A visual summary of the month

Four more inches, and it will have snowed up to my height so far this winter. We’re supposed to meet that target tomorrow!

Ode to a Honda Civic

During the Long Blog Blackout, one event occurred that can be seen as either momentous or no big deal, depending on whether you give a crap about cars. I confess that I do, and so when it came time to replace our 1997 Honda Civic with a newer Toyota Matrix, I was compelled to write this homage to the old trusty car. Read on below the pic.

It was inevitable, of course I knew it was inevitable. But just as humans have the ability to adapt to new situations, so they also often favor the routine, well-worn path. And in this case I’m talking about a path that was worn for nearly fourteen years: our 1997 Civic, bought at a time when we were kind of poor and in grad school and driving around in a shitty Hyundai Excel. That Civic seemed like pure luxury by comparison—I still remember feeling like it was a major step up even on the test drive. Now it’s fourteen years later and 185,000 miles further down the road, and it definitely doesn’t feel like luxury anymore. (Not that it ever really was: manual steering! manual transmission! manual windows and locks!)

A lot of people view cars with an entirely unromantic perspective: necessary transportation, gets you from here to there, annoying when they break down, unremarkable when they don't. Unfortunately I see cars as more integral to my life. In grad school it carried us on thousands of miles’ worth of trips back home for the holidays, most of them, it seems, conducted in horrifying snow or rainstorms legendary in scale. It was bought mere months after we got married, so it forms a sort of monument to the longevity of our relationship. It carried us into our new life when we graduated and moved back to the East Coast; we slept in it during that horrible drive east when there wasn’t anywhere to stay on the way. And then, a few years ago it acquired a roof rack, and we put our bikes on it and had all kinds of fantastic day trips and vacations. With the new car’s arrival it became almost purely a vehicle for the weekend, to escape the mundane life and to be free of weekday worries.

Of course, there is a new(ish) car to take over that role, so it's not as though I’m really losing something. In fact, objectively speaking I should be more excited, since the new(ish) car is so much younger than the old Civic. But for now, it’ll be those deadly adjectives New and Different—something my routine-loving personality will chafe at for a while. At least until it too becomes Old and Familiar. And someday I’ll write a fond homage to it, just like I'm doing now. Assuming that we still have the internet, of course.

2010 in Review

So what the heck was I up to for 2010, that I wasn’t in here posting? The answer becomes pretty damn clear, really, when I break it down by the numbers. For some background reference, you can compare this to the recap post for 2009.

Miles bicycled: 745.33

Minutes of tennis played: 16,960 (5,590 more than 2009!)

Movies seen in the theater:
True Grit
The Fighter
Black Swan

Wonders I can’t believe I didn’t already know about:
Flight of the Conchords
Cooking meat in a slow cooker

Hopes for 2011:
A clearer view of what happens next for me job-wise
Achieving a 3.5 NTRP rating
(Okay, neither of those changed from 2009. Er?)

Something we all still need:
Patience!

A new resolution

Now that we’ve stepped into 2011, it’s time to engage in a bit of self-reflection. And what better venue for that than my poor neglected blog?

You might think that my resolution is to post here more often, and that certainly has crossed my mind. But on the other hand, I’m thinking that that will be an secondary effect as I tackle my real resolution: in 2011 I plan to start marshaling my resources to figure out how the heck to get out of this crazy job of mine.

Why change jobs? I can’t argue with the hours I have, the PTO, the proximity to tennis, and the general lack of pressure to work too hard, but at the same time it seems to be slowly crushing my soul like a giant drill press carefully squeezing a lone grape. So there are drawbacks to staying here. Obviously there’s something beautiful about not having to do much of anything at work if I don’t feel like it, but on the other hand, after a certain quantity of goofing off I start to wonder whether I can respect myself. It’s a fine line, ha.

So what do I plan to do? Well, note how vague and weaselly the wording of my resolution is. I resolve to start thinking about how to plan to do something. The truth is that I don’t have formal training in very many practical areas. The publishing world has done nothing but contract violently in the last few years, so I wonder whether I’d be able to find anyplace else to do work that’s similar to what I do now. And if I throw open the gates to all possibilities, then I’m kind of mystified as to what I could do. So 2011 is going to be all about exploration and all that parachute-color crap. In the meantime, I’ll try not to notice how many ways my current workplace annoys me. Can I do it? Maybe I can at least try, and report back here on my progress.