It's 2009!

[chanaleh]

2008 seems to have been a weird/tough/transitional year for a lot of people.

Two years ago, at the beginning of 2007, I was living with gnawing uncertainty in my love life and a certain amount of misery in my professional life. Over the next several months, I quit the job and got engaged to my heart's joy. :-) So, 2007 was a year of fairly radical shifts for the better.

One year ago, I was thrilled to be gainfully self-employed (though beginning to feel that a more steady income stream would be useful again), and we were trying to settle on a wedding venue, among other such details.

The wedding itself (in August, for those just tuning in; see also new userpic!) came off pretty much as planned -- as much as such things ever can, I guess! And despite all the low-grade trauma of planning and organizing, it turned out to be an amazing festival of love and joy. So in that sense, the biggest event of 2008 was a bringing to fruition: a long-awaited culmination of all the invested care and work and love and hope that went before it. (And no, of course, I'm not just talking about the events of the celebration, here.)

The same could, on a slightly smaller scale, be said of the release of Honorable Menschen's debut CD By the River in December. :-)

But in other ways, this twelvemonth has taken paths I couldn't have predicted. Principally, I found myself taking a job that was rather a detour from my established (book-publishing) career, but that has proven to be an amazing fit drawing on the full range of my strengths, from aesthetic to intellectual to technical to interpersonal.

And there have been other surprises along the way, ranging from the subtle to the profound. For instance, in terms of plot intrigue, it's fair to note that ablock and kalessin both acquired awesome girlfriends. ;-) It's been a year of new and/or deepening friendships on many counts, for which I am grateful, and occasionally (still) utterly amazed.

Maybe that's all that we need is to meet in the middle of impossibility:
Standing at opposite poles, equal partners in a mystery.


Goals and aspirations for 2009:

1. Finish my wedding thank-you notes. X-)
   
2. Fulfill my freelance commitments from last fall, and figure out whether and how much I want to pursue/accept this year. (This, like the above, had better be a short-term goal rather than a long-term one, but it's heavy on my mind right now.)
   
3. Continue working with ablock, brass_rat and friends on transitioning tremontstshul tasks off my personal shoulders and into Google Docs a more central/automated repository. -- Oh yeah, and maybe on planning another trip to Israel, as well. :-)
   
4. Do a show this spring, if I can. (theatreatfirst auditions for The Winter's Tale in January; mitgsp for Iolanthe in February. Pity they're not the other way around, as I am really only eager to do Io A THIRD TIME if I can have a named role. But, whatever. We'll see.) Failing that, hopefully in the summer. 'Cause after that, who knows when I will next have the chance?
   
5. Do more dancing. Every year I say this, but still. :-) Contras (at MIT and/or in Concord), swing (I'm still dying to learn Lindy hop)... modern, again, maybe...
   
6. Make an appointment with a new therapist.
   
7. Overhaul my own website, probably to include moving it off The World once and for all. (End of an era. I feel bad for them, but they just can't compete, really. They're a holdover. *sigh*)
   
8. Clean out the sinkhole that is my home office in the back bedroom. (In preparation either for moving, or for Not Moving, or for... otherwise reorganizing the household. ;-)
   
9. Nurture and grow into this new shared existence, so that my sense of "our life" becomes as strong and trustworthy as my sense of "my life".
   
10. Stay rooted in the present while we wait to see what twists the path of this year will take.
    
11. Spend time in good and productive ways with all my various loved ones.
    
12. Use my powers only for good and never for evil.


A January calendaring entry is in the works, hopefully sometime this weekend.
Shabbat shalom, y'all.

Comments

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

I don't exactly "do swing" in any meaningful sense, but I like it, as I like doing most forms of dancing. :-)

We stopped by the tail end of the swing dancing at [Boston's] First Night, and it was fun... although (a) it's hard to dance in snow boots, and (b) we tend to exhaust our mutual repertoire of moves in about 16 measures. I don't think I've done swing with anyone more experienced since the time lonebear visited some 4 years ago, at the Cambridge VFW, of blessed memory.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

*grins* So you've done some swing- you just don't know a lot of it yet. I have a rather long list of dance-styles that seem like fun that I haven't learned yet, too.

Sounds like a great time.