By Lexi Kupor

People Editor

While the coronavirus may have turned our lives upside down, there’s one thing it can never kill: social media. I’ve enjoyed resorting to my various feeds to keep me sane throughout this difficult time, yet I’ve recently found that it’s made me more frustrated than at peace. Let me explain.

It all started with a carrot. I opened my Instagram stories one day early into the quarantine to find a little hand-drawn orange devil on my screen, and I decided it must just be a fluke. But this carrot spread faster than COVID-19 through the state of New York; before I knew it, there were carrots infiltrating every story I could find. I couldn’t escape, and soon that little carrot face showed up in my dreams. I found myself wishing my sleep paralysis demon would come back and haunt me just so I could get this root vegetable phantom out of my mind. Luckily, the carrot slowly evolved into the hand drawn tomato challenge, which I found significantly less alarming. But I was naive to think the worst was over.

The next morning, I awoke to the worst pandemic yet: the positivity challenge. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for feminism, but these girls were out here acting as if their mirror selfie was about to end climate change, wipe out poverty, and elect the first female president all in one. I knew the quarantine paranoia was setting in when I even considered joining in after the seventh story tag, but luckily I refrained from giving in to the hysteria and saved my dignity and follower count along the way.

The next to set in was the “me and my microwave” challenge. Look, I get that we’re just trying to #keepinstacasual, but that doesn’t require a picture of you next to an electric heating device to accomplish, does it? I guess if we aren’t going to die from the coronavirus, we might as well get our genes mutated by artificial radiation waves.

Just when I thought I could go back to watching my hydraulic press videos in peace, I was hit with the most panic-inflicting phenomenon yet: ‘until tomorrow.’ These thirteen letters became ingrained in my brain like a wicked bad luck charm, and I felt like Alan Turing deciphering the Nazi code as I attempted to discover their meaning. Was it true that COVID-19 really would end the next day? Or was that middle school selfie telling me that I should unscramble the letters into ‘romowt lit unro’ and figure out the Latin translation? I can only hope that my FBI agent watching me through my camera has already begun the investigation.

To my fellow Instagram users, it’s up to us to keep this space free of digital vegetables, global warming-curing selfies, microwave shoutouts, and Fisher throwbacks once and for all. Save your stupidity for your Snapchat Bestify quiz, for goodness sake.