“Fairytale of New York” is one of my favorite Christmas songs going back at least fifteen or sixteen years, to the days when everything that mattered in our lives happened at that one Irish public house in Cleveland Park. It’s a complicated tale about chasing dreams and love and things not quite working out the way you thought – granted, the boy languishing in lockup while the girl dies of heroin-related complications is about as bleak as you can get without binge-watching Jessica Jones (seriously, after that show I need something uplifting, like Philadelphia maybe), but even so, it’s a story about how things don’t always work out like you planned.
This was the year that my first and most favored employer changed forever, in a way that meant my old job didn’t exist anymore and the crew was scattered to the winds. This was the year that I decided I just couldn’t care about my first favorite sport anymore. This was the year that the best man and the matron of honor at our wedding both got divorced. (Under substantially different circumstances, certainly, but it made for an uneasy coda to our tenth year of married life.) It’s also the first year we realized we had no plans on Christmas Eve, and I’ve insisted on going to the 8 PM Mass – not out of any lingering sense of Catholicism* or because it’s a critical part of the tradition, but because the thought of the two of us sitting alone on Christmas Eve was too awful to contemplate.
On a personal level, it wasn’t a worse year than last year, which is the first time I could say that in a few years. All around me, though, are people whose years have ranged from below-average to stunningly-godawful. The missus and I are not in the best of health ourselves – she battles the fatigue and thyroid stuff while I try to find a way to sleep with a bi-level CPAP mask over my face in hopes it’ll improve my quality of sleep and quality of life. It’s been almost six weeks and I still haven’t slept through the night with it once. Hell, only once have I made it to 7 AM without ripping it off and throwing it aside, and I woke up every two hours all night. I don’t think this is what they had in mind. And God forbid you go back and ask for some sort of sedative or tranquilizer or something to at least give you a chance to acclimate, because you’ll get tagged as “drug seeking” and then it’s real trouble. Which is why I’ve had to bite my tongue and just accept whatever sad-sack ineffective prescription NSAID the insurance will condescend to pay for. If there’s an opioid epidemic in this country, it sure as hell isn’t in Silly Con Valley at my Walgreens.
But we traveled again. We left the country for the first time in five years, we saw Japan for the first time, we spent some quality time in a Birmingham that has bike share and a raging craft beer scene. I probably wasted too much money this year by saying “screw it” and just buying anything I wanted that cost $30 instead of spending months agonizing over it, which is how I ended up with way too many books in the Kindle app and a couple of dart blasters that are incompatible with everything else in the house (or each other).
And I actually have plans for next year – they’re more or less the same plans as every year, but I’m going to try again to stick with it: quit with the vending machines and fast food and extraneous bread and sodas, fill all three rings on the Apple Watch every day even if it means walking or riding when I get home, and take advantage of the first positive change at the job in four years to kickstart improving the other areas of my life. The things you do to try to keep body and soul together while a depressing job tries to part them aren’t necessarily good to keep doing once you turn the tide.
Oh, and see The Force Awakens again. And again. And possibly again.
* Although I still want Notre Dame to beat the hell out of USC.