Things I Hate: 2016 Edition

This is the rare purely autobiographical post, after which we’ll return to your regularly scheduled lack of updates.

If you use the modern Gregorian Calendar, it’s New Year’s Eve, at which time it’s customary to reflect on the year past and make some (traditionally wildly optimistic) plans for the year to come. Why, I’ve never been quite clear on. Some misplaced sense of constancy owing to the fact that Earth has returned to its location of last winter’s solstice, I suppose, though of course in reality I and the sun and just about everything else you can see are cartwheeling around a supermassive black hole at a relative velocity that makes me faintly nauseous if I think about it too hard.

At any rate, 2016 was the year my brother died, the year my grandmother died, the year my cat died, the year I lost two friends far too young. It was a year of heartache and depression and opportunities lost, of potential as yet unrealized and potential that now never will be. This year has tested, more than any before, the conviction of my belief in a chaotic and uncaring universe. Also, we finally voted a literal hairpiece into the White House.

Well, I made it through this year, and if anything out there bigger than a supermassive black hole wants to take me on, bring it, because I’m gonna make it through next year too.

Fuck you, 2016.