Strangely Naked

Goodnight 2016. Sleep tight. I know. I understand. I get that you’re sad about how you’re perceived. Unfortunately, you can’t change other people’s perceptions of you. You can only control how you feel about you. You weren’t all bad, nobody is all bad (except Rupert Murdoch). 2016 was when my own precious daughter was born. There were beautiful things that happened to beautiful people who aren’t me as well.

Sleep well, 2016. You’re not a murderer. I know that. We all know that. A year, an arbitrary marking of the Earth’s rotation around the sun, can’t actively murder beloved celebrities. People acted like you were collecting the souls of the talented and genius alike in order to gain notoriety in a sea of celestial-based rotation marking of arbitrary human affairs. You were a victim of circumstances. It didn’t help that you were also an election year. But, hey, you can’t change American electoral politics. Could you have reversed the rotation of the Earth and started over, leaving all of us with knowledge of the world as it could have been like in the first Superman movie? I don’t know, you could have tried.

Maybe you, 2016, were the victim of a careless time traveler. Perhaps whoever it was who created the Mandela Effect, the time traveling prankster who changed it from Berenstein to Berenstain Bears, didn’t realize the butterfly effect their seemingly arbitrary actions would have. It created a time schism that culminated in 2016, sucking hope and good neighborliness into the abyss of our collective unconscious. Or maybe it was Bill and Ted. There are many time traveling paradoxes that could have caused the bad in 2016.

Or maybe there’s just something in our brains that make it impossible to focus and remember the positive things and instead remain hyper-focused on negativity and reminders of our impending mortality? There are some people who could see beyond the crushing depression of losing beloved public figures and having maligned public figures take positions of powerful leadership (oh god, it’s really happening), like this person who made a happy list worth perusing.

If it’s any consolation, 2016, people have a tendency to have a short memory and want to believe that whatever time they are in is the most dire and that the apocalypse is right around the corner. So, whatever horrors visited upon us in 2016, people are bound to think 2017 is worse. Hooray?

Speaking of which–Welcome, 2017! You apparently have a low bar but high expectations. All I can do is warn you that people have woefully misplaced accountability perceptions. I pledge to you that at least a few of us are exhausted by the meme of blaming a year for arbitrary happenstances, and will try to disassociate time markings with extraordinary events. You’ve got a lot going against you already. Good luck, you’re going to need it.

To those actual people reading this and not personifications of year, Happy New Year.