“Hi, where are you from?” A man breathes into my ear. But he isn’t talking to me, he is talking to another woman on this public group chat that I have entered on Rave. It is a multimedia messenger app that allows users to watch videos in sync, while also texting and speaking via VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol).
“Argentina,” the woman breathes back while 14 of us are trying to watch Annabelle: Creation on Netflix. My phone pings, announcing that standup comic Aaquib Jaleel is live with House of T, hosting a quiz on Instagram. I discreetly leave the ASMR conversation at Rave to wash my ears and switch to the ‘Gram.
Weekend pub-hopping has never really been my scene. But given that the world is currently practising physical distancing, the desperation for friends, acquaintances, or strangers to fill the silences in our homes is reaching a crescendo.
So, pub-hopping has today mutated into app-hopping. And that is something I can get behind. I’ve been cruising the dirty lanes of Craigslist since I was 17.
***
Th e Instagram live quiz is going well: I learnt that Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs is the first feature length animation, and Leo Fender, inventor of Fender guitars, couldn’t actually play one.
Unexpectedly though, I get a call via the Dialup app, from QuarantineChat. This app arbitrarily connects you to any of its over-1,000 users across the globe. That is how I met Andrei, a Romanian warehouse worker who has been living near Yorkshire, UK, for the past three years.
We take five minutes to adjust to each others’ accents, but in the next 30 minutes, the 49-year-old describes his life in Yorkshire, how he met his wife, and why he loves that she is as good at fixing things as he is. I tell him about all the cats and dogs I’ve known and how my parents live up in the hills, while I’m spending my years near the sea. “If I could give my 20-year-old self some advice, I’d tell him to live without fear, without worrying about what other people think of you,” he says in his gruff, slow voice.
I am reminded of what Nishad, a 25-year-old from Mumbai I met through QuarantineChat, had told me about his experience speaking to a woman in her fifties, “There was so much warmth in her voice. You know she didn’t spend her time texting people on screens, like people of our generation.”
***
I can’t dwell too much on philosophical discussions, however. Because I am super popular, I have a House Party scheduled in half an hour, and I have to slap on some lipstick for it. This is one of the precious few times I (virtually) meet fellow humans, and I’m not doing it in pyjamas. Not even if it is to play yet another game while facetiming with five buddies. We can get competitive.
I consider heading back to Rave after the House Party. But the scene there is dead: the Shrek watch party speaks a different language, with zero Eddie Murphy references, and the only person talking to me is a certain Diego asking if I’m on Snapchat.
Instead, I convince one of my friends to download Squad. I’m constantly on the lookout for new places to meet the same eight friends I have, and this particular app allows screen sharing. Which means no more screenshots, you can spill tea in real time as your friend’s screen movements and videos come alive in your’s.
Mind you, downloading these apps, including House Party and Zoom, among others, means giving over a whole lot of personal information to third parties. So you might want to rethink who’s really spilling the tea here.
The moon is rising, and I open up a bottle of wine to drink with my college friends living in Italy, US and Germany, over Google Hangouts. We might dim the lights and turn it into a dance party; we have already made a joint Spotify playlist. ‘It’s Saturday night and we in the spot’ — same spot as we have been for the past 10 days.
I need to sleep soon though, I have RSVP’d “yes” to a Brooklyn 99 Netflix Party with my sister for brunch.
