Cootie Catching in the age of Social Distancing

It’s week 8 of the Covid-19 aka. Coronavirus pandemic, and we’re all getting stir crazy AF. But despite our fears, and our anxiety, and the looming death toll ticker crawling across our television screens and twitter timelines, we, as humans, seem to have found coping mechanisms in the simplest of forms, from baking (if you can find flour or yeast), to arts and crafts, to taking up a new language or skill (shoutout to Duolingo for making Klingon and High Valyrian available… seriously). Above all, we’ve found comfort by taking long quiet strolls down memory lane, reminiscing about the good old days when we could share gossip and laughs over brunch mimosas in a crowded hipster Queen West eatery, as we virtually pass our recreational blunts through the Brady bunch squares of this zooming new reality.

A few months back, while browsing the kids section at Indigo for birthday gifts, I stumbled onto some good old MadLibs in the activity books section and immediately texted Gin my excitement (and also bought one for us to use, because of course I did). And it was during our forthwith MadLib session, that we started talking about all the quirky little games we played in our adolescence, like MASH (mansion, apartment, shack, house), where you listed some of your dream careers, but more importantly, husband prospects, and through a mathematic algorithm (I may be reaching) you could map out your future. And of course, we would waste hours and a lot of inkjet paper making paper fortune tellers (or as Gin calls them, Cootie Catchers, which really confuses me because I thought we were supposed to avoid catching the cooties). Nevertheless, in keeping with our Nostalgic sentiments, we decided it was only right to make some cootie catching paper fortune tellers, socially distanced, over zoom.

I have to say, I don’t remember having such a hard time thinking of fortunes to write inside, but then again, I’m married now, and I’m pretty sure back in the day we just filled them up with all the boys or celebs we were crushing on (I’m talking to you JTT). Times really have changed. And whatever happened to JTT anyways?

So if you want to follow along and make your own paper fortune teller / cootie catcher, or you just can’t resist our infectious banter (you might need your cootie shot), then get your paper and your writing utensils ready. As a bonus, we’ve decided to throw in our MadLibs session too for your nostalgic enjoyment 😉