On March 4, or roughly 98 weeks ago in 2020 time, a 20-year-old musician named Curtis Roach uploaded the following video to TikTok. He was, we suspect, bored in the house and in the house bored. Oh, this sweet summer child. Little did he know what was coming.
If week one of extensive self-isolation and quarantining in the United States has an anthem, it is “Bored in the house and I’m in the house bored,” and we cannot stop listening to it. And if you’re using TikTok—and come on, admit it, you downloaded TikTok on day four of this nonsense—chances are you couldn’t escape it even if you wanted to, because it’s everywhere.
Here’s 15-year-old Charli D’Amelio, who has 40 million followers in the app, using the sound:
Here’s Tyga, dancing in his palatial fucking kitchen and then zipping around near his pool table and tiger skin rug:
And Keke Palmer and her very cool glasses are also bored:
But forget famous people. The sudden ubiquity of Roach’s unexpectedly zeitgeisty jam and TikTok’s useful feature that allows you to sort by sound has also made it very easy to browse a collection of videos in which people do dumb things to amuse themselves while being bored in the house and in the house bored. Take these, whatever these are:
There’s also lots of dancing:
And time spent irritating family members:
Or just being visibly bored:
One Day At A Time’s Marcel Ruiz beaned himself in the face with a ping pong ball:
Basically, young Mr. Roach has created the perfect little song for what it feels like to be anxious and weirded out and responsibly staying at home at a very strange moment in time. Because this one, this is exactly right:
Appropriately, Curtis Roach also created a song about this precise moment, which includes frequent admonishments to wash your hands and cough into your elbow. It’s charming and funny and catchy, and he presumably made it because he was bored in the house:
But it’s that first little number that dominates. Looking forward to the inevitable remix.