#I can't wait to spend my combo donny t dollars and biden bucks on a giant tattoo this spring

[something-tofightfor]

2020: a Recap

My timeline’s going to be filled with these today, so this is mostly for me as a way to wrap things up (I’ll be doing a separate writing recap later, so this is going to have very little to do with writing... read at your own risk).  2020 has been a lot of things for a lot of people, and most of them haven’t been great. We all know all of the BS that’s going on in the world, and have all had our struggles and challenges and week after week where we felt useless and scared and overwhelmed with everything. 

But I’m not going to talk about any of that, because I want to focus on the good things.  Some of these are stupid. Some of them are really insignificant to anyone but me. But they matter - and so do the tiny things that happened to everyone else that have them even the briefest moments of joy during this year. So here’s a list of the top 10 moments of 2020 for me. 

10. My pepper plants thriving for the first time. We’ve never had good luck growing peppers for whatever reason, and this year,  we managed to get consistent harvests from 7 different kinds of peppers well into October. 

9. I got to see two friends get married (safely). Spending almost an entire year away from 90% of my baseball friend group was really difficult. In the middle of October, two of them got married in a beautiful outdoor ceremony, and it was the first time we were all in the same place since last September. 

8. I learned how creative I can be. Resin pouring, bracelet making, ornament-making, writing... with all of this extra time to myself, I’ve taught myself some new things and had a lot of fun doing it. 

7. Getting to rewatch all of my favorite shows (and some new ones!) I’m 95% sure that I finished Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video this year. I rewatched favorite shows (Lost, The Punisher, Westworld, It’s Always Sunny, Daredevil and Parks and Rec to name a few) and found new shows (The Boys, Great British Baking Show, season 2 of The Mandalorian, Yellowstone). I watched a lot of TV this year, and I don’t regret it.  6. I played literally 300 hours of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This might sound excessive, but there were a couple months where I played for a few hours a day. This game calmed me down, gave me a chance to focus, and was fun without there being any stakes. I would have been bored out of my mind from March - May when it was still cold out and I was stuck in my house without it.  5. I got a tattoo. I waited until I felt absolutely safe going into a shop (October) and got a very simple - but meaningful - tattoo. Ideally, I would have gotten at least one other (much larger) one this year, too, but that fifteen minutes with Dylan Yeehaw was the most normal that things felt for me in a long time. (No one has asked about this or made a comment, even though it was clearly visible in a picture I posted a while back)

4. I taught myself to cook a bunch of new things. Sourdough (still waiting on Jake Gyllenhaal’s response to my DM), macaroons, poached eggs, french onion soup, the perfect seared scallop ... I got really adventurous this year, and I can’t wait to try more recipes out this winter. I still need to try a carbonara, and I really want to make my own soft pretzels. 3. I got to see humpback whales in person with my own two eyeballs. We went whale watching last September in LA, and saw jack shit. That was not the case in Massachusetts. We saw 8 or 9 different whales, got absolutely SOAKED and had a blast. I’ve never seen anything so majestic in my entire life, and there were tears in my eyes from the second we first saw the whales until we were heading back into the harbor. Whale watching has been on my bucket list for YEARS and now that I’ve gone once and seen them, I just want to go again and again. I want to see Orcas and a blue whale. 

(The entire trip to Boston/Salem was a highlight of the year, and the only time I didn’t feel safe was in a backwoods PA Sheetz on our way home when we had to stop for gas and pee and there were a million and a half people inside of the building)

2. I got to meet @the-blind-assassin-12 and @malionnes in person. After the initial plans to travel and meet up in Vegas had to be put on hold, we came up with something closer and much safer, and I got to spend a weekend on the Jersey Shore in a house with them (No joke we were like two blocks away from the ACTUAL Jersey Shore house). All of us were very safe before and after we met, and I know people probably think it’s really reckless, but none of us would have done it if we hadn’t felt like we were all healthy. It was another short period of time where things felt normal, even though they weren’t. 

1. I was gifted a one-on-one with Ben Barnes by @its-my-little-dumpster-fire​. I never thought I’d actually have the chance to speak with him, let alone have FIVE WHOLE MINUTES uninterrupted with him. It was a video chat, but it was head and shoulders more personal and private than speaking with him at a table would have been, and I am forever grateful that she made it happen. I got to ask him some fun questions, made him laugh TWICE, and got a picture “with” him. Now that my nerves are out of the way, when I get to actually meet him in person, I won’t be as anxious.  And, since I’ve never posted the picture here: 

There you go. It was a million and a half degrees in that bedroom, and my time slot was an hour behind and I was so damn nervous, but it was worth every single second, and I won’t forget it (literally, because I recorded the whole ass thing).  I hope that you guys have found things to look back on and be proud of or happy about in 2020. Ideally, I would have gotten a sunburn at a baseball game, or won a bunch of money in Vegas, or gotten to travel and see more places and people. I would have not been out of work for the last 7 months, and feeling really useless a lot of the time. We would have gotten to spend holidays with our families and not lost anyone due to a virus that could have been contained much more effectively than it was. 

But we have to make do with what we’ve got, right? And all things considered, there were a lot of ok moments in 2020. There were some alright moments, too. And there were even a few almost perfect moments.  If you’re still reading - thank you. Thank you for taking the time to interact with me throughout this terrible, unending year. Thank you for being another bright spot - comments and messages and reblogs and art and producing things of your own. Thank you for everything, and I hope that 2021 brings health, happiness and a better time than we all had this year.  Be safe. Take care of each other. Don’t be an unreasonable asshole.  Happy 2021.