punching the clock

2013, done at last, and not a day too soon. Last night’s excursion to the wilds of the outer Sunset – a holiday tradition for four years now, apparently – ended up with way too many cocktail weenies and Twitter outbursts and not nearly enough quiet reading by the fire, but then, they weren’t projecting football on a screen over the fire before. I guess I’ll need to try again later, once the fog is up – and apparently because the fireplace is their sole source of heat for the building, they are not encumbered by Spare The Air days, so I could have gone anytime.

There’s a lot of complex information there about how 2013 went down. After the emotional firestorm of 2012, I was hoping for a dull moment – what i got was the worst year, health and work-wise, since 2007. So here I sit, on December 31, with the same project incomplete and the same crick in my neck hurting worse than it has in months, as if the Baby New Year is dancing around showing his ass at me.

At least five friends moved out of town this year, including my only blood family I want to claim and the only remaining Southerners I knew. The NOLA contingent and the Canadian contingent are both gone. Silicon Valley became a materially less pleasant place to be this year, driven most forcefully by the brogrammers of SOMA and the techies of the Mission (once I found out that ‘techie’ is being taken as a slur, I resolved to use it every day in a sentence, because fuck those guys). And Vanderbilt football proved once again that no good deed goes unpunished, whether you’re trying to hold a Caesar’s wife standard in a moral cesspool of a conference or persuade the powers that be that facts and evidence should hold more weight than decades of prejudice. And oh by the way we’re playing in a bowl slotted two or three below our finish and not on January 1. The chip is real, and it gets bigger every year, and it should.

Other sports…probably don’t warrant a mention. The less said about Cal and the Redskins the better, although the Skins at least got shut of the most overrated and fraudulent of their recent string of coaching disasters. Honestly, the best sports find of the year was twofold: the return of minor league baseball in an old WPA park in the California League, and the realization that my favorite San Jose bar doesn’t have a single television – which is probably why it’s my favorite.

2014: get healthier. Not so much with the soda, or vending machine chow, or fast food, or unnecessary pastry. More Vasper, more weights. More shutdown nights, even if I have to hole up in the living room or the garage to force myself. And an evening walk at least every other night – not for exercise so much as to let the brain run down, let everything slow down and burn off before going to bed. And oh yeah – get as much personal stuff as possible off the bloody work laptop, because ideally there might be an opportunity to get rid of it. But if I stay in this job, this job goes in a box, and stays there, and is only touched from 8-5 on weekdays. More water, definitely. And get better at shutting out the annoyances of the world that I can’t do anything to prevent. Suck it up and go back to taking the train some days, plug in the headphones and escape. (And maybe see if carrying an iPad mini in the jacket will help prolong the battery life on the phone.)

All I want for the new year is a dull moment. I didn’t know when I was well off.

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