Video in the Time of Quarantine

The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly altered nearly every aspect of our lives. It even altered my YouTube suggestions.

I don’t currently need beauty tips. Half my face is behind a mask, and everybody’s supposed to be 6 feet away. Things like unfiltered breathing and picking up a loaf of bread at the corner store are now existential threats. Returning home involves a degree of decontamination. I don’t need lively music to boost my energy after work anymore; I need to soothe my nerves. YouTube serves up the lyric-free stuff for me at night.

The new videos arrive, unbidden and irresistible, as soon as I open the app. My home page now offers fewer political clips, which were a mainstay in the recent past. Instead, I get vegetable gardening how-to. Urban, small-space, container gardening videos, because YouTube shrewdly deduced my limitations.

Then the penny-pinching videos. How to sew. A week of dinners for $10. DIY everything. But most intriguing are the content creators themselves.

They are normal people.

The ones who modify their recipe halfway through filming because there isn’t enough shredded parmesan after all, but with half parm and half cheddar, every serving gets some cheese on top.

The ones with wrinkles and extra pounds and non-Northeastern accents.

The tarot reader that drops her cards, retrieves them off the carpet, and restarts her reading.

It seems I crave not only information, but the regular people I haven’t seen since quarantine. No, even before that.

I miss my grandma and the ladies auxiliary club. I miss the days before my neighbor placed a “Trump-finally someone with balls!” lawn sign, back when he would talk to a liberal like me.

I go to YouTube for that now.

Normal people doing normal things.

This extends to foreign cooking videos. I love them with English subtitles, metric measurements, modest kitchens in Guinea, or no kitchens (outdoors, over a fire in India).

And they’re all about home. How to repair this or create that or make lemonade out of this type of metaphorical lemon. Taught by folksy entrepreneurs with 400 or 1,000 subscribers.

Related posts:

The insurance industry is a mammoth one that has been becoming massive in terms of size and complexity. The insurers today face unique challenges. The needs of the customers are expanding briskly as…

Today I decided to work on creating a suit for the Lights Out 2 fashion show. This is my first time making a fashion piece so I am very scared as to how it could turn out. The theme of the fashion…

Who will be Christ Christ? Lots of people express your dog appeared to be a little dude, lots of people express your dog was/is The lord, quite a few express they’re a little legend handset made…