the plight of 2021

Anyone else feeling themself walking the line of imminent dissociative fugue? No allowances for pleasure or reflection, at least not without a PCR test. just panic, survival, crisis, work, night terrors, work, hamster wheel, and feeling nostalgic about each and every one of my ex boyfriends. A year where being mindful feels uncomfortable and boring at best and looking ahead is met with the wrong kind of uncertainty, so instead I've been doing a lot of looking back. 

And as with most times I've found myself moody as well as in keeping with the world's current state of omicronion affairs, I too am presently suffering an outbreak of my own, that gift of herpes that keeps on giving in my right nostril. 'Tis the season.

Last time I was here I was considering the tactic of manifesting love. This was the GenZ inspired advice that I've since learned doesn't actually work. Will revert back to the millennial/GenX persuasion that you get it when you're not trying, because actually since manifesting, my love life has never been more shambolic! but other than failing in love and watching the pores on my face progressively expand in size to the wormhole of infinite possibility, here's what's been going on in 2020 and 2021. 

On the final night of freedom before lockdown 1.0, March 2020 when London was voraciously getting their last social pint in at the pub, I quietly picked up my dry cleaning as well as my seeing glasses which I had left in the uber a few days before. The uber driver and I met in a dark alley near the camden roundhouse on a foggy night and he handed them over to me in a plastic baggy. It was a covert assignment, like a drug deal only for Linda Farrow opticals. I then picked up two cans of beans because... ...toilet paper hoarders!!, and went to bed. I have thought a lot about doom and what this behaviour says about me on the eve of the final hurrah. I have reached the conclusion I am a highly practical introvert who may also be pathologically boring.

Bumped into the very attractive neighbour who also lives in the penthouse of my apartment building  and could have  been the perfect lockdown lover. I was taking out the trash and wearing my hair shaped like a pineapple and sweatpants with socks AND birkenstocks, which he commented on. That was the beginning and end of that. 

I'm an organized person so lumped all the dating apps into a single folder on my iphone called 'fuck my life'. I then deleted them all. Then I redownloaded them again. Then deleted them. I need rehab. 

One guy on a second date asked me if I would sign a prenup immediately after learning that my financial situation included owning two (2) shares of pfizer stock and another one (1) in beyond meat. 

During the winter I returned to hospital medicine. In my first week back to feeling very golden for saving lives during a pandemic, rode my bike to the hospital and got pulled over by a copper who slapped me with a 50 quid fine for running a pedestrian(!) red light. This was still zombie apocalypse with ZERO people or cars on the road and i was late for work asadoctorinapandemic. Must have been collections coming to grab back at my karmic debts. Imagine. Cried the whole way to work on the cyclette.

Later that week I got shit on by a bird whilst riding my bike home from the hospital.

My flatmate moved back to the countryside and so I started living alone which was great until I almost died multiple times choking on a shrimp summer roll and then a banana slathered with peanut butter. Had to throw myself over a chair. Which then threw me into existential angst about who and how long it would take for me to be found if i went out like that. Looking for a flatmate who is as skilled a lover as he is the heimlich. 

Googled and read the wikipedia page for identity crisis. Twice. 

The candelit Vivaldi Four Seasons that I watch in a church every christmas season was obviously canceled due to the 'rona but rescheduled for July in the middle of a heatwave when the sun don't set. So that was weird. 

Escaped London lockdown 2.0 by the skin of my teeth, flying to switzerland last christmas to help deliver Roki's baby. Slept in the airport overnight and woken up by a squadron of policemen wondering if I was fugitive or homeless, staring down at me and my possessions on the floor, demanding proof of identity. But all's well that ends well and whilst i spent the holidays in quarantine (but not jail!), Roks slid meals under the door, inclusive of my favorite champagne, gifted me a gorgeous leather bag (which I would later spill fish sauce into on my way to work), and graced me with the honour of welcoming her third bebé into the world. This was the highlight of 2020.  The second was being on top an empty St Moritz with my snowboard.

Caught the mouse that had been freestyling in my living room for the better part of 2020/21. Realized this when i came back from switzerland and my heater was broken. Electrician came round and pulled the sofa back...

"ughhh miss, you know you have a mousetrap back here?"

"oh yea just kick it aside"

"ok but there's a dead mouse in it and it's decomposing"

I became obsessive about cleaning my own apartment. Have you ever accidentally tipped over the toilet brush to spill poo water all over the tile? Me neither. shit. 

I became bored and lonely and so started filling my brain with garbage television like Selling Sunset which for lack of my own personal life, became so emotionally entwined with that I cried genuine tears on at least one episode. I hate myself.

Found a zucchini in my takeout burrito, confirming my longstanding evidence-based belief that england doesn't know mexican food and Deliveroo and UberEats cyclists in london are the biggest pillocks on the planet. can i get an amen. 

Got the gift of UTI for my birthday whilst on holiday in Greece which resulted in pill popping antibiotics and swirling D-Mannose martinis rather than something more pleasantly intoxicating. 

In the autumn, began receiving quotes for funeral plans in my email inbox. 

But the best bit of 2021 was finally getting to go home to California and see my loved ones, where there is so much endemic plastic surgery that when I told a man my boobs were real but the smile was fake, he asked if I'd had my lips done. 

Goodbye 2021, we had great expectations for you after 2020 but you remained firm on your pillage for good times. I'll be spending Christmas in isolation no doubt with chinese takeout and my friends and family from reality TV. Cheers to you, 2022.

reminder to not stay in your wet bikini this christmas