Potpourri

A bit of a mixed bag today. First up, congratulations to Cherry J. for huge momentous life event news, but I'll let her tell you all about that. http://coffee-jones.blogspot.com/ (Well, she'll tell you when she's done cooking -- and boy, does all that sound yummy. Except maybe the oohbleck.)

Next, I'm instituting The Resolution Big Board today. Check in and see how I'm doing on the Big Four Resolutions: Job / Exercise & weight loss / Backlog reduction / Demonslations. On the Job front, nothing new today, but I did apply Tuesday for a position in a nearby city. (Well, to be more specific, I found a posting, found the firm's website, identified the office manager and sent her my resume by e-mail. I figure that's the equivalent of actually applying, although what I really want is for her to forward my resume to someone who can say yea or nay to whether they are interested in me.) The job -- as posted -- is a good fit with my skill set & background, but in my life that means I won't even get a courtesy e-mail back. I have terrible luck in employment matters, which just balances out my awesome luck in other areas. I'll do more on the Job Resolution tomorrow.

Exercise & weight loss: I went for a walk by myself today, so I'm up to 5.2 miles on the week/month/year. Starman has a cold, poor dear. Oddly enough, Stobex has a cold too (I saw him yesterday in Philadelphia). I suspect they have the same cold, caught around Christmas, as the timing is otherwise suspicious. I won't know about weight loss for a while, as I don't own a scale, but for right now the walking is very good. I did today's walk in a little over an hour, which is fast for me.

Backlog reduction: I need to explain about this one. I spent about a third of 2006 in England, and if you have magazine subscriptions you'll know what I mean when I say I have stacks of stuff to read/throw away/whatever as a result. So I've been working through them as fast as I can. I have gotten completely caught up with Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide, I'm working now on Vanity Fair and Sports Illustrated, and I have the Godzilla of magazine backlogs, The New Yorker, still to get to. That's the real resolution: be completely caught up with The New Yorker by 2008. When I get to them, I'll start a count, but for now, I'll just list the other titles as I finish them off.

Demonslations: Well, it's a bad pun, but what I mean by this is more of the lifelong effort to put to rest my fears and issues about my childhood. (I'll unwind this over time, but the short version goes like this: I am missing 8 years of my childhood, probably as a result of abuse by siblings. They were kids themselves, and we were all stuck in a bad family situation, so no one's a monster here; all the same, I have real scars that only I can smooth out.) So I'm trying to slay my demons, hence the bad pun. And I'm trying to understand just what my fears are, so it's a bit of "demon translation" as well. (I know, I know -- it's still a bad pun. I'll work in it. I will.)

This is the juicy bit of my week's efforts, because on Monday Stobex, Starman & I all went to my sister's annual New Year's Day party. I had good reasons for going, mostly because I knew it would end the odd frostiness that developed in the summer when I announced that Stobex and I were getting divorced and that Starman and I were a couple. I told everyone then it was okay and that in fact all three of us would be travelling in the fall. In December they all got my Totally Impersonal Christmas Letter saying what a good time we'd had on our travels and how happy we all were, etc. I know people have been known to uh, exaggerate in holiday letters, and I also acknowledge that my romantic life rather beggars the imagination, but my sibs are really smart people whom I rather expect to keep up with reality.

In any event, Starman had only met my brothers, so I wanted to bring him to a party where he'd meet other kinds of useful relations: One sister, two nieces, and three in-laws. It worked like a charm. My sister is e-mailing me again (she's not one for the phone) and my brother is now talking about all four of us going to see The Magic Flute at the Met. But, specific to my Resolution Big Board, I had a fine time at the party and wasn't too anxious or uncomfortable. I did get ten minutes or so alone with my sister, during which I realized that I might have been guilty of "Christmas treeing" her. Remember how much bigger Christmas trees were when you were a kid? We know why that is, but we can't quite adjust our memories to provide a more accurate sense of how big the childhood trees actually were. I think I'd always assumed my sister -- a very bright and talented woman, to be sure -- was almost superhuman in her ability to perceive my weaknesses. While we were talking, I realized she hadn't gotten the story with Stobex & Starman right at all. (I think she figured Stobex was bereft and crushed by my betrayal. Puh-leeze! He's not quite at the "Wanna lose unwanted weight? Divorce your wife!" stage, but he's a happy man these days.) That's when I realized that I'd imagined her powers to be roughly as overwhelming as Christmas trees must have looked to us back in the day. Not so big now, of course, that we've grown up.

All in all, it was a good week on the resolution front. But I gotta go -- I got a new SI today!