The Standard New Year's Post

If there's anyone out there reading (at all?) who happens to remember the blue bird's blog of old, you would also (possibly) recall that I'm not a huge fan of marking linear time the way we do. This year I'm celebrating the fact that the damn holidays are over rather that the fact that they exist. Not in a bah humbug way, I guess, I haven't been cranky or demanding. I've just been mellow and keen to see the crowds dissipate, as if somehow all the people in Los Angeles who are not supposed to be here, and some may think that includes me!, are somehow getting in the way of my forward momentum. Maybe I'm getting in the way of my forward momentum. I've definitely done that before.

Anyhow, you might imagine New Year's Eve/Day is one of the more annoying times for me, given the previous paragraph, and since I don't drink alcohol. I used to love New Year's Eve as a kid--we got to stay up late, there was still no school for a week or so, and my sister and I spent large amounts of time creating elaborate honey graham/cream cheese type delicacies, and cutting confetti, and arranging the dolls and stuffed animals for their optimal New Year's Eve enjoyment.

But as I grew older, and frankly the more Postmodern I've become thanks to literature and what not, I don't care for the linear marking of time. I'm not fond of the notion that, somehow, everything I do today bodes ill or well for the coming year, when in fact, the problems with any coming day, or any past day, are really in the windmills of my mind, which haven't been turning that quickly of late (that's a confession). They're not rusty or cobwebby, they're a bit apathetic. I guess I keep waiting for Don Quixote to rescue me, instead of rescuing myself, even though I don't need rescue.

Yikes. Sometimes you start writing something and it goes to new places. That just happened, me and Mr. Confessional.

The past two months are my focus of reflection. Some very good things have happened, some things I don't want to jinx just yet. But in other respects, I haven't made things happen. There's the rub...me making. It has nothing to do with external forces, I am alone responsible for my ennui in certain areas.

If there is a resolution this year, which I also hate, because perhaps I am cranky right now, and am always writing and re-writing and questioning and revising my goals almost weekly anyhow, but if there is a resolution, it's to move forward boldly. Sometimes I'm still fighting making this Western Expansion my new life, and I know I have to get to a place where I recognize myself in the mirror here and can get things moving in the direction I know they can go, successfully.

So, there. If you must know, today I slept late, worked out on muscle beach, dipped my toes in the freezing Pacific for the New Year, wandered on the beach, went on the Venice Pier, then walked around Venice thinking. If it foreshadows anything in the "coming year," it foreshadows (and aftshadows) my contemplation, and that's always going on, so that the time in my head is more of a spiral. If you looked at it from the top, you'd think it was a circle, but I'm convinced it's a spiral moving...up.