2020 in 10 brilliantly ambiguous popular phrases
COVIDO, ergo Zoom.
Remember all those people who made New Year’s resolutions and celebrated 2020 as “their best year ever finally”? Then 3 months later, we all know what happened — the world went into a global lockdown due to the COVID19 pandemic and 2020 has put its mark on everything. So those same people started looking forward to its end. Well… it’s coming, but who told you it all ends with 2020?
In any case, 2020 provided us with plenty of food for thought in the world’s biggest home-staying. Some ingeniously ambiguous popular phrases started popping up here and there. Here are my top 10 (in no particular order):
I hope this email finds you well!
Well… It finds me in a pantless outfit, sitting in a semi-lotus on my bed in front of a laptop with a camera protection cover, near a glass of wine and a pack of chips, jumping between Zoom calls and Teams calls, chasing a stable Internet connection the way pre-COVID self-proclaimed adventurers travelled around in a pretentious chase of sunsets. I guess it finds me well (given all the alternatives of 2020).
I wish you and your family are staying healthy and safe!
Your wishes for the health and safety of me and my family would be heart-touching if only this sweetened opening was not followed by a brutal “important urgent” to-do list for the day, containing 20+ items of time-consuming useless insignificant tasks. Now I start wondering whether your wish is not directed toward my mental health most of all.
This is the new normal!
This “new normal” is nothing new anymore, let alone normal. I feel like I have spent a whole year in pyjamas, supposedly working from home but rather living in a workplace. If there was ever a boundary between work and personal life, it all feels now like a limbo between the anxiety of unanswered calls and emails from dawn till dusk and the big fat procrastination taking all kinds of shapes from cooking a delicious homemade Paella Valenciana for three hours to ordering my socks according to colour shades. Yes, I find this new and pretty normal indeed.
Excuse the background noise.
(of screaming toddlers, barking dogs, meowing cats, and neighbours drilling the walls). You are certainly excused, dear, as we all know how this feels now. Finally, empathy prevails!
You are on mute.
Can you hear me? You froze for a moment. You are breaking up. The connection is really bad. You are on mute... Aren’t we all on mute (in so many ways)? This phenomenon of a broken connection due to technological obstacles seems like the perfect metaphor for the general state of communication in our world. If we think of all the half-truths and outright lies we are used to saying and hearing daily, no surprise the connection is falling apart. To truly unmute ourselves we might need to learn how to speak our truth only!
Wear a mask!
As if we are not wearing so many masks already? Isn’t it funny how 4–5 years ago we were all busy in Europe debating the rights of Muslim women to cover their faces, introducing laws to ban that or protesting to defend that right? Now all of a sudden we are all face-covered and (in some cases) feeling safe and pleased about it. Holy irony!
Stay home! Save lives!
Heroes! That’s what we are. Staying home, clapping occasionally on our balconies, oversharing dumb videos of our “exciting” home-staying life on social media and feeling proud of serving our countries, fulfilling our duties to society, and contributing for the common good. Germans even went that far into creating a promotional video praising couch potatoes as heroes. I cannot resist the temptation of seriously doubting those new values suspiciously resembling some old-school propaganda of times passed not so long ago.
I can’t breathe!
2020 is the year in which breathing became such a big deal in so many ways from the severe acute respiratory syndrome SARS-CoV-2 flying in the air (instead of us flying in planes) to George Floyd’s last plea “I can’t breathe”. If you can breathe now, that’s huge!
Vote!
For all non-US citizens out there in the world showered generously with memes, pics, tweets, stories and so on in social media, begging them to vote, it felt like promoting chicken wings to vegetarians. Nevertheless, voting is important! I admit that we (from the rest of the non-US world) watched the US Presidential elections with almost the same excitement as we usually watch the FIFA World Cup. The only difference is that it is hard to tell who and what won or lost.
In these strange times…
Welcome to the Age of the Aquarius! As the world is slowly and steadily entering the rulership of Uranus, strangeness, sudden unexpected changes, massive disruptions and unrest are becoming more and more evident. You don’t need to believe in Astrology to notice that nothing is under control. However, if you do believe in Astrology, it all makes sense now.
Corona, COVID19, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus SARS-CoV-1 or just the Virus, there is now a before and after in this whole thing. As we are getting close to making it in whatever happened between 2019 BC (before Coronavirus) and 2021 AC (after Coronavirus), let me finish with a famous quote allowing free interpretation: STOP THE COUNT!
