New year, new me...?
2020. Where do we even start?
For Dungeons & Dragons nerds like me, a natural 20 (rolled on a twenty-sided die) means critical success. Accomplishment with flourish. It’s like having your teacher forgo finals and finding out that on the last day of class, you’ll be watching a movie.
Two natural 20s in a row? On dice, that’s a 1 in 400 chance. Like finding out that that movie is Shrek and your teacher plans on bringing donuts.
Two natural 20s in a row - there’s a 0.25% chance for that. Statistically-speaking, a person is more likely to score between 1400 and 1600 on the SAT. And truly, 2020 was improbable to say the least, though hopefully much rarer than 1 in 400.
Last New Year’s, enthused by the period of promise and possibility, I looked forward. I thought about where I wanted to be 12 months later, what things I wanted to change. Like many people, I made resolutions: Spend more time with friends. Relish my second-to-last year of cross-country and track. ONE MORE THAT IS NERDY AND FUN.
Rarely do things go according to plan, but when have they ever gone so awry?
“In 2020, I strived to do better. Going into 2021, my goal is to try not to let the world get worse,” says Eagle Rock 7th grader Mason Calderon. “As we’ve seen, it can get worse. It can get a lot worse.”
Indeed, this year, we took a collective bite into the proverbial Chocolate Chip Cookie of Life, only to discover that it was not a chocolate chip cookie at all, but a pathetic oatmeal raisin. And then, upon swallowing our first sad bite of deceitful dessert, we unearthed a grave allergy to all things oatmeal. And raisin.
Hindsight sure is 20-20.
Though junior Velouria Perez doesn’t set official resolutions each year, she did have ideas she wanted to keep in mind heading into her second-to-last year at Eagle Rock. Much of her friend group enjoyed spending time together at the Glendale Galleria, and she wanted to find more time to embrace that aspect of her life.
“I told myself I was going to be better about work habits, to be better about making time for myself to hang out with friends,” Perez says. “Well, that got thwarted.”
Not only is it physically impossible for her friends to gather in-person, but for Perez, as for so many students, work habits suffered in the transition to online-learning. “Work work work, sleep. Work work work, sleep. That has pretty much been quarantine for me,” she says.
The pattern of desk-to-bed migration is a familiar one. The predatory Schoology consumes what could be an abundance of free time, and interpersonal connections fall prey to the carnivorous Zoom.
Looking ahead, Perez plans on reusing those same resolutions in 2021. She says that even just calling a friend on the phone or trying to engage in digital activities with friends will help keep her laptop from siphoning off her spare time.
Perez has plenty of company in her desire to create space to relax. “Going into 2020, I determined I’d carve out space in my every day to read 15 pages of literature for me, not for work,” says Belinda Ortiz, ERHS 9th grade and DP English teacher. “My logic was that this habit would yield 100 pages a week, 400 a month, 12 + books a year. The end of winter break 2019-2020 provided me ample time to get a good start, but as the Spring semester picked up speed, my reading came to a screeching halt.”