As we rolled headlong into 2023, it was refreshing not to see a myriad of posts about how this was going to be “my year” or “the best one yet.” The plague years of 2020-21 and financial fuckery of 2022 have, it seems, beaten people into submission and given everyone a bit of a more realistic perspective on the world and their place in it.
The date on a calendar, you see, doesn’t mystically change anything. Absent unusual circumstances, things plug along much as they did before. There’s no secret sauce, no matter how badly some want to believe that in a new year, all things are possible.
I know for some of you that’s going to sound too pessimistic, or defeatist, but that’s not in any way how I see it. I didn’t think last year was so bad. Hell, we all know I was absolutely built for life in 2020. If there was ever a moment of living my best life, that was it.
Sure, my take could have some cognitive bias at work, but so far 2023 doesn’t feel all that much different than its immediate predecessors. If I’m wrong, we’ll all find out soon enough – and if everything does slide off the rails, I’ll be the first to admit that I called a bad shot. Still, my plan is to keep doing what I’m doing, on the assumption that nothing we’re seeing at the moment is the herald of the collapse of civilization. If I’ve misread the signs, well, none of what I’m thinking about or doing will make a lick of difference anyway.
If you’re just cynical enough, it’s actually kind of comforting.
Tag Archives: new year
The interregnum…
The week between Christmas and the new year is more or less a lost week. Let’s face it, it was still 2021 and there was still plenty going on. Even if you weren’t paying attention to world events there was more than enough that needed doing, but the whole week has forever felt like it exists out of time or in a universe where time has no meaning.
It’s an interregnum as the old year closes out and the new one starts. I don’t hate it. I just can’t shake the feeling that it’s an odd sequence of days that don’t feel quite right.
Add in that I spent most of my time alternating between the bed, the couch, and one of the various La-Z-Boy’s scattered around the house and it’s pretty much the week that wasn’t. At least it (probably) wasn’t COVID, so I’ve still got that going in my favor, even if it was one of the nastier head colds I’ve had in the last half-dozen years.
Here we are a little more than a week later and the last remnants of this particular crud are finally dissipating… but hey, I have one of those fancy oxygen meters, a few boxes of KN-95 and N-95’s, and a few other odds and ends now due to my paranoia of the Great Plague. Given how hard it is to find a simple test, even my NyQuil addled brain was able to grasp with growing realization that if I should come down with it, I need to be prepared with whatever tools I can muster to triage and treat myself.
The interregnum is over. I’ve put together a decent little stockpile against what feels like an increasingly inevitable bout with the plague. Still, I can’t quite shake the feeling that mostly it was a perfectly good week of annual leave utterly wasted.
Roundup…
Do you even have a website if you don’t do a year end roundup?
2021 was my best year yet here at WordPress. I exceeded every measurable metric from last year, which was the previous record setter. Not bad for a poky little blog that doesn’t do any advertising, doesn’t have any particular focus or built in fan base, and doesn’t offer any tips or tricks for making anyone’s life any better.
The whole thing exists entirely as a method of saying whatever happens to be on my mind at day’s end. I’m consistently amazed that anyone chooses to follow along with the level of nonsense that shows up here.
Starting next Monday I’ll be back to my regular weekday posting schedule. Whatever fuckery happens in 2022, you probably won’t hear about it here first, but you’ll definitely hear about it eventually. If it’s not good times, I can only assume it’ll be interesting.
I won’t jinx anyone by wishing them a happy new year. Good luck out there.
Setting the tone…
Ah, so it’s New Year’s Day. There is a temptation for it to feel somewhat celebratory, but it’s got a darker undercurrent. The arrival of the new year means that this great ultra-long weekend has been whittled down now to no more than the length of a normal weekend. Just two days. Sigh.
I’m not ready for this. Even constrained by the plague from doing those things I’d normally have spent the last two weeks doing, it was time much better spent than any normal week (even a week in a plague year) could offer. I’m in no way prepared to my time to stop being entirely my own. Knowing that moment is near has already launched a cloud over this new
People make an effort this time of year talking about turning over a new leaf or having a better attitude going forward. Me? Yeah. That’s not going to happen. It’s a new year, but I’ll be trundling through it as aggrieved and surly as ever. The things that annoyed me a month ago are sure to keep annoying me well into the future.
From one year to the next, at least you can rely on my fundamental consistency… So I’ve got that going for me in 2021, which is nice.
Happy Christmas…
I don’t generally spend a lot of time writing this time of year. Christmas week is a blogging dead zone. Not much content being created and even fewer readers as we go about our appointed rounds.
In any case, it feels like a good time to wish everyone a very happy Christmas and all the best as we prepare bring the curtain down on the second decade of the 21st century.
Predicting the future…
Now that I’ve spent a day at the office, it feels like 2019 is well and truly underway. The meetings, the phone calls, the email, the regular and recurring requests to change “happy” to “glad” on every piece of paper leaving my desk… the calendar may be changed, but the new year feels reliably like the old. It is, if nothing else, the devil I am extremely well acquainted with by the point.
Everyone wants to start off the new year drunk on champagne and optimism – believing in spite of themselves that surely this year will be better than the last. I’ve always thought such optimism was a funny attitude with which to go through life – especially after living through a few decade’s worth of new years and finding that the only thing that ever really changes is the date.
I’m not saying that the new year needs to be welcomed with doom and gloom, just that we collectively heap the time of year with mounds of unreasonable expectations. I try to be a bit more circumspect in acknowledging the arrival of 2019. Taken on average, some things will be marginally better. Other things will be marginally worse. A few things will swing wildly in one direction or the other. Mostly I expect that things will muddle through largely unchanged year over year.
So far my ability to predict the future is remarkably prescient.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. Running out of time. Even as I grudgingly accept the fact that it’s necessary to work in exchange for money which I can then exchange for goods and services, I cannot quite shake off the feeling that I’d rather be safely tucked into Fortress Jeff with an endless supply of hot coffee and a mountain of books to read. Mentally preparing myself to go out and rejoin the world is, in a word, traumatic. It’s times like this I can see how one might just get suckered into the fool’s gold appeal of something like a “universal basic income” scheme.
2. January finances. As a professional adult head of household, January has always been a budget buster of a month for me. It’s the month when my biggest bills come due for the year – car insurance, home owner’s association dues, paying off Christmas gifts and travel expenses, the start of the winter heating season, and a few others. No matter how well the year is budgeted, January always comes around like a swift kick in the teeth and throw in one more large dollar item than I was projecting. It’s like the new year giving you a rabbit punch just to remind you that just because it’s a new year doesn’t mean it’s anything more than business as usual.
3. Congress and the president. If you thought having the executive and legislative branches run by the same party put the “fun” in dysfunctional, just wait until you see the magnificent shitshow that Washington devolves into this afternoon when Democrats assume power in the House of Representatives. To all those who scream “false equivalency” or who want to blame one side or the other, I’ll simply say go fuck yourself. A pox on both their houses. No one sitting in our hallowed halls of power is an innocent.
A rambling post at the end of the year…
Looking back, I’m forced to admit that I have something of an uneven history of New Year’s Eve posts here on WordPress. It seems to weave between the extremes of overly sentimental on one side and barely acknowledging the changing of the year on the other. It’s easy to slip down either path, depending on the mood that strikes me when I sit down at the keyboard.
Today’s mood is decidedly introspective. I’ll just assume it has something to do with the rain falling again in what feels like a year where it hasn’t really every stopped falling. In spite of the introspection, I’m afraid I really haven’t come up with any deep year end message to leave you here. Instead, I think I’ll use the opportunity to just say thank you for reading along with whatever crackpot ideas and personal screeds show up here. Screaming into the internet’s void is a fairly inexpensive form of four or five day a week therapy for me. It’s always gratifying to find that others may also have a passing interest in whatever it is that’s rattling around my head on any given day.
Those numbers are up a little from last year, but a still off the heyday numbers back in 2013. I can’t bring myself to feel badly about that. The sheer amount of online content created in the last five years makes the fact that anyone finds my slice of it a bit remarkable, really – especially when you consider that it doesn’t involve embracing videos, porn, memes, or even pictures most of the time.
It’ll be 2019 in a few hours. I expect I’ll be asleep by then, but it means I’ll be able to catch the first few peaceful hours of the new year while the average revelers are still tucked soundly into whichever bed they’ve poured themselves or face down drooling on whatever floor they’ve happened to collapse onto. I’d like to think those early hours will give me a first look at a year bound to go better than the one we’re ending… but we’ve been given the opportunity to live in “interesting times” so I expect 2018 is just scratching the surface of what we can expect once the collective hangover starts to lift in 2019.
Easing towards the end…
Chalk this up to one of those nights where my worst enemy is a blank screen and a flashing cursor. There are worse problems to have – ass cancer for instance – but I really do try rather hard to have something engaging, interesting, or otherwise worth reading here four days a week… even if sometimes the word count runs a little bit short. There are a few days a year when getting across that bar is harder than others.
I’m going to blame it on the onrushing calendar and the impending arrival of Christmas and the long sweep of days off that goes along with it. It wouldn’t be entirely true to say that I’ve engaged cruise control and switched my brain over into rest mode, but it would’t be entirely misleading either. The fact is, I’m doing my level best to make the next week and a half as absolutely low key and minimally demanding as possible.
There are plenty of external factors I can’t control, but there are plenty that I can exert influence upon – like when someone asks if I’m going to scheduled a meeting about some random project coming up in April. The answer to that one is a hard no, spoken with conviction. Something, of course, could come along and convert that no to a yes, but it won’t be because I’m calling a meeting just because we haven’t had one in a while.
I’m easing into the end of 2018. So bear with me if anything around here feels just a little less energetic than usual.
The Year in Review: 2017 Edition
WordPress use to helpfully provide a year in review feature that would auto-magically spit out a post with all the facts and figures about what posts were popular, where your views were coming from, and all manner of information about what your readers found interesting. Sadly, they discontinued that feature a couple of years ago, so it’s up to me to come up with something to say here at the end of the year.
In plain language, this year was almost exactly average with about 6,600 views and 3,684 visitors. Some years have been better, some worse, and I guess that’s about all we can reasonably expect to say about blogging – or life for that matter.
The most viewed post of the year wasn’t even a post from this year. Instead, you have to reach back all the way to 2014 find the post titled For Official Use Only. Some people would mind that, but me, I’m not picky about where people are looking so long as they’re looking. In case you’re wondering, you had to drop all the way down to the third most viewed post to find one written in 2017. You probably won’t be shocked to find out it’s about people making bad decisions and the rest of us poor sods who have to listen to them talk about it.
In related news, it’s also the first year that “hot lesbian cheerleader” didn’t lead the ranking of search terms that brought people here. I’m not sure if that says more about what people are searching for or the content I’ve been posting this year… so make of that what you will.
I won’t even speculate what 2018 holds for the world. Assuming the new year is about the same as the old, it’ll be about equal parts joy and terror, with a heavy dose of “what the actual fuck” thrown in for good measure. The only thing I’m reasonably sure about is that as long as I have an internet connection and and a few thoughts that I can’t stand keeping to myself, I’ll be here writing them down and sharing them with the world. That too could be good or bad, depending on your perspective. Since it seems to help preserve my sanity, I’m going with the idea that remains a net good overall.
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