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Monday, December 31, 2018

Humbug

Well, here we are at the New Year again. So this is Christmas (or, rather, New Years Eve), and what have you done? Another year over. A new year just begun. 

I figure we must somehow have been cheated out of some time this year, because the last New Year's Eve seems to me to have been a couple of months ago rather than 12 months ago. 

I remember writing last year that rather than to celebrate, people ought to cover themselves in sackcloth and ashes as an expression of debasement, mourning, repentance, and as a nod of grief to our poor old world at large, remembering those who were starved or tormented, excluded, marginalized, torn from families, stuck in cages, dismembered with bone saws, lied to, robbed, put out of work, cheated. And so on. Happy frickin' New Year. 

Oh well, I'll admit that I've never liked New Year's Eve. I don't like drunks or noise or noisy drunks. I don't like celebrating the great nothing we have personally accomplished nor the greater nothing the crumbling world has accomplished. Just what are we cheering for? That we have made it alive to the far end of a magic number of days only to find that we must start again? 

Bah. Humbug. 

What have I done this year? Well, I learned at the conclusion of the 11 years of my 3rd marriage, almost exactly a year ago, how to be single again (although, admittedly, I was already pretty well practiced).  I made some friends. I learned, finally, to speak conversational Indonesian more or less comfortably--which came, in large part, as a benefit of being wifeless. As I was explaining to a friend who wants to learn the language, being married to a native speaker removes the incentive to fully communicate on your own because you can always just turn to her for handling things. Remove the wife, and you're on your own. It's either sink of swim. I have watched as my MS has become more debilitating and have learned to modify, adjust, accept. I managed to develop cancer on my ear and face--which is something that I thought, for some reason, that I would never achieve. Good job, right? Hmm. What else? I will say, on a positive note, that I have not fallen off my motorbike even once this year. No scrapes, no cuts, no breaks. Although I have fallen off my own feet a couple of times. I have learned that napping in the afternoon is not impossible. It is easy. 

And so happy new year. And God bless us. God bless us, everyone. 

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