You washed your hands like you were Lady Macbeth and refrained from human contact for months. Yet, despite your efforts, you got the swine flu. And even though you’re heavily medicated, you realize that you are bored. After all, you don’t have classes or club meetings to keep you busy. Heck, even going outside isn’t an option. When even sleeping gets old, what are you going to do for the next week?
Fortunately, this list contains all you need for when you’re sick and have nothing to do. After you finish hacking up a lung, we can begin.
1) Ready…Set…Click!
Wikipedia Race! You can do this with someone (preferably also infected) or alone. Pick two completely random topics that Wikipedia will have articles on (for example: radioisotope thermoelectric generator and Gandhi), and try to get from one to the other in a minimal number of clicking on the links within the article. No cheating!
2) Use those eyeballs
For those extremely bored, build up visual acuity and read your books and magazines upside down. You probably won’t actually understand what you’re reading the first time (or the second, or the third), so pick something you’ve already read before.
3) Practice your foreign language skills (or just amuse yourself)
You might not have learned anything in high school Spanish, but at least you can amuse yourself for an hour or two. Watch a movie in a foreign language, put the subtitles in another foreign language, and prepare to laugh. You’ll be so bamboozled (or, as foreign language teachers would say, “immersed in the language”) by the end of the movie, you’ll actually want to read a book upside down.
4) Waste time in the best way possible
Download StumbleUpon, an online tool that, when you click “stumble,” brings you to random (and often highly amusing) web sites. Warning: this may cause you to lose several hours of sleep.
5) Waste time in the second best way possible
Whenever you search Google, you assume something will pop up. This is not entirely true. Use different combinations of words to try coming up with “0 results.” Warning: Remember Rule #34 of the Internet. If you can imagine it, there’s porn of it. Search cautiously for your sanity’s sake.
6) Catch up on a show. Big time.
Challenge yourself! Watch an entire series before you go back to class. For the faint-of-heart, watch “Firefly”. For the headstrong (or those who somehow don’t sleep at all), watch “Friends”.
7) Only for those slightly better and extremely bored (or without Internet connection)
For the engineering-inclined, or those who want to return to their childhood (you know, when we didn’t have the Internet and laptops were twenty pounds): buy a ton of Lego sets. Reconstruct your dorm, the house you grew up in or a sweet Millennium Falcon.
8) Pretend you’re a member of Boomshaka
Grab a pen, a highlighter, or a pair of chopsticks, and start banging away on objects in your room to create a musical masterpiece. Anything non-breakable will do. You can also plug in your iPod and make a complimentary beat. When you’re done with that, see how much noise you can make before the people forget about the quarantine, barge in and tell you to shut up.
9) Choo-Choo! Here comes the tissue train!
When you’re sick, grabbing tissues can get old. For amusement as well as functionality, build yourself a tissue train. Knot together lots of tissues (a boxful will work), and hang it from your wall or ceiling, preferably right by your bed. Any time you need a tissue, just rip one off! Yes, it’s just like grabbing tissues from the box, but these are hanging from the wall. Fire hazard warning: Don’t light candles anywhere near the tissues.
10) You’ve survived!
Once you’ve reached the end of your illness and start to feel like your old self again, throw yourself an Unbirthday party, a la Alice in Wonderland! Gather up all the candy that you have in your dorm and eat it. Play some lively music. If you have balloons, test your lung capacity by blowing them up — although since you’ve just gotten over an illness that has possible respiratory complications. Party like you’re just getting over an illness: weakly.