I last interviewed you in the Spring. What would you say has changed since then?

I don’t think much has changed since the spring. I’m fortunate to not be in a terrible condition familially, or medically, or economically, but I do want to be in school. I do want to be able to see my friends and have a senior year. And like not being able to do that, being a senior at a school that I’ve been going to since kindergarten, is really terrible. But I’m really fortunate, though, to be alive, so… but it’s kind of hard to balance the perspective, being genuine and accepting of the way I feel.

Would you say that being in quarantine has gotten easier or harder since the spring?

It’s gotten… I don’t know because we’re doing this hybrid thing so it’s gotten easier in the scene that I get to go to school every other week and that was really nice and that made being remote for the other weeks a lot better because the stretches that I was inside weren’t as long. But right now it’s pretty hard. It’s hard applying to college and—like—feeling that stress remotely because I have no idea how anybody else in my grade is feeling so there’s no strong sense of like where all in this together.

How has the pandemic impacted the college process?

I think with testing it was worse. I was supposed to be done with studying and taking tests last spring and I took the sat for the last time in October so like having to study took up a lot of mental space and stressed me out because I was doing more work than a first semester senior might be doing. And also for me, it meant that I was extending my tutoring which was also expensive so that was really frustrating. Other than that, I really don’t know because I have nothing else to measure against so I don’t know if I would be more or less productive if I was in person.

So you mentioned that you’ve been going into school. What was that experience like?

It was different from a normal school year obviously I think that having half of the class on zoom and the other half in the classroom was different and not having my fitness in the same cohort as me was different. I also think the social distancing aspect made it easier for me to just kinda stay within the same friend group, which was fine, but like… It was also—like—physically exhausting I think because parts of the school are closed off so we had to go weird ways around the school also the schedule changed this year to better suit remote learning which is good but it doesn’t really translate super well into in-person, so I don’t know if there were things that Packer could’ve changed about the way in-person school works because I think there are a lot of pros and cons and every pro has a con and vice-versa. I also think teachers have been really great and accommodating and I bet it’s difficult for them to teach under these conditions.

How was your summer. What did you do? In what ways was it affected by the pandemic?

It was a weird summer. It wasn’t particularly good. But I also didn’t—it just didn’t feel like summer. There were a lot of anti-racism efforts on part of Packer and the larger Packer community and I feel like that really shaped my summer, whether that was because I was in forums, or something else I feel like it was just on my mind a lot and it impacted my summer in that I wasn’t able to see a lot of people, or even if I was able to see them, I couldn’t see them very often because I’m not allowed to take public transportation I also couldn’t get a job this summer which was really frustrating because I had planned don getting some sort of job or internship so it was just a lot of like me being at home. COVID impacted people’s summers really differently. People who had houses in the Hamptons like I would see them at parties and when I went to my friend’s house in Hamptons it felt so much more like covid didn’t exist. And she had been spending a lot of time out there so there was a totally different experience.

We also had a presidential election recently. How has that impacted your feelings about the pandemic and your hopes and worries for the future?

Our current president isn’t conceding, also think that the real time to act on the pandemic passed. Not that there isn’t more that can and should be done it’s just like... the actual timeframe for genuinely preventative measures passed. There’s stuff that should be done more immediately that can still be helpful like unemployment packages but that’s not solely up to the president. I also think that rhetoric matters. And Trump has been fueling anti-Asian racism surrounding the pandemic.

See more of Lea's interview in the video below:

How did you spend your summer and how was it affected by the pandemic?

This summer was really good for me, actually. My plans...well, my plans were to be in Canada that summer as a staff member working at a canoe camp, and that got shut down pretty early so I knew for March, April, and May that I would most likely not be in Algonquin Park, Ontario, so I kinda braced for that and you know I had mentioned in the last interview that skateboarding was like one of the things that kept my attitude and spirits up so I spent a lot of this summer skateboarding, and skateboarding actually opened me up because one of the things that I often do with skateboarding, and one of the things that got me into skateboarding originally was filming skateboarders. So I had this idea and when I met with people, through a series of events, I eventually developed an idea for a script that I wrote in late May, loosely based on the thoughts that were going through my mind while I was skateboarding with people which. And that was one thing that I worked on over the summer, so I made this film with is Truckslap and it came out on September 20th so it was like an all-summer project. So that was something that really spent my time up, and even though I didn’t work every day, having an overarching goal was really helpful. Every day, I’d wake up and my plan was to pack my bag with my camera because I’m going out to skate but no matter what I’m gonna come home with clips and footage that, in one way or another, are going to make it into the end product. Um… so some days I’d come out with all my gear and mic equipment and lighting and we’d shoot scenes but for a good two months, it was just filming skateboarding. And it worked because it was all outdoors and COVID wasn’t as high this summer. And another thing that I worked on was a remote job that I had, which I was fortunate enough to get on a job on a film set as a researcher and that was remote, so as well as making this film of mine, I was tasked with work to do. This summer went well. I was busy, and that kept me happy… so, and I think that the hardest part of this summer with COVID was to stay busy, so I just filled my time.

See more of Graham's interview in the video below: