Complaining about the snow and cold in Chicago this year doesn’t carry the usual cachet. It seems everyone is frozen. My parents have 16 inches of snow outside their home in Portland, Ore., which diminishes the amount of carping I can do about the foot outside here. I do have a situation that I bet they don’t, however. My car’s tires are frozen to the ground. When I parked on the street a couple of days ago it was wet and slushy. Then the temperature plunged to zero and everything that was slush became solid ice. The car is frozen in place. And the defroster fan has stopped working.
But inside it’s warm and cozy, and I can sit and reflect on the year gone by. There were more ups than downs, and higher highs than the lowest lows. That’s a change from recent years. Everyone I worked with at HedgeWorld got laid off, leaving just me and an uncertain future. However some good things have come out of that upheaval. It jarred me out of a kind of professional trance and motivated me to branch out. I’ve been doing more writing.
A good friend, Aaron, who also lost his job earlier this year, and I are considering writing a book about journalism in the 21st Century. I’d started thinking about that after we got news of the HedgeWorld layoffs. He’d been thinking about it too, and our ideas seem to mesh.
A book that Aaron suggested I read, Betsy Lerner’s “The Forest for the Trees” has me thinking not only about the journalism book, but about a novel.
I’ve also been having some stimulating e-conversations with my old college journalism teacher, Rick Seifert, about online community journalism. So, professionally there are a lot of interesting possibilities in the coming year, and for the first time in many years I find myself looking at genuinely interesting and realistic goals.
Personally it’s been another challenging year in many ways, but it’s ending on a very positive note. I feel it’s been a year of moving forward on many fronts, rather than treading water or regressing.
I’ve spent much of the day relaxing, exchanging Christmas greetings with friends and loved ones, considering my overall good fortune and trying not to think about the creeping entropy I see all around. It’s been happening for months but over the past couple of days I seem to have become particularly attuned to it. Part of a gutter fell off the other day, yielding to the weight of the snow and ice that filled it. There’s the aforementioned frozen car and the problem with the defrost fan. My sinuses are bone dry with the cold and I feel like I’m getting a cold all the time. I feel like I can hear cavities growing in my head and that any day all my teeth are going to fall out. And beyond the physical, I am slowly filling with dread about the likelihood of social and economic disorder in the New Year.
No matter what economic corner you peer around, there is chaos and fear. Politically our best hope for “change” has been brought low, at least for now, by pervasive corruption and the blind greed of a megalomaniacal state governor. Indeed it seems many of our critical systems—especially political, financial and commercial—have been exposed as either questionable or outright frauds and their leaders as a parade of hacks and traveling medicine salesmen.
But that’s not very Christmas-y, is it? And maybe it’s not as bad as all that, anyway. I just need to adjust my thinking. For instance, that’s not ice coated slush-snow out there, it’s a soft white blanket, tucking us in for the winter. Rod Blagojevich isn’t corrupt, just a misunderstood entrepreneur.
There, I feel better. Don’t you?
Seriously, though, Merry Christmas and happy holidays.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment