With at least 3 to 4 months of quarantine having gone underway, my family has been suffering the effects of listlessness, often caused by our lack of productivity. Normally, my household would be bustling with busyness, either to rush out the house for work and school, or with furious cleaning and completion of chores while the young children of my household cause a commotion in getting ready or playing on their days off.
Due to the pandemic, the working adults of my family have had their hours significantly shortened. While they are considered essential workers and have to leave the house to work, more often than not, they are at home. My brother and I, home from college, jobless and without any internships, have resorted to online classes to find something to do; however, we still find ourselves raking our heads to do something that isn't just play video games all day, scroll aimlessly through social media and news outlets, and the little hobbies we have picked up and started to practice more to the point they have become a part of our daily routine.
Nine people in a household with nothing to do has left us all restless.
On a whim, simply because I wanted to reward myself for getting straight A's this semester— a feat I was surprised to accomplish, as I had struggled with my major for the longest time, I decided to purchase the recently released game on the Nintendo Switch, Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Surprisingly, as obsessively as I played the game at first, I find myself unable to even hold my switch for longer than five minutes, preferring to either watch from the sidelines as my younger cousins play, or observe my mother destress from a particularly difficult day at work with her patients. Of course, I wanted to keep the game a secret from my family— I already knew that the moment they lay their eyes on this cute animal-based game with the freedom to create an island paradise as one so envisions, that I will never see this game again until they become tired of it. The last time this had happened was fairly recently. My dad had hoarded the switch for weeks to play Pokemon for essentially the entirety of my winter break. It led to a lot of annoyance on my part.
Initially, I had been upset as I had woken up to find my game has disappeared. My parents, my brothers, and my younger cousins established a form of the routine of who has hold of the game. From 4-7 am, my father would be in our lounge, playing the game at ungodly hours of the morning, only to be followed by my brother, who plays before and after his online classes. This would then be followed by my younger cousins, who are free from the clutches of their public school and have the flexibility to complete their assignments any time of the day. This would ultimately leave my mother to play from the late afternoon to the night, leaving me to play extremely late to when I would normally want to sleep.
As of recent, however, while we continuously fight over the little game, I've found myself closer to my family than I have been in the past three to five years. My brother and I share an unstable relationship with our parents due to our desire to break free of their Asian toxicity mindset and strictness it entails. College was our taste of freedom away from them; from high school to now, we had been at a constant back and forth with them, and had tried to limit our communication from them, preferring to be with our friends. We sit together in a room for longer periods of time, bickering and laughing and playing games together and talking about political and social issues, as we once had when we were younger. We eat dinners together again due to our schedule lining up and staying home. We bake and cook together, something I haven't done with my father since my sophomore year of high school.
