The strange thing about anticipation, is that it can be either good or bad. You can be anticipating something amazing happening, or something truly, fucking dreadful. And then, sometimes you can be anticipating the unknown, which is rarely fun for those of us who have anxiety and an overactive imagination. Tonight, I’m a mixture of many variants of anticipation.

Professionally, I’m anticipating something that could be good news, or could just mean more work for me depending on the feedback I get.

Personally, I’m anticipating a few things. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, the kid has her Q2 benchmark testing. This is to find out if she knows her shit or not, which is not where my concern lies. I know she knows her shit. But I also know that when you put her on the spot, on a video call, she suddenly does not know her shit and she has a tendency to lose her train of thought and get the giggles.

Also tomorrow, our Hoarders collecting event kicks off on Afterlife, which means excitement but also disappointment. I’m somehow notoriously unlucky when it comes to collecting full sets of our decks and I am notoriously uninterested in many of the decks that get voted into rotation. I don’t have very many common interests with the community at large, and this is where it ends up crippling me. I’ll have fun either way, but I really do hope that it brings a surge of life into the board, so that we can continue to build on the community that we’ve got so far.

And of course, the future. Buying a house, moving if/when we manage to buy a house, furnishing a house, cleaning up the place we’re in, change. I’m nervous, but I know that it’s what we need. It sucks here. We generally don’t like it. It doesn’t have anything we really need as far as space and storage. The scary change is needed, but it’s scary. It has so many ways it can go right, but so many ways it can go wrong. I just hope that hoping is going to tip the balance in the favor of good.

All in all, I’m a bundle of mixed feelings of anticipation. Good, bad, and goodbad (is that a thing?) but at least I’m feeling and I’m invested. I definitely went through a phase this past year where feeling was a bit of a challenge.

Here’s hoping that 2021 continues bringing me back to the state of being a functional human being.