I came home and rested. I had nothing else to do without having schoolwork to finish so I sat bored out of my mind on my bed. I browsed YouTube and looked up “ASMR videos.” I knew some kids in college who liked watching those videos because it not only helped them with their depression and anxiety, but also just because they got tired of watching cat videos in their procrastination time and wanted to watch something different. There was something satisfying about these videos, maybe just seeing people do the easiest thing in the world that could be monetized: eating leftovers or takeout, whispering into these jumbo microphones, giving Turkish massages. I hadn’t watched them before; in fact, I sort of poo-pooed them because it just seemed weird to watch people doing an everyday thing that shouldn’t really deserve any likes. But I was bored, so I thought, “What the hell?”
I typed “asmr eating.” There were thousands of videos that popped up in the search showing people eating Taco Bell, eating raw honeycomb (I don’t know if that can even be called a legit food), or whispering French into the microphone. Some people even read racist, sexist and homophobic comments from haters of their channel. Somehow that didn’t seem too relaxing to me, so I went with the whispering Spanish video by ASMR Afficionado, a girl with cornrows and excessive makeup.
“Holaaaaaaaa…” she whispered into the microphone. “Me llamo Tricia, y hablo espanollllll…”
All of a sudden I felt this weird tingling sensation down from the top of my head to the bottom of my spinal cord. Was I experiencing ASMR, too, even though I never knew all these years that like those kids in college who liked ASMR, I had the same response?
She continued to speak into the microphone, reading from a novel in Spanish that she must have gotten from the library. Then all I heard was jumbled noise, and I was asleep before I knew it.
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