Tuesday evening. Talk about lame anniversaries, eh?

Two-hundred days… What an unimaginably long stretch of time. Long enough to make a premature but viable baby. If you live to be 80, that’s 29,220 days (mind the leap years), which means 200 days is almost 1% of your total lifespan, including the early childhood years that nobody remembers. What’s worse is that we’re all pretty much guaranteed to go through another 150-200 days until vaccines start getting distributed. (I’m sure the wealthy and the celebrities will get them first.) So there goes another percent of your life.

What a shitty, truly shitty and irredeemable year this is.

More long days at work. It’s seasonal, sort of, since things heat up when you plan for a new quarter. I’ll most likely end up having to pull a work-related all-nighter tomorrow. Oy vey.

Long hours lead to poor diet and more stress, which leads to more therapeutic wine, all of which leads to zero time or inclination left to exercise. Excuses, I know…

Purely biologically, I know my body will survive just fine for another 200 days, and another 200, and 200 after that, etc. I’m not as down as all the extroverts who (perhaps for the first time in their lives) are devoid of company and people to socialize with. I know there are others who have legitimate problems and issues, and need far more help than I ever will. Nonetheless, I know I’m well below my baseline. I’m not so naive as to believe things will magically get better on January 1 (and I suspect many people do, in fact, believe that) – I’m in it for the long haul. Still, I’m not at all sure what kind of person I will be by the time I get my magic vaccine shot. I know for a fact that I’ll be much hairier, and hopefully in better physical shape, and rocking an awesome hermit beard, but beyond mere physical characteristics… It’s anyone’s bet.

Tonight is the first presidential debate in the US. It starts in a few minutes. Part of me wants to watch it, if only out of habit and because my degree is, after all, in political science. The rest – and most – of me is going to deliberately not watch it. No social media, no blogs, just some book or a TV show. It hurts to disentangle myself from yet another country (first Russia, and now the US) but that’s necessary. If I recall correctly, the first two years are the hardest, before you truly begin to adjust to your new country and comprehend that the past is behind you…

In covid news, a 42-year-old man in Maryland kept throwing parties, and now he’ll spend a year in jail. This is an unusual case, but the circumstances were just as unusual. Evidently, he didn’t even cancel off the second party the police got called for. (It had over 50 people.) Blatant disregard for rules means actual jail time and national headlines, since this is the first time a state actually threw the book at someone. There’s a fair chance that he’ll appeal and end up serving far less time, but still – this is an important change in tone. I expect there to be more arrests for those who deliberately ignore public safety guidelines. Other things will change too. I’m not sure whether here in Canada we’ll ever get to the point of awarding bounties for those who report a car with US license plates, but I’ve seen multiple people call for that online.

I have a hunch that just three months from now, at the very end of the year, the world will have changed more than we can possibly imagine.