End of year musings

I'm going to be 30 in nine days. It's kind of nice that my birthday coincides with the beginning of a new year (give or take a few days), because it allows me to take the opportunity to look back over any given year and associate it with the age I was all year long. I know this isn't how it works for most people, but it works for me.

I'm both very pleased and displeased at how this year worked out for me. I got a lot of things accomplished that I had been waiting for for quite some time, and got to a place in my life where I feel secure and balanced in a material way. I managed to hang onto my job for an entire calendar year, for the first time ever, and that's saying something. Come spring, I will have only one T4 to file, which I have been anticipating with quite some pleasure, I must say.

I moved into an apartment which suits me and my needs much better than the places I had before. I have begun to furnish said apartment, and feel more at home there than I have in any place since 1999.

My current job and a more attentive attitude toward my finances has allowed me to remain completely solvent for two years now. My situation isn't perfect (I am still lousy at budgeting), but it's miles away from where I was even three years ago.

I have made a number of very good new friends, and have reconnected with old friends, and kept in touch with current friends as much as I could this year. This one was a mixed bag: my work kept me isolated a lot more than I would have liked, and a few good friends got neglected as a result, which I regret a lot.

On the whole, it's been a good year.

That being said, there are things which I need to work on for myself this coming year. I am highly dissatisfied with myself for not doing any of this last year, and so this year I hope to make some pretty big changes.

I completely neglected my spiritual life last year. I got immersed in work, and with all the overtime I was working on top of my regular shifts, I don't think I managed to go to Meeting more than a couple of times. I miss it. I want to go back. I feel as though I've kind of lost the good direction my spiritual life had taken back in 2007, when I was living more mindfully in many ways. So I'm going to go back, starting this Sunday. The Sunday after that I'm working, but afterward I'll have several free weekends. January is a time for new beginnings for me, and I'm looking forward to it.

I completely neglected my writing last year. Again, there was work and overtime and other shiny things to take my attention away from something that used to come easily to me. Now writing fiction takes a major effort of will on my part, and it saddens me. I tried "easing" back into it, and all that does is give me an out, an excuse to continue not writing. So I've set up a schedule for myself, and come hell or high water, I will stick to it.

For the last six months, I let ALL my good healthy eating and exercise habits go by the wayside. As a result, all the progress I made between January and the beginning of July has been reversed, and I'm back where I started. So, once again, I am clambering painfully back on the wagon, and starting again. I am really, really disappointed with myself about this, because I did so well starting out, and then lacked the staying power to stick with it and build on my successes.


Essentially, my work this year will be three-fold: mind, body, spirit. I got caught up in external things last year, but this coming year will, I hope, afford me the opportunity to take a step back, regroup, and forge on once more.

Oops...

You know that point you can hit when your entire physical being revolts and says "Enough!"?

Yeah, that one.

I've just hit that point, and I have twelve hours of work ahead of me. I have to leave in about twenty or twenty-five minutes, and I suspect I will have to drag myself all the way there.

*sigh*

It's not so bad. I'm just done, but twelve hours too soon.


In related news, it really takes a special kind of person to call in sick over Christmas. As we were saying earlier at work, for most of us to call in sick over Christmas, we'd have to be on a stretcher in the hospital, possibly already in a coma. To call in sick because you have a cold, well, that's pretty special.

See, if you call in sick on Christmas, it means you've wrecked someone else's Christmas. Someone who wasn't expecting to work on Christmas, who has to scuttle ALL their plans, leave their family behind, and come into work.

The people who were working this Christmas were mostly "expendable" people. People who don't have small children or sick wives who depend on them. Yes, we have family, but my parents for instance already knew that I wouldn't be sticking around for Christmas and had time to get used to the idea.

You try explaining to a three-year-old that, no, Daddy can't stay to have lunch with the family and that you'll see him again tomorrow morning because he has to go to work. Or hey, why don't *you* go and explain to the woman with breast cancer who just had another round of chemo that you have a cold and therefore her husband has to leave her by herself on Christmas Day?

Yeah.

So right now one of our coworkers is kind of in the shithouse. Yes, it sucks that he has a cold, but none of us want to work over Christmas, so most of us are of a mind that unless he's dying he can suck it up and come in. It's not like anything is happening anyway: Christmas is always dead.

Okay. Time to get dressed.