Last year was a mess. Partially for the reasons you can guess (I'm assuming you
can guess, but the further we get away from 2020, the more the memories will
fade. Will these events that seem so momentus now even register to people ten
years from now? Twenty? (Yes, I'm assuming that this phlog will be around in
twenty years. That's maybe ambitious)), but also for reasons that I won't be
going into here.

Normal seems to be slowly returning, and it looks like 'normal' will probably
never resemble the 'normal' we had even two years ago. Sure, in some ways I'm
sure there are people who will fight tooth and nail to try and force the old
normal, but that wasn't working for a lot of people in a lot of ways, so I'm not
sure that that's a good idea.

I can only speak for myself here, but over the last year or so, as new routines
set in, I just sort of went with the flow. I no longer went to restaurants, I no
longer went to stores to pass time, weekly engagements with friends were
suspended indefinitely. But I also moved and had some other life-changing
events, so things were in an upheaval anyway, so I didn't feel like I was being
impacted all that much by stay-at-home orders. Especially since I was deemed an
essential employee and my employer was deemed an essential business. I didn't
miss any work.

And I'll admit right now that I was actually a little jealous of people who did
get sent home to work. Between working from home and nonessential businesses
being closed, I started hearing stories all over the place about how people were
using the extra time they were saving to do things that they had been putting
off forever. They were learning new skills, writing that book they had been
putting off, and so on. I, meanwhile, got a day off in exchange for working a
holiday and I had to use it to take the car to the shop and the cat to the vet.
It was hard to look at the pile of unfinished or unstarted projects I had around
here and not be a little envious. As strange as it sounds to be envious of
people sequestered in their homes for weeks and months is.

But, I also was fortunate enough that I did keep my job and I did go in to the
office every day. I got to leave home (for a good reason!) and I got some
in-person human interaction with the skeleton crew we had running the place. We
even had weekly pizza parties for the first couple of months while we were
trying to figure everything out. It was kind of like when the power goes out.
It's fun for a couple of hours, but once it turns into days and weeks, it's less
fun and more problematic. Beyond that and I started to get numb to it. 

And that's pretty much where I've been for the last 20 months or so. I haven't
updated my phlog because I didn't have anything to say, and I didn't have time
to say it anyway. At least that's what I told myself.

Truthfully, I was just passing time, trying to weather the storm. Biding my time
until this thing was under control and we could put everything behind us. But
days bled into weeks and weeks bled into months, and 'biding my time' became
routine. I would get up, go to work, come home, watch television/videos until it
was time to go to sleep, and then do it all again the next day. At some point
time lost all meaning. 

Sure, I could check the days off the calendar and I could watch the seasons
change, but every day was the same. It was the same news, the same things to do,
even the same food a lot of the time (I ate a *lot* of frozen pizza). 

Now that we're halfway through 2021, the end of 2020 is finally in sight (we're
not there yet, and we still have the potential to screw this up, but I'm
hopeful), and I feel like I'm starting to wake up, at least a little bit.

I'm seeing people I haven't seen in over a year, I visited a restaurant and ate
inside, and I'm weighing the pros and cons of visiting a movie theater for the
first time since early 2020. And even though I moved over a year ago I still
have some things in boxes that need to be unpacked, which I've started to do
again.

But some of these things have been with me for a long time. Some of these things
are still in the boxes I put them in two moves and fifteen years ago.Is it
really worth keeping around a box of video game controllers that sat in the
bottom of my closet for ten years only to keep them at the bottom of the new
closet for twenty more? Thirty?

As I'm figuring out things I can get rid of and how best to do that, I also
started to think about myself and the personal baggage that I carry around with
me. I wonder why I carry around so much, and I wonder if I can unload it, too.
Unfortunately, I can't sell that kind of baggage on eBay (not that I'd get much
out of it, anyway).

I guess what I'm getting at is that I know that 2020 was a rotten year for a lot
of people, and I know that I didn't have it nearly as bad as a lot of other
people did. I didn't get sick, and none of my close friends or family got sick,
but I lost two acquaintances to the pandemic, and that impacted me (not nearly
as much as their close friends and family, of course). But I just generally just
floated through 2020 and it feels like I'm starting to wake up from a dream. 

And, just so I'm clear here, 2020 isn't the dream that I'm waking up from. 2020
was just the end of it. The dream has been going on for so long that I can't
remember when it started, and, like real dreams, I didn't know I was in it.

I don't yet know what this means for the rest of 2021, much less 2022 and
beyond, but I do know that I have a lot of things that I want to do, or, at
least things that I *thought* I wanted to do, and this might be the kickstart I
need to get some of them done, or at least started. 

At least, that's what I'm going to tell myself, and I'm going to do my best to
convince myself that that's correct.

--- Last updated 8 Jul 2021