January
I was genuinely excited about the start of the year. There was no mistaking it for anything other than a year to mark the beginning of the future. Gone were the tedious pronunciations of the earlier years of the millennia. Did I have to acknowledge all the numbers—like I was writing a cheque—as in the year two thousand and eight? With an and? Years don’t have ands, and the future doesn’t use cheques. So clunky. Or what about twenty‐oh‐eight? What was that? Did anyone ever say that? Or the ‘aughts? Is this a hundred years ago? And the linguistic travesty awaiting the awkward teen years: the twenty‐teens? Abysmal.
It was the start of the year 2020 in January. It was now twenty‐twenty. The year finally sounded correct. The future was here. And I couldn’t have been happier. Let’s do this.
February
Okay—so things were not really going as smoothly as expected, mostly because the unexpected is traditionally not smooth, and yes—by definition—there’s always an amount of the unexpected present in the future. But, on the bright side, there was Leap Day to look forward to, a holiday I constructed for my own amusement because I didn’t think the day had received proper acknowledgement for being amazing.
It literally takes four years to create Leap Day, conjured out of nothing more than the second version of a still not so precise calendar. And then sometimes Leap Day isn’t a day and takes another four years to arrive. But it’s not a catastrophe, because it was all known in advance—it was just everything else that wasn’t. Life’s on the edge as a pandemic goes global. But it’ll be okay. Just grin and bear it.
Marpril? Munuly? Augustemvober!
A’ight—fuck it. I’m out.
See you in 2021.
