Quarantine Cartoons by Marie Gilot
Marie Gilot spends her quarantine in New York City and posts her drawings and sci-fi shorts on Medium.
She wears her mask and so should you, you big baby.
Quarantine Cartoons
Share a photo of your mask
Take a photo of your anti-COVID mask, and tell us where you got it
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Williesha
Got it from home and only wearing for challenge. I rarely walk outside the house.
Sara
I got this Covid mask at a garden centre, part of a desperate attempt to 'do something different' with my boyfriend in Surrey. Both just driving around trying to think of something to do other than ride bikes and walk around our local area. This is all I bought.
Nicole
In her retirement, my mother-in-law picked up a part-time job as a seamstress. When COVID hit, she started sewing cloth masks for local hospitals near Buffalo, New York. She was sweet enough to find some unique fabric to make masks to my family as well. She even sewed pipe cleaners into them for a better fit around our noses.
Jeanne
I got this mask from a designer named "robecode“ in Germany.
Kim
I made this mask. In the spring, I unboxed the never-used sewing machine in my basement and made some masks using fabric from my collection of free t-shirts. It was my first time sewing in decades. Now, you can buy masks everywhere from Etsy shops to major retailers, which is good since the ones I made are fraying at the edges (as am I).
Tana
I got the mask at my local grocery store!
Ella
My mask was made by my mum. She runs a sewing school and since lockdown has been doing a lot of voluntary work making masks for friends and family and sewing scrubs for health workers.
Vincent
It was made for me by someone I dated over lockdown. Our first date was in a park the day before we were told to stay at home, and the next time we met up, she gave it to me.
Wearyourmask
Ordered it online from Resistance by Design, which donates to women's causes.
Describe how you are feeling right now in one word
Describe how you are feeling right now
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What have you done during the pandemic that you’d never done before?
What have you done during the pandemic that you hadn't done before?
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Work in the bathroom 🚽
Rode a Revel moped.
I never threw a kayak into the water of the Gulf.
We just moved into a new house less than a month before quarantine; at the end of the street is an inlet that feeds into a bay off of the Gulf of Mexico. As soon as we knew we were quarantined, I ordered inflatable kayaks from Amazon, the least expensive ones with the fastest shipping. When they arrived, we inflated them in our living rooms to check for leaks—it was really easy.
Soon, we put them, still inflated, in the back of the car and plopped them into the water. My wife, son, and I paddled a good ways for our first venture into the bay, up past the bridge on the north end of the bay, and spent some time floating in the water. My son had packed a lunch for us to take, but eating in the kayak was kind of difficult.
We had a great time, and on the way back to the inlet, we watched a dolphin arc to the surface and followed its trajectory through the bay. It was a great experience for us — we counted it as gym class for our son and a great bit of family time.
Does this count?
Other than not leave my house for long periods of time I also am using Duolingo to re-learn Spanish.
What brings you joy at home?
What brings you joy at home?
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Ella
Tana
Tokoroten, a favorite summer dish made of seaweed noodles :)
Williesha
Double Toasted Twitch. 🙂
Nicole
My cat, Cairo. She is constantly getting herself into weird situations. And she's not even remotely photogenic, so she looks even crazier when I try to capture the moment. This picture is just a normal Saturday morning for her.
She turns 2 in a little over a week, and she's brightened my life since the day we found her.
Wearyourmask
Jeff
Going for family bike rides or kayaking adventures. We live near an area secluded so that we can enjoy bike rides and occasional kayaking trips—it is a wonderful experience of being outdoors with the ones I love.
Write a letter to your pre-pandemic self
Write a message to your pre-pandemic self
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Trust me, girl. You won’t eat THAT much pasta. 🛒
Dear Williesha:
You are about to face the most difficult challenge you’ve ever faced in the last 20 years. It will be new to you and you’ll want to succomb to the darkness, the anxiety hibernate.
Don’t fall for that trap! Commit to at least step outside every day for fresh air. You don’t have to go anywhere but you need to connect with the sun and all of nature. You need to take time to feel human. This situation will be completely out of your control, so grab hold of the things around you
Speaking of feeling human, you may want to go ahead and quit your job, clean off the table in the bedroom, get the cars serviced, learn to grow and cook your own food, get any doctor appointments out of the way and get your hair straightened. Pretty much everything that requires human contact or being in any public space. It would save you a lot of trouble in the future.
You don’t have to be around humans to feel human.
Sincerely,
Williesha
Dear pre-pandemic Tana:
America will shake in the next few months. But hopefully some good will come out of it.
Most of the world will be in quarantine due to a global pandemic. It will be painful for many. For those of us who will be lucky to overcome it without losing our loved ones or our jobs, it will just require a change of routine.
PS: You better buy an indoor bike.
Dear me,
Relax some…take it as seriously as you did, but to know that you can keep yourself relatively safe.
You will not run out of toilet paper if you get just a little extra; maybe buy some shelf-stable milk for those times in between grocery trips where the gallon you bought last is starting to turn.
You’ll make the most of this — you will (re) connect with family in a way that you never had before, and it will be glorious.
You will wish your son could play with his friends, throw the football and tackle, run around without a care. You will do a great job of not bringing the full horror of COVID to his world. He will know it is serious, and he will know how and why we are taking precautions, but you will temper it with calming advice and rational discussions that the precautions will keep us all safe.
Know that you will do a fine job, and that your mistakes will be glorious as well. But most of all, turn off news feed, facebook, and text if necessary.
You will not change the minds of the indoctrinated… your school will grudgingly close, because it must. Know that your leaders will not protect you, so you will make the decision as a family, will read more biology lab reports and more medical research than you ever thought you would read.
Perhaps the two most important pieces of advice I can give: stay safe and be kind.
– Jeff
What do you miss the most from the time before the pandemic?
What do you miss most from before the pandemic?
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I miss most the ability to make quick trips to the store for necessary items. It’s a good thing, In some ways, that every purchase and every trip is meticulously planned—I have designated days on which I shop for the family, and forgetting an item means not having it for a couple more weeks. It creates a challenge for certain items, like milk, that are more difficult to buy ahead and store. But this has also taught my family a great deal of resilience. As well, I miss being able to go to the park as a family—we still get out and about, distant from others, by ourselves in a field or along the sidewalk. But not having to be so aware of every move, to be able to relax, that is what I miss.
There are so many people and experiences that I miss to the point where my heart aches, but I can imagine a return those things in time. I can picture small celebrations with people I care about, or finding a way to eat at a restaurant safely within the coming months.
But the one thing I have a hard time envisioning is how the live music I love will come back. And I miss that the most because it seems unattainable right now.
You will always find me in the pit at a show, and a mosh pit requires physical trust in people you don’t know. It involves full body contact, being covered in other people’s sweat, holding complete strangers above your head and letting them pull you off the floor. And, at least with the shows I go to, there’s an overwhelming emotional connection of shared experience between every person there. It makes me feel so alive.
I have no idea when this will come back. Or what form it will take when it does. But in the meantime, here’s a photo of me and my family at a Flogging Molly show in 2018. I can’t wait to get back out there and dance again.
Going to Raku, in the East Village, to have udon noodles!
This trash app ❤️
Share something in your neighborhood that exists because of the pandemic
Share something in your neighborhood that exists because of the pandemic
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What are you most afraid of?
What are you most afraid of right now, and how do you cope with your fear?
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I’m most afraid of my parents or husband contracting the virus. I don’t know how I cope. Maybe I’m not coping. I have anxiety regularly, so this was just one, massive thing to add to the pile.
I try to spend time with them (text or call my parents, though I haven’t done a great job with that) and remind myself especially when they aggravate me, that this is not something to take lightly. I could lose them at any time.
I’ve tended to avoid digging in to coronavirus news (or general “doomscrolling”) as a way to keep my mind separated from the disease. That’s about all I can do at this point.
Not really scared, but the idea that children may be more vulnerable to Covid than we’d thought is scary.
I hug them tight when I think something bad could happen to them.
I’m still most afraid of getting the virus itself. I cope by following precautionary measures to reduce my risk of catching it.
What’s the hardest decision you’ve had to make?
What's the hardest decision you've had to make?
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Quitting my job as an office and communications manager at a small nonprofit.
We had gone remote and I was struggling a bit. (You know…because of a PANDEMIC.) I’d been there almost 9 months and tended to forget steps or read too quickly. (And this was before the pandemic.)
But even though those mistakes were few, my boss disciplined me via Zoom and expected “near 99% accuracy” or no more than 2 mistakes per month. Or I’d be fired. And by mistake, this could mean something as serious as asking the same question more than once or (the camel back’s straw) forgetting to remove a job listing before a publication went to print.
Yes, they sound ridiculous written down. I should have never taken the job or quit earlier. But I learned a ton and I met a lot of good people.
I had to make the decision not to return to my job at a school due to my underlying health condition of CFS/M.E. I felt the risk of getting the virus was too great.
No big decisions have been made during the pandemic 😉