2020’s great. It really is. Imagine something being so bad that it gets funny. It’s not the fact that it was a bad year, but how it just progressively got worse that amuses me. The decade ended with a blast- literally, as half of Australia was burning down.

 January began quietly but snuck up on you like a math test. Australia continued to burn down and we were all laughing, thinking, let’s get the worst of it over with. But of course, locusts swarmed and claimed dominance over all of Africa. On the other hand, we were all trying to dodge the draft for a minuscule event know as the threat of a 3rd World War.

February pulled a sneaky on us- in fact, try to think of one single thing that happened in February. You can’t, can you? At the same time, we were all laughing about something weird named after a beer. I think it was the coronavirus? Remember joking about school being canceled over it? 

Well, for some reason, March thought we were serious. On March 13, we were all excited about that extended spring break. I walked out of my math class and told my teacher, “See you in April!” And we laughed. The audacity we had to laugh. Everything got canceled and we were powerless. First, it was prom, but soon enough sports and events were goners too.

 I think April was sent here to teach us a lesson for hurting March’s feelings. March gave us two weeks off and she was offended by our callousness in the face of the global pandemic she had worked so hard to bring us. So April was called over to take revenge. Together, they conspired to punish us with the power of exponential growth. Cases got so high that we were locked into our homes. Some of our more right-wing citizens might describe it as a strip of their freedoms and denial of basic human rights, but the boomer-remover queen, Ms. Rona, took care of those people real quick. Remember when we were all planning to meet each other over break? Nope. Ah, the disaster that Zoom was in April; changing your name to “Reconnecting” and playing the old Wi-Fi cut out the trick was all we had after we lost privileges of seeing our friends, teachers, classmates, and basically all human interaction. 

But there was something we had all forgotten about: AP Exams. And that’s where May came in. Collegeboard managed to screw up AP exams so bad it made the US government look like a government that managed a pandemic well. Yeah, they made OUR government look good. That’s hard to do. Of course, they shortened tests so that we had no idea which topics we would be tested on. But that’s not the worst of it. Imagine studying all year and getting hit with a “could not submit on time lmfao loser.” It’s like they were trying to steal our money and hide behind the title of a nonprofit while actually being a corporation with billions of dollars of revenue and profits. Oh, wait. Well anyway, after that fiasco they got hit with the one thing Americans love to do the most. Yep, they got sued by students. Fairy comments quickly became much more serious. I mean, they did come up with some alternatives to retake the test in June but that’s BS. 

June came in with a bang. Apparently, racism rates dropped to zero after celebrities posted black squares on Instagram. On top of that, cases were spiking while rednecks decided that this was the perfect month to start traveling again.

Then the freaking bubonic plague sparked up in July. A 1000-year-old plague deciding it was still relevant. I think the gods decided to cut us a break, so luckily those just turned out to be rumors. But who even knows anymore? Kim Jong Un literally decided to fake his death and watch western propaganda freak out over it while he laughed, sipping a cold one and noting the traitors in his country, chilling in his basement.

Remember August? No, not the Taylor Swift song- back to school month. Well, more like burn down the entire state month. Wildfires literally burnt down half of California as a couple decided the perfect way to announce their baby’s gender was to release a smoke bomb in a forest. The sky was literally apocalyptic yellow with ashes falling from the sky and we felt like it was the end of the world. 

September came in and we were ready to pick up our bags and get back to school. NOPE. The FUSD decided to switch classes to being online “Online for an indefinite time”- probably because the other districts were doing the same thing. I never thought I would wish for less time in front of my computer but there, I said it. 

Spooktober rolls in and somehow, it gets worse. Trump gets the virus and we don’t know if we can say “Told ya so”. Halloween, fortunately, does happen, although with much less grandeur. Awkward groups with 2-3 people trick or treat and you would see that occasional loner on a mission to get as many sweets as possible. Political commentary intensifies as the race to 270 begins. 

November stops by for a hot minute as the election day turns into an election week. With Nevada competing with Pennsylvania and Georgia to see who can count votes slower, I think that the names of those “swing counties” are burned into my brain permanently. I never want to hear the words “Maricopa country” again. Trump goes back into tantrum mode, and his troompa loompas follow suit, blindly parroting whatever Orangutan Orange-man tweets. Biden wins and we see a small ray of light. Turns out it’s just the glint of the teeth of God as he laughs hysterically and throws December upon us. 

Cases, cases, cases. California is literally dying. Winter break rolls around and disabling School Loop does nothing as we all use online grade calculators to see if our GPA can take a hit. 2021 is here. So what will happen? Do we get a break or is part 2 of 2020 just beginning after the intermission that was winter break?