It wasn’t that bad a year, personally. Work went well, or at least didn’t make me want to walk in front of a Caltrain. Personal life went reasonably well, highlighted by a 20-year high school reunion that really completed the “remember who you are” business. My health is pretty good and getting better (looming trip to the dentist notwithstanding), the car is running well, and I have much faster Internet access at home than ever before.
And yet.
The crap of the wider world is out there. Whether it’s the ongoing disaster brought about by the Confederates and their amen corner in the press, or the nonsense going on with my relatives down South, or an economy that just seems stuck in neutral, or the growing sense that those responsible for this foolishness will completely escape consequences for their actions – there’s a lot out there to be depressed about, which can only be held at bay by resolving to shut out the outside world and not participate.
Maybe that’s why my Christmas wish was for a dull moment – enough of them to last a year. 2011 may well be a cocoon year – stay home, curl up on the couch at the screen end of our new fat pipe, get lost in the distraction of books and movies, and regularly pull the plug to go hide somewhere with coffee and comfortable chairs and maybe even a fireplace.
For the last four years, I’ve regularly kept a list of things I’ve enjoyed throughout the year, so that I can look back for trends and things to look at for next year. The theme this year, it seems, was either traveling to someplace far away and unreal (Europe, or Disneyland) or else holing up somewhere quiet, whether that be at home on the couch or on a backroad in the driver’s seat or in some quiet and largely empty dive bar. There’s something to be said for five-space, and that may be what’s helped keep me sane this year. Maybe an increasing sense of self-reliance is preventing the kind of trouble I had in 2007. Who knows.
Meanwhile, we have a New Year’s Eve plan – a very nice early dinner in Napa, followed by a proper party with friends, and then? The Rose Parade and the moveable feast of college football.
HOGMANAY!!