Happy New Year, everybody! God, I hope it’s better than the last one. And the one before that… and like the four preceding that one. Remember when we just had to worry about the world ending in 2012? That was nice, huh?
ANYWAY. Because it’s the new year, the ever-lovely Miss Pearl, of omisspearl.com, put out a tweet where she was kindly assigning (NOT demanding!) New Year’s resolutions to people. I made a little tweet saying how lovely an idea it was (which is true) and received the following:
As you could probably tell, I’ve been a little short on blog ideas recently – so the idea of doing just a little writing each day instead of one big post every week or so seemed like it would work excellently for me! I checked in with my owner, Mistress Charlotte, naturally – can’t just have me exercising free will, now – and with her permission, I started writing, uh, this post you’re reading now.
With all that out of the way, it’s time to get to the actual body of the post! Except, well, I still have no idea what I’m going to write about. I guess I could start with… ooh, how about I muse somewhat depressingly about the state of everything!
I think I’ve mentioned this in a tweet, but i just keep seeing more and more people feeling scared, or worried, or otherwise just despairing at the condition the world currently finds itself in. I’m fortunate enough to be in a country that’s not really been that terribly afflicted by COVID-19 (in comparison), and even I am starting to feel it somewhat. Moving to a bigger city hasn’t really helped in that respect – where my feelings were once “well, we’re in a tiny town in a sparsely populated region of the country, how likely is it really that I’ll get it?” they’ve since shifted to “OK, I’m in the city now, but there still aren’t any cases here, so in theory I’ve got nothing to worry about”.
In recent weeks, that’s become “well, they’ve registered a supermarket as a place of interest, but at least it’s not the one I go to”. It just seems inevitable at this point, that sooner or later, vaxxed or not, we’ll all get it. And that scares the shit out of me – not for myself, but for my family. My parents aren’t OLD, and they’re reasonably healthy, so they’d probably be alright – but one of my sisters has cystic fibrosis AND a lung transplant. She’s about as immuno-compromised as it gets. If she gets it…
We are living in pretty unprecedented times, I feel. I remember thinking earlier on in the pandemic that I was reminded of the SARS outbreak back in back in ~2003 – how serious it felt at the time, even to a little kid.
I was shocked when I looked up the numbers and saw that only around 8000 people contracted it, and less than 800 died. COVID had massively dwarfed that even back then – now it’s just too huge to even contemplate. More people have died across the world than the population of my entire country – it’s fucking terrifying.
And, frankly, I don’t know what to say to make that better. And that sucks! I wish I did – God, I wish I did. I would spend all day telling it to anyone, everyone, if I could. I’d love to just be able to say “hey, it’s OK, things will get better!” Because, the thing is – I’m certain they will. CERTAIN. They have to. But it’s hard to say that to someone and have them believe it, given, uh, *gestures at the past two years*. But we’ll adjust, and we’ll adapt. This isn’t the “new normal” – NOTHING about this is normal, none of it should EVER be normal. But we can’t change the past. We can only go forward, and do our best to make sure things improve.
The point I started out trying to make here, is that I see a lot of people scared and frightened, and I usually don’t know what I can do about it. And that’s frustrating! The normal platitudes, while I’m sure they’re appreciated on some level, can only go so far. So, from now on, I’ve decided that I’ll be doing all I can to help people, if they want it. If there’s something I can help you with from here, please let me know. If you ever need somebody to talk to, vent at, even just a void to scream into for a while – my DMs are always open. I’m told I’m a pretty good listener – or, uh, message-reader, in this case – and I’ve got PLENTY of cute cat photos to send your way if need be.
And I think that puts me at around 30 minutes! (Maybe? I got a little distracted in the middle there and lost track of time, oops)
I assume Miss Pearl intended that as more of a minimum than a maximum – but I kinda like having a bit of a time limit, try and get some thoughts down without rambling on TOO much.
Service and Sluttery 