I can parse out my life from the broader picture, so unlike most people who look at pretty shitty world events and descend into hyperventilating and doomposting despite their own circumstances - I can recognize things being shitty and being alright in the same vein.
I'm a lucky sort that kept a steady, non-trumpbux paycheck through the year and despite the hiccup of suddenly being unable to hit up my usual haunts, the latter half of the year wound up being fairly productive. I'm still annoyed that the gyms aren't open, but eh. The circumstances of the pandemic made me pick up a good range of skills and hobbies that I previously had no real use for, and the drive to fill my time with something meaningful meant more time poured into good habits.
And at the same time, while the world was falling apart to people who just started paying attention to it, I didn't have much trouble reading into the details of various countries, economies, and governments all tremendously fucking up and proving themselves utterly inept and being unconcerned about it. Human history is one long string of "things are bad," and they depend on you using a specific blend of nostalgia and ignorance to think otherwise; with that in mind, things are shitty as normal, just more visibly so. The unipolar power structure again slips to a bipolar one, and the hegemon's response is to shit its pants in various ways. People who barely sailed past high-school history proclaim the end of days in a chorus. It's a year that is an integer.
But it was nice to find a spot to blather on incessantly about how retarded the people of this planet tend to be, on a lark because I happened to remember that I never actually followed up with Chris's self-mutilating "transition."
