Reviewing 2021

Apparently, the pandemic-induced time distortion that defined 2020 didn't get the memo about the new calendar year. Looking back, the events of 2021 turned out to be just as mind-meltingly difficult to keep track of as last year's.

But we are once again here to jog your memory about the wrong timeline we continue to live through.

There's a reason why, in the beginning of the year, people were already doing retrospectives on what went down in the first week and first hundred days of 2021. It was kinda darkly funny at first, the impossibility of keeping up with the sheer amount of timeline-breaking, unprecedented shit happening. Then it just went on, and on, and on, and stopped being funny and started messing with our grasp on reality again.

Whether you spent 2021 still trying to process 2020 or simply did not have the capacity to clock it all in the memory bank, we've compiled a list of the good, the bad, the weird, and the forgettable from this year. While this isn't a list of all of the year's major moments (otherwise, we'd be here well into 2022), we're sure you'll find lots that make you want to launch into a rambling Matthew McConaughey monologue about time being a flat circle.

1. Bean Dad and Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical rang in the new year as the first viral memes of 2021.
While their energies could not have been more different, you couldn't escape these viral characters if you were online in the first week of 2021. #BeanDad discourse — over the dad with a polarizing method for teaching his daughter how to open a can of beans — triggered Twitter into a spiral of their non-bean-related daddy issues. Meanwhile, the Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, which began as a somewhat sincere joke on the app, gave us hope for wholesome content by raising over a million dollars for struggling actors.

2. Capitol insurrectionists made Jan. 6, 2021, a day America will never forget.
Yet even so, it's hard to wrap our brains around the fact that this horrifying event, where a Trump-supporting mob incited by the president stormed the Capitol, happened less than a year ago. Living through history really does funny things to time, doesn't it?

3. President Donald Trump was impeached (again) on Jan. 13 then acquitted (again) on Feb. 13.
Trump was the first president in American history to be impeached twice, the first time for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and the second time for incitement of an insurrection. But we collectively forgot all about that in about five minutes. Guess we were preoccupied!

Demonstrating just how broken our society is, though, online platforms like Twitter and Facebook (now Meta) actually banned his ass for inciting violence. I guess even an anemic amoeba like Mark Zuckerberg has more of a spine than our government leaders when it comes to threats against American democracy.

4. Bernie Sanders' mittens and JLo's “Let's Get Loud” performance turned Biden's inauguration into a fever dream.
Honestly, no 2021 inauguration was ever going to be "normal." But in the midst of all the fear and post-traumatic stress of the Capitol riot, the internet found two bizarre things to distract us.  TO READ ABOUT THE OTHER 40 THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN 2021, CLICK HERE...