New Year

A little after noon, New Year's Day.

In the past, I would have felt this way due to a wild night out, a hangover. Aversion to light, the desire to sleep till dinner time, sensitivity to noise. Good memories, those.

This time around, it's just a sense of being completely worn out. No wild New Year's Eve party-- Jen and Sam and I grabbed food from Moe's, then played a round of Life, and I stayed up a while and finished reading 'salem's Lot while they drifted off to sleep. But still, worn out. A cold helps it along (my-- fifth? sixth?-- cold of the year), but it's just the busy-ness and the doing-ness of life mostly, the hustle and bustle and jostle and trying to remember what you had on that list you've lost, those things that needed being done.

Anyway. It's the New Year.

Hooray for that.

I've always loved New Year's Eve, New Year's Day.

I've got an agenda for 2012.

Pretty much everybody's agenda, I guess. Nothing surprising. Pretty much last year's agenda. Still, it's a New Year, so you can't help but have the hope-y feeling.

Lose weight. Run faster, run farther. Get some nice new tattoos. Write more. Write better. Oh, and be nicer to people (that one always falls to the wayside a few days in).

Get in some good concerts if I can.

But anyway.

2011 was good. A nice year.

A crazy year, really, if you look around the world. Crazy with crazy things happening in Egypt and Tunisia and Libya and Syria and all of the world and crazy with pepper spray and Occupy here at home. Crazy with weather and earthquakes and nuclear disasters and other biblical nuttiness. Crazy that it's close to 50 degrees here on New Year's Day. No snow in CNY. No ice to scrape off of anything. Shovel still where I left it in the garage this Spring.

Crazy GOP. Out of their mind crazy nutty oh-my-god-they're-going-to-hurt-somebody GOP. A year where Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have all been, at one point or another, front-runners, have all been the person that a substantial portion of the conservatives in this country have thought best represented their ideals, their spirit, the direction the country should go. That's some scary kind of crazy. Worse than the weather. (And, yeah, Mitt Romney has been a front-runner too, but that's not scary crazy.)

Me?

Yeah, sure, okay. It's been a year. A nice year. Another year. The good, the bad, all that, but I guess a lot less bad than good.

I caught some good shows. That's always nice. Michael Franti and Spearhead. Iron and Wine. Bright Eyes. The Mountain Goats. The Jeremy Wallace Trio. Nine Ball. The Rusty Doves. Ohde-ka the Burning River. Not much heavy stuff, no great hardcore shows, and I admit, I really would have liked to throw in a couple of those upbeat shows, those gritty shows; but still, it was nice. Michael Franti and Spearhead especially.

And Rob Bell. A Rob Bell talk in Ithaca. That was good. Quite good.

It was a year with lots of books. More than 50, less than 100. I'll add them up later, maybe. Some were crap, but most weren't. Some were very, very, very, very good, like Rob Bell's Jesus Wants to Save Christians and John Joseph's The Evolution of a Cro-Magnon and Jonathon Safran Foer's Eating Animals and Chris Cleave's Incendiary and many others.

I started the year sure I would attend a sesshin through the Zen Center, a week long silent Zen retreat. I didn't do that. I did, however, block out a couple of days and stay at the Farm Sanctuary, alone, in the quiet, with my cushions and my books and my incense. It was a very good thing.

I wrote a book. I didn't really write a book. But I compiled a book for my mom for Christmas. Took the best of all these posts from the past six years or so, lightly edited them, rearranged them into chapters, through in some snarky Facebook stuff, and made a book. That was fun. That was a lot of fun, actually. I'll sell you a copy for $40. I'll sell you a PDF for $20.

I quit the New Environment Association board. That was tough, because I really like those guys. But I had reasons. Among them was time, and the lack of it, and wanting to use it better, and wanting to not feel over-extended all the time.

I helped organize and run a Voluntary Simplicity study group. Which was of course a good thing. Not as overwhelmingly powerful as the first one I attended years back, in part because of the newness that first time, in part because the materials weren't quite as good. But still, it was a very good thing.

I saw my brother and my sister go vegan. Hooray for that.

And attended the Westcott Fair, which is always fantastic. And the NYS Fair, which has become fantastic since I've been able to see it through a kid's eyes again.

Our dog Yoko died. That was sad. There were other deaths. A close friend's wife, a close member of the family. My son has become sort of fascinated with death. Not in a bad way, I think. But there's been death, and he's felt it, and he's working with it.

There were three trips to the Farm Sanctuary, including that solo retreat. They were all good.

And lots of trips to the zoo. Always lots of trips to the zoo.

I became a Big Brother. Not just a big brother, but a Big Brother. Officially. I have a Little Brother. We get together a few times per month. His name is Jimmy. He's 11. He's... intense, sometimes. But it's a fun thing.

I went bowling for the first time in almost twenty years. I went ice skating for the first time in thirty-four years. I did better with the bowling than with the skating.

I saw some good movies, I'm sure, but I can't remember them. I can remember some of the cheesier ones, like "Thor" and "Iron Man" and "Captain America," but none of the really, truly good stuff. I learned that the new "Conan the Barbarian" is not very good. I could have guessed that, but I watched it anyway.

I started running. And going to the gym. I made a lot of progress there. I lost a little weight. Not a lot, but at least a little (15 pounds, about half of which I gained back during the Christmas season). But I made a lot of progress in that I couldn't even run a quarter of a mile when I started, and now I'm doing a couple of miles a day and would be doing more except that I worry about pushing a bum ankle too far too fast. And I can lift more than when I started. Not Herculean, but progress. And my blood pressure has gotten freakishly healthily low. That's all good stuff. Happy stuff.

I bought a bike from my brother but forgot that he's a gargantuan freak, so now I've got a bike that's too big for me. If you're freakishly tall, and you need a bike, and you've got $250, I've got a really nice deal for you.

I committed myself to running a triathlon next year. As I still have no bike to ride and can only swim a lap or two in the pool, I feel a little foolish, and am looking into ways to back out of this. That, or maybe improve my swimming and buy a bike. We'll see.

Watched my boy go from three to four. Read him countless "chapter books." Hung out with him in coffee shops and vegan cafes and biker bars. Had lots of fun together.

Celebrated my 6th wedding anniversary. And my 38th birthday.

Planted my Square Foot Garden beds. Lost most of my corn to a son-of-a-bitch squirrel, but ate lots of onions, garlic, kale, tomatoes, and such out of my back yard, which was nice.

Worked. Work was tough. Huge cuts. Lay-offs (none in my department). Reorganization. Doing more with less. State bureaucrats making huge budget cuts, but then sending in auditors who demand more and more and more, but no way to pay for it. And the occasional state bureaucrat with a power hard-on, loving the control they have in their petty little kingdom... but no, I shouldn't get going down that road. I'll sound petty and bitter. A tough year at work, but good things have happened. Somehow, I still really like my job. There a lot of mornings that I don't want to go there, but if I've got to go somewhere, I can't think of a better place to be, I guess, so that's gotta be a good thing, right?

And that's 2011, more or less.

Happy New Year.