A mess of zoom calls, screaming eh hem.. I mean singing, and New Year's resolutions

Author Note :P

Hello! Sorry for being dead and not writing ;-; anyways, hope you enjoy the story! Happy New Year! Stay safe during the pandemic! 

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the story!

-WeiWei (Wei Hello)

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I woke up early, admittedly cold due to it being December. Turning on my phone, I only managed to get a glimpse at the date, as I scrolled through the day's email I lazily recalled the number of today's date- 31 December 2020

"Oh that's nice.. today is the last day of Adobe Flash.."

I thought absentmindedly, remembering what my friend had told me earlier in the year before lockdown had occurred. As I deleted another email, the meaning of the words finally got into my groggy morning head, and I almost screamed aloud.

Today’s the last day of the year!

Checking the date once again, my conclusion was confirmed as my phone screen showed the current date, it being-

31 December 2020

Remembering that I still had to finish one more pen to finish in order to fulfil my New Year’s resolutions, I took my current favourite pen which was starting to run out of ink as well as my notebook, and sat down, with the intention to stay there until my favourite G soft NX Plus Blue pen was fully drained of ink. Though I preferred writing stories, I had recently taken up poetry both for class and because I decided it would be nice to try something new during the chaos that was online classes, or whatever they call a mix of failed zoom calls, weird people seemingly blowing a whole tornado on their microphone, google classrooms that never let you submit work, your annoyingly lazy classmates who never attended the calls and expect you to just hand every single detail over to them like an entitled princess and probably just for me- my sister screaming like a banshee at the top of her lungs while I’m trying to listen to an instructional video. Despite the year’s struggles, which for me mostly stemmed from online learning due to being a student- nearly losing my hearing from having to blast music or some sort of noise in my ears all the time to drown out the sound of my sister screaming.. Heh hem sorry, I meant singing Disney Frozen’s Let it go at the top of her lungs while having rock music play in the background, needing new glasses from clocking 12 hours of screen time on the computer (Don’t get me wrong! I just wanted to google a bit on Ancient Egypt and it ended up a whole three hours of clicking on link after link after link of a pharaoh's relatives and predecessors!) and basically becoming a noodle from lack of exercise- yes mum, I know team swimmers should stay in shape for when we start back up, but tell me, when is that? Tell me, where is the space to run five laps in this tiny house where I’ll have a 50% chance of falling on a car toy and break it, ending with me getting my eardrums destroyed by a certain five year old screaming how I hurt a toy that now needs a bandage (gee, I wonder if humans feel pain when they fall? I wonder..) but overall, it was a decent year, as difficult as it was. But I remembered I had achieved something- wrote a 100 page story! I threw a fist up in victory- before remembering what had become of my story. First of all, my father had spilled coffee over it, thankfully the writing could still be scavenged, so I set to work on transferring it to a computer, before it died. Though, to be fair to that computer, it was over a decade old, and it was used when my mother was a university lecturer, so I suppose it had served its purpose. 

But the loss of the computer didn’t bother me too much as I still had the hardcopy, until my sister decided to use it as paper mache by soaking the whole hundred sheets of paper in a large basin full of water that was used for laundry while also pumping in half a whole bottle of shampoo and hand soap for good measure. I shivered at the thought, really, I was the luckiest sibling ever right? I had even left my papers on a shelf! How the world does a five year old who’s 105 cm tall get there you may ask? Well, turns out she had dragged a chair all the way to get her paper mache material, commenting that she thought it was scribble paper left over from math (I had a habit of mindlessly scribbling on scrap paper as I solved math problems) and that she thought it didn’t matter to me. I don’t know whether I should take it as a compliment that she was so dedicated to get the papers or feel offended that my handwriting could be mistaken for scribbles- admittedly, I had used a computer for most of online learning, so maybe it shouldn't have been a surprise that my handwriting had gone from the cursive we were taught in second grade to the mess of letters that could be taken as a bunch of scribbles by a five year old who liked to craft, something that she had gotten from me. As I sulked I remembered my mother reminding me how I had taken a poor student’s homework from her workplace to go make origami with, ironically, the same student’s friends, maybe that was why there were all struggling to hold back laughter and how I commented that there was a typo in a certain place, assuming that it was just some newspaper. Another time, my mother had told me, I took a couple paper’s from my grandfather’s office as well, who owned his own business. As I thought of these things while I wrote- admittedly distracting myself, making typos here and there and writing ‘two’ instead of ‘to’ but finally a satisfying sight came to my eyes- 

My pen ran out of ink 

“I FINISHED MY NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS!”  

“WeiWei, you’re phone’s one day early. It’s the 30th.”

What did you say!?