Chinese Version
01-18-2022，Tuesday，a very cold sunny day
The cold winter night is getting longer and the number of COVID positive cases are getting higher. The joke “if you don’t have friends who have COVID that means you have no friends” has begun to spread now. My experience in the past two days made me feel that people with and without friends are prone to “social hunger” symptoms because many of us are longing for face-to-face social opportunities now.
On Sunday, I became “lucky friends” with C, in the game of Pokemon Go. Lucky friends are a random and rare one-time special friendship state. Lucky friendship guarantees a lucky Pokemon after a trade. After trading of a lucky Pokemon, the “lucky friends” state disappears and you go back to being ordinary friends. Because Pokemon need a certain amount of candy to be upgraded, and lucky ones need less candy than ordinary ones, having lucky Pokemon creates an advantage in resource usage! As friends can only trade Pokemon face to face, on Monday, Martin Luther King Day, C walked to my house to make a lucky legendary Pokemon trade and chatted for a while. C is a bachelor who works at home, I guess he may feel more lonely on weekends or holidays when he doesn’t work.
Today, I heard a story told by a mother: “My daughter, who was just in junior high school, planned to invite a friend over to play this weekend. Yesterday, her friend called and said, ‘My mother just tested positive for COVID, so I can’t go to your house this weekend’. My daughter is not happy, as her plan to play with her friend fell apart. She complained: ‘I will be with a bunch of adults on this weekend again’. My parents do not seem worried about the sharp increase in COVID infection rates, as they believe that the third dose of booster vaccine is for life convenience.
A few days ago, my parents went to the wake of an old friend. My mother spent a long time dressing up and wearing her favorite jewelry. While staying in the wake for more than two hours, My mother called me from time to time and told me that so-and-so asked about me. When I heard a strange name, I replied that I don’t know this person, my mother would say on the phone: You met this person when you were little, and she still remembers you’. In my memory, the wake time usually doesn’t exceed half an hour, but my mother stayed in the wake for more than two hours this time. I joked that she regarded the wake as a rare party, and she didn’t deny it. I asked her: ‘Did your friend die of COVID’? My mother said, ‘No, he was 85 years old and had heart problems. I heard that he changed his medicine for heart problems recently and didn’t feeling well after taking the new medication. He fell down on stairs and died soon. I don’t think he should have changed his medicine’”.
Illness, seeing a doctor, taking medicine and passing away remind me of one of my hospital visiting experiences in November 2021: “The emotional stress related to COVID-19 pandemic for more than a year seems common, as I saw tips on how to maintain mental health are rotated on the TV screen in the waiting room”. The experts’ advices I found on the Internet: one way to stay mentally healthy is doing some achievable small goals daily, such as:
(1). Walk for 30 minutes five days a week,
(2). Improving listening skills
(3). Willing to be known by more people
(4). Improve presentation / presentation skills
(5). Go make friends
(6). Volunteer regularly
(7). Improve time management skills
(8). Get up early
(9). Learn a new thing every week
(10). Learn a foreign language
(11). No longer bothered by social media
(12). Form the habit of recording important events in daily life
One third of the small goals, such as (2), (3), (4) and (5), encourage face-to-face interpersonal communication.
The stories told by the mother, the episode of C making a lucky trade with me, and the tips for stay emotional healthy suggested by experts, putting it all together made me think that the COVID-19 pandemic which lasted for more than two years, the colder and longer winter nights, and the well-adopted third booster of vaccine have begun to breed “social hunger”, a kind of desire or impulse eager to interact with people face-to-face.
This morning, while chatting with my neighbor in Boston now and in Almaden Valley in California then, I said, “We try to stay fit recently. Let’s get together after sometime.”
This afternoon, when professor A, my daughter’s professor, called to greet us, I told him: “I heard that Waltham’s infection rate is about 15%, It is better to avoid going out often.”
I remember one of my alumina said, “The pandemic is terrible, disturbing normal life by the pandemic in such a long period of time is even more terrible.”. During the pandemic, it really takes our courage to cure “socially hunger”.
Little Episodes
1. Ping and I are lucky friends of Pokemon Go, but because friends can only trade Pokemon face-to-face and I haven’t seen Ping for a while, so our lucky friend status hasn’t been utilized.
2. Ping, my four-year room mate in college from 1981 to 1985, are neighbor in the Big Boston Area now.
Stories about Ping
Playing Pokemon Go together（2021）
Shopping together（2018年）