could work from home were forced to work from home, this policy helped a lot of people, especially office workers because they realized that they do better while working from home than at the office. They were more productive and could finish their task much faster.

     I can’t possibly list out all that happened but there you go. Also, as a side note, when I was talking about security breaches in Zoom meetings, I wasn’t kidding. Recently a Zoom meeting of Italy’s government Zoom call got hacked on live television and the hacker screen shared NSFW content on Jan 17, 2022.