20 things in 2020

As the year comes to an end and I run out of pages to write on my little journal, it seemed like coming back here would be a good idea. I remembered how much fun I used to have while blogging and writing down my really loud thoughts in a space that belonged to just me – and not some big tech corp spamming users with targeted ads and infinite scroll.

In the middle of the night, things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing–the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame or woe. But all, good or bad, give me food for thought, food to grow on.

May Sarton

The 15 minutes I spent taking that silly photo and adding it to the watercolour for a ‘featured image’ in a 2009-blogosphere vibe were probably the longest period of time in which I exercised my creativity in 2020. Creating anything requires something I’ve been hell-bent on avoiding these last few years, and the reason why I’ve barely shown up here: processing my feelings/life/thoughts into a decent ‘output’ format. Anywho.

I’m gonna skip everything about how challenging 2020 has been (can’t wait to skip from ‘has been’ to ‘was’!!1!) as it isn’t news to anyone. The goal here is to list 20 things from *my* 2020 that have forever marked me somehow – good and bad stuff.

2. Losing 笨笨, aka ‘doggo’ in February.

I flew back home during Carnival and doggo was not so well. She’d been struggling with an ongoing bowel and stomach problem and she was so weak. I remember trying to cheer her up and on the following days she was so much more energetic. I genuinely believed she was getting better. On my last day before flying back to SP, I hugged her and told her, ‘thank you for being the best doggo, the best companion, the best friend a lonely girl like me could ever have growing up. I’ll be back in a week for the Law school graduation ceremony and I’ll see you then.’

She passed a day after I went back to SP. Mum had called the previous night saying doggo wasn’t so well and, once again, rather than praying for her to get better, I just prayed she would be rid of her suffering soon. I don’t know why I do that as I carry that guilt in my heart everyday, thinking I should have at least tried? Hoped? Had faith? she would get better.

I still don’t know how I went to work after hearing the news that she’d passed. Every time I think of her I want to scream and cry an ugly cry so I avoid doing so. Writing this has been the longest I’ve allowed myself to think about her this year. RIP, 笨笨 – 17/02/2007 ~ 28/02/2020.

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3. Getting robbed

I was robbed in front of a metro station at around 7am in SP, a metro station that always has military police patrolling around but was oddly and utterly empty that day. They took the brand new iPhone mum’d given me as a graduation gift and some other stuff.

I was so shook that, after borrowing someone’s phone to call mum to tell her I’d been robbed and not fall for any potentially weird texts/calls from my number, I just went to work HAHA.

Obviously I couldn’t focus and suddenly it dawned on me all my data omg. So I went to the cell carrier, got a new sim card with the same number to block the old one (customer support was ZERO helpful when I tried blocking my #), put it in my old phone, then went home and turned on the ping thingy from stolen iPhones.

At some point during the day I got a ping on the location of my stolen phone and it made me sick to my stomach, seeing it in the middle of an area known for its high drug dealing/crime rate. I started thinking ‘whats the point of knowing where my phone is????? lmao pathetic’, so I set it up to delete everything next time it connected to the internet, removed it from my Apple ID and just wished to not have my data misused.

At night, I got a text message with a link saying my IPHONE BLABLABLA 256GB had been found, click here!!! And the link lead to a page that looked exactly like Apple’s iCloud. Halfway through typing my email to “login” I realised it was a phishing attempt and felt nauseous again. I spoke to a friend afterwards and she said she’d fallen for the phishing when she had her phone taken, and that the guy who took it wreaked havoc in her life for a bit. At that moment, I just hoped they would sell my phone and be done with me.

Writing this here as a warning to whomever reads it. If you have your phone stolen, report the IMEI to the police and let go of the rest.

4. Parasite winning a gazillion Oscars, I cried so hard sdlfkjghslfdkgjhsldfkjgh

5. My Law school graduation ceremony

First, there was a mass and I had to walk into a church wearing a white dress. LOL.

I felt like a little princess, wearing one of my mum’s dressess!

There was a moment during the mass as that nobody had warned me about in which students would be given a rose be told to give it to their parents. My mum’s not a catholic/christian so she didn’t go. I went to the mass to honour my dad. When I saw everyone getting up and hugging their parents I started panicking and crying, holding the rose I was given, no idea what to do. I’ll forever be grateful for my ex (who also graduated with me) seeing the despair on my face, taking me by the hand and bringing me to his parents, and for his mum, hugging me and telling me my grandparents were just in the back of the church. So. Much. Crying.

On the following night there was the whole cap-and-gown thing, surrounded by all my best friends and closest family members. I’m so grateful for everyone.

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7. Moving back home.

In March, came the pandemic. Everyone I know and I were already expecting it to be a shitshow considering the current government in Brazil. However, none of us were ready for a whole year of self-isolation in order to protect everyone who can’t stay at home and has no support from the government.

My company sent everyone to work from home mid-March and on the weekend some friends and I drove from SP back to our hometown.

I packed a tiny carry-on as I could barely grasp what was happening, had no idea how bad things would have gotten, my one comparison was China, where my friends locked down for 2 months then life kinda went back to normal.

In August, I drove back to SP and cleaned out the apartment I’d barely gotten to enjoy. Everything I had, back to mum’s. Sometimes I think of the girl moving to SP in August/2019 and I feel as though I’m watching a movie about someone else entirely. Everything from before the pandemic feels like a really distant, blurry reality.

Moving back home has its perks and I’m beyond grateful I had the option to come here and be with my family, the fluffy ones and a garden during these challenging times.

8. The cobra that bit a 22yo vet student in Brasília and led to a huge investigation on illegal international wildlife trade

A 22year-old vet student was bit by a cobra he’d illegally acquired in Brasilia. Since it is not a Brazilian native, its anti-venom had to be flown in from São Paulo to Brasilia. The bite raised suspicions, the vet student tried to hide the cobra somewhere near a mall (??????), the whole case led to a massive investigation on illegal exotic wildlife trade in Brasilia. The vet student had the support of his parents on his ~entrepreneurial~ endeavours and everyone received massive fines.

Keeping up with the news that followed the bite was rather entertaining and a welcome break from all the Covid-19 and endless corruption scandals headlines that dominated Brazil this year.

A national heroine:

Screenshots from this article on The News and this article on The Brazilian Report.

9. Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Thanks, ACNH, for soothing my anxious little soul at beginning of the pandemic. When I started self-isolating, I had barely processed anything of what was happening and just threw myself onto several distractions, ACNH included.

The friends I made on ACNH twitter, all of our playing sessions and chats on my discord server helped me get through the first few months and by the time I realised it, I wasn’t that anxious about the pandemic/everything anymore – mostly because it’d been months of self-isolating already, and I sorta adapted.

10. Time with bunbun

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11. Time with the kitties

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12. LL.M.

I chose Peking University’s LL.M. program based in their Shenzhen campus. Shenzhen because it’s the tech hub in China (but I was really torn between Beijing and Shenzhen).

By the time I made my choice I thought the western world would have learned a lesson from China in terms of how to control a pandemic. That is, I believed I would be able to go to China in September. LMAO, little did I know.

We started off the (two-year) program online, and, though the courses have all been pretty great so far, it’s been really annoying and hard to juggle online and live classes with all the timezones hassle, so I’m doing very few credits. I’ve decided to focus on the LL.M. whenever I can get to campus (which seems further and further away T_T).

13. Eating at home

We’ve been cooking all our meals since March – with the exception of the 20 times we ordered in (coz we live in the middle of nowhere and there are only two restaurants that deliver – a pizza place and a burger place).

That has given us (mostly my mum, who’s been really into youtube cooking channels lately) some window to explore and try random recipes. More like ‘forced us’ than ‘given us’, if we’re being honest, because after 9 months of cooking everyday if we hadn’t tried out new recipes we’d probably have gone mad.

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14. My job

After announcing everyone had to work from home from March onwards, the company I work at announced they would also freeze all HR procedures until September. That is, nobody would be hired or fired until September (unless there were some extreme circumstances, I reckon). That announcement gave me peace of mind.

I told my boss I would stay until August and then leave for my LL.M.

August came and China’s borders were still closed.

By then, my boss had already hired my replacement, who I was already training. I felt so weird and guilty about asking whether I could stay until the end of the year (because PKU said we’d probably be able to go in Feb/21), but I did. And my boss said I was doing great and could stay, yes.

Then in September, seeing how the pandemic did not get any better anywhere else, I told the folks at PKU that I wanted to set my arrival date for Sept/21…. And then had to have ANOTHER convo with my boss and she said, yes, I could stay until Aug/21, while taking online LLM courses.

The stability of my job, and my boss’s empathy towards me juggling both work and an LLM (at really odd hours), have definitely help me stay sane throughout the year.

15. Friends

Goes without saying, but I don’t know what this year would have been like without my friends. They’re the most supportive, loving, fun, adorable, smart, beautiful people ever.

The pandemic has definitely influenced how we interact with one another. With some friends, I’d barely text or chat with them online – whenever we did, it was to set up a dinner or a coffee date. With others, there would be daily interactions across multiple messaging services and social media platforms.

Zoom fatigue and screen fatigue are real so I’m just glad that the close friends have remained close even when we go weeks without texting one another. At some point this year we all created a calendly page and sent each other the link, so whenever one of us wants to catch up via video call, we’ll just go to calendly and schedule it, HAHA.

Thanks to online services, I’ve been able to send out gifts and baskets to my closest friends, even though I can’t be there to hug them in person. And they’ve sent me too! (My birthday cake included).

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16. …fighting with a friend

few things hurt worse than grieving for a friendship that was lost because one of the parties was being an a**hole who failed at communicating properly at every given opportunity.

i wonder if we’ll ever go back to however we were before all this crap. thinking about them and what happened makes me sad. i still care for and miss them.

17. The popcorn machine and Sony’s WH-1000XM4

Life. Changing. Purchases. Especially when you’re working from home, need easy n quick snacks AND some quiet from the other people around you who are also working from home.

18. 以家人只名 or ‘Go Ahead’

I love c-dramas and watched a few this year, but this one really touched me.

I started watching for 宋威龍 (Song Weilong), but stayed, binged and loved it for the plot. A beautiful story on two dads (neighbours), one a widower, one a divorcé, raising 3 kids together as a family. A lot of emphasis is put on the meaning of family throughout the show. The kids grow up, each goes do their own thing, they grow apart due to *life*, but they find their way back to each other as a family later. It’s just beautiful.

Both dads are so loving to all the kids, it made me miss my dad so bad. Ugh.

It’s also available on China Huace TV official youtube channel with English subs.

19. Loss

I love(d?) someone. And they died of Covid-19. I haven’t really dealt with the aftermath of their passing, burying myself in work and studies. But now I’m on vacay from work and actually have to deal with the bureaucratic stuff one deals with when someone dies, so welp me.

My heart hurts.

20. Survival