{"id":1009,"date":"2020-05-03T00:16:35","date_gmt":"2020-05-03T04:16:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=1009"},"modified":"2020-05-04T13:54:30","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T17:54:30","slug":"things-that-are-getting-me-through-the-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/things-that-are-getting-me-through-the-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"Things That Are Getting Me Through the Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"

1. Survivor: Winners at War.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
I know it’s becoming the Tony Show. I am OK with this.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve watched Survivor<\/em> on and off since its debut in 2000, but drifted away from it in recent years\u00a0unless a returning player was someone I really liked. (Or if Lisa Whelchel was a cast member, because come on. Like I\u2019m not gonna watch Blair Warner getting all dirty and hungry on a remote island.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But the current season, in which 20 former winners came back to test their wiles against each other? That\u2019s been appointment TV for me during this whole nightmare. When Wednesday rolls around, I feel like celebrating because I\u2019ve<\/i> survived another week. I\u2019ve enjoyed seeing old favorites like Ethan Zohn again, and I\u2019ve had fun\u00a0getting to know some of the newer winners I wasn\u2019t familiar with.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u00a0feel sorry for people who don\u2019t like Tony Vlachos. His boundless energy and wild scheming crack me up.\u00a0I\u2019ve enjoyed watching him slowly take over the season, and at this point I\u2019m pretty sure he\u2019s going to join Sandra Diaz-Twine in the two-time winner\u2019s club. (Whoever wins, though, the Queen stays Queen. Always.) Boston Rob saying \u201cTony\u2019s a boss\u201d at the end of the most recent episode couldn\u2019t have been a more obvious passing of the torch.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

2. Homemade Bread.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
My first bread machine loaf, Parmesan herb bread. It tasted better than it looked. Really.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I know, boring. Everyone and their cat has taken up bread baking during lockdown. Why not? It\u2019s comforting and it makes the house smell nice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In my defense, Bill requested a bread machine for Christmas from his parents and they came through. We were baking homemade bread well before everything went to hell, and so we already had a decent supply of flour and yeast on hand before those things became scarce. I figured homemade bread would save us trips to the store; I didn’t realize everyone else would end up having the same idea. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bill makes an amazing pumpernickel and I\u2019ve improvised a rosemary and olive oil bread I\u2019m pretty happy with. I\u2019m sure all the purists out there would scoff at our lowly machine, but I like\u00a0this new routine.<\/p>\n

3. What We Do in the Shadows, Season Two.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
This is the face of the ultimate vampire slayer. Buffy who?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve sung this\u00a0show\u2019s praises before<\/a>, but I was nervous when the second season started\u00a0in mid-April. Would the show be able to maintain its offbeat humor?<\/p>\n

So far, so good. Having the hapless familiar Guillermo turn out to be a Van Helsing descendant who\u2019s a natural born\u2014but reluctant\u2014slayer was a stroke of genius. Harvey Guill\u00e9n’s\u00a0become the MVP of the show as Guillermo tries really, really hard to reconcile these two sides of his personality. He\u2019s still devoted to his vampire master Nandor (who doesn\u2019t deserve such\u00a0devotion AT ALL), but he just can\u2019t escape the vampire-slaying side of his family tree. Having him inadvertently stumble into a secret crew of vampire slayers headed by Craig Robinson was an especially inspired twist.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

4. Doom 64.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I got a Nintendo Switch for Christmas a couple years\u00a0ago. After I grew tired of endless rounds of Mario Kart and a couple of other games, my poor Switch gathered dust in a bookshelf.<\/p>\n

And then the lockdown hit, and I found out that Nintendo was re-releasing Doom 64<\/em> for the Switch. It\u2019s bundled with yet another ultra-modern iteration of Doom, but those confuse the hell out of me and I was relieved to learn that I could buy Doom 64 by itself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Give me the old-school first person shooters you didn’t need a damn engineering degree to figure out how to play. I spent an unseemly\u00a0amount of the 90s\u00a0parked in front of my N64 playing this\u00a0game. It’s\u00a0my favorite version of Doom, and I\u2019m enjoying it even more with the brighter Switch screen and the controls, which are much easier on my hands than that weird N64 controller was.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
I have small hands, and that shit was awkward to use.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Doom 64<\/em> was released on the same day as another Nintendo Switch game that had my entire Twitter feed going berserk. I resisted its siren song for a long time because I had a feeling it was a rabbit hole I didn\u2019t want to go down. But eventually, I played enough of Doom 64<\/em> that I wanted a change, and so I bit the bullet. And that brings us to\u2026<\/p>\n

5. Animal Crossing: New Horizons.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Me and the Godzilla statue I stayed up half the night to earn.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Animal Crossing: New Horizons<\/em> is about as unlike Doom 64<\/em> as it\u2019s possible to be. But variety is the spice of a lengthy quarantine period.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never played any version of this game before, but I\u2019ve become completely engrossed in ACNH. It\u2019s similar to other time sucks like FarmVille<\/em> (remember that?), Minecraft<\/em>, and The Simpsons: Tapped Out<\/em> in that I can spend hours building up my island, hunting for supplies, and pursuing the little mini-games ACNH throws at me. I even got to \u201cmeet\u201d Weekly Knob editor Aura Wilming when she paid a visit to my island. She was kind enough to bring me some oranges (a non-native fruit on my island) and an awesome gothic mirror. And my villagers are still talking about her character. That was fun!<\/p>\n

This long isolation period hasn\u2019t been all about materialism and pop culture worship, though. There\u2019s one last thing that\u2019s been helping me a lot: \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

6. Lunchtime Meditation with the Tibet House US and the Nalanda Institute.<\/strong><\/p>\n

During a trip to NYC in June of last year, Bill and I found the Tibet House<\/a>, and in late March, Bill discovered a link to daily meditation classes Tibet House is cohosting with the Nalanda Institute via Zoom. Although you can give a donation to an instructor, to Tibet House, or to the Nalanda Institute, the classes are free.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to be a Buddhist to get something out of this; it\u2019s a very relaxing, pleasant time, and I\u2019ve grown attached to the teachers and several of the student faces I see every weekday via Zoom.\u00a0I’ve also gotten much better at focusing during\u00a0meditation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On the one hand, I\u2019ll be relieved when these online classes are discontinued because it will mean that things are getting back to normal in New York City and elsewhere. On the other hand, I\u2019m going to be very sad when they\u2019re gone, because they\u2019ve become an important part of my endless weekdays.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

https:\/\/tibethouse.us\/programs-and-events\/meditation-classes\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1. Survivor: Winners at War. I\u2019ve watched Survivor on and off since its debut in 2000, but drifted away from…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,44,33],"tags":[55,54,52,53,35],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1009"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1017,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions\/1017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}