Time After Time

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This month 6 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.


My “Secret Subject” is:

It’s January 1, 2021. How do you see 2021 playing out?

It was submitted by: https://crazymamallama.blogspot.com/

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Time is a construct.

I mean, sure, we age. We have sunrises and sunsets and calendar years to mark our trips around the sun, but we also arbitrarily change the time twice a year in most of the United States to fit old farming and harvest needs, so time is not really an unmalleable fixture.

We get lost in 8 hour work days and fixed holidays and 7 a.m. alarms, school bells, deadlines, punching in and punching out, and begging for any scrap of life unhindered by the clock. We live on borrowed time and someone else's time and at some point a clock or a day of the week or the marking of a brand new year starts holding far more significance as a symbol than it does as reality.

I'm not really a new year, new me person. I don't like to set myself up for absolute failure.

January 1st isn't going to magically change anything for me. My chronic illness isn't going away. I won't wake up with a new body or a brain that will suddenly be better at handling all the things my body can no longer do. I won't wake up to better behaved cats who don't pee on the stove the night before Thanksgiving leaving me to not discover it until it is much too late. Yes, yes I mean I burned cat pee on Thanksgiving. My financial situation isn't likely to change for awhile if ever. None of the things that have made my life more difficult in the day to day is going to change once I wake up on January 1st far earlier than I'd like because dogs have to be walked and the vacuuming needs doing.

Are there going to be improvements? Maybe? We elected someone who isnt trump. I mean , there's that. But, at *best* we prolong our descent into fascism until someone better at it than Trump comes along and woos enough people. Frankly, Biden is far too little too late to stop that train from rolling. He has no plans on investigating Trump. He's our modern Gerald Ford who we remember for what besides pardoning Nixon? I won't suddenly get healthcare or the ability to buy weed legally or be less afraid for myself, my genderqueer kid, or any of the friends I have in marginalized communities. We won't be able to quit saying the names of people killed by police as Biden prepares to funnel more money into policing. Kids will still be in cages. All the unbearable parts of being American will still be there and unfortunately will be even less talked about just like under Obama.

We will still be living in a pandemic. Vaccines aren't going to be widely available for some time and who knows if they'll be affordable even then. I haven't left my house for most of 2020, and I still won't be able to on January 1st and probably for much of 2021. My immune system is compromised, and no one gives a shit enough about their loved ones not to gather and spread death much less about strangers with shitty immune systems. I'm stuck here for the foreseeable future.

If I hear one more healthy person tell me I'm being too cautious when my kid has no other parent if I catch it and die, I'm going to fucking explode.

What I'm trying to say is 2021 is going to be the same as 2020 but without the stress of an election year. It'll be stress over a president who won't get anything done or can't. It will be stress over a conservative Supreme Court and career politicians that should have been drug out in the street ages ago and if not 5 years ago then definitely when they abandoned us in a pandemic to play head games with each other while we starved and died as sacrifices to the only Gods allowed in this country--capitalism and money. (And of course the minor god of internet clout). 2021 will be all the same problems I had in 2020. I'll be living in struggle and trying my best to find happiness and peace in the little things.

I am a roll with the punches kind of person, but it's good to be able to predict most of the punches as they come, so I cant pretend anything about the coming year is going to drastically change, and that's ok? Maybe? I honestly don't know. It's been a rough one, but I've made it this far so fingers crossed I can hold on for longer. It's fine to live for those little things and little moments...because I'm the only one that can get the dogs to take their meds without a fight and knows that my kid's favorite color is pink. I have to finish reading Discworld and finish painting the halloween mural in my kitchen. I have an album I pre-ordered coming, and I kinda want to see if David Lynch actually is doing a series for Netflix. I can't do those things if I'm not here...and when those projects are done there will, hopefully, be more. Hopefully there will always be more.


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Here are links to all the sites now featuring Secret Subject Swap posts. Sit back, grab a cup, and check them all out. See you there:


Baking In A Tornado https://www.bakinginatornado.com/2020/12/ghostless-secret-subject-swap.html


Wandering Web Designer https://wanderingwebdesigner.com/blog


A ‘lil HooHaa  https://hoohaa.com/?p=15131

Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.com/2020/12/secret-subject-swap-scariest-thing.html

The Crazy Mama Llama https://crazymamallama.blogspot.com/