Well, that was a year.

As you may have heard, a deadly pandemic sort of ruined the world in 2020. Vaccines are starting to roll out, so it may be less than a year before this all seems like a hazy dream. I guess that makes it important for me to write down how this affected me, because this period is deeply weird right now, but may fade to a trivial “wow 2020 was kind of crazy” blip in my memory if I don’t preserve it.

Personally, I was in a best-case scenario for a pandemic to hit. I already worked from home for a company that was well set up to thrive in a world where everyone stays home. Much of the time, I actually like staying home, and having excuses to avoid social situations. We adopted a perfect dog, Pepper, just before the great dog shortage of 2020, who has made my life so much better, and allowed the part of my heart reserved for furry best friends to open up again.

So, 2020 was, for me, strangely fine?

That’s not to say there was no suffering. Even those in a best-case scenario suffered. Meg briefly lost her job (twice) due to effects of the pandemic, which turned out to be more than okay, but the uncertainty sucked. More importantly, people I know lost family members directly to the virus, and I feel terrible for them, as well as angry at the monsters who still (still, after nearly a year of this) think it’s “just the flu,” or a tool of government control, or that wearing a mask for 15 minutes is too much discomfort to literally save someone’s fucking life. My grandma died this year. Her death wasn’t due to COVID-19, but the fact that she couldn’t have a proper funeral with her geographically-dispersed family was.

I don’t need / want constant parties or hugs from acquaintances, but a funeral would have been at least normal. I also miss just going to the coffee shop and getting a coffee and drinking that coffee there in the coffee shop. Maybe running into someone I know and chatting for a maximum of 5 minutes. That stuff is nice and I hope it comes back soon.

That was my life in 2020. Before I go on to my usual yearly review of music, movies, TV, and games, remember, I’ve started writing at the group blog Across the Board, so you can find more of my stuff there. It’s mostly focused on writing, even though I didn’t write much in 2020. I don’t know why, but it’s like a switch flipped as soon as lockdowns started, and I went into “just get through the day” mode. Since writing isn’t my primary source of income, it faded away, and free time got taken up by activities that take as little thought as possible, like movies and video games. Writing is fun for me, but it’s not an escape; in many ways, it’s the opposite—an intense dive into the struggles of what it means to be human. Maybe I couldn’t handle that in 2020. Maybe it wasn’t healthy to avoid it. But I got through each day.

Music

As usual, this is just an uncurated list of the top 20 albums I listened to most, courtesy of Last.FM.