You need more year-end perspective. Take this!

Laziness is working against me even blogging in time for New Years, but here I am and off we go. New Years Eve! Not a big night for me, in terms of celebrations. I will be in bed and  asleep well before midnight. I’ve never had great affection for New years eve parties, since it always felt like I was uneasily hanging around hoping to be surprised by a miraculously great year.  But I won’t go so far as to say that it’s a meaningless evening.

The cynics, especially the ones who are love self-inflicted failure, look down on New Years as cliché, a night of empty promises that are quickly forgotten. And a lot of resolutions do get flushed away in January, because real change is devilishly hard to make stick. But don’t throw out the idea of the new year ritual.

Instead, start off by coming to terms with the idea of flexible success. If you look at your own progress in absolute terms, things start to look grim, so look at each challenge as a measure of your effort, and take pride in the learning that each attempt gives you. Keep trying.

This year taught me a lot of things (most of which are eluding me right now, because they think that’s funny). I learned more about being a good dad, about being a better writer, and a ton about putting honest effort into things. I think I’m starting to find  my voice as a writer (another concept that sounded cliché and hackneyed until it happened to me), and I’m moving towards a more harmonious life.

As for resolutions, I aim to slightly improve across the  board. I’ll get a little bit better at managing my time, make it to the gym a little bit more, put a little bit more effort into my personal grooming, do a little bit more cleaning during  the days. Boring, I know, but that’s a  side-effect from being pretty content. I don’t have a lot of monstrous vices lurking in the shadows.

So here’s to the New Year. Take it easy.

 

p.s. I think I broke my left pinky toe yesterday. It’s my first broken bone ever. Pretty anti-climactic. I wonder if  I’ll even get it x-rayed?

 

Why don’t YOU try to come up with a witty title?

I can see the truth behind the stereotype of the worrying mom/grandmother force-feeding the young people around them (“Eat, eat. You’re skin and bones!”). The other parents out there will back me up on this: properly feeding a little human being is hard work. You have limited information from them about the state of their hunger, but that’s the easy part. The real challenge is dealing with an interlude of low appetite.

We all have a wide range of hungryness (how hungry we are at any given moment). Some days, I am the hungriest boy on earth, and woe betide the haunch of beef that lingers in front of my voracious gaze. But there are a few, infrequent days where my normal bowl of cereal is too much for me, and I don’t get hungry again until mid-afternoon. We don’t notice our own swings in appetite: we either shovel more in or eat a late meal.  But when the diminished appetite belongs to the tiny life form you are responsible for keeping alive and healthy, it can turn you into a nervous wreck.

First you trot out the terrifying list of illnesses that can affect hunger. Then you scrabble around to remember the eating habits from the last few days, cursing your lack of attention. It’s very important at this point that you keep losing your mind and forget the wisdom from your peers and your doctor when they tell you that this is normal. Now you are in the right frame of mind to aggressively offer a buffet of food options.

When you regain your sanity, you remember that, two days ago, the little dude ate cereal, an orchard of apples, a hunk of roast pork, 3 pieces of bread, yogurt, cheese, and STILL ate 3 cookies for a bedtime snack. Don’t worry about one meal as long as they eat well enough over the span of a week.

Greetings from the post-holiday wasteland!

(I was going to throw in a quote from TS Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, but skimming the poem just blew my mind. I assumed that I had read it before in high school. I was wrong. I am intrigued by it and I will pour over the thing later. But enough about that.)

So here we are at the arse-end of Christmas, sick of indulgent food and tired of our families. That’s not to say that I did not enjoy the holidays. I did, and I’m still enjoying them. But, there is a festive fatigue that settles in during this time of jolly chaos, and I suspect everyone is happy to return to routine.

Christmas day gave me an insight into a gap that lies between my childhood and being a grown up. When we reached noon on Christmas day, all the presents were open and played with, phone calls had been made, and the empty expanse of the afternoon loomed in front of us. When we finally all went stir-crazy, I marshalled the family out of the house for a forced snow march, and I felt a touch of resentment for having to take charge. That made me realize that I only really knew how to interact with Christmas as a child, not as an adult. I was waiting for a parental figure to call the shots, but that figure is supposed to be me.

The breakdown of my family years ago started when I was just about to enter my teens, though you could argue the decay had been evident for years. From the age of 12 on, I had little to no positive interaction with my father, and our family celebrations pretty much collapsed into chaos. My theory is, learning to transition roles of responsibility in holiday situations takes place during your teen years, and since I had no good male role model to pattern on, my development was arrested.  It’s not a big deal, but it is something I need to keep in mind when festivities approach. As much as it would be nice to sit back and passively ride along on the holiday fun train, somebody’s got to be the conductor.

I don’t want to give you the impression that Christmas was full of brooding introspection. I received a pile of wonderful gifts, my little dude was bouncing off the walls with gleeful enjoyment at all of his new toys and books, and the wife liked the things I picked out for her. We topped it off with a wonderful meal at our friend’s place (the lad’s fairy godmother), and cookies galore.