Your Last Year on Earth

Today’s prompt: “Your last year on Earth”

Okay, I’m looking at the Wikipedia page for 2021, and maybe let’s ignore a lot of the stuff that was going on in the news because a lot of it was super depressing (I’m looking at you, January 6, but also there’s a lot of COVID deaths and a surprising number of military coups abroad). Except for the stuff that was going on in space. That was pretty cool. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission landed at Jezero Crater, bringing with it the Ingenuity helicopter, which performed the first powered flight on another planet. Plus the Juno spacecraft did a flyby of Ganymede, the first time that’s happened in 20 years. Plus NASA launched Lucy, which is going to explore the Trojan asteroids. Plus SpaceX and Blue Origin did some stuff, but maybe let’s forget about that because billionaires using their money to have a dick-measuring contest around who gets to go to space first makes me depressed again. Other nations did cool space shit too – China started its own space station, and the UAE launched the first Arabian mission to orbit Mars. Also, apparently the first transplant of both arms and shoulders happened in Lyon, France, in January, so that’s neat. Good job, science. Good job, medicine.

So let’s focus on what your year was like. You got super into TikTok. You got super into Squid Game. You discovered a new dry rub recipe you really like. That was fun! What else, what else…. Oh, you became the first casualty of the Omicron variant in your home country. Man, now I’m bummed out again.