GOSH DARNIT BAYMAX. I had the PERFECT opportunity to sit in serene solitude working on my annual post, and you RUINED it by barking like an idiot. And now that I know there are other conscious beings present (other than the kids giggling and shouting in the other room, that is), it makes it that much harder to concentrate.
Concentration has never been my forte, of course. When it comes to these kinds of things, as I have oft repeated, ideas float to me, delivered by the fingertips of angels, as I take a shower or spray **** out of my ***. But once I've left the confines of the tub or abdicated the porcelain throne, they dissipate, stolen away by the grubby little claws of imps. It seems that only under perfect conditions can I actually construct the post I had originally envisioned, and those conditions strike maybe once every 5 or 6 years. Heck, probably less frequently than that in the last decade or so.
Anyway. I set my laptop aside a few hours ago (according to the timestamp over there I last edited it at 3:08 PM and it is now 7:06 PM, so that is almost exactly 4 hours), and the opportunity to get rap-tap-tapping on the keys in near-solitude (albeit with the kids still hollering from the other room, of course) has presented itself once again. My laptop is now fully charged, so I have pulled it from its tether, and thank goodness I was able to do that, because thanks to a coughing fit, I have relocated to the upstairs bathroom so as not to wake my darling wife Ashley. Every adult on this property is sick, and about half of us have been since Christmas Day, the other half since about two days later. The children are fine, because their hyperactive little bodies have all already conquered this particular strain prior to passing it on to us JUST in time for the Holidays.
But I have returned to the domain where I typically do my best work. The door is open (in case anyone else actually needs to use the bathroom) and the lid to the commode is shut, but seated upon the toilet I am. So let us begin the task at hand: my now annual blog post to reflect on the past year and what it has brought about.
Perhaps, if you are among the infinitesimally small number of loyal readers, you have come here specifically for this. I would imagine that anyone who still remembers this blog even exists might have picked up by now on the fact that I never let a year go by without posting, and for the last few years, that post has come on New Years Eve. In that sense, I'm breaking the trend by getting it in a day early, but I've learned to modify many of my habits, as you do when you are in charge of young lives. And that's one development of this year, of course, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
Actually hang on, I have to go tell the young lives to stop making such a racket lest they wake up their mother.
Well they woke her up anyway, so it was all in vain. My hope was to get this finished before she woke up so I could post it all sneaky-style and she would perhaps see it at some point in the future if she checked, but oh well.
I guess that falls in line with the theme of the year, doesn't it? You can't control everything, and hardly anything ever goes exactly how you plan it. I mean look at this: nearly this entire Christmas break (which is one of the final weeks of my extended retirement), we've all been sick and able to accomplish virtually none of the merry-making I had envisioned. And that's okay. Because while things may not go how you would like for them to go, they go how they NEED to go.
I once tweeted that everything happens for a reason, but it's almost impossible to tell whether you're in the "everything" or the "reason" at any given time. And while I still think that's true, I think it's also a little more philosophically involved than that. We were having a discussion last night (Meg, Ashley, and I) wherein I made this very point, that life doesn't have precise arcs like stories do. It doesn't just have a concluding act followed by credits and The End. There are ebbing and flowing "everythings" and "reasons" all the time, and I believe that right now I am in the "reason" for the "everything" that happened since about 2012.
This has been one of the most challenging years of my life, but also one of the best. In 2022, I visited Texas, got Covid, came home after 6 weeks (was supposed to be 5; never made a trip and DIDN'T extend the stay, bay-BEE), returned to the workforce for 2 months and change, uprooted and moved my entire existence some 700 miles south, made many trips back and forth between Home and New Home, got married, and pulled off the kids' first Santa Christmas all whilst finagling travel between two states. Brief aside - Santa denial is child abuse. Quote me on that. If you tell your kids Santa isn't real, you are a miserable cunt, and no I'm not censoring that one because you absolutely need to hear it if you are one of those people. It is pure, unadulterated magic for children to walk into a room and see it filled with presents delivered to them PERSONALLY by a fat jolly man in a red suit, and you want to TAKE THAT AWAY FROM THEM?! What kind of monster would think that's okay? Santa won't come to the houses that don't believe, and the saddest thing to me is that there are so many children in this generation he's just not visiting, and those kids are none the wiser. Instead of experiencing the wonder and joy of free stuff from Santa, they're getting... presents from mom and dad. Just like on their birthday. There's no mystery, no intrigue, nothing particularly special about it. It's ridiculous and my heart breaks for those kids. You're a scumbag if you subject them to that.
I could go on and on forever about Santa, because I know he's real, but I guess I can't make parenting decisions for any of the myriad unqualified boneheads out there. I swear, they let just anybody have kids these days. But I digress. The real point here is one that I gleaned from a book (I'll get to that in a second) nearly two years ago, but which was reinforced and really brought to life by arguably the best movie of the year: Bullet Train. I'd also listen to arguments for Top Gun: Maverick, since that movie was AWESOME, but I think ultimately I'd have to give it to Bullet Train, since... well, it's got everything. Great action, bountiful laughs, an excellent story with slick, airtight writing, philosophical merit to ponder upon conclusion, a boppin soundtrack, and even a few moments of Genuine Feels. In my estimation, it's a more adult version of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (my favorite movie of all time, particularly because it's like the 21st Century Great Gastby, in that it has meant different things to me at different points in my life) because there's so much going on and a lot you can kick around afterwards. I
I'd compare it to No Country For Old Men (remember the book I mentioned last paragraph?) in its theming, except much more accessible and decidedly more optimistic. On the accessibility: I watched No Country For Old Men... what, about 4 years ago now? I wanna say it was early 2019. And I did not get it at all. I had no clue what I was supposed to glean from it, but everyone raved about how good it was (I mean it won Best Picture for cryin out loud), so I figured I HAD to be missing something. So I took it upon myself to read the book it was based on, thinking it might help me solve the riddle. And it did. The moral of the story is: crap happens, and since there is nothing you can do to stop it, you have to just deal with it the best way you can. The line from that book that really stuck with me was "you never know what worse luck your bad luck saved you from." A similar interpolation of that line is repeated at the beginning of Bullet Train, and that's pretty much what the entire movie is about. What you perceive as bad luck may be (and probably is) putting you on a more beneficial path.
How that applies in any precise moment is pretty tough to interpret, but what I'm saying here is that once you get where you're going, it'll look back and make sense. Just stay the course and keep moving forward. Let life take you where it does. Just like a bullet train.
For now, people are gathering in the living room and the festivities (as it were) are starting to slowly but surely churn towards being in gear. Which means I won't get to wrap this up as tidily as I would have liked. But that's kind of what the end of 2022 is looking like in a nutshell itself. So perhaps this is all a lesson in managing expectations and not clinging to them so tightly. On the bright side, since I had to put my laptop away before finishing the paragraph I was working on two prior, I WILL be achieving my standard publishing date of December 31st. Unless Blogger went back to their original method of listing the post as published on the date the draft was started. I guess we'll see. But do know that, as I type this, it's 4:14 PM on December 31st, 2022.
Remember: just because it SEEMS bad right now doesn't mean it's going to STAY bad or end badly. It's all Bullet Train, baby.
Thanks for tuning in for another year. Your loyal readership means more than you probably know. And if you're just discovering this now, don't worry. My next post won't come later than a year from now. And if I ever get any divine inspiration in the midst of considerable free time, I may even squeeze more in between then and now. Here's to hoping while realistically managing expectations.
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