Today’s lessons from a very productive day that also involves a new dishwasher and getting these damned stitches out of my gums:

1. Do not speed in or around Emporia, Virginia. It’s a pretty notorious speed trap, and a minor violation in Virginia can become a major one hack home in North Carolina.
2. If you ignore rule #1, it apparently helps a lot not to have had any convictions for moving violations in the past 25 years. But you still probably need a lawyer.

Not that I’ve gained any of this knowledge firsthand or anything…

This very nice girl was my New Year’s Eve date thirty-five years ago when I was a senior in high school. She holds the distinction of being the last date I had as a heterosexual impersonator.

I don’t think her heart was in it any more than mine was, really, as evidenced by the fact that the minor traffic accident we had earlier (not my fault and not alcohol-related) was the biggest excitement of the evening.

A lot of people are celebrating the demise of 2016 as if an arbitrary calendar event were the root of all the world’s problems. I agree that it’s been a pretty rough year in many ways, but…

The fact that many well-known celebrities died this year is not really all that unusual. What is unusual is that a few of these deaths were perhaps more unexpected and higher profile than the norm, which resulted in very intense scrutiny not just of the “big and newsworthy” deaths but of all the celebrity deaths that took place this year. And the rock and roll generation is aging, which means that (surprise!) a lot of its members will be dying over the next few years. It’s sad, but it’s also statistically unavoidable.

All these deaths probably did not have anything to do with Brexit or the catastrophic shitshow that was the 2016 American election cycle. It’s tempting to believe this because of the current state of media in the U.S. and worldwide, where a 24-hour “news” cycle has led to a form of pseudojournalism that is more about hype and perceived outrage and “sharability” than about actual facts or (Great Pumpkin forbid) context.

All in all, was 2016 really any demonstrably “worse” than any other year?

For Americans and Brits, maybe (although it may pale in comparison with 2017), but for most of the rest of the world, probably not. Which is not to say that it was a good year (ask any Syrian you run across) but that it was maybe not all that much worse than its predecessors in most cases.

And for some of us, it was pretty good on a personal level–at least when we weren’t thinking about politics or dead people. I made tenure this year and accomplished quite a lot, both personally and professionally. I travelled a lot, read good books, and ate decent food. And 2016 marked for me the first time in many years that i really felt like I had my shit together pretty danged well. I like myself a lot better than I ever have before. And that’s what I plan to concentrate on.

A lot of things really sucked this year and will really suck next year. The task at hand is to do what you can about it. but also to find your happiness where you can. New Year’s resolutions are kind of stupid in my book, but if you have to have one, that might be a good example.

Cold. Gray. Rainy. Book. Blanket. Ocean.

I think we’ve covered the fact that I don’t really “do” Christmas anymore, or at least no more of it than is absolutely necessary. This year is no exception; I’ll be doing the family thing on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and trying to hover in corners with the sane cousins I like rather than the one or two batshit crazy ones my need for sanity requires me to avoid. Fortunately, most of my family falls somewhere in the middle.

But now that I’ve established my new after-Christmas tradition of one very cold week in Virginia Beach (this will be year five) with a nice two-room suite and lots of books, I’m now able to look at Christmas as “that little hurdle I have to get over so I can have one relaxing vacation of the year.” It makes me slightly giddy with excitement. I tend to have very exhausting vacations, as many of you may have noticed, but I really enjoy my winter beach trip. I don’t force myself to do anything other than eat, read, and occasionally look at the ocean. If I do happen to get bored, though, there’s plenty of civilization nearby. 

The trip, combined with the fact that I also don’t really have to buy Christmas presents anymore, has made the last two weeks in December surprisingly pleasant of late. In short, I have succeeded.

I would, however, still consider accepting a hippopotamus. Maybe.