Managing "Maycember"

This blog is now old enough to legally drink.  I don't know what that means and, frankly, neither do you, so maybe anthropomorphizing a website wasn't the best idea after all?  Oh well, too late now.  I wonder how Bloggy feels about its own sesquiquattuordecennial?

It's always tough to think of what to write here.  Last year, I noted that May gets "deceptively busy", and this year, it's no exception — but now I know there's a name for the phenomenon: "Maycember".  Even for those who aren't parents, a lot of events line up around the end of the school year and the ramp-up to summer, just like in December, but they're not accompanied by the same "slowdown" in other responsibilities as the winter holidays, so it feels even busier.

Despite busy days, I wish I could say more has happened of note.  There is some positive, to be sure, but a strong undercurrent of malaise, and in recent weeks the accumulated stressors have started causing some physical symptoms I haven't experienced since the worst of grad school.  It's also just unclear how much of that is exacerbated by just the normal seasonal weather changes.  So that's not really any fun.

But I have to find my fun somewhere!  And finding time to find suitable organic bloggy cake mix was its own task, so I guess my goal is to keep the process short and sweet so I can rest.  Thankfully search tools remain reasonably effective when wielded well, so there wasn't a ton of digital slop to wade through.  May that continue to last as long as it can.

2026

Twenty-twenty-six.  Truly a wild number.

There's not really much to be said here that hasn't been said already, to be honest.  Mostly yesterday, but also, in a way, similar to the start of 2025 and 2024 as well.  I have goals, sure, but at this point they're so numerous and multifaceted that, if I even end up achieving a few of them — ideally, from among a key few — I'll be satisfied.

At times, it's a bit overwhelming, though.  Having so many irons in the fire sometimes seems like it may contribute to a lack of direction, but everything kind of interplays into one overarching trend toward the new phase of life I'm building.  So I guess, to the extent I'm inclined to set any sort of renewed intention for the year ahead, it's to stay directional with everything I set out to do… even if there are, in fact, many, many directions at once.  ;)

After all: Things change, and we can only move forward.  Things evolve, and we must evolve with them.

It's the second quarter of the century, after all.

Random tangent: In addition to the traditional Eastern Time countdown and their now-usual Atlantic Time and Central Time countdowns, ABC introduced a live Pacific Time countdown for the first time last night!  And yet… they didn't actually broadcast it live coast-to-coast and still delayed the entire proceedings for western time zones.  Methinks this was a bit of a tiptoe experiment in evolving the broadcast for a more modern age, and I think it went well.

A K-Shaped Year

It's not easy summing up — well, any year, really — but especially a year like 2025 has been in my life.

Since the sine wave that was 2023 and the broadly upward, though far less intense, trendlines of 2024, 2025 has yielded a rather starkly dichotomous path.

And so, much like talk of the ongoing "K-shaped" economic recovery, the line graph of my life feels like it has diverged into two different directions.  A lot of aspects of my life are going quite well right now, arguably better than they've ever been.  Others are truly not great, and arguably have never been worse.  That alone is bittersweet and more than a little frustrating.  But the biggest part of what has me leaving 2025 feeling so adrift is that everything seems flipped on its head.

It's incredibly disorienting, and frankly a bit unnerving, to find myself doing so well in areas where I've historically struggled while simultaneously doing so poorly where I've historically excelled.  Of course, I'm exceedingly grateful at every turn that it's not all bad news.  But the good gets better and the bad gets worse in seemingly equal measure lately.  So it's understandably hard to justify focusing on gratitude when there's still a lot of work to be done in turning half of my life right-side-up again.

And that kind of hints at the details behind the headline: It has been a full and busy year throughout, and nothing has been static for long.  The first quarter of my year was largely directed toward an increased spirit of volunteerism, while the second was about polishing skills for the betterment of community.  The third quarter was about scaffolding sustainability onto those skills while helping a friend through crisis.  And most recently, the fourth quarter has been focused more on equal parts personal and professional growth.

It's certainly not all been roses.  But there have been a lot of bright spots to keep me going.

Who knows what 2026 will bring?  All I know is it's about time to dive right in.

Random tangent: Mom retired on Friday 19 December! And her coworkers bought her an air fryer as a parting gift. She set it up tonight and used it for the first time to make some fries which were deliciously crispy!

Two Decades of Bloggy!

Twenty years ago tonight, I guess I was bored.  You could maybe say the same thing about tonight, just in a radically different context.  There are all sorts of things I could do, but forcing myself to slow down and write a bit, even vaguer-than-usual drivel, isn't a half-bad exercise to engage in from time to time.

I usually save the long-term reflection for New Year's Eve (even if in practice I tend to actually do more of it on New Year's Day), but it's hard not to notice patterns.  With almost any focal distance I choose to look back with, I can see that my life has changed quite a bit recently.  In particular, I've noticed that I've tended to mark this middle part of recent decades with a higher degree of uncertainty and change.  And yet, I've also been reflecting on just how deceptively busy the month of May always seems to get, no matter what else might be happening on a macro level.  Is it something persistent about my social environment, or is it just everyone wanting to do stuff now that the weather's more consistently nicer?

Anyways, I've often complained at this time of year that it's been getting increasingly difficult to find the good-quality, free clipart which is of course the primary ingredient in bloggy cake.  In recent years, it feels like that difficulty curve has spiked.  And this year, it was damn near impossible.  Most anything new worth considering is well behind a paywall, or at least a login.  But I scrappily managed.

It had occurred to me in a textbook "shower thought" yesterday that, nowadays, a bloggy cake could theoretically be baked with a fairly straightforward prompt into a generative image diffusion model.  But there's just no way that the result would taste as good, and besides—all the detailed piping might not even end up being legible.

And yes, despite the em-dash in the last sentence, I've written all of this myself.  It's not at all a sign of outsourcing to a large language model, and if you've been here long enough, you'd know that.

Some things you've just gotta bake yourself.

Happy birthday, Bloggy!

2025

Hmm.  If I felt as though 2024, at its outset, was shrouded in mystery, what then is 2025?

In spite of the significant setbacks I faced throughout 2023, I started 2024 with a pretty clear sense of purpose and direction.  But life had other plans.  By March, efforts to try to smooth out the previous year's sine wave were stalling out increasingly often, but I was still maintaining a positive and hopeful attitude without too much trouble.  Then the second quarter walloped me pretty hard.

Family deaths and the associated grief will tend to do that, of course — two of my three remaining grandparents passed away just over a month apart (my paternal grandfather on 8 April and my maternal grandmother on 9 May).  But once one already has enough to mourn, every additional little thing can really just compound the sadness and grief, in all its stages and forms.  And while repeatedly processing grief alongside family does, itself, entail more than its fair share of those "little things", often the world doesn't think to hold off on adding just a few more.  By mid-June, I found each proverbial straw increasingly straining, and it was becoming clear that it was about time to disconnect and reset.  Somehow.  Whatever that means.

Sometimes though, it seems, you really do have to try turning it off and on again.  Even as a loose metaphor, it can be an enlightening exercise.  Although I have long known full well that it rarely actually solves any underlying issue, it can definitely provide new perspective — or at least just buy a little extra time to deal with it all and gather more data to better inform next steps.  I feel very blessed to have been able to provide myself the opportunity for such flexibility.

Now I've not usually been one to rush toward shedding aspects of the Old Year, and I'm not about to change that, but I've definitely used this reset so far to be a lot more intentional about how I plan to bring certain things along moving forward.

In doing so, I seem to have bought myself just enough space to regain the confidence to approach the rest of 2024 from that slightly different angle I needed — still quite gingerly, but ultimately stumbling upon some new pathways.  And, in a sense, that extra breathing room has helped me make effective use of the recent autumn months, setting myself up to more readily benefit from any more favorable circumstances that could arise in 2025.

Ya know.  Despite … (sighs and gestures broadly) … everything else.

So, although I probably now have an even fuzzier 12-month horizon than the fuzzy one I thought I had a year ago, I nevertheless enter this New Year quite grateful: For old friends who reached out to connect me with something new or to help distract me with a smile on some of the more painful anniversaries, but also for new friends who are helping me to finally start expanding that fuzzy, fuzzy horizon.  And since "adapting" might as well be the word of the decade and the only real constant is change, my true priority remains simply to honor myself and my experience with kindness throughout each twist and turn.

And at least in that regard, come whatever may… I think it just might be a good year after all.

Aw, man, I did the thing again where yesterday's retrospective post leaned a bit heavy on the prospective side, and now this one's gotten kinda sappily vice-versa.  Oh well.  I never promised consistency.

Random tangent: For most readers, 2025 is the only year in our lifetimes that can be mathematically expressed as the square of an integer (in this case, 45²).  The last time was in 1936 (44²) and the next won't be until 2116 (46²).  Somewhat more uniquely, one can accurately write (20 + 25)² = 2025.

Wrapping Up and Revving Up

Well, there's not a lot to say, and it took a while to get to this point, but ultimately it's clear that 2024 turned out much better for me than 2023.

Not nearly as good as I'd been hoping — and certainly still with its share of downswings and disappointments — but, in the end, it still held more ups than downs, and I'm leaving 2024 feeling pretty good.

It has certainly been an interesting year, and 2025 promises to be interesting as well.  Hoping to keep the positive juices flowing well into the New Year.  We shall see.

Random tangent: Apparently ABC's Puerto Rico party was reliant on many generators following this morning's near island-wide blackout.  The show must go on, I suppose.

A Quick Birthday Greeting

I'll be honest.  It's been a rough few days of a rough couple months of a rough year.  For a lot of reasons.  Right now, my body, mind, and spirit all are in much need of some solid rest.

But still… it wouldn't be 14 May without bloggy cake, however hastily made.  And at this point, I think this blog is old enough to understand that that's what counts.

Happy nineteenth, Randomness.

Three Dozen

Today, three dozen years into my life, I had a rather dissonant day.

I started hopeful and productive, then got a bit overwhelmed as I'd set out to do perhaps a bit too much and was developing a headache, then I really needed a nap, then I woke to lots of birthday messages from friends and family, then I felt worse and worse until I decided to take another test.

Yup.  That cold I picked up the other day appears to actually be Covid.  The juror summons I got for my 31st birthday was a better gift!

I'm trying to not let it diminish my spirits, though, even if it's diminishing my faculties at the moment.  I am blessed to have gotten the most important stuff done and to be able to dedicate more time to resting, which my body will need.

So enough with the blogging.  I've hit my limit and am going to bed.  Happy birthday to me.

2024

2024 is going to be another one of those years, huh?

One of those years like 2011 or 2017 when, sitting here on 01 January, it feels like everything ahead is shrouded in complete mystery.

Back then, it felt a little daunting.  And truthfully, it still does a bit.  But this time, it feels more exciting.  (Though maybe that's the nice, even number talking.)

This year will continue to represent an era of major change as I continue to recover from the setbacks of 2023 and — perhaps because of that — more than usual, it feels like something worth embracing.

It does mean, though, that I don't have much to write.  (What else is new?)

But at least the old strained "hopefully" from the pandemic years has turned into a modicum of genuine hope, I think.  Even if I don't know where things are headed, it's a nice feeling that has been missing for too long.

Anyway, as it pertains to my annual doodle, among the more minor setbacks of 2023 was losing access to an Adobe license on any computer that operates faster than molasses.  So instead of Illustrator, I whipped this one up a bit more economically in PowerPoint instead.

Just try to ignore the fact that all of these colors are from the default Microsoft Office palette.  I bet you wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't told you.

Random tangent: My parents are in the midst of renovating their downstairs half-bathroom, and the new tile went in yesterday.  Although there are still several steps before the fixtures can actually go in, the long-awaited visible change led my brother to proclaim "new year, new toilet."  I'm sure that's not how it works, but I appreciate his enthusiasm nonetheless.

A Sine of the Times

Welp.

I'm not sure where to start closing out 2023 but "welp".  Since I'd ended 2017 with a similar sentiment, I'd posit that maybe it has something to do with years ending on a Sunday — which does feel weird to me despite years beginning on a Monday feeling quite natural — except 2006 was pretty awesome, so it's probably just a periodic coincidence.

It being a Sunday, there are the usual distractions of football as I write this.  But I have to write this earlier than usual, because Mom is performing in tonight's New Year’s Eve Concert at the Erie Playhouse which, while it will surely be entertaining, will take up a bit of extra time this evening.

So despite the fact that it is still light out as I write this, there is still much of the familiar time pressure to distill the year into something digestible for this blog.  Since I hear that a picture is still worth about a thousand words (more or less, adjusted for inflation) and I'm still a math geek at heart, I think my 2023 can perhaps be most concisely described by this sinusoid:

Very rough and not quite to scale, of course, but still freakishly accurate in spite of its simplicity.

In short, while the first quarter of the year certainly wasn't perfect, most of my 23-based cautious optimism was ultimately panning out.  By March, I was feeling pretty good about most aspects of my life.  That lasted for most of the spring, but heading into May and June things got a little rougher, and then the setbacks truly began in July.  Just as April and May were a new apex, October and November were a new low.

Most people who are close to me know a few details of some of the setbacks that befell me in the second half of this year, and I'm sure those who don't can understand why I am not really going to say much about them here at this time.  Frankly, there are very few people with whom I feel comfortable talking about all of them.  Needless to say, each was significant in its own way and I've been working with those around me to move forward from each as I'm able.

And don't despair for me: I wouldn't have plotted the end of the graph as I did if I didn't truly feel that they're collectively moving toward resolution by this point.

Huh.  "Resolution."  A bit unorthodox, but I'll take it.  Such unbridled optimism is normally far too sanguine for my liking, but I really do need a good dose of it in the year ahead.

So anyway, much like the passing of the seasons are sinusoidal, so, too, has my year gone.  Sure, it's out of phase with the seasons by about 2½ months, but the extremes felt just as wide.

It's not like I'm hoping for a sigmoid in 2024.

And so for a math geek like me who still likes the number 23, all that's left to do is to celebrate one more numerological quirk as we waltz into the new year on 12/31/23, or 1,2,3; 1,2,3.

Ah! Ah! Aah!

Random tangent: NBC has Sunday Night Football tonight, but as hoped ABC and CBS are both breaking their New Year's Eve programming for news at 22:00 EST for a second year.

Adulting

It's Mother's Day, so I spent some time this weekend with family as usual.  Yesterday's food drive went smoothly and brought in a lot of food, albeit lowest returns in many years.  Economic effects have brought more need to the community, which means fewer able to give, and even those who can giving less.

I also watched my parents perform Mozart's Requiem with the Erie Philharmonic Choir last night, which was wonderful.  Although I guess the lesson is starting to be reinforced on me that I really need to bring my glasses with me to events like that if I want to be able to discern faces from more than a handful of meters away.

Since I had to be back in Pittsburgh tonight to get ahead of the coming week, my mother and I kind of explicitly didn't have any plans for the day.  But spur-of-the-moment externalities caused it to be a day full of adulting and similar obligations which, while enjoyable, tired me out more than I probably needed.  So this is all hastily written (and designed!) in the waning minutes of the day with far less planning than I would have liked.

Perhaps having adulted today is more appropriate than blogging, though, now that this blog itself is eighteen years old.  Old enough to be legally an adult; although in blog years, I think it qualifies as "ancient".

But even adult blogs — er, hmmm, grown-up blogs? — want some bloggy cake!  And I won't disappoint!

2023

For the last couple of months, it definitely felt like 2022 just started, and yet now it's over, and 2023 has begun.  I guess that's partly the general pace of life getting back to normal, which of course entails a lot of the mechanics of normal, even though nothing feels normal about how it's getting back to normal.  "New normal", I guess.  (Bleh, I do hate that phrase, but occasionally it's apt.)

Anyway, 23 has long been my favorite number, so despite any awkward feelings, I'm determined to make 2023 a good year in at least some ways.  And as I start to ease out of vacation mode (and down from the overstimulatory sugar high), I'm already setting it up for a good start, I think.  Still: Approaching cautiously.

Like in 2013, I leaned toward a serifed three for today's doodle.  I think it's a good reflection of where I'm at and where I'm heading.  It doesn't so much reflect the old strained "hopefully" anymore, but rather — really — genuine hopefulness.  And that feels good.

Random tangent: Realizing in the waning days of 2022 that my parents didn't yet have a calendar for the new year, I picked up a Dayspring "Kittens 2023" calendar while passing through a Wal-Mart.  Only when I put it up behind the old calendar did I then realize that the old calendar (which I hadn't bought for them) was a Dayspring "Kittens 2022".  Kitties!

A Refreshing Respite

Huh.  I find myself in the usual position of writing this in the waning minutes of the year, but this time I'm finding it weirdly kinda refreshing, albeit still in the usual and frustrating way.

In particular, I'm struggling a bit to recap the year that was, in part, because, for the first time in a while, I have quite a bit of optimism for the year ahead.  (I suspect I'm not alone.)

Don't be mistaken: After the trials of the last few years, it'll be critical not to enter 2023 with any particular expectations.  Walk in slowly, no sudden movements, don't startle it — all that good stuff.  But I think, despite the necessary modicum of caution, there's actually a lot of concrete reasons to be hopeful.

Work life is progressing.  Stabilizing from the peak-pandemic chaos, surely, but not into anything resembling the past.  We welcomed new coworkers in April and May to expand our team, and they're already helping bring us well into our next phase of existence, as we continue to have more prominent impacts across campus.

And yet somehow, personal life is maybe progressing even more?  I finally have some decent answers to some long-standing questions.  Of course, major answers, while helpful, often beget further questions.  So still a bit of work to do there, especially in the weeks ahead.  I'm never one for resolutions, of course, but nevertheless poised for progress and positivism there, too.

Meanwhile, family have been struggling a bit here and there, especially these last few months.  Some ups, some downs, to be sure.  But broadly a bit more on the better side than the worse side at present, which is a relief.

In any case, it's been busy, and it's been good to have a bit of a break from it all.  During my stay in the Erie area, the weather sure has been, uh, variable: We broke the record low on 23 December with a temperature of –2 °F (–19 °C) on 23 December, only to break the record high a week later on 30 December, with 64 °F (18 °C).

Ah, home, sweet home.

Now if I could just get over dealing with the last ten days' worth of sugar.

Random tangent: It looks like all three major networks arranged to break from their primetime New Year's Eve programming for local news an hour early, at 22:00 EST.  Makes sense: Not only is the overall pageantry less rushed, but also ABC no longer has to cut away from national just as it hit midnight in Puerto Rico.  I hope that's able to stick around in future years, and wasn't just a one-off because this year's broadcasts aren't on a weeknight.

Transitional

Did I really say 2022 was going to "feel about the same" as 2021?  Oh, what a difference a few months can make!

In fairness, I'd said it would be "long and transitional".  And now that I can see more clearly where the year is headed, that much has been spot-on.  But certainly not in the same sense, no.  Whereas 2021 was transitional in a more gradual way that even seemed stagnant at times, so far 2022 is transitional in the OMG IT SEEMS LIKE LITERALLY EVERYTHING IS CHANGING way.  It's not actually quite that dramatic, of course — but even good and necessary change, when significant enough, can get a little bit overwhelming at times.  Right now, I'm in the thick of that in more ways than one.

Of course, it's fun that my blog's birthday is around the same time as the National Association of Letter Carrier's "Stamp Out Hunger" Food Drive each year, which brings me back to my hometown and, in some sense, the same roots that bore this blog in the first place.  But things are also quite different, since I'm literally double the age I was then.  Now, at the age of seventeen, this blog is just a few short months away from being just as old as I was when I started it.

Maybe it's time for my blog to start a blog.  While it decides whether that's a good idea (it's not), here's some bloggy cake:

Still, while there's usually proximity, it's not every year that 14 May falls on the Saturday, which means both volunteering for the food drive and blogging on the same day.  If that weren't enough, the Eurovision Song Contest has been added to my radar in recent years.  And I have friends graduating at Carnegie Mellon's commencement ceremony tomorrow, so it was right back to Pittsburgh tonight.  And good, novel bloggy cake clipart is increasingly hard to find these days.  Busy, busy.

After that, my mother's spending a little time with me here before I help run a primary election on Tuesday.  Did I mention I'm a local Judge of Elections here?  Been that way for four years.  I'm so bad at this blogging thing.

And then it's right back to what already feels like the busiest summer season I've had at my job, even before adding in the two new full-time staff that have been added to our tiny team in the past five weeks.  (One started just yesterday!)  All of the shuffling, divvying, and expansion of responsibilities that entails — while certainly for the betterment of us all — will definitely take a lot of adjustment in the coming weeks and months.

As far as the food drive, though — since ya know, that's what's already happened — you could indeed consider it a "transitional" year as we got our bearings back: Folks remembering that the food drive exists, letter carriers remembering how and when to best get the food to us, us remembering how best to process the intake, and also getting used to doing it all in the social hall and food pantry area of the new church building, a building which hadn't even broken ground when we had the last food drive in 2019, and which by now has already been open for more than a year.  Today, we took in 3642 lb (1652 kg) of food nonetheless — among our lower totals but still an impressive feat — less a super-consistent 3.58% in spoilage from outdated or damaged foods.

So it's good to see that, despite the challenges of the past few years, and those that continue, the community's generosity hasn't changed.

Another thing that hasn't changed is my "pandemic hair".  Unless, of course, you count it having grown a year longer.

It was already pretty long in last year's post-vaccination photo at the age of just over 14 months.  Today, it's pushing two-and-a-quarter years since that last haircut on 27 February 2020.

I'd kinda missed a good window of opportunity last summer before the Delta variant came roaring through, but now I've got some big things coming up before which I'd like to tame it significantly.  I don't think I'll be going straight back to the short hair of the past, but I've gotta get this stuff out of my eyes.  And mouth.  And all over everywhere.  Just gotta find the time first to get it done right.  (Ya know, 'cause "big things" and "busy".)

And the humidity today, oof.  The result is not so much "unkempt" as "unkempable".  Suddenly all those hair product commercials that once confused me as a child make so much sense.

(Maybe my hair should get a blog?  Nah.  Besides, it's "transitional".)

2022

Well it sure isn't March 2020 anymore, but I still don't know what it is.

Yeah, the calendar says January 2022, but oof.  That's weird, man.

If last year's New Year's Day feelings were "novel", this year's are really stale.  Hopefully things would soon be better.  Hoooppefulllllyyyy.

We'll get there.  Somehow.

At least I correctly pegged 2021 as long and transitional.  So far, prospects for 2022 feel about the same.  But progress upon progress adds up, I suppose.

Just two glyphs for this year's doodle; had to find a good font for twos.  I have a feeling that, with their increased prevalence, my handwritten ones (by which I mean twos) will soon decline in quality.  I think I'll manage.  And given that this year is starting out feeling much the same as the last, it's not surprising that I landed on a similar design.

Whatever last year's "checklists" have even become these days — gosh, it seems nothing is ever over anymore — here's to progress, whatever that may ultimately mean.

Random tangent: After last night's unusual thunder at my parents' place, this morning saw an unexplained noise around Pittsburgh at 11:24 ET! Theories quickly converged on a small meteor breaking up in the atmosphere. 2022 is already coming in with a bang!

Muddling through the Middle-y Mush

Gosh, this has gotten tough.

At least I can rely on starting with a generic statement on just how tough I find this.  Why do I do this again?

This time last year, I wrote of ending 2020 "in the middle" of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, a year that went by like mush.  Well, if 2020 was mush, gosh, what even was 2021?  Just as vaccinations rapidly ramped up, plateaued, and even started ramping down… suddenly variants! First Delta and now Omicron; or, I guess, δ and ο.  Good thing I learned the Greek alphabet back in undergrad.

(Sigh.)

There's definitely been a sense of collective burnout in the air lately.  Maybe my persistence here on this blog is a way to rail against that instinct at this particular moment.

But gosh, this has gotten TOUGH.

Why are we so inept at testing infrastructure compared to other nations?  Sure, the specifics of these variants can't have been predicted but, like, it's not as though we didn't know enough to know that something was likely and that maybe we should prepare for it this time.

On some level, every time the situation changes course, there's an element of "we've done this before, so we can do it again"; but on another, there's "oh no, not again", coupled with the knowledge that different situations are, in fact, different — who knew!? — and so tend to require rethinking and reinvention anew.

And absolutely nothing is ever "done" or "finalized" or "settled" anymore.  Not that that was ever strictly true, but it at least used to be true enough to count on to a reasonable degree of approximation.

So there's definitely a Sisyphean empathy going on right now.  Or something similarly discomfiting like that.  I'm too tired to think of anything better.

The flip side of different situations being different, of course, means that 2021 has allowed us to get some good things in, though.  After a year off, we managed to hold Music Camp in July with surprisingly few material modifications, getting it in just before Delta came onto the scene.  As emergency use authorization for vaccinations had only just been approved down to the age of 12, all sorts of considerations and adaptations were considered, and many adopted, allowing us to provide a meaningful experience while cases were near their summer minimums.  Had camp come a few weeks later, or the variant a few weeks earlier, the situation could have been wildly different — if it would have been able to happen at all.

Just one more way in which everything's been a little harder at every turn.

For all the stresses, work saw a successful semester with predominantly in-person instruction.  We're at the point where I, for one, am certainly trying to regain composure from the sort of emergency footing we've found ourselves on for the last nearly-two years, and get back into dealing with a lot of deferred backburner stuff that, in the interim, has grown a bit bigger.  Such is the nature of emergencies, of course.  The endeavor has thusfar seen mixed results: Such is the nature of ongoing emergencies, I guess.  Here's just hoping, however the coming term goes, we're familiar enough with our responses that we can continue to adopt "adapting" into our vernacular, albeit hopefully requiring a bit less of an all-encompassing effort each time.

Other vague personal developments continue.  Again, it's been tough to find the time, the energy, the motivation.  While I'd hoped this would be a significant year in that realm, many of those things got backburnered for a bit, too.  As we close out the year, I am finding support and at least starting to make progress on some.  More in the coming weeks, and further in the weeks after that, I'm sure.  2021 bleeds into 2022: My tasks and goals really fundamentally remain the same.  When will they be "done" enough to share?  Soon enough, I hope.  Finding words is half the battle.  Maybe I should blog more.  (Ha!)

Most years have some unique quality to them, even if it's a bit fleeting and hard to pin down.  But yeah, this time, I'm really struggling to distinguish 2021 from 2020.  Perhaps as I make my way through 2022, that will become a bit more clear.

Random tangent: David's a bit upset that Carson Daly's out of the New Year's scene at NBC, and they've gone with Pete Davidson and Miley Cyrus, it seems.  We'll probably check out a bit, but may stay with Seacrest.  Also, I heard thunder at 23:38 — not often that happens on New Year's Eve.  

The Agitation After

Do sixteen-year-old blogs care about cake for their birthday?

I don't know, but mine does, I guess.  And if not, I do.  Besides, looking out at the world today, it's a time for celebration.  Well, kinda.  It definitely feels like it ought to be, but it also definitely feels like it ought not to be.  Feelings are weird, man.

Vaccination against Covid-19 accelerated so much just over the course of April that late March and early May really have seemed like they were two different worlds.  It's hard to understate just how hopelessly things felt to be plodding along, and then — BAM! — suddenly, there's a lot of hope in this new reality.  So much, so fast that it's difficult to suspend disbelief.  I suppose psychological trauma, in whatever form, will tend to do that.

Each of the last 6 weeks or so has brought rapid change: Just in the last three days, emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 vaccine was extended to children as young as 12, and CDC recommendations were updated to reflect that fully vaccinated individuals no longer need to wear masks in most situations.

Of course, broader society remains complicated.  Knowing for sure you're actually in one of those safe situations is impossible, and while it becomes more likely over time, it's nowhere near a guarantee now.  We know that folks need time to adapt well.  Just as March and April 2020 were a sudden shock to the system as we came into this pandemic, it seems that May and likely June 2021 are shaping up to be similar as we come out of it.  So, while the light at the end of the tunnel is ever clearer, true celebration does still seem a bit premature.  For now, anyway.

But I did my part and got my (Pfizer) jabs on 12 April and 03 May.  The first one, I think, was not administered particularly well and my left arm even still has a little stiffness around the injection site today after having been quite sore for the first 10 days, but the second one (in the other arm!) was quick and comparatively painless.  After having helped run two elections in 2020 under pandemic conditions, I am incredibly thankful that I will be just past the 14-day post-vaccination threshold considered "full immunity" before the upcoming municipal primary election on 18 May.

There will be more public excursions to come, of course.  At the present moment, all have me anxious, albeit to varying degrees.  But all in due time.

In the meantime, while we work our way up to getting ready to gather again, have some bloggy cake.  It's just as shocking that this blog is that old.

2021

So, like, this is a novel combination of New Year's Day feelings.

For one, as I mentioned yesterday, it genuinely still feels like March 2020.  Given, though, that vaccine distribution, while it will (hopefully) ramp up in due course, will undoubtedly be continuing well into the second and third quarters of the coming year, I suspect the pall of March 2020 won't really feel truly lifted until April 2022 when (again, hopefully) we'll be able to do real "April" things again.  Insofar as anyone can really make "plans" these days: What are those?  (Every past year's me simultaneously shudders at the thought.)

On the other hand, New Year's Day is, fundamentally, just the day after the last, like any other.  Nothing terribly earth-shattering has happened.  Twenty-twenty-one is a continuation of twenty-twenty in so many more senses than usual.  Twenty-twenty, part two.  There's a temptation to affix a roman numeral and call it "2020-II", but that would be too easily confused with the proper name for the following year, when (hoooppefulllllyyyy) far much more of this can be aptly described as "behind us".  In the meantime, perhaps more resonant, if a bit defeatist: twenty-twenty came for us, and twenty-twenty won.

Of course, for most of us, it didn't actually.  We've adapted, as humans have done through the ages.  It's still important to make plans and to set goals.  The key has been to remain supremely flexible in throwing out plans and goals — often repeatedly — and picking something else that ends up suiting the present moment better.  As you can inevitably understand, this is undeniably easier said than done.

And so, a lot of us have been continually deferring things, which has meant that a lot of us have been talking about 2021 as this bright, rosy thing for quite a while now.  And I think it's pretty clear it will have a lot of rosiness throughout, even if the exact timing and nature of those positives isn't yet known.

But let's not be naïve: We're pretty far down in the depths right now.  It will take time to work our way out of that, both individually and collectively, and there will be setbacks along the way.  Remember in March when there seemed to be this conviction that we'd be through this in just two months?  Postponing events just to ultimately have to postpone them again?  That's not likely over.  And that sucks.  It's real rough in both a logistical sense and an emotional sense.

Yet all this clearing of space can still — somehow — offer opportunity.  For my part, in a year when most normal journeys have been curtailed, I've spent the last five months or so embarking on the latest of my series of journeys of self-discovery.  Some of those have been bigger ones, some smaller.  Some I've shared (albeit not here; I'm a terrible blogger) and others I haven't.  I get the sense that this one is on the more significant side of the scale, which has been daunting at times.  But I also feel much better equipped for this trek and I definitely know that I'm far from alone.  So that has been helping a lot.

So when it comes to my goals this year, I honestly — and uncharacteristically — haven't got a clue about the "how" that's ahead of me.  Nevertheless, the usually-nebulous hope and confidence that I have actually feels more concrete and tangible than ever.  In other words, I think I've got some good leads, guys; and ones that I can probably make real progress on despite the current state of the world.  It's quite appropriate, then — though not at all unique — that the name "twenty-twenty" is carried forward as part of twenty-twenty-one, and on through the rest of the decade that lies beyond.

Not to distill it too far, but this year's gonna be less of a datebook and more of a checklist.  "Whenever" is fine.  It is Absolutely Fine.

And while no grand checklist is ever complete, hopefully — can you hear the strain in my voice? — enough boxes will be filled that 2021 will be full of fond and rosy memories.

Hopefully.

Ending in the Middle

Uh, well.  Words continue to fail.  But I'll give it a go.

How to properly synthesize a year that has come and gone mostly like mush?  It's probably not possible, and yet our collective culture remains imbued with the compulsion to try.  Myself included.  More so than usual, TV presenters and news anchors alike have been signing off their final broadcasts of the year with a far more noticeable, and often overt, "good riddance" than the traditional look back.  Fare thee (not so) well.

If you're familiar with my New Year's Eve posts — and frankly, even if you're not — you're probably aware that it's been a good long while since they've had that "holiday letter" quality where I actually recap the highlights of each month individually in any meaningful sense.  I've never really been able to maintain that in the best of times, and — I'm not sure you've noticed — this ain't that.  Sure, I often go through spells of a few weeks to a month or so where I feel I'm deeply uninteresting, but this year, I'm not even sure I could pick out much from my life about the average day from late-March through June.  That, in itself, is pretty remarkable.

So, yeah, after muddling through those first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic (which should need no further context), by July, I'd learned a bit about what works for me and what doesn't when it comes to dealing with the "new normal".  Although aspects of my apartment had honestly not been serving me too well for some time, it's amazing how quickly a living space can almost completely stop working for you when circumstances change and you end up having to use it quite differently.

Fortunately, I also spent much of the extra time at home knowing I would soon need to move from my apartment of 7 years.  Combined with plenty of time in the space and few things to distract me from myself, that provided sufficient motivation to help me cultivate a level of self-awareness that would be necessary to plan a more amenable setup in the new place.

Unfortunately: Moving during a pandemic.  Still not thrilled about that, honestly.  Thankfully, right around a local minimum of cases, which made essential travel and assistance from family possible.

More recently, though, through the holiday season, it's been worse than ever, nearly everywhere in the US.  For my part, the responsible approach has meant a very different holiday period: Christmas Eve Chips-'n'-Salsa over Zoom, though my folks started without me!  One Christmas family gathering that definitely had a time appointed… and then just not followed through upon.  And trying very hard to arrange for some sort of human connection time each day so as to keep my mental health afloat.

There have been positive moments: One reason my immediate family eagerly dug into the chips without me at first was because they had just come out from the cold, having celebrated a brief and "socially distant" Christmas Eve service with members of their church in the parking lot of its brand new building — finally complete enough after rebuilding from a 22 July 2018 fire which I didn't even mention here (I told you I'm bad at this!) that in any other circumstance, it would have been a major celebration.  Instead, services are being recorded inside for the foreseeable future.

Music Camp had to be cancelled of course, but we did a virtual thing which was centering.  I've had some professional and personal accomplishments, too, but it still really hasn't felt right to highlight them amidst (gestures broadly) THIS.

Of course, as I've said before, the end of a year is hardly ever the "end" of anything, but just a reflection point — and, hopefully, an inflection point when necessary.  It certainly feels truer than ever now, heading from what might as well be, and in some ways truly feels like, the 306th of March into the 307th.

I've learned a lot about myself in the last few months, and the work on that — just as our collective work with ending this pandemic — will continue well into 2021.  All in all, I think I've actually been managing reasonably well.

The Calm Between

Words fail.  But we try anyway.

By this point, it's cliché and a bit trite to say that we're in unprecedented times, in the midst of an ever-changing situation, living through history… but it's absolutely true.  There were certainly jokes early on, when we were comparatively uninformed, but no one really expected at the start of the year that we'd be in the midst of a global pandemic a few short months later.

Locally, we've come a long way. In just a few minutes, the "Stay at Home" order for Pittsburgh and many surrounding areas, which has been in place since the evening of 23 March, will officially be lifted.  Fifty-two days and four hours in total, just shy of one-seventh of the entire year.  A lot has happened since then, and a lot hasn't.  Events postponed or cancelled.  Plans scuppered, classes virtualized, and goals deferred.  But there's also a long way to go: more testing and tracing is needed.  There will be future flare-ups in our epidemics and, inevitably, more resultant deaths.  May we have the collective and individual strength to face that challenge and keep it manageable.  For now, I'm trying to savor the occasional liminal moment of calm in between all the uncertainty, doubt, fear, and anxiety.

In work and in life, it's been easier than ever to lose sight of my direct impacts.  New patterns continue to emerge, and on average, I know I'm doing okay and contributing positively.  But on any given day, the reality is that everything is, at best, just a little harder.  And the thing about everything being harder is that every thing is harder.  And those things add up.

So it was with great relief that I found another piece of purportedly-free clipart without too much trouble so I could bake another bloggy cake for a special birthday blog.  With 2020 so far being a year replete with almost every cancellation imaginable, it's important to try to keep the easy streaks alive.  It's already digital; no further social distancing is required.  ;)

Random tangent: If this blog were to be anthropomorphized even further and ascribed a female gender, I suppose you could say it's celebrating a quarantinceañera.  That is a portmanteau that exists now.