This video by Carters encapsulates how I feel extremely succinctly. I know 2020 has been a historically catastrophic year by any number of measures, and I’m not going to even try and change anyone’s mind who’ve already decided that there’s absolutely nothing at all redeemable about it. It’s a fair judgment, and there’s tons of justification to where I just have to shrug and agree that such X and other Y really are terrible things, and leave people alone to continue believing that 2020 was the worst year in human existence.
Frankly, if not for the one obvious event in my life this year, I’d probably be right there with them. But because of said event, there’s absolutely nothing else that could really occur that can make me possibly think that 2020 was anything other than among the greatest years of my life. Like many, I too know my share of people whom coronavirus has dually affected throughout the year, or had some very unfortunate events or news take place, and my heart genuinely, sincerely goes out to them, and I wish for nothing but the best for them and their loved ones.
But nothing is going to change my perspective on 2020 being a magnificent year, because nothing has been a greater event in my life than the birth of my daughter, right before all the shit really began to hit the fan. And throughout the remainder of the year, for every piece of horrible, shitty news, note about someone dying, bad day at work, or any other reason for stress and unhappiness, I was always mere steps away from being able to go pick up my daughter and hold her in my arms and will away the negativity.
As ironic as it may seem, and I’ve said it as much, as much as coronavirus and the global pandemic have been devastating to the world throughout the year, it’s inadvertently put me in the most optimal position in the sense that I’ve gotten to work from home since the shit hit the fan, and I’ve gotten to spend a tremendous amount of time more raising my daughter than if the world wasn’t in lockdown and I had to go back to work in the office while my child would be in a daycare, in the hands and responsibility of people I don’t know.
I don’t fucking want that, even if there were no coronavirus in play. I’ve been fortunate and I treasure all the time I’ve had and will continue to have being close to my kid, and it’s ironic that I have to thank the selfish stupidity of ‘Muricans for being so stupid and greedy that they can’t or refuse to comply to the behaviors that would’ve eradicated all of this if we just had some collective cooperation.
But outside of my child and coronavirus, 2020 has been somewhat of an eventful year. Yes, most of it was bad, but not everything was completely putrid. And as I tend to do every year, I take some notes on a daily basis of the things that happen that are remotely interesting to me, so I guess behind the jump, we’ll take a look back through the year that everyone loves to hate and can’t wait to see end:
The year didn’t start off too horribly. In spite of early news of a mysterious disease that was ravaging China, life went on as usual in ‘Murica. Mythical wife and I joined Costco, officially becoming the parents we were months away from being, and Jeopardy! ran the all-time champions tournament, which was unsurprisingly won by Ken Jennings, despite the fact that James Holzhauer clearly changed the way the game was played. The Houston Astros had the whistle blown on them for cheating, opening a months-long investigation on them that revealed a sign-stealing process that occurred over three seasons, in which they made the playoffs every year, went to the World Series twice, and won one championship.
At work, I had to take witness to my team letting an employee go, and as deserving she was of her fate, it was still an awkward and uncomfortable situation to watch from the managerial side of the table, as the rest of the team behaved and conducted themselves in light of the loss of a peer. Throughout the rest of the year was up and down but mostly down, and I’ve grown severely disenchanted with my job and really want to get out of it, and I have had a hard time separating my disdain for my work environment from not really hating what I do for a living, and hold resentment at the parties that have made such thoughts even come to fruition.
LSU won the college football National Championship, besting Clemson in a high-scoring game between Tigers, and the Kansas City Chiefs won the Superb Owl, coming back from behind to beat the San Francisco 49ers. These would be the last real notable sporting events to happen in the year, as at varying points throughout, the NCAA cancelled both the men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments, while the NBA and MLB postponed their seasons until way later in the year when they put together some hackneyed seasons and playoffs in order to crowd champions, in which both the Los Angeles Lakers and Dodgers won the NBA Championship and World Series, with the latter of course, besting the Atlanta Braves in the NLCS, to add to the collection of Atlanta sports team failures, as the Braves had a 3-1 series lead before choking.
Wrestlemania went from supposed to being in a football stadium, into a closed set with no crowds, and throughout the rest of the year, professional wrestling transformed from exciting live events to creepy no/low-audience shows, but feeds the narrative that the show must go on, no matter what.
Parasite won the Academy Award for best picture, among numerous other Oscars, leading Koreans to finally get some mainstream respect for anything other than K-pop, and the reaction to such an award was a veritable grab bag of excitement but mostly a lot of different flavors of racism, whether it was inadvertently passive while trying to be positive, to downright bigotry mostly, of course from the baked potato in the White House.
Speaking of political figures, it was a tumultuous year for those in Washington, as well as those in Georgia, with there being some frequent cross-over and flip-flopping, as is the norm when it comes to the topic of politics. Plenty of racism, plenty of socio-economical hypocrisy, but mostly swirling around coronavirus response, but to really boil it down, there was lots of sometimes-conflicting, sometimes-cohesive attitudes towards opening states versus closing them, with everyone looking at ledgers and not human beings, and no matter what happened, infection and death cases never budged, except to get worse.
Meanwhile, the early hot spot countries in the world like China, Italy and South Korea all fought back like gangbusters, and basically the United States was the worst-infected country on the planet, and just about all other countries closed their doors to ‘Muricans, unsurprisingly.
Not helping were the endless parade of protests and demonstrations, primarily about racism, but also involving either police brutality, the unjust killing of black people, or, well there is no or, it was basically all always about police killing black people that stemmed in all of these protests and demonstrations. All the while people forgetting that we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and these inadvertently become super-spreader events.
But not everything that happened in 2020 was pure shit. October was basically the best month ever as I brought my mom down from Virginia to stay with me and bond with her new granddaughter, and to this day is the only member of my family who has yet to meet my child. I guess this could be chalked up as more baby-related goodness, but it was still an eventful and gratifying instance of the month, in spite of the fact that I was mostly fucked in the head and needed a power tool to get my head out of my ass and realize that I need to be more in the present and not be thinking too hard about the future.
And of course, there was the eventful November into now, where as much as I give ‘Murica shit, at least a small majority of the people came together and did the right thing, and voted for a new fucking president, ousting the baked potato that plagued this once-proud and powerful country over the last four years. Despite the tantrums, inability to concede and all other bullshit, the inauguration in January is at least one bright shining thing to look forward to at the start of 2021. It won’t change the fact that there are 74 million registered Republicans racists who were hoping for four more years, but at least they’ll have to, in their own words, deal with it.
And as is often the case whenever I write one of these posts at the end of each year, there’s a ton more that will go unsaid, mostly because I don’t want to recap 365 days of events, and maybe not everything is as eventful or worth mentioning towards a general posting, and others that I simply just don’t have the gas left in my willingness to write to continue on with.
Coronavirus most certainly had the one of the biggest footprints stamped onto the year 2020, and a ton of negative shit occurred as a result. But birth of my child is greater than a global pandemic, and nothing will bring me down from that ledge for a very, very long time. And there were some good things that happened mired among the shit that encapsulated the rest of the year, and when the day is over, not all hope is lost, and eventually we’ll hit a point of hitting bottom to where there’s nowhere to go but up, and then it’ll kind of reset everyone’s expectations, to where small victories will feel like hard-fought championships, and things will eventually be okay again.
