What are the best apps for video calls on Android?

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Let’s find out which of these apps are the most commonly used.
Google Duo
Let’s start with the Internet giant’s free video calling app, Google Duo. Many experts consider it the best app for video calls on Android and the counterpart of the popular Facetime app on iPhone.
Google Duo offers a high-quality video and audio experience with impressive data and resource savings. Features include:

• chat with video messages and emoji, stickers, doodles
• group calls for up to 32 participants
• Knock knock feature allows you to see the caller live before answering
• live screen capture

Also available on the Google play store for iPhone, iPad, and any device.
Google Hangouts
Another excellent app for video calling on Android by Google is Hangouts. It is a multifunction app that allows you to make free domestic and international calls, share photos, videos, emojis, video conferencing, share locations, and much more. Also useful for work, it has all the essential features for instant communication:

• Synchronizes calendar and contacts
• HD group conference
• chrome-extension available
• smart mute
• built-in screen sharing.
• Use shortcuts and commands to improve efficiency.
• Integration with other Google apps.
• Limit bandwidth so the other person does not have difficulty during video chat.
• Status, photos, emojis, stickers, and GIFs.
• Send messages to friends, even if they are offline.
• Multilingual video chat app for Android, iPhone, and other devices.

An awe-inspiring service, even with the free option.
Whatsapp
We had a chance to introduce Whatsapp by talking about the best video calling services available today. Probably the most reliable and widely used messaging app, Whatsapp allows free video calls from Android to iPhone.
Group video calls are possible with decent video quality, but not to the exceptional levels of Google Duo and FaceTime. Features include:

• group chat for up to 250 people
• broadcast messages to as many contacts as you want at once
• personalized chat background, emoji, and stickers
• file sharing for sizes up to 100 MB
• shortcuts for particular chats
• low data consumption video chat
• multitasking during a video call
• backups of WhatsApp conversations

Facebook Messenger
Still, in the realm of popular VoIP and instant messaging applications, Facebook Messenger offers exciting features for android video calling.
It has the advantage of synchronizing all Facebook contacts with whom it is possible to engage in video chat. The video call quality is similar to Whatsapp’s, thus not exceptionally high. Among the main features, Messenger has:

• group video calls
• chat with emoji and voice messages and file transfer
• capture moments with a Messenger camera, and add filters or stickers to share or insert stories
• play games
• Share location, change chat themes, or apply dark mode to the entire app
• to make and receive payments. (Feature limited to the United States)

Also available on iPhone/iPad devices and the web.
Telegram
Famous for maximum security and data privacy, Telegram is a messaging app that allows you to initiate video calls on Android and from Android to iPhones in private chats since it’s available for all devices and operating systems, as well as on browsers.
Group video calls and in groups are possible. The video quality is excellent compared to Whatsapp and Messenger, although not at Google Duo and FaceTime levels.
Viber
Also prized for its first-class privacy and security features that enable a better communication and data sharing experience. Excellent quick messaging app useful le for Android video calls, but that works on all types of phones and devices. Its features include:

• HD video and voice calls, including international
• automatic synchronization across multiple devices
• group chat, with quick switching between chat rooms
• lock contacts
• stickers, stickers, and emojis on any image
• integration with Facebook, Twitter, and more

Signal
Who doesn’t recognize Signal’s interface at first glance? Famous for its ease and speed, it is a popular messaging and video calling app for Android that is also available for iOS devices and browsers.
It offers a secure connection with international SMS, voice, and video calls free of charge. Multiple accounts can be managed on one phone, and its most valued feature is privacy:

• strong end-to-end encryption
• lock screen PIN
• hide messages from being displayed on the lock screen
• self-destruct messages
• block contacts and groups

Signal chat options include funny stickers and themes, image sharing and editing, message backup, and restore.
Tango
Another option for video calling on Android is Tango. Perhaps less well known, but it has over 400 million users, not only android users but also iPhone and even Windows phones. It allows high-quality video calls and live streaming; the chat room function is also for random conversations with strangers.
Its features are pervasive; in fact, you can:

• Share songs via Spotify.
• Add filters and effects during video chat.
• Find friends nearby
• and capture and share real-time photos and videos with friends.
• Chat or make voice calls, and send personalized animations.
• playing games during video chat
• make or following live streamings

All this is enjoyable for free.
IMO
IMO is another excellent solution and the newest app for video calls on Android and iOS, completely free.
It allows you to create unlimited high-quality video, voice, and text messages. The app also works incredibly well on 3G and 2G networks and is very easy to use. Among its features it has:

• group video chat
• photo, video, and other media file sharing
• contact blocking
• groups for chatting, with a wide range of emoticons and stickers
• access multiple chat clients at the same time
• multilingual support.

Skype
The historic Skype is also an excellent app for video calls between Android and iPhone. Known for its home screen and call jingle, it is simple and clean, and you can access your list of contacts and recent conversations, make VoIP (over the internet) calls, chat, video call, and send files or text messages. With Skype, you do not need a phone number, which is necessary for Whatsapp, Messenger, and Google Duo. Also available for Windows and on the browser.
Find out more on: https://www.zegocloud.com/blog/best-apps-for-video-calls-on-android

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Any communication done through the internet can be called online communication. Email, social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, chat applications like WhatsApp, telegram Snapchat chat, etc are modes of online communication.
If any marketing actions do not involve the Internet as such, some refer to it as traditional marketing or Offline communication.
How does people’s communication online differ from how they communicate in person?
Interesting question! I was discussing this with a friend recently. We had met a couple of times in person following which our interaction was limited to frequent texting for a couple of months due to the pandemic.
Here are a few things I noticed:
The data we get over text is limited. It lacks many dimensions that we otherwise find with direct interactions such as facial expressions, tone, eye contact, and stimulation to other senses. This gap in the data leads to completely different experiences. With online interactions, people I’ve known very well in person act differently. The comfort of the screen allows one to send a smiling emoticon when they’re tearing up.
The screen acts as a filter to emotional data we’d rather receive or give away. Recently when I misplaced a friend’s pen driIlackedsd was t far easier to tell him this over text than inform him in person first.
How important is communication to you?
Communication is key. Let me tell a story. I know of a person who loved this one guy. But they lived apart, and can only talk over phones. They tried- video calls, texts, normal phone calls- everything. However, somewhere, somehow, they weren’t able to communicate their feelings to each other. Your words, your body language, your hand gestures, your eye contact, your facial expressions- everything has a role to play in good, effective communication. If you do not communicate, you will never be able to put your point across! That’s why communication plays a significant role in our everyday life!
Why is an email service called an offline form of communication?
Because you are not communicating with the other person IRT. They send you a message, and, depending on how often you look at your email, you might not see it until they are no longer online. Whereas with Skype, you can only communicate with each other as long as both of you are online. Text messaging, IRC, and the like fall somewhere in-between, but because they are often used for immediate responses, they are considered online.

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I have this really clear mental image of standing in my kitchen one morning before work, cat churning around my ankles wanting to be fed, and noticing that one of the burners on the stove was already lit. Which meant that that little flame had been steadily burning ever since I’d last turned the stove on a full night before, to make tea that was supposed to calm me but didn’t, in defiance of the dulcet-toned ads on NPR which try to persuade women like me that even though your new normal might look a little different these days, self-care or whatever doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, it can be as simple as brewing yourself a warm, comforting cup of Yogi Honey Lavender Stress Relief Tea. Even though the world you once knew has become so abstract to you that it seems more like an AP US History essay prompt than a place you used to live, and the shattered fragments of human connection itself are being inexpertly cobbled together amidst the rising death toll of a senseless and omnipresent public health disaster, this relaxing herbal tea blend encourages you to take a moment to pause, step away from the chaos of the day, and sip your way to a more stress-free state of mind. Find your flow with Yogi Tea.
I’ve always rolled my eyes at Yogi Tea and their ilk and yet still find myself following their basic logic, only with (decaf) black tea instead of Honey Lavender Stress Relief. (Most herbal tea depresses me in the same way that soup does, at least if the soup presents itself as a full meal: Both are diluted excuses for nourishment, spiritual or otherwise, essentially hot water dressed up as something more.) Anyway my point is that the stove had been lit for the hour after hour after hours that I hadn’t slept the night before—and my larger point is that I still don’t know if this actually happened, or if it was a dream. I am very tired, and have been for a long time.
I won’t know either way till I get my next National Grid bill. Unlike ConEd, who lets you track your real time electricity usage as the month goes along, National Grid withholds all the juicy details until your monthly bill, I guess because that’s how often they read your meter. If the burner thing was a dream, my next gas bill will probably be about $20, which is a pretty good deal for a perfectly good couch. If the burner thing was not a dream, I have no idea how much the gas bill will be. I am frightened to attempt an estimate.
Part of the couch arrangement is that I never find out how much the gas bill was for. If you live in New York you probably use National Grid yourself, rendering much of this next part unnecessary, but here’s how it would work:

1. I receive my next “Your gas bill is ready to view” email, which is coming any day now.
2. I forward this email to you. It will contain the bill amount in the body of the email, and in an attached PDF, which you unlock with a password, which is my zip code, which you will know once I give you my address to come get the couch. The PDF will also contain payment instructions.
3. You look at the bill amount, keeping in mind that in “normal” times it should be about $20, and make a judgement as to whether the burner thing was a dream.
4. You convey this judgement to me, without telling me how much the bill was for.
5. And then you just pay it.

I’ve provided a picture of my perfectly good couch. I don’t really see the point of having several photos from different angles; this is the couch.
You might be wondering if something is wrong with the couch. Otherwise why would I so willingly part with it, especially after the past year—Jesus, a year—when the luckiest among us have spent so much time on our couches that they have become our north, our south, our east, our west* – our desert, our tundra, our sand and our sea, the horizon holding up all of our skies? You may deduce from the outer edges of the photo that I have other objects in my apartment, most of which I could dispose of online. Yet since I first moved into this place almost three years ago, this is the first time I am asking someone from the internet to come over and take something. So why the couch?
The answer is: The couch is too big. The couch is too big because: I am the only person here. Pre-pandemic I would sometimes have another person here, maybe even more than one. On such occasions, this rather spacious couch would be just the thing. For up to I would say four people, pretty much any combination of relationships and personal space needs could be accommodated by this single piece of furniture. Four people, here, in this studio apartment! Can you imagine?
Now I always sit on the same side of the couch, much like I always lie on the same side of my loft bed, which I chose over a normal bed to make my apartment seem bigger than it is. My cat sits on the other side of the couch to watch her YouTube videos for cats, just as she lies on the other side of the bed to watch me try to sleep, but she was the runt of the litter and hardly needs all the space. I don’t want a smaller bed but if I got a smaller couch, or even just a chair, I could use the extra floor space for something, not that I have any plans for it. My psychiatrist just recommended that I do what I can to make my apartment feel different since I’m here all the time, essentially trick myself into thinking I’ve gone somewhere else, and having some flexibility floor space-wise would help. I might leave it empty.
Take it from me: You can do so many things on this couch. I’m not great at remembering to close the blinds and for a while didn’t have any, so some of my neighbors probably have stories, not that I’m suggesting you ask them. One of the other things I’ve done on it, and which you can do too if you pay my next gas bill, is knit. Or crochet! Before COVID I knew how to knit but not how to crochet, but now I know both.† Last summer I found it soothing to make winter apparel because I foolishly thought the pandemic would be better by then, even though I’d read all the articles saying it wouldn’t be.
But when winter actually came and everything got even worse than they thought, I had the mittens and the hat and this cozy headband thing but almost no place to wear them, unless I was picking up prescriptions at Rite-Aid, or going on one of my many walks with no destination other than this same world in an hour. In the summer I was knitting a sweater on and off but in the winter I abandoned it to complete the summer hat I’d started crocheting in the spring, which I’d abandoned to start the sweater.
I usually hate summer but this year I do think of it as a time when life should be better—vaccines, outdoor gatherings, 4th of July without a Trump speech, probably other good things I can’t think of right now—but I also think that dissociating to fixate on some other time is just a very human thing to do. In winter I focus on summer, and it really is that simple. My theory is that this is why we’re on our phones so much, even if we’re pedestrians putting ourselves in mortal danger to do so: If you’re texting or listening to music as you’re walking down the street, you’re not exactly walking down the street. Someone else is walking down the street, and you’re just kind of along for the ride.
Actually I’ve been thinking about this a lot. There’s nothing like a stay-at-home order to make you notice your constant, baseline longing to be somewhere else. I think this is what makes a person interrupt a nice moment to take a picture of the nice moment, and then post the picture, and then look at their own post of the picture, and only then enjoy the nice moment that they theoretically could have enjoyed at the time. All these little steps pushing the actual experience further and further away until you can look at it as though it happened to someone else, and imagine how it must look to someone who hadn’t been there (though if this is how you’ve dealt with the nice moment, you arguably weren’t there either). Context and structure are only clear from the outside, and that’s what we all want, on top of which we’re obsessed with ourselves. No one says “Pics or it didn’t happen” anymore but still we live by that idea.
What dumb phrases do you think we’re saying now, that don’t seem dumb to us yet but are? Maybe “doomscrolling,” or “social distancing,” or “virtual happy hour.” Or “I’m fine.”
Another thing I do on my couch is Zoom or Skype or Bluejeans or Facetime or TwoSeven or Google Hangouts or Gaze with people sometimes. It’s one of my two standard video call locales, the one I use for the people I know best, or am most comfortable with even though we can hardly ever meet in person and I haven’t known him that long. If I don’t know someone well or at all, I will Zoom from my desk, which is where I sit for all my video work meetings; it provides a pleasant backdrop defined by plants and books, and from there my apartment never looks messy. I used to have a third, medium-intimacy Zoom location – the armchair under my loft bed – but I cut it because talking from there made me feel trapped.
All my Covid video first dates have been from my desk. All my Covid face masked first dates have been from Prospect Park.
The thing you don’t expect about a first date in face masks is that the mask makes it even harder to recognize the person, which with dating apps is hard enough. On my first one I met the guy at the Prospect Park subway station, on a gorgeous spring day I was too tense to enjoy, and approached the station in a frenzy of uncertainty as to whether the person who’d just texted me “I’m here!” could be some dude in a red hoodie, slouched outside the station with his eyes on his phone—not only because he was shorter than expected and losing his hair, but because the lower two-thirds of his face were covered with a piece of cloth. I had to creep up to him in a face mask that I’d recently fashioned from a stretchy headband, to ask if his name was the right name while a man in a sidewalk tent looked on in silence. Hoodie guy confirmed that he was Hinge guy, to my relief and swiftly suppressed disappointment, and then tent man shouted: “Do you know who you’re talking to?”
I asked tent man if he was talking to me and he shouted yes, and I said I did know now, and tent man said: “I don’t understand what’s going on here. You two want to get together but you have to take off the face masks!” With stilted laughter Hinge guy and I walked away, as tent man called after us: “I’m jealous!” If this comment referred to the date, which I’m even less sure of now than I was at the time, I can say with confidence that he had nothing to be jealous of.
Another COVID first date (a Zoom one) was challenging in the sense that I’d been crying two minutes before it started. In fact I’d been crying on and off for hours. It had begun when I’d been lying on my versatile couch that afternoon, scrolling through Instagram feeling nothing, only to see a post from WNYC announcing that beloved radio host Richard Hake had died unexpectedly at age 51.
Richard Hake was—in my mind, at least, and in my mind your mind is where things are most real—one of my best and most supportive friends. When my psychiatrist asked me in Early Pandemic who my “support system” was, I had silently debated whether including Richard Hake would make me seem even more fragile than I already did. I woke up to his voice every morning, as part of a longstanding routine which included a sunlight alarm clock, timed Mr. Coffee maker, kitchen table I actually used, and faint unease on the part of most of men I dated, who found it all too grown-up. No matter. Richard Hake wouldn’t find it too grown-up. Richard Hake got up at 3am every weekday, so he could be at the studio in time to wake up New York.
I want to be clear that I did not have a crush on Richard Hake. My feelings were much more important than that.
How to describe Richard’s voice, if for some indefensible reason you haven’t heard it? It would probably be best for me to listen to a recording right now and have it fresh in my mind, but if you think I’m emotionally fit for that, think again. A dead or affected writer might refer to it as a “pleasant” voice, as opposed to a “deep baritone.” Light and non-threatening, verging on nasal, suffused with a kind of thoughtful enthrallment that glowed comfort into your morning like so much lamplight. Very much in the sound family of the whispering dishwasher, the gurgling coffeemaker, the rumbling above-ground train in the distance, its robotic stop announcements close to music when you don’t need the information—all so many aural reassurances that things are underway, that it's all being taken care of without you. Good morning, I’m Richard Hake, he would say, and sometimes on my worst days I’d say “Hi, Richard” back. This was one of the few things that always helped. On a starless street at 3am, Richard Hake was the one house that still had the lights on.
Covid defined his worth with terrible precision. In a matter of days, a group to which Richard had always belonged –the handful of consolations you could always count on—had gotten even smaller. And WNYC listeners everywhere, I am sure, had never counted on him with such pressing distress, now that the virus he’d been telling us about had shed the static of elsewhere to beam straight into our eardrums, now that we were making jokes we didn’t believe about going into lockdown as we went into lockdown, now that Covid-19 was sinking its claws ever deeper into the hide of New York City, which had turned out to be helpless, warm and downy and soft.
I don’t know about you but for me, time has never moved as slowly as it has this past year, has never been so heavy and sodden and dripping with dismay that every known metric has splintered beneath it—but at first it all happened so quickly, right? For those of us with more luck than we deserved, the world shrank in less than a week to a ludicrous news cycle and inescapable job, whose work-from-home emails felt so pointless that you might as well not reply, and so momentous that the thought of annoying a coworker made your eyes fill with tears. The days of listening mostly to gospel music despite your agnosticism, of sobbing while you did the dishes and Sister Rosetta Tharpe sang “There’ll Be Peace in the Valley for Me,” would soon arrive—though you didn’t know that yet, or know anything yet.
But still there was Richard, wishing you good morning and telling you his name. Even if 900 people in New York were dying of COVID every day, if religious bigots were building a field hospital in Central Park, if going to sleep meant staring at the ceiling for hours before getting up and doing it all over again, you still had the cushion of drinking coffee every morning, while Richard broke it to you gently from the blanket fort of his home studio. Even if no one else is here for you, Richard seemed to say, I am here. Good morning. The world is falling apart but I will still tell you which trains are running, whether alternate side of the street parking rules are in effect, and what the temperature is in Central Park. Good morning, I’m Richard Hake. Everything will be okay.
Except six weeks into the pandemic he was dead. I can’t remember ever feeling so shocked. What made it even worse was that I had decided just that week that I couldn’t wake up to the news anymore—I was making a short-term project out of contemplating real life as infrequently as possible, which meant setting my alarm to bird sounds—and for this reason I never heard Richard’s final broadcast. It sounded like no one had realized it would be his final broadcast—only the outsiders who’d outlived him saw it now for what it really was—but there’s nothing too unusual in that, since things are always turning out to be something you hadn’t known they would be. The point is, I hadn’t been there for Richard, even though he’d always been there for me. And now he can’t be here for anyone. He just isn’t here.
“If Richard Hake died of COVID,” I texted my dad, “I will burn down the White House.” Naturally COVID had been my first thought, since 51-year-olds don’t just die “of natural causes,” whatever WNYC press releases have the nerve to suggest. Before my morning news hiatus I’d noticed that Richard had been stumbling over his words sometimes, and there’d just been a Washington Post story about how younger people were dying of strokes that turned out to be caused by COVID. Just what everyone needed, a new way to die of COVID.
Basically I had a lot of weepy internet sleuthing to do, but first I had a stupid Zoom date to do, which I wanted to cancel but didn’t, drunk on a confused emotional cocktail of not wanting to be left alone with my thoughts, wondering whether Richard Hake could turn out to be a meaningful first date conversation if this guy turned out to be nice (maybe I could even tell him about the time Richard replied to me on Twitter), being afraid to disappoint anyone ever, and – perhaps most of all – yearning to just fully lean into the 2020 misery. I still had tears in my eyes as I applied stupid makeup and put on stupid dangly earrings, but by a monstrous effort of will I had turned off the tap by the time I entered the guy’s Zoom waiting room.
It’s still unbelievable to me that he didn’t notice I’d been crying – my face gets red and puffy for 24 hours if I shed so much as a single tear—but maybe he just didn’t know what my face is supposed to look like. Or maybe he thought I was flushing with romantic excitement about him, ghoulish and skeletal in the eerie green light of his computer screen, sporting a ratty T-shirt and full quarantine beard (they all grow quarantine beards) and, for no reason that he ever explained, resting a guitar in his lap (I did not ask him to play it, or even acknowledge that I saw it, so eventually he put it away). Or maybe he had noticed I’d been crying, and just didn’t say anything.
I told him about Richard Hake but his response was not sufficiently sympathetic to make me emotionally vulnerable. I think he started talking about John Prine, who had died earlier that same month, because this particular Zoom guy was big into country music and also one of those men who just keep turning the conversation back to Willie Nelson or whatever else they know about rather than stay on a topic about which their date is more knowledgeable. He also ended up freaking me out for various reasons, on top of which his last text before I stopped replying was a picture of soup. Though he was still better than the Covid Hinge guy who messaged me asking if I got lonely living by myself, and used this emoticon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ when he said his friends were all hooking up with strangers as usual, or the Covid Bumble guy who informed me in his first message that he missed having sex and inquired in his second message if sex, for me, was off the table. Each in his own way, all the Covid date guys have ended up being bad, except for one.
A few mornings after Richard died I switched on WNYC, squeamish with the question of which pitiful soul was attempting to take his place, and it was Sean Carlson. Sean is fine. Smart of them to pick a voice that would be familiar to WNYC listeners—it’s familiar to me from something, I don’t know. I only listened for a second because hearing someone else tell me that D trains were delayed made me dizzy with sadness, and because they were doing a call-in tribute to Richard Hake all morning. I think they’d updated his cause of death by then to “accident,” with no further details. Whatever the accident was, it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been working from home by himself (he lived alone), so I still consider his to be a Covid death—one of the deaths they’ll never count.
It’s been 11 months since then, and I still don’t wake up to WNYC. I’m not sure I ever will. I don’t even know if Sean Carlson is doing it anymore. I don’t care.
Do you believe in ghosts? I don’t but it’s starting to seem like my mom does. Specifics aren’t important but just after 2pm on 12/20/20, when we were deciding which Hallmark Christmas movie to watch over Zoom, she told me this whole story about her friend Face Timing with a medium, and the medium telling the friend that her (the friend’s) dead parents had been watching her (the friend) dancing in her (the friend’s) kitchen the night before, though even according to my mom her friend had not been dancing in the kitchen the night before. She’d just been listening to music that her dead parents had liked so I guess the line they’re all taking is, close enough. I do not view this as the mic drop that my mom, her friend, and presumably the medium all consider it to be, but I do like ghost stories—especially ones with no rational explanation, which itself has no rational explanation since I don’t believe in ghosts. I listened to a lot of podcasts featuring Christmas ghost stories as 2020’s mirthless holiday season approached.
These podcasts have taught me that if ghosts do exist, their posthumous lives, locations, and activities seem to be dictated almost exclusively by the manner of their death. This seems limiting and unfair. If you die in a train crash, that’s all you are to the infinite universe? A train crash victim? To local news broadcasts, sure, but to the universe itself? Yet what other conclusion can we possibly draw when apparently all you’ll do in the afterlife is ride around in an ethereal replica of the train that killed you, its ghost lights unsettling onlookers on the bridge where it crashed? And what about people who die unremarkable deaths? Do they not become ghosts, or do they just become unremarkable ones?
I wonder if dying of COVID-19 will prove special enough to make you a ghost. If there’s one thing I do know, it’s that dying of COVID-19 is getting statistically less and less special. People have even stopped capitalizing it. First it was COVID, then Covid, then covid. Alternatively, corona, then the ‘rona, and finally, rona. Everyone’s cutting it down to size, not scared of it anymore. At this point I too find it hard to be scared of the ‘rona – viscerally scared, petrified windpipe scared – even though I haven't been vaccinated yet, and I realize it could kill me or ruin my life.
Plus all the variants now.
They’re always talking about what a serious threat Covid still is on the NPR podcast I now listen to in the mornings, which Richard isn’t missing from because he never did it, and I think for many listeners that tactic backfired long ago. There’s some term for becoming numb to a threat once you’ve been warned about it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, but I forget what it is. Reinfections in Brazil, double mutant in India, stay vigilant, wash your hands, got it, fine.
The danger only starts to become more real to me when I think about how if I died of covid at home, my body would just be lying here and my cat would be hungry and waiting for me to wake up. Or for my alarm to go off: Sometimes in the morning she’ll be splayed out by my pillow, wide awake but waiting. Then when the alarm goes off she gets up and stretches just like a person. And a much more functional person than I am; it strikes me every time she does this that alarms have never had that effect on me. Anyway she would probably start eating me if enough time went by. I read about this study where cats ate a human corpse when they were left with it and no (other?) food for long enough, though I don’t think they knew the human, if that makes a difference.
I should get one of those stickers asking people to save your pet in an emergency. There’s one stuck on the window of a ground-floor apartment that I run by a lot, which says something like IN CASE OF FIRE, PLEASE SAVE OUR GERMAN SHEPHERD, and then it has a drawing of a German Shepherd. Though of course mine would say CAT. Maybe BEAUTIFUL CAT if you can customize them, although then people might think it’s a joke.
My cat really is beautiful though, unusually so. She is multicolored and swirly, a rare dilute torbie per the vet, but when she was a stray stunted kitten no one wanted her but me, because while stunningly gorgeous she also was feral. Or seemed like it at least, much more than her littermates did. But I had a hunch, as small and stubborn as the kitten herself, that all she needed was a little peace and quiet and for someone to cut her some slack, so she could feel safe and loved like we all need to feel, even if we don’t all get what we need. So four years ago I scooped up that churlish kitten, the two of us equally deaf to my roommates’ skepticism, and now she’s the sweetest cat you ever met—or might meet if you pay my next gas bill (you’re unlikely to meet her in any other way). She’s curled up asleep on my lap right now—just a little purring donut, dreaming of pigeons. I myself am seated on the couch.
I forgot! This thing folds out! You could have someone sleep over, if you still have people sleep over, and they could sleep on a bed instead of a couch unless they were going to sleep on your bed either way. I completely forgot to say in the heading of the ad that it’s a fold-out couch. The problem is, my attention span has gotten so bad, I can’t remember to do even what I decided to do two seconds ago; I’ll gasp myself awake at night remembering a browser tab I meant to open last month. If the heading of this ad still says “perfectly good couch” instead of “perfectly good fold-out couch,” that’s how you know that I couldn’t focus long enough to add it.
To me my cat is the color of sunset. A thoughtful person with an eye for detail recently remarked that she’s also the color of ice cream and I like that, too, even though there is no “color of ice cream,” maybe of certain flavors but not of just ice cream, but he knows that and so do I and that’s why I like it, or at least partly why. If I die of corona I’m pretty sure people here and there will be sad but the thing I picture first is my cat sitting on the kitchen floor all alone, tail curled around her paws, feeling not sad necessarily but less and less safe, less and less loved, still lovely and small, still the color of ice cream. I’m not sure what the comparison is worth, but this haunting tableau is as vivid to me as the stove thing.
In many ways I’m glad I don’t have to deal with other people right now – I can’t even imagine what it’s like to have had roommates this whole time, and I read the other day that divorce rates are already spiking – but on the other hand, lots of good things about living alone are actually bad. A slow-draining bathtub is a lot more stressful when there’s no one but you to call the super, especially when there’s a pandemic and your super is about 96 years old. (In that case the least you can do is wait until the bathtub doesn’t drain at all.) Plus it’s probably nice to have someone to drink with in horrified silence while you watch Trump supporters storm the Capitol, even if sometimes you want to murder that same person for leaving their dishes in the sink. I used to imagine that living alone would mean that no one could tell me what to do—when I was a kid, I thought adulthood consisted of wearing lace gloves and subsisting on pound cake—but as it turns out, most of my life is spent on chores of some kind. Tons of people can tell me what to do.
I recently read a self-help headline which said that to change your outlook, try not to use these three pesky little words anymore. You had to click on the headline to see what the three little words were so I grudgingly did and they were “I have to.” I have to go to work, I have to do my laundry in a slow-draining bathtub, I have to write a post about my couch. You’re supposed to change “I have to” to “I get to.” I get to go to work. I get to do my laundry. I get to go to the emergency room because I got to get an infectious disease. I get to never click on a self-help headline again.
Maybe I’m focusing on the negatives because the grass is always greener, or because everything is backwards right now. Really not even backwards, because that would still suggest a kind of pattern or logic, and as far as I can tell there’s no logic at all. In this new, rudderless world, there are no consequences for wearing your pajamas to work, but ducking into a bodega for some half-and-half means putting the lives of everyone in the bodega at risk. People nod at their webcams when you tell them that your sole ambition is life is to get a better rise out of your sourdough. No one asks what you’re up to this weekend, or if they do, you’re supposed to say “nothing.” That’s one thing, at least – we don’t have to pretend we’re busy and popular anymore.
I guess the couch isn’t actually free; I am asking that you pay something in order to get it. That would be like a concert ticket that costs extra for a free t-shirt. The couch is not free. I just don’t know what it costs.
Another disorienting thing about this past year is that almost every moment of social solidarity has concerned something bad. When the lockdowns started it felt in a post-9/11 way like we were sort of all in this together—though the subgroups were many, ranging from I must put my own health aside, come to work in a garbage bag, and accept the certainty of future PTSD in order to save as many emergency room patients as possible to Bring me my private jet to haha (?) this is weird wtf is going on haha (??) did you change your Netflix password ???
I missed the initial solidarity around the George Floyd protests, because at that time I'd gone on another staycation from news and social media. Let me tell you, logging back into Twitter and reading about the video and the protests and Minneapolis on fire felt like waking up from a coma.
In June I walked to Cadman Plaza for the George Floyd vigil, which had a strangely positive vibe that felt both uplifting and worrying. Smiley, Whole Foods Brooklynites brought their kids, cops handed out disposable face masks, sidewalk vendors sold buttons printed with BLM slogans and George Floyd’s face, and teens stood on boxes like town criers to scream that they had free water and snacks. A guy driving a semi-trunk gave a thumbs up out the window and toot-tooted his horn (no hands on the wheel) while everyone cheered and waved their DEFUND THE POLICE signs, except for the police, who looked pissed. Protestors moved their phones in solemn panoramas as if casting a very slow spell, banishing the crowd to their Instagram stories as they mouthed along with mourn-cheers of anger, smugness, and premature triumph.
I hovered in the unofficial but-what-of-the-pandemic section at the back, where some effort was still being made to maintain personal space, and the leaden summer air was tangy with the scent of hand sanitizer. It was impossible to see or hear any of the actual speakers from back there, which made the act of not leaving a tacit admission in itself that seeing was less important than being seen. When even that useless space became packed, I walked home.
That was the same time all the fireworks were happening, remember? Booming nightly from scattered locations till 2 or 3am, at intervals too random to ever become rhythmic and ignorable, with no common purpose other than sheer madcap torture of a tortured city. Not to brag or anything, but Flatbush had the highest number of noise complaints of any neighborhood in New York. I would search “Flatbush fireworks” on Twitter around 1 or 2am—my loft bed seeming to shake with explosions that felt more like bombs than fireworks, since I could never see them, only hear them—just to find some sense of community in this misery, to reassure myself that other people were upset by it, too.‡
Then I turned to police scanner apps, listening for any indication that the cops were either actively ignoring the fireworks, or setting them themselves, which always seemed more plausible the later it got. On family Zoom calls I jumped at small sounds. "At" work I was so tired that I felt like I was floating. And all I wanted to talk about was the protests at Gracie Mansion (IF YOU CAN’T SLEEP, WE CAN’T SLEEP), the people who’d thrown a lit firework onto a sleeping homeless man, or Macy’s plans “to delight New Yorkers with unannounced displays” of 4th of July fireworks over five nights. At some point during those memorable seven weeks I tried sleeping on my couch to see if that would help, since my actual bed had long ago become a space I associated with the inability to sleep, but it made no difference other than confusing my cat.
Don’t hold that against the couch, though. I’m an insomniac. The couch is very comfortable. Lots of people say so, sometimes when we hadn't even been talking about the couch.
I think Trump losing the election was practically the only moment of positive solidarity I can remember from the past year, at least for most people in New York City. That Saturday when the networks finally called it, I’d been dyeing a coat red in my bathtub and thinking about how much the water looked like blood and about how Alfred Hitchcock used chocolate syrup for blood in the Psycho shower scene when I started hearing cheering and honking through the bathroom window. It sounded much rowdier than it had ever been when people were still doing the 7pm cheering for essential workers, though even at its height that trend never exactly caught fire on my street. Then I started getting texts with lots of exclamation points, and it was touching to me that even in a time of suffocating isolation, there were still people out there who wanted to make sure I had heard.
I was wearing an outfit that day that I hadn’t really intended for anyone to see because I hadn’t been planning on going outside, but after several more minutes of offstage cheers I felt like I was missing out. Much like the sinking feeling I would get when I overslept on a school day, waking up flushed and confused in grubby, twisted sheets, while my classmates were sure to be fully dressed and alert at their desks, smelling of deodorant, hair still a little damp from their early morning showers. Anyway, so Trump lost and I put on a jacket and walked out the door, just like that, like someone in a movie.
I really wanted to take out my phone and record everything – the people cheering as they walked, honking as they drove, someone wheeling around a boom box blasting “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” Obama’s ’08 campaign song – but I also wanted to at least appear as if I was taking it all in, so I only recorded now and then, and otherwise just low-key cried as I walked down the street. I really wished I’d put on sunscreen before going outside, and charged my phone, and checked the weather so that I’d known it was too warm out for a jacket, but I guess that’s what you get for living in the moment.
Even more than the cheering, the thing that struck me most was how differently everyone moved. I hadn’t realized till then how beaten down, flattened, and cowed we’d all looked until we were smiling, standing upright, looking straight ahead and not down at the ground. Wolf Blitzer has a piece of breaking news and all at once we’re happy, ready to concede that not all change is bad.
I took the most videos from the corner of Parkside and Ocean, where a drum circle was growing outside Prospect Park. The drummers and dancers were all wearing masks, some with “Biden/Harris 2020” printed on them, but I still kept my distance on the other side of the street. Not far from me a shirtless man was waving a full-sized American flag, hoisting it above his head whenever the stoplights changed. He was rewarded every time by a riot of jubilant honks, as if the cars were a flock of freed geese soaring higher and higher, half crazed with the vastness, the blueness of the sky.
The only person I talked to was an old lady wearing one of those disposable face masks that come in packs of 50, who wheeled her laundry cart up to me and asked what everyone was so happy about. I said because Trump lost the election, expecting her to have some kind of positive reaction, but instead she just gave me this hard look and asked if I thought that was a good thing.
It had been so long since
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