Like every year, 2021 had ups and downs on a personal level, though this year the personal downs have outweighed the ups for the first time in a while, as my relationship ended. Globally, it's been just the latest tough year for everybody, a streak that began in 2016 with the great celebrity die-off and continued through Donald Trump's election, something that affected how things have gone this year.
On the writing side, my fiction suffered a bit, as the second year of lockdown meant more mental stress and fewer ideas overall. I tried to write a cyberpunk short story, but fell afoul of the rule Lavie Tidhar once gave me for writing steampunk, which is that it should be about more than its genre. I think I have the atmosphere almost right, but I need more compelling characters and a better plot. Still, some of it's percolating and elements will likely come out at the right time.
More positively, I was pleased with the work I did throughout the year on my other blog, where I did a round-up of mobile plans aimed at seniors, students and children throughout the US and Western Europe. They weren't always easy to pull together, but at least each month I knew what to work on, and in the end I think I created a body of work that no other analyst has collected and compared. And it was just fun to use my various language skills to do the kind of mobile industry research I enjoyed in 2012-13.
The other writing positive is that I started work on a new novel idea. It was partly inspired by my character in the Dungeons & Dragons game I've been playing this year, and I spent part of the year working on background and worldbuilding for it. I started writing it in earnest in November, when I took part in my first NaNoWriMo, which was unexpectedly fun.
Speaking of D&D, that almost-weekly game was a good anchor for the year, as it became my primary vessel for seeing my friends, even if it was only through a computer screen. I've slowly started seeing them in person again for outdoor walks, but D&D turned out to be a fun activity to keep connected to my main social circle.
Fitness-wise, things were made difficult by the ongoing pandemic and another summer of heat and unhealthy air. The pandemic means I'm not going to the gym, especially to breathe hard on a treadmill or elliptical, but when smoke from our now-annual wildfires blankets the Bay Area, I can't run outside. I still managed some regular workouts, and even started seeing a personal trainer again (virtually), but I'm really looking forward to the day when I can go back to the gym with confidence, or at least when I can buy my own damn treadmill.
My biggest piece of good news was that I managed to find a new job. I'd been trying since January 2020, but the pandemic stopped that fairly quickly, but I set myself the goal of sending out a certain number of applications, and got to work for the first six months of the year. Ironically, the interviews I got were based on applications I sent out last year, which were only now being followed up.
The timing was also good, because the day before I received the job offer that I ended up accepting, my previous company announced that we'd be expected to go into the office for team meetings, which was awkward for me as my team was in Arizona. Being on Zoom in the Los Altos office would be okay, but being on Zoom at home would not. I gave my notice the following day.
Two other thoughts from that whole experience. The first is relief that I left when I did, because I recently learned that the project I'd been working on was pulled. I don't know where I'd have ended up if I'd still been there, so I'm glad I'd left. The other thought is more of a rule for life going forward: never have your last day on a job be the last day of the month, because your health insurance coverage ends the month you leave. I managed to give my notice on 1 July, which meant I was covered throughout my whole 18-day between-jobs period.
At a global level, the pandemic slightly faded into the background, though it was always there to remind us that we're still very much in it. One reason for the fading was positive, as the vaccine rollout took on speed, and I got jabbed in May (and boosted this month). They may not confer 100% protection, but as another layer of protection on top of masking and social distancing, they helped lower deaths and hospitalizations, at least in some places and for a while. More negatively, we've seen the drawback of our inequitable system of distributing vaccines, as two terrible variants, Delta and Omicron, arose in India and South Africa, respectively - taking advantage of large pools of unvaccinated people there to develop.
The other thing that put the pandemic on the back burner was way more frightening, as a mob of right-wing extremists stormed the US Capitol on 6 January to stop Joe Biden being certified as president and keep Donald Trump in office. We've seen the effects of right-wing violence resonating throughout the year, from that and from violence at some BLM protests last year, and the atmosphere just grows more and more worrying. Mass shootings are back up in 2021, after last year's lockdowns meant people weren't congregating in places, and far-right extremists are just elevating the tensions further by making more explicit threats against lawmakers they don't like - sometimes lawmakers themselves are threatening their colleagues.
To add to the instability, Republicans are making moves that will make it easier for them to steal the next presidential election. The media's focus has been on voting laws in places like Georgia, where the accusation is that voters of color will find it harder to vote in coming years, but the GOP has also quietly been shifting election officials in various battleground states, who are expected to be more tolerant of shenanigans than the officials in place in 2020.
All of these steps, and the simple demographic sorting of Democrats into urban areas and Republicans into thinly populated rural areas, are setting the stage for Republican minority rule for years to come. That'll mean more regressive laws like Texas's SB 8 abortion law, but my other big worry is that laws like that will be used to weaken laws in progressive states - our governor in California, Gavin Newsom, says he wants to use SB 8's model to sue gunmakers, but I also see a danger in right-wing judges striking down our own gun, environmental and labor protections.
The cherry on top has been the political polarization of the pandemic, which started last year with protests against lockdowns and mask mandates, but gained a new battleground with the vaccines. Many of the same people parroting the big lie that Trump won the election are also pushing the idea that the vaccines are dangerous, sometimes in very cynical ways (see any Fox News host, where vaccinations are apparently mandatory and well taken-up). On the fringes, but dangerously close to the mainstream thanks to social media, are people claiming that the vaccines are a plot to depopulate the world.
To sum up, I had a couple of good wins this year, but a couple of big losses, and weighing on all of it is the uncertainty of what's happening in the world around me. I'm lucky to live in an area that's both responsible with regard to pandemic precautions, and is seeing lower numbers, but other parts of America (and California in particular) aren't so lucky. I see the pandemic continuing for another year, if we go by the length of the 1918 flu pandemic, but I also expect that the polarization and misinformation on vaccines will mean we have to get boosters for the next few years, which will suck.
Unfortunately, next year will see a midterm election, and the forecasts are already negative for the Democrats, so we can expect gridlock and hateful right-wing rhetoric to ramp up. So unfortunately, I don't think we're going to see a good year for some time to come.
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