Aria in B flat Major

Welcome back to Tea with Liya! Today, I'm playing a little song by George Frideric Handel called "Aria in B flat Major." This is something for you to listen to as 2021 is coming up. Maybe 2021 will also be a year that's different from all the other ones you've seen. I hope you like listening to it!


Listen to the song here
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You might remember that I've tried to use numbers to prove a point about 2020. It's time for me to use them again. Since you've been writing out the date many times this year, chances are you've noticed that the number repeats itself. There's a 20, and then another 20.

They really should have called COVID-19 COVID 20 instead. Then it wouldn't only be the virus that had most of its effects (at least its past effects) in 2020, but the virus that appeared in the 21st century (2000). In fact, I think it could have even been December 31st that I read the first headline about the new coronavirus. "Hmm, I wouldn't want my eyes to be infected," I said, forgetting the difference between "corona" and "cornea", and left the article behind 10 seconds later. I was eventually forced to realize that it was a respiratory disease.

So we have 2020. 2 20s. Perhaps you've also written dates like February 20th, 2020 at 8:20 pm, which you could write as 2020/02/20 20:20. You can have as many 20s as you want... for only two more days.

He's getting to work ahead of time. The 0 has to get out before the 1 can go in!

Once January 1st arrives, you'll have to start bringing 1s in. Hmm... 2021/01/01 12:01. You can still write days with not very many numbers, but your repeating year is gone. The next time that will happen will be 2121, which is 101 years from now. 

Can you get something like it back? You could have 2030, so you'd have another two numbers beside each other that end with 0s, which, once we get to 2100, won't happen for another thousand years....

You must have been right when you said you've never experienced a year like this one. Maybe there are many other years that deserve to have that said about them, but we've never noticed, because nothing unusual seemed to happen. Chances are that there are good things that happened to you in 2020, some of them perhaps even caused by COVID. Possibly there are things that won't even happen again for 101 or 1000 years.

So, 2021's coming up. It's time to take advantage of the year that you have, before you notice that it really is a year that you'll never see repeated again - on the last 2 days. Do you think you can notice sooner than I did?

Here's a cup of tea to keep your "eyes" sharp. Keep filling it up with music!

~Liya