“Humans make connections with the face. With masks, you don’t know what they’re doing.”

Stone LaPorte, a 22-year-old music major at UW-Milwaukee, found a sense of normalcy being surrounded by his peers and doing more of the “little things” again after in-person classes came back.

(Michael Null) What’s something you remember about your first day of classes this year?

(Stone LaPorte) Oh man, I think I missed my first class.

(Null) Really?

(LaPorte) Yeah, because I was working so late over the summer and I woke up and I was like, I can’t do it. I got like three hours of sleep. But it was weird coming back and there’s a lot of anxiety. It was kind of like, How is this? You’re going to go hopefully better than last year, you know, like, uh, yeah, it’s just really a very rough and sudden transition, you know, after like a dead summer.

(Null) So, back when online classes were a thing, did you feel like they put a hindrance on you?

(LaPorte) I definitely did when classes first started. The first couple of weeks especially, it was hard to have more than one thing to do, actually having to get up and go out and do multiple things during a day. It almost feels like you’re trapped in a room just doing things, but you don’t really feel a sense of accomplishment.

(Null) How have classes changed for music since being online to now? What was different about it being online?

(LaPorte) So, it’s changed quite a bit because of everything that happened last year. We did our lessons online, we did master class online. It can be difficult to communicate physical actions over Zoom because sometimes you need to watch someone do it.

(Null) I imagine it’s a given that something like that would benefit from a more hands-on experience.

(LaPorte) Yeah, It’s a lot better to be face to face, to be able to see what’s going on. You know, there are technical issues there, like audio quality issues. For choir, we had to wear masks over singing, which of course, is, you know, trying to breathe while you’re singing and trying to project.

(Null) How have you changed since the pandemic, for better or for worse?

(LaPorte) Well, I feel like a lot of the momentum of my personal growth kind of stopped because I was really like after my first year at UW, and I was finally getting comfortable, like ready to go out more, you know, be more involved in school and extracurricular programs. And everything just stopped. So it was kind of really frustrating to like, make progress and then not be able to. It’s like if someone took away my guitar for a year and I couldn’t practice anymore. And then I just had to pick it up again next year and try and still be as good.

(Null) So you feel like your progress as a person has been halted in a way?

(LaPorte) Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I kind of got the hang of things faster, but like, like I said, the first few weeks were definitely, definitely difficult, like having so many conversations with people, you know, just trying to find things to talk about even if it’s like, ‘what’s up?’ I’m like, I don’t know nothing.

(Null) Do you feel a sense of anxiety being back around people? With the COVID regulations and us being told not to really see anyone, did it make it hard to adjust to go back to this kind of setting?

(LaPorte) Definitely. Like, I don’t mind saying I have preexisting social anxiety, so it was already very difficult for me. Then you kind of have to build up your conversational skills even and everyone’s just kind of realizing it didn’t get any better, it wasn’t getting any better. It feels a lot harder to have a conversation with someone, like find something to talk about and, you know, keep it going without it being weird.

(Null) Isn’t it weird just seeing everyone around you in masks? I feel like it changes the way you make connections with people in your classes.

(LaPorte) It’s weird because I met a lot of my classmates, and especially when I went to Jimmy John’s when I first started working there, probably in the summer or right at the start of last school year. So, I met everyone there with a mask. I didn’t see their faces for the longest time. So yeah, it’s weird. It’s hard to tell how people are feeling, how they’re reacting to something you say and it’s hard to make connections because usually it’s psychological that humans make connections with the face and, with masks, you don’t know what they’re doing. It’s like you see their face squinting and it’s like,`Are they smiling’ or are they like, ‘the hell are you talking about?’

(Null) It’s just a matter of settling in and getting used to everything, right?

(LaPorte) Exactly.

(Null) What’s something that’s helped you settle in during this time? How have you reached a level of normalcy when things aren’t exactly ‘normal?’

(LaPorte) Honestly, it’s just kind of the little things that your peers do, like just eating breakfast with some classmates, you know, hanging out in the lounge before or after class is really nice. People are pretty desperate for any form of connection, so just putting out a little effort is really helpful because, eventually, you just realize everyone’s on the same page and you can just relax around each other.