2 minute read
Grunion: New Year, Same Me
Problems don't just vanish at the clock striking midnight.
By Jebediah Morningside
2021… you were supposed to be different. I have spent the last 12 months slack-jawed and glassy-eyed waiting for you to come and sweep me off my feet.
I was so ready for this to end, to go outside and breathe deep the air of a world without political strife, economic uncertainty or social instability. But just six days in we had a clown in a buffalo headdress storm the capitol building who went on a hunger strike in prison because his “shamanic diet” organic food.
A Republican congresswoman shared that she believed the California wildfires were caused by Jewish-controlled space lasers. Next a conspiracy theory pharmacist sabotaged the COVID vaccines he received, resulting in fifty-seven people being injected with compromised doses.
Headlines written like mad libs are so last year, so what are they still doing here? If anything they seem to be getting worse. We collectively agreed that all the garbage would be left in 2020, a year so bad that Australia burning to the ground was just a footnote.
But here I am, once again carefully centering my webcam so my professor can’t see the discarded beer cans to the left or the pile of dirty laundry to the right, what gives?
Shouldn’t I be energized and perky again? Shouldn’t I shrug off the last 12 months of purgatory like a heavy coat and go skipping through fields? Or whatever happy people do?
Everyone was so sure that this was the end of it. Match.com even had those totally-not-terrible ads with Satan dating the embodiment of 2020. 2021 was supposed to be the year I seized the moment. Did Match.com lie to me?
The new year is supposed to be a moment for renewal, innovation and reinvention, but lo and behold, January 1 is here, and nothing has changed. There were heaps of think pieces written about how when the ball dropped on the first, things would be looking up. I tried to keep an open mind, give the new year a chance to find its legs, but here we are, two months in and I still duck and cover when I hear my roommate cough.
Now, and I know this is blasphemous, the passage of time is starting to feel arbitrary. Like we barely registered the turn of the new year, nothing has changed day to day. Come 1/1/2000 did people not immediately bedazzle their jeans and junk their grunge CDs? That’s how it happened right?
Because it feels like we built up this year to be the light at the end of the tunnel only for it to be a train.
